His eyes flicked to Josie, and the menacing scowl was enough to make me take a step back, only to back up right into a hard body that I knew all too well.
“I swear to God, if you had anything to do with this, I will ruin you. I will make you pay?—”
He never got to finish his thought. JR swung hard, laying Ben out flat on the ground with blood dripping from his mouth. As he stepped forward, he hovered over the older man, kneeling so his words could only be heard by the Parker patriarch.
There seemed to be some kind of standoff between the Parker family and JR as he got to his feet, but then the brothers grabbed their dad and they were off, getting in their trucks, their tires squealing on the pavement as they drove off.
“What was that?” I asked Josie.
When I turned to my friend, tears spilled down her cheeks unchecked, but she quickly dashed them away as she rushed to her store. Not knowing what else to do, I followed, ignoring the man on my heels.
“Josie, what happened?”
But the words died on my lips when I saw the state of her shop. Things were scattered everywhere. Every drawer was left open and the contents were spilling out. It was a disaster.
“Look at this,” Josie whispered, her fingers pressed against her lips. “Everything’s ruined.”
“Can we clean it up?”
She shook her head. Her eyes darted around to all the drawers. I didn’t know much about any of this stuff, but the dried herbs seemed to be all mixed together.
“I’ll have to restock everything.”
I still didn’t understand what was going on. “Why would they storm into your shop? What were they looking for?”
“Someone poisoned Clara,” Sam said from behind me.
“That didn’t give them the right to come in here and destroy her fucking shop,” JR snapped, shoving past Sam to get to his wife. “They could have come to me.”
I was reeling from all the information being thrown at me. “Someone poisoned Clara?”
My eyes met Sam’s, but he wasn’t paying attention to me.
“JR, you know it needed to be done.”
JR’s gaze swung to Sam’s, but there was nothing friendly about this exchange. “You know damn well that Josie would never hurt anyone. She didn’t put that poison in her supplies, and now that Ben stormed in here and made such a fucking ordeal about it, no one in town is going to trust her!”
When Sam didn’t say anything, JR slowly shook his head at him. “Get the fuck out of this shop.”
Sam glanced at me, then backed out of the shop, turning on his heel and leaving.
I was at a loss, unsure of what to do. But I remembered what happened to Ellie, and how her shop was destroyed and it nearly ruined her.
“I’ll call in reinforcements. We’ll get this cleaned up in no time.”
“You have your shop to run,” Josie said quietly.
“My shop can stay closed for today. Right now, we need to get this cleaned up and salvage what we can. I know Alyssa will come help, and you know Delaney will be pissed as hell when she hears about this.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but I wasn’t going to stop and question it now. Reliving the whole thing would only push Josie into a downward spiral.
Ten minutes later, Delaney, Alyssa, Ellie, Ryder, and even Archer were in the shop, and we were all working to get it back in order. So much couldn’t be salvaged, but as we took care of organizing everything, JR helped Josie get everything ordered.
The sad part was that so many of her ingredients were things she picked and dried, or grew in the shop. All of that hard work was down the drain, and she’d basically have to start over.
And based on the looks JR and Archer were exchanging, someone was going to pay. Whether that was the Parkers or someone else was still to be determined.
20
