Radley's Home for Horny Monsters, Annabelle Hawthorne [howl and other poems TXT] 📗

rolled up after rinsing it off. Jenny faced the mirror, her head slightly tilted.

“What the fuck?” Beth rescued Jenny. How had the doll gotten down there? Staring at the spot on the shelves, her mind turned over the idea that Jenny had fallen under the bed, rolled forward, then had been pushed upright when Beth had stowed away the yoga mat. While not impossible, it was highly implausible.

But it sure beat the hell out of the idea that the doll had moved itself.

Beth put Jenny back on the shelf, casting a wary eye at the shelves while she stacked the pillows on the bed. She tapped her way through several chapters before letting out a huge yawn. Sliding beneath her sheets, she let out a sigh. Beth rubbed her lower belly gently with one hand until she dozed off.

“YOU CAN HAVE AN ATTORNEY read these over first. I prefer that you would, actually. There isn’t any hurry-now that we have an heir, the clock sort of resets for a bit.” She set the pen on the table for Mike to use. “However, I am just on delivery duty today. I need to get into the office to begin processing some additional documents. Today is Tuesday. I would be happy to drop by on Friday to pick these up, if you have them done. Otherwise, I can just drop by to make certain you are getting settled. That is part of the provisions as well.”

“Um, yeah. Sure. Thank you.”

Beth walked toward the front of the house, Mike following behind. She had dropped by with additional paperwork, and was stunned at just how different Mike seemed. He was still very awkward to be around, and he was pretty much rushing her out of the house today. Something had happened in the last eighteen hours, she was sure of it. Not only was Mike all gung-ho to keep the place, but there was a strange aura about him, almost like he now had super powers or something. She did find him cute, but not cute enough to account for the fact that his scent alone was making her horny again. Last night had been about defraying that particular issue, but today she had caught herself staring at the bulge in his jeans multiple times during their conversation, when she knew he wasn’t looking. This behavior was totally unlike her.

After pulling away from the house in her car, she kept checking the rear-view mirror to see if Mike was watching her leave. She drove to the other side of town and pulled in to the parking garage under her office building. She walked into the office, greeting Ed the receptionist at his desk. She spent the rest of the day in her private office filing papers, getting everything in the estate ready for transfer. However, her mind kept drifting back to Mike, wondering just what had changed.

It wouldn’t be the first time something weird had happened in the house. Over the last couple of years, she had had to hire many different maids to keep the place clean, several of them getting spooked by random noises and movement in the house. When she was little, she had heard that the place was haunted, but she had walked those rooms herself many times and never heard a sound or experienced the feeling of being watched. What happened inside the walls of the old house that could change a man overnight, make him seem taller, stronger, more chiseled?

Beth was embarrassed to realize that her left hand was pushing against the top of her crotch, just under her desk. Taking a deep breath, she jerked her hand away and tried to get on with her work. She sent an email to the Society rejecting their offer, then dug through a couple of extra papers she had received regarding the estate. She frowned on discovering that one of the letters she had received was a Past Due notice addressed to Emily from New castle Storage.

“Weird.” She couldn’t remember dealing with New castle before and guessed the original bill had gotten lost. She opened it up with the Excalibur letter opener on her desk.

“Fuck!” The original bill had apparently come quite some time ago, but she had never seen it. Apparently Emily had rented a storage property outside of town, paying for several years in advance. Six months ago, the rent had come due, and they were threatening to sell the contents. She checked the address on the letter and was stunned to see that it was dated three weeks ago.

Beth punched in their phone number, only to get a message from the answering machine. Business hours had ended over thirty minutes ago. After hanging up the phone, she made a note to herself and then emailed her boss. She wasn’t sure who had fucked this one up, but she wasn’t going to go down for it if it turned out that the storage unit had been full of valuable items. Why was this letter just reaching her now? Frustrated, she scoured the storage unit’s website, but they didn’t have an email address either.

Distracted, she looked at the clock. She still had almost an hour of work left, but she just couldn’t deal anymore. Between thinking of Mike and this new fuck-up at work, she felt like going home and drinking some wine in the bath. Her mind touched briefly on an image of the Dragon, but she shoved it out of her head. She knew better than to fuck that monster more than once a week.

She put the paperwork in her desk drawer and locked up, then tried her best to look nonchalant as she walked out of the office. For all anybody knew, she was headed out to deal with a client. Not that she had many currently-she had been the object of jealousy in the office when she had taken on Emily’s estate. Due to the sheer enormity of money involved, her boss had