Absolutely Captivated (31 page)

“I knew that once I was already in,”
Zoe said. “There’s no such thing as a bolt out of the blue that
makes you believe you’ve found your one and only.”

Something changed in his eyes,
something cooled, and he finally achieved that distance she had
noted the day before. It felt as if he had left the room, even
though he was still only a few feet from her.

“So is that why you kissed me?” he
asked. “For fun? For experimentation?”

“You kissed me,” she said, with more
heat than she wanted to. “And I liked it, so I kissed you back. I
thought we had something going here.”

“If Kyle weren’t in my life,” Travers
said, “maybe. But he is.”

“This kiss, then,” Zoe said. “It
was—what? Impulse? A tease? An experimentation to see how I’d
react?”

He dropped his gaze, his
eyelashes brushing against that inflamed skin. “I just—wanted—I
couldn’t—you’re so beautiful, Zoe. I just wanted to—just
once…”

His voice trailed off. He didn’t look
up. She felt her own skin coloring. It had been impulse, and it
embarrassed him. Or she had embarrassed him by taking things one
step farther.

“Give me the lotion,” she said,
suppressing a sigh. “Let me teach you a very simple spell for
healing.”

The spell was simple. Travers
performed it slowly, carefully, with a single finger tracing a
visible path on his sunburned skin. He stood in front of the
mirror, and examined his face with a care he hadn’t used since he
was a teenage boy about to go to his first prom.

At first, his fingers had shaken. Zoe
had given him a cool smile, told him that was normal, and decamped
for the main part of the office. He supposed he could call her if
something went wrong.

But nothing did. His skin stopped
looking so red, and the pain—which felt like someone had placed a
hot mask over his face—eased to nearly nothing.

Now, as he examined his arms, he
realized the sunburn had faded into a tan, something that hadn’t
happened to him in his entire life.

Just like that kiss. He
had never experienced a kiss like that in his entire life, either.
And then, with her hands on his, taking his own hand between them,
rubbing—

He had to end it. Just to maintain his
own control.

He had thought he was past
that, that loss of control that would lead him into making a
mistake he would later regret. Not that he regretted Kyle. But
Travers regretted the circumstances of his marriage, which no one
knew except himself and Cheryl, and he regretted being the cause of
it all.

Hormones.

Maybe he had misunderstood the magical
explanations. He thought the Fates (or was it Zoe?) had said people
came into their magic when their hormones no longer controlled
them.

He snorted, and shook his head. Until
today, his hormones hadn’t controlled him for a long
time.

But he couldn’t pass up that kiss. Zoe
had been so close and the floral scent of her hair, mixed with a
scent that he had already come to recognize as uniquely Zoe,
enticed him to act on impulse.

Now he wished he hadn’t. She was angry
at him, and he was angry at himself, making a physical promise that
he couldn’t keep.

He knew the
arguments: He could have let that moment continue, taken it all the
way; they were both adults. But he didn’t dare. Not with his heart
already intrigued. And not with Kyle able to read—what did he call
it?—
broadcast
thoughts.

The last thing Travers needed was
explaining risky, unprotected (and impulsively enjoyable) sex to
his son.

Travers finished the spell and washed
the lotion off his hands. Then he squared his shoulders and carried
the bottle into the main part of the office.

Zoe sat at her desk chair with her
back to the room. She was hunched over her computer, her fingers
dancing across the keys. Rays of light peeked through the blinds,
making her skin look striped.

“What do you want me to do with the
lotion?” he asked.

“Keep it.” Her words were clipped.
“It’s a gift.”

He sighed, ever so silently, knowing
he deserved her withdrawal, and not sure how to apologize for
giving into his impulse without sounding like he was apologizing
for the kiss. He hadn’t felt sorry for that.

Sometimes his own rules seemed harsh,
even to him.

“Finding anything?” he
asked.

She rotated her chair with the tips of
her toes. “You ready to talk business?”

As if he hadn’t been. As if the
discussion of invisibility and the lessons in healing had been his
idea.

But he didn’t let those thoughts out.
It was better for him to keep as much control around Zoe as he
could, so he wouldn’t make another mistake.

“Yes,” he said. The word sounded meek.
He wasn’t feeling meek. The irritation he felt was fueled by a
sexual tension he had buried long ago. He wished he could bury it
again.

“All right.” She nodded toward a
chair. “Sit.”

He walked into the office,
set the lotion on the desk, and sat in the chair closest to the
desk. While he had been healing his face, Zoe had cleaned up the
front. The smell of wet fur was gone, along with the remaining
five-dollar bill, and that embarrassing scrap of pink
cloth.

“This is going to be
difficult for you,” she said. “You’ll be learning about two magic
systems at once. You’ll have to keep firmly in mind which refers to
our system and which refers to the Faerie system.”

“How do you know that I’m
not part of the Faerie system?” he asked.

To his surprise, she grinned. “You
don’t have pointed ears and a rude manner.”

“Excuse me?”

“The Faerie’s magic is
hereditary. Occasionally, the Faeries bring in a civilian, but the
Faerie traits dominate. You’d have a particular look if you were
Faerie.”

Travers was intrigued. “So how do we
get our magic?”

“No one knows. We’re all orphans. We
just appear on someone’s doorstep one day.” Then Zoe peered at him.
“Except you. You have a family. Kyle has magic. He’s your son,
right?”

“Oh, yeah,” Travers said. “Can’t you
tell?”

She smiled. “You look alike, but
sometimes that doesn’t mean anything. Especially when you’re
dealing with magic. What about the rest of your family?”

“My sisters and I were
adopted,” Travers said. “Kyle says that Vivian has magic—or will.
She’s psychic, too, although I never believed it before this
month.”

“And your other sister?” Zoe
asked.

“Megan?” Travers shrugged. “She’s as
normal as they come.”

“Like you.”

He felt the words as if they had a
steel edge. The ease he had thought was returning between him and
Zoe disappeared.

“Good point,” he said.

“Still, two or three in one family is
very unusual for us. Did the Fates say anything to you about this?”
Zoe asked.

Travers shook his head.

“So they knew about it.”
She steepled her fingers and leaned back in her chair. It squeaked.
“Fascinating.”

He didn’t want to
think about his family. Not about his sisters or his parents or
Kyle. Especially not Kyle, who, if Travers was lucky, was at this
moment talking Klingon to some poor unsuspecting
Star Trek: the Experience
employee.

“Your parents have no magic?” Zoe
asked.

“My parents found Viv appalling,”
Travers said. “Not because she had psychic experiences, but because
they often made her black out. My folks took her to all kinds of
doctors, but it wasn’t until our Aunt Eugenia—”

He stopped and frowned.

“Your aunt,” Zoe said.

He shook his head. “She wasn’t really
an aunt. But she did help Viv. She even left her fortune to Viv.
And Aunt Eugenia was weird. She had a way of making things
happen.”

“So your sister had a mentor,” Zoe
said. “I wonder what exactly happened to yours.”

Travers shrugged. “It doesn’t matter.
You were going to explain the different systems to me.”

“No,” Zoe said. “I was going to tell
you about my progress.”

She tapped her steepled
fingers against her chin, as if she were thinking about how to
discuss this. He couldn’t believe this was the same woman he’d
kissed not half an hour before. She was cool and distant, not
laughing and warm like she had been when they’d arrived.

“The Faeries,” she said
after a moment, “believe in collecting power.”

“I think someone mentioned that
yesterday,” Travers said.

“They take it from even the tiniest
sources,” Zoe said, undeterred. “Sometimes they use it, and
sometimes they keep it. They hoard magical power for the future, so
that if something happens and they need extra power, they can tap
it, like a reservoir.”

“Our people don’t do that?” Travers
asked.

“We consider it theft,” Zoe
said.

“Like what nearly happened last
night,” Travers said.

Zoe unsteepled her
fingers, opened her hands in an I-don’t-know gesture, and, for good
measure, shrugged. “That’s extreme, at least for Faerie. Pretty
common for us. Faerie goes after items—totems. You know, if you had
a lucky quarter and whether or not it was lucky, you believed that
it was, the Faeries would want it.”

“Because I have magic,” Travers
said.

“Even if you don’t. The Faeries think
belief transfers a magical essence and, from what I’ve seen in this
town, they may not be wrong.”

“So by stealing this spinning
wheel—”

“They stole great power from the
Fates,” Zoe said.

“Why didn’t the Fates go after them?”
Travers asked.

“That is the question,
isn’t it?” Zoe stood up. She paced behind her desk like a detective
in the last scene of a locked-room mystery. “I’ve been asking
myself that since yesterday. Part of it is pretty simple: the Fates
didn’t want a war with Faerie.”

“Isn’t that what they
said?” Travers asked. A lot of the day before was a blur. His mind
had to reorganize itself, and it still wasn’t done. He thought he
was doing pretty well for a man who believed he wasn’t anything
special, only to discover that he had an ability that made him
extremely unusual.

“That’s part of what they said.” Zoe
leaned against the desk, revealing a great deal of thigh. Travers
had no idea why she wore skirts when so many women didn’t anymore,
but he didn’t object.

Not even now, when he was pretending
he could get his hormones back under control.

“They also said they didn’t need the
wheel anymore,” Zoe was saying.

It took Travers a bit to concentrate
on that last. The thigh had distracted him even more than he
thought it would.

“But they need it now,” Travers said.
“What if it doesn’t have any magic left?”

“If the Faeries have
stolen the power?” Zoe let out a whistling breath. “Oh, dear. That
might be war. Some magical items—not totems like we were talking
about, but items with true magic—they can’t be depleted, except
through overuse or misuse.”

“And ruining this spinning wheel,
which has been gone for longer than the Western World has recorded
history, would be a cause for war?”

“Don’t ask me,” Zoe said, tugging at
the edge of her skirt. “For a mage, I’m pretty young.”

She wasn’t looking at him when she
said that. This was the third time she had brought up age. Perhaps
it bothered her. It only intrigued him, although it might not have,
if he still believed he had a limited lifespan.

Perhaps that was the best factor, the
most mitigating. He might have all this pesky magic, but in
exchange, he got to live what, in his mind, seemed like
forever.

“It just seems odd,” Travers said,
thinking that sentence was odd. Everything had been odd since Viv’s
wedding. Only some things had been odder than others. “We’re not
going to start a war, are we, by stealing the thing?”

“We’re not going to steal it.” Zoe
hopped off the desk. There was something she wasn’t telling him.
Some plan.

“And shouldn’t we even see if the
wheel still has some power?”

Zoe looked at him over her shoulder.
Her hair had caught on the edge of her lip, and she brushed the
strand away.

“You don’t get this,
do you?” Her voice was low, almost dangerous. “What the Fates want
us to do—want
me
to do—is go to one of the most unstable places on the planet
and reconnoiter for them. I’ll be lucky to get out alive,
Travers.”

“I thought you said you wouldn’t have
to go into Faerie.” He matched his tone to hers. He wasn’t going to
let her intimidate him, no matter what.

“I’m hoping I won’t,” she said. “I
have a few tricks that might work.”