Sympathetic Magic (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 4) (7 page)

“Not today,” Lucas replied. “I need to be somewhere at six-thirty.”

A knowing grin. “Hot date?”

Well, at least Dave had relaxed a lot, now that his divorce was final. Of course, getting paid cash up front for the house that Connor and Angela now owned probably had something to do with his improved outlook on life.

“Not really.”

“Hmm,” was all Dave said, but Lucas could tell he wasn’t quite buying it. His friends were too used to the apparently unending string of women he dated. Not that he’d added to that string in a long time. Ever since meeting Margot, his heart hadn’t really been in it.

He went home and took a quick shower, then put on some jeans and a T-shirt, pulling a sweater over that. For a second he wondered if he was being too casual, then reminded himself he was going to Jerome. If anything, he probably looked overdressed.

Spatters of rain began to fall as he drove south on I-17, so he was glad he’d decided against going down through the canyon. Not that the Porsche couldn’t handle it, but in his current abstracted state, he preferred the straight-line driving on the highway.

By the time he pulled up in front of the shop Rachel McAllister owned, the rain had begun to fall in earnest. Since the weather had looked iffy in the rain department, he’d worn his leather jacket instead of his wool overcoat, but the shop looked very closed. Rachel hadn’t given him any specific instructions, and he waited in the car for a minute, wondering if he should pull around to the back, where he knew the private entrance to the apartment over the store was located.

But then he saw the shop door open, and Rachel herself standing there, giving him a beckoning gesture. He got out of the car and ducked his head, walking quickly to the entrance. She stepped out of the way so he could move past her, then shut the door behind him.

“Lovely weather we’re having,” she quipped, and he grinned at her.

“I like it.”

She made a noncommittal “hmm” noise, then said, “Come on up to the apartment. If we stand by the front door, someone’s going to think the store’s open, and I don’t feel like shooing away tourists right now. The crew I had to get rid of at six was bad enough.”

“No problem,” he replied, letting her take the lead and guide him up the narrow staircase to the apartment that occupied the top two floors of the building. It took some effort for him to avoid seeming too obvious as he studied his surroundings. Angela had told him about this place, but he’d never been here before. It felt cramped to him, although he wasn’t sure whether that was because the place really didn’t have much square footage, or because Rachel seemed to have crammed it full of antiques and knickknacks and potted plants, most surfaces taken up by framed pictures of family members or crystals or figurines carved from stone.

Above all that, though, he smelled something rich and spicy emanating from the kitchen. He must have lifted an eyebrow, because Rachel said, “I’ve had beef barbacoa going in the crock pot all day. Of course you’ll be staying for dinner.”

“Oh, no — I didn’t expect you to feed me — ”

“Maybe you didn’t, but I’m still going to.” Her hazel eyes twinkled. “But I have some last-minute things to do, so I hope you don’t mind chatting in the kitchen.”

He knew better than to protest. Besides, Rachel’s cooking was supposed to be spectacular. She’d taught Angela, after all, and the girl was definitely no slouch in that department herself.

Rachel washed her hands, and then pulled an onion and a pepper from the ancient refrigerator. After setting down a scarred butcher-block cutting board, she set to work, chopping the vegetables with a brisk, easy efficiency that put the chefs on those cable cooking shows to shame. “I suppose you want to talk to me about Margot.”

“I — ” What the hell? He hadn’t said anything about why he wanted to see Rachel, only that he hoped she had time for a quick chat.

A corner of her mouth twitched as she attempted to repress a smile. “Angela called me to give me some warning.” The knife glinted in the light from the aged brass fixture overhead as she continued to chop away. “And I feel like I should be giving you some warning, too. Are you trying to make your life complicated?”

He hoped he hadn’t driven all the way down here just to get a lecture. “Look, I know you’re still not thrilled about the whole McAllister/Wilcox situation, but — ”

“That doesn’t have anything to do with it,” she said, interrupting him, but so gently that he couldn’t really take offense. “Well, actually, it does, but not because of my feelings on the matter.” Vegetables chopped, she went to a skillet already sitting on the stovetop and dropped a pat of butter into it.

“Then what is it?” he asked, hoping he didn’t sound too desperate and guessing that he probably did. “I know it’s not as if you expect your elders to take a vow of celibacy or something. The other two are married, right?”

“Yes,” Rachel replied slowly, not looking up as she stirred rice into the melted butter, and then added the chopped vegetables and some minced garlic she had sitting off to the side. “The thing is, they were both married
before
they were made elders.”

“So?”

She turned away from the stove and met his gaze directly. “I’m sure Margot would probably kill me for telling you this, but it’s not that it isn’t common knowledge — well, among my generation, anyway. She was engaged when she was called to be an elder, and her fiancé just didn’t want to deal with the implications of that. He broke it off a month before the wedding.”

The word escaped Lucas’ mouth before he could stop it. “Asshole.”

To his surprise, Rachel nodded. “More or less. Luckily, he was with the branch of the family over in Prescott, so it’s not as if she’s been tripping over him continually for the past ten years, but it still was rough on her. As far as I know, she hasn’t even tried to be with anyone since.”

Ten years…with no one? He had a hard time even comprehending that level of loneliness. “I still don’t see why her being made an elder would be such a big deal.”

“Well, you Wilcoxes don’t have elders the way we do. It’s sort of being a city council member, a marriage and family counselor, a real estate agent, and an attorney all rolled into one. You’re basically on call all the time to handle family business. It’s one thing if you’re already married and settled — Bryce was in his early fifties when he got the call, and Allegra around forty-seven, if I’m remembering correctly. Their marriages were stable, their kids already out of grade school or even in high school. It was an adjustment, but they could handle it. But thinking you’re going to have your wife all to yourself, only to discover that you’re going to have to share her with the whole clan?” Rachel shook her head, then picked up a can opener and began to open up some tomatoes. “Clay couldn’t handle it. So he backed out.”

“Clay, huh?”

Once again her mouth twitched at the disapproval in his tone. “Yes, Clay McAllister. Like I said, from over in Prescott. They met at Great-Aunt Ruby’s seventy-fifth birthday party, as the Prescott McAllisters generally keep to themselves, but they did show up for that occasion. Good-looking man.”

“Of course he was.”

Now smiling openly, she dumped the tomatoes into the skillet. “I don’t think you have too much to worry about on that front, Lucas. Anyway, you can see why Margot is gun-shy. She doesn’t think anyone would be willing to take on everything that comes with having an elder as a significant other. So she hasn’t even tried. And now you come along, and you think because Connor and Angela made things work, that magically every other Wilcox/McAllister pairing is going to work as well. But it’s not that easy.”

“I don’t want easy,” he told her. About a million thoughts were raging in his head, foremost among them the desire to drive to Prescott, find this Clay person, and punch him in the face. Hard. But that wouldn’t solve anything, would only make matters far, far worse. “Margot needs to realize that just because Clay was a cowardly prick, it doesn’t mean every man who’s interested in her is.”

“No, you’re definitely not cowardly,” Rachel agreed. “But you don’t have much frame of reference, either. You see things going fine for Connor and Angela, and maybe in the back of your head you think it should be the same for Margot. The problem is, Angela was barely a
prima
before her entire world changed. She doesn’t see why there should be an issue with her splitting her time between here and Flagstaff, because she hasn’t spent the past ten years being available whenever the people in her clan needed her. But Margot has all that history, and it’s not going to go away just because you want it to.”

Put that way, the prospect of getting Margot to change her mind did seem fairly daunting. But there had to be a way. He wasn’t going to give up that easily. “Okay, I understand that,” he said at length. “But she has to understand that history isn’t necessarily destiny.”

“True,” Rachel replied. “And I wish you luck in convincing her of that. In fact,” she added, as Lucas heard the front door to the apartment open and muffled voices coming from the tiny entry, “you can start right now.”

And as Lucas began to frown at her in confusion, he saw Rachel’s “friend” Tobias and Margot come around the corner of the dining room, and realized what Rachel had been planning all along.

T
o tell the truth
, if she hadn’t been so on edge after her “date” with Lucas, she probably wouldn’t have accepted Rachel’s invitation to dinner in the first place. But when Margot had stopped by for a brief chat during her rounds, Rachel had made the offer, and at the time it sounded infinitely better than a Saturday night home alone with a book and a bowl of soup.

Now, though, Margot paused in the cramped dining room just outside the kitchen and wanted to flee. Because there was Lucas, leaning casually against the counter as if he’d done so a thousand times, watching as Rachel made Mexican rice. His gaze slid over to Margot, and she realized that, even though his posture looked relaxed, he was anything but. He hadn’t been expecting this, either.

“Hello, Lucas,” she managed to say, and the slow smile she’d already come to recognize spread across his lips.

“Hi, Margot,” he returned. “Guess you couldn’t resist Rachel’s barbacoa, either.”

Just the right note, friendly and unconcerned, as if the two of them meeting like this was something that happened every day. Margot could feel Tobias’ gaze on her and wondered how much he really knew. It seemed clear enough that Rachel had some idea of what was going on between Lucas and herself, with information probably supplied by Angela. Whether Rachel had said anything to Tobias, Margot wasn’t sure. Then again, Lucas might have mastered the art of appearing as if he didn’t have a care in the world, no matter what might be going on around him, but she wasn’t sure she was quite that skilled. She could have given something away, even while thinking she had everyone around her fooled.

“Do you need help with anything, Rachel?” she asked, hoping the words didn’t sound too strangled.

“Not at all,” Rachel replied. “The table’s set, and Tobias will help me get everything transferred over. Lucas, there’s a bottle of wine on the sideboard. Do you mind opening it? The corkscrew’s in the middle drawer.”

“Sure,” he said, pushing off from the counter where he’d been leaning and coming into the dining room. Luckily, the sideboard was on the opposite side of the space from where Margot stood, so at least he didn’t have to brush past her to get to it.

Tobias went on into the kitchen to assist Rachel, and so Margot found herself strangely at loose ends as she lingered in the no man’s land between the dining and living rooms. She watched Lucas head toward the aforementioned bottle of wine, extract the opener from a drawer in the sideboard, and begin to extricate the cork. Since Tobias and Rachel were clattering away in the kitchen, Margot decided it was safe to speak.

“Since when do you make a habit of having dinner with Rachel McAllister?”

“I don’t,” he said easily, twisting at the corkscrew. “But we had a few things to talk about.”

Margot had a pretty good idea what those “things” were. Casting a quick glance toward the kitchen, she replied in an undertone, “Why can’t you just let it go?”

He paused then, dark eyes meeting hers in a stare that made a shiver run down her back. “Because I don’t want to.”

What she possibly could have said in reply, she had no idea, but Tobias came in then carrying the big pot of the barbacoa meat, and Rachel followed with a bowl of rice and a bowl of beans, and by the time the other odds and ends had been set out — tortillas, cotija cheese for crumbling, a big glass bowl of Caesar salad — the opportunity to say anything at all was lost.

Conversation wasn’t as awkward as she thought it might be, either, as Rachel asked Lucas about Angela, and he said she was doing fine but was looking a little tired, as might be expected. The talk flowed about the impending arrival of the twins, and the upcoming preparations for Thanksgiving and all the holiday hubbub that would follow afterward. Lucas asked a question here and there, complimented Rachel on the food, said he hoped Margot hadn’t gotten too damp on the walk over here, and in general acted like a model dinner guest. She wasn’t quite that nonchalant, but she did manage to respond normally to most questions put to her, and even laughed at Lucas’ jokes without sounding as if she were pretending.

Through it all, though, it was difficult to keep herself from staring at him. She wanted to gaze at the long, strong fingers as they wrapped around the stem of his wine glass, the way his heavy dark hair waved back from his brow, the fine shape of his mouth…the mouth that seemed as if it had been created to match precisely with hers. At that thought, she felt a sudden heat burn through her, and she reached for her own wine glass and took an over-large gulp, then coughed.

“Are you all right, Margot?” Rachel asked.

“Fine,” Margot got out. “I must have swallowed something wrong.”

Rachel appeared unconvinced, but she let it drop, instead asking Tobias if he thought the rain was going to keep up all night, or whether it would blow by quickly. Margot had to hope for the latter, as she’d already gotten somewhat damp on the walk over and was only now drying out.

“The wind was pretty brisk, so I doubt the rain will hang around long. It usually doesn’t,” Tobias said.

Well, that was true enough. The storms in this part of the world were intense, but in general they did what they had to do in a brief period of time before moving on. It was hard to tell exactly what was going on outside, as Rachel had the curtains drawn, and there was still the third floor of the building above their heads, effectively blocking any sound of raindrops hitting the roof.

The conversation drifted to the coming winter, and whether there would be much snow, or whether the drought would continue to limit the number of storms passing through. Before she knew it, Tobias was clearing the dinner plates and Rachel was bringing out some of her homemade flan. Where she expected her dinner guests to put it, after everything else they’d consumed, Margot wasn’t sure.

She did manage to eat most of hers, just because it was too good not to, and then it was time to wrap things up, and do what she could to slide out of there gracefully before Lucas could see what she was doing. Not that her ploy worked, as he saw her struggling into her raincoat and came over to retrieve his own jacket from the coat rack.

“Can we talk outside for a minute?” he asked.

“The rain — ”

“If it’s raining, we can go to the Spirit Room and have a drink.”

That sounded even less appetizing than standing and talking to him in the pouring rain…or at least far more dangerous…but the only way to say no was to be downright rude, and he didn’t deserve that. “Okay,” she said reluctantly, and buttoned up her raincoat. Her dripping umbrella was still downstairs in the short tiled corridor that led to the back entrance, so she’d have to fetch it on her way out.

They said their goodbyes to Tobias and Rachel, then went down the stairs to the ground floor. As it turned out, Margot didn’t need her umbrella after all; when Lucas opened the door for her, the whole world was dark and dripping, but the rain had stopped falling. Above, a gibbous moon flickered in and out of the fast-racing clouds.

“I didn’t plan that, you know,” Lucas said, almost as soon as the door shut behind them.

“I know.” She tightened her grip around the umbrella, not looking at him. “That was Rachel’s doing. I guess she wanted to make sure we could get along like adults.”

“Which we did.”

“Yes.” They’d been walking down toward Hull Avenue, and she realized she was unconsciously heading back toward her place. That wouldn’t do at all. No way was she taking Lucas Wilcox to her house. She stopped on the corner and said, “Look, Lucas — ”

“She told me.”

“What?” Margot replied, taken aback by the interruption. “Told you what?”

“About Clay. About how you wouldn’t give anyone a chance after that.”

Fury burned through her then, which was good, because the air blowing in from the north was cold, so cold, and she needed the fire in her veins to combat it. “She had no right to tell you that.”

“She said it was fairly common knowledge among your clan…at least, the people who were old enough at the time to understand what was going on.” His mouth twisted, and he added, “If it makes you feel any better, she tried to warn me off.”

“She didn’t do a very good job of it,” Margot snapped, and began walking again.

Of course he didn’t take the hint, but kept striding along behind her, like a stray dog that thought it would get a good meal if it followed her home. She stopped again, this time in front of Spook Hall; no events were planned for this Saturday night, so the building was dark and empty.

“Lucas, I’m going home. I’m sorry you drove all the way down here for nothing, but — ”

“It wasn’t for nothing. Rachel fed me a very good meal.” He stood there, staring down at her, and once again she could feel her cheeks flush, could feel a tingle move over her at the intensity of his gaze. Damn it, why was it so hard to be indifferent to him, when she’d become an expert at freezing out any man who evinced so much as a modicum of interest?

“Well, then,” she said, attempting a tone of brittle carelessness. She wasn’t sure how well the comment went over, though.

He didn’t move, didn’t blink. “Just tell me one thing. One thing, and then I’ll leave you alone. Okay?”

“Okay.” That sounded safe enough. She hoped. Anything to get him to back off, to let her retreat to her lonely little shell where she didn’t have struggle with her body’s unwelcome responses to a man who was utterly wrong for her.

“Tell me you felt nothing when I kissed you.”

Oh, Goddess. One lie, and she would be rid of him. The trouble was, would he believe it?

She took in a breath, expelled it, and said, “I felt nothing.”

For the longest moment, he didn’t reply. Then, “You’re lying.”

Now was the time to protest, to say of course she wasn’t lying. But that would only be piling one lie on top of another, and for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to do that.

“So I’m lying. It doesn’t change the fact that this is impossible, and
you’re
being impossible.” She turned on her heel and began walking again, not bothering to wait for his reaction. A second or two later, she heard the sound of his footsteps behind her. So he really was going to follow her all the way back to her house.

Would she have the courage to shut him out?

As they walked, the rain began to fall again, lightly at first, and then with increasing strength. Grimly, she popped open her umbrella and hastened her strides. By the time they reached her front porch, the rain was falling in sheets, and Lucas’ hair was plastered to his scalp, the water sluicing off his leather jacket. Of course she couldn’t leave him outside in this.

“Come on in,” she said with some irritation. How like him to force her into taking him inside her home. Then again, it wasn’t as if he’d brought the rain. That wasn’t his talent, after all.

Unless his talent made the rain come so she’d be compelled to offer him shelter. Damn. She really had no idea how far this gift of his extended, how much it pushed and pulled on the world around him to make it form to what he wanted.

There was a coat tree in one corner of the tiny entry, so she unbuttoned her raincoat and hung it up, then watched as Lucas divested himself of his rain-slick garment and draped it from the arm of the coat tree next to hers. With one hand, he reached up and pushed his sodden hair off his forehead.

“I’ll get you a towel,” she said crisply, going down the hall to the linen closet. After fetching a spare hand towel, she returned to the foyer and gave the towel to him.

“Thanks.” He immediately began blotting his hair, getting rid of the worst of the moisture. His shoes were dripping, too, so Margot went on,

“Take those off, and bring them into the living room. I’ll get a fire started, and you can set them on the hearth to dry off.”

She could only hope that by being as brisk and businesslike as possible, he’d understand that she was only doing these things because she didn’t want him to be uncomfortable or catch cold, and not because she was encouraging him in any way.

How successful she was, she didn’t know, but at least he was silent as he slipped off his loafers, then followed her into the living room. At this time of year, she always had logs stacked and ready to go, since the nights were chilly, and her hundred-year-old cottage had its fair share of drafts. One flick of her finger toward the hearth, and the fire blazed up at once, warm and inviting, banishing the drafts for the moment.

“So can most witches do that?” Lucas asked, towel still pressed against his head as he settled down on the couch, which wasn’t much bigger than a love seat and creaked faintly under his weight.

“Can’t you?”

“No,” he replied, giving his hair one last blot. He looked down at the towel as if not quite certain what he should do with it, so she let out a sigh and retrieved it from him, then folded it and placed it on a corner of the hearth. “I’ve seen Connor do it, and Angela do it, and of course Damon could. Some of the other Wilcoxes, too, but not all. And the McAllisters?”

“Some can, some can’t.” She shrugged. “I’d say it depends on the strength of your primary talent, but I know yours is fairly powerful, even though it’s not as obvious as some others.” Since she was being forced to play hostess anyway, she asked, “Do you want some hot tea or coffee? You got pretty soaked out there.”

“Coffee,” he said at once, and she wasn’t sure whether she should be relieved or not. It would take longer to make, which meant more time spent away from him in the kitchen, where she could try to get her roiling thoughts together. On the other hand, an offer of coffee usually meant some lingering, as her coffeepot made far more than her teapot did.

Well, not much she could do about it now. She went off to the kitchen, wondering what on earth she’d gotten herself into.

L
ucas watched
Margot leave the room, while at the same time trying his best not to seem as if he was watching her. She wore a pair of slim jeans tucked into high black boots and a snug-fitting black sweater, and he couldn’t help but admire the view as she walked away from him.