Page 42 of Falling for the Beast

That would have to do. She continued to eat, ignoring the other question nagging at her. Why had he run from her after the kiss? She wasn’t about to ask that one. What if the answer was, ‘Sorry, you had horrible breath’ or ‘Kissing you was like kissing fungus’? But probably more accurate was ‘A relationship would never work between us.’

So she left the question unspoken and cleaned up the dishes. After supper, she curled up in the library with another book. She knew Thaddeus wouldn’t be coming in to snuggle in the chair with her. He’d probably go upstairs and lock himself in his room. Either that or fall asleep on the recliner.

The book she picked was not drawing her in. She tried several times to get into it, but in the end, she sat there looking around at the library. One section of shelving had cupboards on the bottom. She hadn’t opened them when she’d dusted the shelves because it had felt like snooping. But now things had changed between them. It didn’t feel like an invasion anymore.

She slid the book back on the shelf and crouched down before the cupboards. When she first opened them, she was disappointed. All that was in there were some old board games: Sorry, Candy Land, Monopoly, and others stacked up on the shelf. But when she saw Clue, she smiled and pulled it out. She’d always wanted her dad to buy Clue, but it was a three-person game, and had been just her and Dad.

The box was in mint condition, which made her suspect Thaddeus hadn’t played it much. She took off the lid and unfolded the board. The mansion displayed on the game wasn’t unlike the house she was currently sitting in. She took out the little weapons, examining the details on the candlestick.

Thaddeus walked in, and she jerked her head up. Heat crept up her cheeks. This was twice now he’d caught her doing something embarrassing. “Hi.”

He gave her a curious look. “What are you doing?”

“It’s Clue.” Oh, boy. That was brilliant. Like he didn’t already see it sitting there on the floor. She was sure letting her genius show today.

“You playing by yourself?”

Nice. He thought she’d be dumb enough to try to play Clue by herself. “No. I was just looking at it.”

He got a funny look on his face. “Do you want to play?”

“With you?” She didn’t mean it to sound the way it came out, like that was a ridiculous idea. She ducked her chin.

“Sure.”

“We can’t. We need three people.”

He leaned over and picked up the board. “No, we don’t.”

She gathered up the rest of the game and stood. “How can two people play?”

“There are two-player rules.”

She followed him into the dining room and set the game down on the table. “Are you kidding me? All this time I thought you needed three or more people.”

“I’ll show you how to play with two players. My friend Lance and I used to play after school.” He motioned for her to sit, so she did. He separated the cards out in three piles, the characters, weapons, and rooms. He shuffled and put away one of each card in the yellow murder envelope, then shuffled them together again.

“Now we set aside four cards before we deal them out.” He laid down four cards, face down. “These are for when you or I can’t answer a question. The person asking gets to pick one of these cards to look at, but must put it back where it was, and must then remember which card was where.”

“Brilliant. How did you learn to play that way?”

“The newer games have two-player rules in them. Lance taught me how to do it. This game is old enough that it doesn’t have the two-player rules included.” He dealt the rest of the cards and handed her a clue sheet and a pencil.

They each picked a game piece and put it on the board. “You can go first,” he said.

She rolled the dice. “Were you friends with Lance all through high school?”

“Not really. He joined the chess team and started hanging with the smart kids. You know how things go.”

“Yeah, kind of sad how we grow apart sometimes.”

He rolled the dice and moved his piece. “It was probably my fault. I was kind of a self-absorbed jerk in high school.”

“I’m sure you weren’t that bad.”

“Yeah, I was.”

“We’ve all had times in our lives where we’re not proud of how we’ve acted.”

---