A Sinful Trap (Three Sinful Wishes 2)

Braids giggled. “Attics don’t kill people. I like your dress.”

“Broken hearts kill people. And sometimes knives.”

Bailey glared at the girl with the obviously self-inflicted hairstyle and bloody imagination. “You’re very dark. Wednesday Addams has nothing on you. Who are you?”

“I’m Stan and this is Lila. Who’s Wednesday Addams?”

Who named you Stan? “It doesn’t matter. You wanted to talk to me?”

The girls ignored that, walking over to a bright red chest painted with yellow flowers. Other than that, a rocking horse, and some luggage, the rest of the attic was empty.

“Hello? Will said you had something to tell me?” Bailey tried again, feeling ridiculous.

Now even ghosts were ignoring her. This day kept getting more surreal.

“We’ll keep everything we care about in here, so it can stay safe until we come back again,” Stan told her sister.

“Will they let us come back?” Lila worried her braid. “Why do we have to go away at all? It’s fun here and we can be together. Mommy won’t care. She doesn’t like us anyway.”

Bailey knew what that felt like. She wanted to tell them they didn’t have to go back if they didn’t want to, but she couldn’t form the words. She tried to move and realized she couldn’t do that either. What fresh hell was this?

“We’re coming back.” Stan sounded sad, but confident. “Years from now, Uncle Thad will leave this place to us and we’ll decide to make it a boarding house like the lady the town gets named after. We’ll be so happy together and everyone will want to stay here. You’ll see.”

These little girls were those sisters?

“Then what happens?”

“Then I’ll meet a handsome man who can change into a wolf,” Stan continued as her sister listened, riveted. “He’ll be my mate, and I’ll love him, but he’s a restless soul and needs to feel important. He’s not as good a man as we both need him to be. Not like Uncle Thad at all.”

“Oh no,” Lila murmured, reaching for a doll to hold for comfort. Bailey didn’t blame her.

“He left his family before, the same way Daddy left us. The way Mommy wanted to. You’re scared he’ll convince me to leave you next. So scared it gives you nightmares. And then he does. He tells me we have to move because he’s been sent away by the coyote man.”

The coyote man? Was she talking about Stax?

“I don’t want to leave you, but he says we’ll send for you as soon as we sell the inn. You don’t believe him. You convince him to go on ahead, so you can have a few more days with me before I join him…”

“That’s when I tell his secret to someone who goes after him. Kills him.” Lila cried at her admission, and Stan wrapped her arms around both her and the doll.

“It’s okay, Lila. I never told you what it meant to be his mate. It was a secret, he said. The only secret I ever kept from you. That’s why you didn’t understand that the rope that tied my heart to his would kill me a little slower when he died, but kill me all the same.” She kissed her sister’s forehead. “You never left me alone, once you knew. Not to eat or sleep or see to the guests. Not even when I died. You didn’t want me to do that alone either. The sheriff came and found us both up here. He buried us out in the desert in secret, because we didn’t have any family left and his cousin, John Pikeson, wanted the inn.”

No wonder Stan was so dark. She’d had a Pikeson in her life, too.

Bailey’s heart hurt for them, but was this why they’d started making noise after seventy years of silence? They wanted her to know that mating was disappointing and led to a horrible death in an unmarked grave?

“That’s not it. Why would you think that?”

Anyone would think that, Stan.

Stan shook her head, looking irritated. “We wanted the wolf to know about his grandfather. To see what’s in our trunk. It isn’t worth a dime and it won’t change anything, but people deserve to be seen, flaws and all. And I wanted you to see it too, because we created this inn and we deserve to be remembered.”

You could have just said that.

A Locke had been the reason the inn’s first owners disappeared, and a Locke purchasing the inn was the reason they’d come back. She supposed it made sense, but she still wasn’t sure why she had to know it instead of Cam.

Lila knelt beside Bailey, her smile sad, but resigned. “I didn’t trust her love for me. Stan was all I had, but I didn’t think our bond could compare to what she felt for her mate. I was so afraid I would be left again that I made a mistake I couldn’t take back.”