Never Been Witched (2 page)

Here, she could put her worries behind her.

Shadows danced in her circle, leaving the room’s edges in darkness, including the stairs whose spindles she faced but could no longer see. Her flashlight had picked them out on arrival a short while ago, and her possessions now sat at the bottom, in large, wheeled carts awaiting transport to a bedroom upstairs.

Relief improved Destiny’s spirits. She was here, not in Scotland with her well-meaning family auto-pairing her with Morgan Jarvis, so much a friend, he felt like family . . . to everyone except her.

Peace, Destiny sensed, was just out of reach.

Serenity. If only she could grasp it.

Her hyperactive cat’s purring contentment attested to the tranquility surrounding them. She petted the caramel-and-marshmallow-swirl tabby. “You like the lighthouse, don’t you, Caramello? I like it, too. I think it wants us here.”

Destiny centered herself, a first step on this journey of self-discovery fired by a profusion of confusion over her elusive psychic goal and a riot of romantic fantasies over one maddening man.

Breathe in. Release. Breathe. Release.

Perhaps she should have saved her ritual for morning, except that—

 

A tentative calm settled over her, obscurity filling the dark edges of her consciousness the way it claimed the periphery of the room. She closed her eyes and searched the recesses of her mind before letting her words pour forth:

 

Destiny opened her eyes . . . and lost her breath.

In her circle stood a man dressed as if for a centennial sail. Beside him, an apple-cheeked young girl sat in a grotto of bright white angel wings. Standing tall behind her: an angel.

Destiny’s heartbeat trebled. Fear stole her breath, prickling her from the roots of her hair to the tips of her toes. She shivered and clutched her cat so tightly that Cara me-owed and jumped from her grasp to circle, examine, and “talk” to the little girl.

Destiny had never seen her cat try so hard to communicate.

The child held her hand flat, well above Caramello, and the cat purred loudly, and arched as if into an actual caress.

The girl smiled, and the angel said, “Be not afraid.”

Destiny about choked. Wait a minute. She tried to regain her composure. “The last time an angel spoke those words, didn’t a virgin get pregnant?”

The angel remained passive, its lucent amber eyes deeply probing, while Centennial Man’s eyes widened. “I don’t think that could be an issue here,” he quipped.

“I resent that!” Destiny fought a warm shot of embarrassment at her knee-jerk reaction and the truth of his words.

Despite the entities’ lack of apparent threat, Destiny stood and pointed a large green fluorite crystal their way like a negative-energy scrub gun, because she knew—
she knew
—they were ghosts.

 

Adrenaline pumped through her as she stepped back, but her visitors remained.

Normally, she’d feel safe in her ritual circle, except that
they
shared the circle with her.

Destiny gasped, knelt, and with a sweep of her arms, pulled candles and crystals close around her, to form a smaller, safer circle.

The ghost child’s lips quirked upward on one side, bringing Morgan’s rare smile to mind.

Centennial Man shook his head, as if in warning. “We’re not negative,” he whispered and pointed behind his hand. “That really
is
an angel.”

Destiny rose and straightened, preferring to tower over them, though no human could stand taller than the angel, and she chanted her spell again, this time, loud enough to wake the dead.

A light appeared at the top of the stairs.

Another icy rush of fear. An involuntary catch in her breath. “Don’t tell me there are more of you!”

Footsteps, she heard, running on the floor above. A crash. A curse.

Another male ghost? Destiny stamped her foot. “Enough already!”

A hair-raising stair creak. Two. Three.

Heavy footsteps, slowly descending a blacked-out staircase.

Words of inquiry caught in Destiny’s paralyzed throat as she stood frozen in her protective circle. Beast or ghost, he could not harm her here.

She aimed the fluorite crystal high, and at the next creak—thank the Goddess for teen softball—she served it in a deadly pitch.

A man-grunt. A tumble down the stairs.

A horrendous crash against wheeled carts, her caterwauling cat leaping into the fray, and her personal belongings flying into view turned her mind from ghosts to a flesh-and-blood man, about the size of Bigfoot, wrecking everything she’d—

“My things!”

Her heart beat a wild tattoo, yet shame for the selfish thought claimed her. A ghost would not have disturbed her carts or landed with a thud and a shivering head-crack. Unable to reach a light switch without stepping near the yeti at the bottom of the stairs, Destiny set her ritual knife on the floor to open the sacred circle to allow for her escape.

For insurance, she grabbed a large potted geranium off a nearby table. “Anyone hurt?” she called.

She heard silence but for the sea sweeping the shore out back.

As she tiptoed forward, her intruder groaned, sat up, and breached the light. A yeti, indeed, given the size of his chest and the bright of his eyes in shadow.

Destiny lowered the clay pot and crowned him before he could strike.

Like a tree trunk in a hurricane, he fell, taking at least one of her carts down with him. His torso lay in darkness, but she could see his hairy legs and ginormous feet in the candlelight.

A behemoth in the flesh, moaning like he’d been shot.

She skirted the interloper and flipped on the light.

Curled in the fetal position, amid her clothes, both hands on his balls, he wore a purple bra like a bracelet.

“Uh-oh.”

Cat-scratch blood curled down his arm and dripped on his red boxers.

“Balls . . . busted,” he gasped.

Destiny’s fear morphed to horror. “Morgan?”

Chapter Two

MORGAN’S agony and rising nausea radiated through him, deepening his suffering. As he rode out the pain, he identified his assailant with a dizzying peek, then he closed his eyes to recover with shallow breaths and a soothing mantra:
Dead witch. Dead witch. Dead witch.

Not that he believed in witches, but
she
sure in Hades did.

Her attack cat came over and licked his throbbing brow, meowing, or yowling, as if she were crying for him. Morgan opened his eyes and came face-to-face with the subject of all his dreams. “Nightmare,” he said.

Kneeling beside him, Destiny looked as if she could
feel
his pain.

He didn’t think so.

He tried to sit up and groaned, but his anguish began to level off, a sign that it might recede, and he might live, in which case:
Dead witch. Dead witch. Dead witch.

“Can I help you up?” she asked.

“Not. Quite. Ready.” Crushed cojones; that’s what he got for running and hiding.

“I didn’t know it was you,” she said, sounding sorry, as she reached toward his brow and then stopped.

He refused to be charmed by the regretful brat who crushed his nuts. “Why, here?” he asked and blew out a breath. “Candles? Voodoo?” Damn his lost soul, he’d come here to get away from the lust of his life—to get his house in order—and here she was, like an absolution addict sitting in his confessional. Again.

She knelt to pick up her knife and snuff her candles. “The circle is open,” she said, scanning the room at large. “They’re gone.”

“Who?” he asked, ignoring Chatty Kitty yowling his ear off.

“Who, indeed?” the temptress repeated as she knelt beside him. “Caramello is talking to you. What’s with her tonight?”

The subject of his fantasies ran paradoxically gentle fingers along his scalp, raising his testosterone level to excruciating proportions. Morgan closed his eyes in renewed anguish, yet he couldn’t ask her to stop.

Death wish. Sex wish. There may not be any such thing as a witch, but this woman sure could cast a spell on him.

After her sister Harmony’s wedding, he and Destiny had nearly succumbed to what he believed might be mutual lust, but they didn’t, which was just as well, since he’d known squat about making love back then.

With her in mind, since that night, he’d read book after book about how to pleasure a woman, make himself last for her sake, doing the exercises until he could last forever. During the self-training, he’d stayed away from her, certain that by the time she got back from Scotland, he’d be able to hide his ignorance and raise her to the heights of orgasmic satisfaction.

Instead, she’d knocked him on his ass and broken his equipment in the process. Now, she was trying to nurse him back to insanity.

Destiny. His
destiny
, God help him, soothed every bruise she’d caused, except for the ones on his balls, which she didn’t touch, more’s the pity. Then again, maybe not.

Despite that, Morgan raised a knee to hide his reaction, however weakened by her attack. Sick bastard. “Ouch, damn it! That hurts,” he snapped. “Ouch, there, too.”

She brutalized his head, looking for and finding every bump and lump, cut, scratch, and prune. He focused on his poor, battered lap, his pecker attempting a painful call to attention.

Damn his lost soul, only she could fix
that
ache. And when she did—at some indefinite date in the future—it would take as many fixes as either of them could bear, until one of them expired of bliss—him, he figured.

Too much to hope that she might be as hot to jump his bones as he was to jump hers.

And yet he had to get her the Hades out of there. Now. Tonight.

“You’ll survive,” Destiny said, sitting back on her heels. “Though I’m not so sure about my things.”

“Your things? You concussed and castrated me. I should think you’d be more worried about my . . .
things
!” Damn, his head hurt when he shouted.

She knelt on her heels, full of surprise. “You gave
yourself
the concussion when you fell down the stairs.”

“I fell because somebody threw a boulder at my head while I was investigating a break-in.”

“I didn’t break in. I have a key. And all I threw was a little crystal.”

He touched his throbbing eyebrow, and his hand came away bloody. “A crystal about the size of a fist?”

With a look of false innocence, she picked up a crystal off the floor. “See, I told you,” she said, palm out, a speck of crystal in its center. “I couldn’t have hurt you with this.”

Anybody who looked that innocent had to be guilty. He searched the floor around him and found a brick of a crystal on the bottom stair. He held it so close to her face, Destiny crossed her eyes to see it.

Too bad for him, that charmed him the more.

She pushed his hand away. “I forgive you.”

Morgan untangled his arm from her bra. Purple and plump, it was enough to make him think about letting her stay, the sweet, seductive scamp.

He moved the heavy metal cart handle away from the source of his pain.

Destiny stood as if that were a sign he was ready for payback.

The idea of strangling the object of his lust for showing up turned to a sick kind of gratitude. Books and practice were all well and good, but he’d rather claim the sex life he’d long suppressed with a flesh-and-blood woman. And here she stood, the source of his fantasies, in the beautiful, bountifully endowed flesh. “You forgive me for what?”

“For breaking my crystal. It’s a green fluorite, which is to your benefit, by the way. They aid in cleansing the aura. Good for one as dirty as yours.”

“Lucky me.” Was an aura like pimples? Would it clear up if he got laid?

“Seriously,” she said. “I think the crystal you broke helped when it touched you. I already see a hint of tan with a light blue band next to it in the muddy energy around you, almost as if you’re happy about something. Your aura is a sensitive tan, bearing logic and a secret.”

“I might once have been logical,” he said, “but when I met you, that flew out the window.”

“I wonder why I can’t read anyone else’s aura but yours?” she mused aloud, certainly not expecting an answer from him.

Damn, she was annoying. She had a mouth on her that could chew him up and spit him out. Yet the thought of what else she could do with it drove him crazy. Sass and all, he wanted it against
his
mouth, among other places.

“Gritty Spanish stucco,” he snapped. He’d come for peace, two weeks’ worth, while she and her family were in Scotland, to avoid the torture of her constant sexual stimulation. Who needed that? Well, he did. No, maybe what he really
needed
was to figure out what to do about this obsession he had with a self-proclaimed witch who needed to get real. A witch, by the saints! “Why aren’t you on a plane to Scotland?”

“Why aren’t you?”

Morgan blew out a breath. “It’s
your
nephew’s christening, not mine. They only invited me because King had no family, except me and Aiden, before you and your sisters showed up.”