The Belle and the Beard (The Santillian Triplets, #3)

by Kate Canterbary

Energy radiated from her, far from warm but not exactly cold either, and it was clear she could stomp one of those pretty high-heeled shoes, crack open a chasm deep enough to fully digest those who got in her way, and be finished with them without getting so much as a smudge of dirt on her hands.

There was honey in her voice, something warm and southern and completely at odds with the rest of her unhinge the jaw, drag you into the ocean, and crush your bones and destroy you like a kraken vibe.

Funny thing, she said all these nice words and she made them sound sweet as hell but she was actually slapping you back into your place. If I wasn't totally fucking annoyed about everything right now, I'd admire it.

She interrupted my morning with her plastic cheerfulness but I couldn't stop thinking about her skin. She brought me a biohazard of a banana bread and she smelled like heaven. She stubbornly insisted on sleeping in a teardown bat cave but made me want to wrap her skirt around my fists.

"You're seeing what you're choosing to see. Sometimes it's not that complicated. It's helping someone out, even if they have a hard time asking for that help."

I had a painfully beautiful belle of a neighbor who shouldn't be allowed to use power tools or kitchen appliances without supervision. She was naked in my house every day which meant she was naked in my dreams every night but she was also the pain in my ass intent on poisoning me.

As much as I adored my dresses and the disequilibrating power of knife-sharp femininity, there was something about a pantsuit that said, I am in fucking charge here. Try me at your own peril.

"Nothing blooms in every season," I said. "You shouldn't expect that of yourself when it doesn't occur in nature."

There was no fun in taking a bewildered, emotionally exhausted woman to bed, not for anyone. Especially not her. If we were going to do this, we were going to start it up the right way. And that meant waiting until she didn't look like a breeze would blow her over.

We love a filthy gentleman 👏🏻👏🏻

Taking her to bed would mean something. If not to her, definitely to me. After she left, she'd always be the beautiful maybe-burglar who blew into my life with a cloud of bats at her back and a toxic banana bread. She'd always be the woman who told an eternity of secrets the first time she stepped into the heart of the woods. She'd always be the woman who made my heart stop when I saw fire trucks outside her house and the one who got woozy at the sight of blood. She was the one who'd catalyzed ordinary concern for my neighbor into the kind of worry that kept me up nights. And she was the only woman I'd ever met who could make a meal out of toasted bread. I wasn't getting attached.

He was huge. I didn't know a lot of dicks on a first-name basis but this one was huge. It was fitting—quite literally—as Linden was a tall, barrel-chested beast of a man and anything short of an impossibly thick shaft wouldn't make sense on him. I was so happy for things that made really good sense.

"We can talk about the Three Hunters another time," he said, his hands sliding to my hips. "Same with Smaug and the Lonely Mountain.

Officially in love with this man

I didn't know but I had the sense people weren't supposed to be one stationary, static thing their entire lives. People were supposed to live a lot of lives in their time on this planet. They were supposed to reinvent themselves and reevaluate their beliefs. They were supposed to look back and shake their head at the things they did before they knew better. They were supposed to get all the second chances.

I never would've guessed it would be my rude, mansplainy neighbor, the one who said not two hours ago that I couldn't be trusted with paint, to make me feel like I belonged here. Like I belonged with him.

And I wondered how I'd give up lazy evenings on Linden's sofa where he explained how, when filming The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, the textually male Riders of Rohan had to be played by women because they couldn't find enough men with adequate horseback riding skills.

"I don't know what to tell you other than you are extremely gifted with many complex things, and less gifted with a few basic things."

It me

I didn't know how this woman could be both a bone-crushing kraken queen who had more power in her little finger than most people could conjure in a lifetime, and the source of her own poison. It didn't make any sense to me though it did make me irrationally furious. I wanted to slap the shit out of the people who put that garbage in her head.

"It's okay to change your life, Jasper. It's okay for it to be messy and it's okay to wonder if you've ruined it all." "What if I actually have ruined it all?" "That's just not possible, honey. It's not. You have so much ahead of you. Learn from the past but leave it there while you build a life that brings you joy and peace."