A Witch's Handbook of Kisses and Curses (24 page)

With recently ended relationships, cultural differences, and as-yet-undisclosed vampire relatives, we were dealing with enough issues without adding magic into the mix.

“Rough day?” he asked.

“I learned a lot,” I said as he brushed the wet hair out of my face. Like the fact that I could create tiny storm systems with my mind. That was a life lesson if there ever was one. “Why don’t you take off those clothes and join me in this big old tub?”

“Because if you’re all wet and slippery and I’m all wet and slippery, one of us might get hurt when I do this.” He leaned down and kissed me softly on the lips. I rose to my knees, plucking at the buttons of his shirt with my wet fingers. I threw it onto the floor, and before I could get to his jeans, he pulled me against him. He was right, it was slippery. My skin slid against his, and he nearly dropped me as he dragged me out of the tub and wrapped a towel around me, although he didn’t give me time to dry off as we fumbled toward the bed.

I looped my ankle around his, pushing him back onto the bed so I could yank the jeans and boxers away. He chuckled. “Well, this is an exciting new side to you.”

Grinning wildly, I climbed up on the bed, hovering over him, and settled my hips over his. I tucked my feet under his calves and stretched down the length of his body.

“Soooo bendy,” he murmured, threading his hands through my hair and pressing his lips to mine.

“Really, Jed—”

“Nola, there’s something I’ve been wantin’ to tell you for a while now,” he murmured against my lips.

“Hmm?”

He gently pinched my lips shut with his fingertips. “Shh.”

I rolled my eyes as he smirked. His hips surged forward with a snap, and my whole body sang.

Never trust a werewolf when life is on the line.

—When, What, Witch, Were, and Why?

The Five W’s of Safe Interactions with the Paranormal

D
r. Hackett took a week off to go trout fishing in Arkansas, leaving me with time to throw myself into searching Specialty Books. The solstice deadline was looming in three weeks. I tried to use the die to contact Nana Fee (without Andrea’s help), but all I managed to do was make contact with one of Jane’s former step-grandfathers. He just wanted to say hello and tell her that “Grandma Ruthie is still secured,” whatever that meant.

As I had officially scoured every inch of the shop space, including searching for the athame in the utensil drawer of the coffee bar, I called or e-mailed Mr. Wainwright’s contacts in the artifact market, anyone who might have supplied him with items for the shop, on the off chance that Mr. Wainwright had traded the athame for stock. Giving them a sob story about my grandmother accidentally selling a family heirloom to Mr. Wainwright, I asked if they would mind sending
me a picture of any athames they’d bartered through the shop. If it was the item I was looking for, I offered to buy it back for fifty percent more than they’d paid for it.

A buyer in California told me to mind my own damn business and hung up on me. A buyer in Canada was only too happy to help, but the handle of his athame was blue enamel with a dark onyx stone. And the buyer in Spain . . .

“I know my Spanish is rusty, but I’m pretty sure
cuadros desnudos
means ‘naked pictures,’ ” Andrea said, handing me a printout as we sprawled around my living room, sorting through these e-mails. Jed, who had been spending more and more time in my half of the duplex, was perched on a ladder in the middle of the room, replacing the old globe light fixture with a ceiling fan. Because I still wasn’t ready for the whole witchcraft confession, we’d told him we were searching for some antiques to complete a collection for one of Jane’s customers.

“If you want to see what he has, he wants to see what you have. It’s your classic tit-for-athame scenario.”

“You are enjoying this far too much,” I told her.

“Yes, I am,” she said, nodding. Behind her, Jane gave me a wicked grin.

“I am not comfortable with this line of conversation,” Dick muttered, walking away. “If I see you with a camera, young lady, you’re grounded.”

Jed, who seemed wary of my protective vampire great-great-great-grandpa, raised his hand. “I’m with Mr. Cheney.”

“Yes, sir.” I sighed, tossing the e-mail in the trash.

“You don’t have to call him Mr. Cheney,” Andrea assured Jed as he made the last adjustment to the ceiling fan.

“Yes, I do,” Jed responded.

Dick nodded as Jed climbed down the ladder. “Yes, he does.”

I snorted, making a paper ball from the other e-mails and tossing them, too. Jane watched me closely as Jed climbed down the ladder.

“You’re taking this far too well,” Jane observed as Dick and Jed carried the old fixture and the ladder out of the room. “You’ve been really relaxed the past few days, despite the fact that you’ve struck out with those buyers.”

“Well, with the Earth plaque broken, it feels like the pressure is off a little bit,” I said, shrugging. “I’m going to keep looking, because it’s the right thing to do, but I don’t know if the binding will work, even if I do find all four.”

“No, that’s not it,” Jane said, her eyes narrowing. “You’ve had sex. With Jed.”

“Shh!” I hissed at her. “Dick will hear you. We haven’t actually told him that Jed and I are involved, for Jed’s sake. And we haven’t told Jed that I’m related to Dick, because explaining my whole twisted family backstory is not something I’m ready for.”

“So why is Jed all nervous and twitchy?” Jane asked, glancing out to the backyard shed, where the menfolk were putting away tools.

“Because Dick keeps glaring at him and muttering
under his breath,” I told her. “And don’t poke around in my head; we’ve talked about that.”

“She doesn’t have to poke around in your head,” Andrea protested. “It’s written all over your face. You might as well get ‘recently banged’ tattooed on your forehead.”

“I don’t know if I can be friends with someone who sleeps with a ‘Jed,’ ” Jane pondered, pointing at her friend. “Andrea, you set them up on that drive to Georgia; I blame you for this. Nola was such a nice girl.”

“So Stephen is no more?” Andrea asked, slapping Jane’s accusing finger away from her face.

“Well, I didn’t murder him,” I said. “I just stopped taking his calls.”

“So what’s going to happen when you have to go back home?” Andrea asked. “Are you going to try to keep seeing him?”

“It’s not like we’ve made any big commitment to each other,” I said. “I like Jed. And he clearly likes me, or, at least, parts of me. He’s a very nice man. He’s sweet and funny and smart. And he doesn’t ask a lot of questions about the amount of time I spend with vampires in an occult bookshop.”

“And he looks good naked,” Jane added.

I sighed. “Sooo good. But there are so many things I can’t tell him. As much as I like him, how could I have a real relationship with someone I have to lie to and omit huge portions of my life? How could that ever work?”

And that was what had been missing in my relationship with Stephen, I realized. I couldn’t share my life with him, because there was so much he couldn’t accept.
He never directly asked me to give it up, but the message had been subtly clear. If I wanted Stephen, I would have to give up the connection with my family. I felt like an idiot now for not having seen that. He wouldn’t have made demands. He wouldn’t have forced me. He just wouldn’t have been happy otherwise. He wasn’t a bad man, just a “normal” one. And normal was something I was never going to be, no matter how hard I tried.

But where did that leave me with Jed?

I’d told myself I was keeping things from Stephen to keep the peace and to protect him. But that was based on that fact that I’d known he couldn’t accept the witchcraft or the weirdness. I thought perhaps Jed was just quirky enough that he could. At the very least, I could tell him about Dick. Or warn him about Dick.

“So you haven’t told him about the witchy stuff or the Elements or anything?” Andrea asked.

“It’s kind of hard to fit into a conversation,” I told her. “How did you tell people that you were a vampire?”

“I didn’t tell people, really, until I told my parents,” Jane offered.

“How’d that go?”

Jane frowned. “My mother asked me if I could
try not
to be a vampire anymore.”

“My parents disowned me way before I was turned,” Andrea said. “But they did get really indignant when I didn’t invite them to our wedding.”

“That’s remarkably unhelpful,” I said, covering my face with my hands. I was going to have to talk to Jed about some of these things. And the small matter of my
returning to Ireland in a few weeks’ time. Otherwise, we were doomed to end up just like Stephen and me. And that wasn’t fair. If anything, I should let my personality and emotional baggage doom the relationship.

“You want to go back to talking about sending that Spanish guy the naked pictures?” Jane asked, nudging me with her elbow.

“No.”

*  *  *

It took a while to pry my vampire friends out of my living room. Jed had given up hours before, finding some excuse to retreat back to safe quarters on his side of the duplex. Jane and Andrea finally persuaded Dick to leave before he could try to replace other fixtures by reminding him of a
Dukes of Hazzard
marathon starting at midnight. I waited until I saw the taillights clear the driveway before sprinting across the porch. Before I could knock, Jed opened his door, yanked me into his foyer, and pinned me against the wall. Without saying a word, he pressed his lips against mine in a searing kiss. I moaned, twisting my fingers in the light cotton material of his long-sleeved workshirt as his hands slipped around my waist. Breathless and dizzy, I pulled away from him.

“Your family scares me,” he said.

I arched an eyebrow. “Family?”

“Well, you’re obviously not blood-related, what with the opposing accents and pulse differences, but I know family when I see it. Those people love you. They’re happy to spend time with you. And Dick spends most
of his time glaring at me and making crotch-specific threats when you’re not around. That’s family.”

I frowned. Were they my family? Was I ready for any sort of family beyond the McGavocks? The clan and the clinic had been the focus of my life for so long. Did I have room for anything more in my head or my heart? I liked them all so much—Dick, Andrea, Jane, the whole company. They’d made me feel welcome and warm when I had no clue how to go about my search. They’d done all they could to help me, sometimes crossing the line of what was appropriate or sensible. I wasn’t a leader. I wasn’t expected to know what to do every moment of every day. I made an absolute fool of myself when necessary, and nobody panicked. It was lovely. If I could somehow blend the two groups—the overwhelming love of my living family with the unquestionable acceptance of my undead relatives—I might turn out to be a somewhat normal person.

Probably not.

I kissed Jed again—Jed, the man who’d done nothing but help me without demanding details or even questioning whether driving me across three states was a waste of time. And I felt a prick of guilt for keeping so much from him. How could he really like me when he only knew such a small part of me? No magic, no mission, no crazy vampire family. Maybe he would find those “quirks” charming and attractive.

Probably not.

“There’s something I need to tell you,” I said, kissing him one last time. “Several things, actually.”

He nodded, the flirty, sweet energy draining from his face. “There are some things I need to tell you, too.” He kissed me again, and there was a strange air of finality to it. As if he was bracing himself for bad news. Did he know something was “off” about me? Was he more comfortable wondering than not knowing? A buzzing noise sounded from the kitchen, making me break off the kiss.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Dinner,” he said. “I noticed you don’t eat much around the vampires, so I warmed up a chicken pot pie. We’ll eat, and then we’ll talk, all right?”

We gorged ourselves on pot pie and watched some silly Chuck Norris film Jed had insisted on, after I told him that I’d never seen
The Delta Force
. Apparently, this was a felony in some states.

We cleaned up the dishes, then settled in for discussion, coffee, and the most feared beard in the universe. And for about twenty minutes, I was content and relaxed. Of course, it was all downhill from there.

“Hey, could you take this into the living room for me?” he asked, handing me a bowl of rocky road ice cream. “I’m having a fistfight with the coffeemaker.”

“Why does everyone in this town have an adversarial relationship with coffeepots?” I muttered as I carried the ice cream into the living room, carefully balancing the bowl to keep it from sliding off onto the floor. Penny never had forgiven me for the “Christmas trifle” incident.

But the television blaring Chuck Norris’s all-around badassery was too much of a distraction, and I wasn’t
watching where I was stepping. Just as I passed the farthest edge of Jed’s blue rag rug, my shoe caught on the fringe, dragging it back. I grumbled about my own clumsiness as I settled the bowl on the coffee table. I knelt to straighten the rug and noticed that one of the floorboards was loose, set slightly higher than the rest. I shot a guilty look toward the kitchen, where Jed was humming tunelessly. I hadn’t damaged the floor, had I? I didn’t remember dragging anything but the rug. I pushed on the board, trying to slide it back into place, but it listed and slid down into empty space.