A Witch's Handbook of Kisses and Curses (9 page)

I nodded. “Yes. Please.”

Jane shrugged her shoulders. “OK.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“No other questions?”

“No,” Jane said, shaking her head. She stepped closer,
her eyes narrowing suddenly. “Understand that we will be monitoring what you do very carefully. You will not be given free access to the shop. You will not be given a key. And if you try to tell me how I should be running things, so help me God, I will—”

“Jane!” Andrea barked.

Jane cleared her throat, seemingly forcing herself to relax. “Sorry. One day, we will get you drunk and tell you about your great-uncle Emery.” Andrea shuddered violently.

I did not quite know how to respond to that, so I said, “I’ll start tomorrow.”

*  *  *

I rolled into the driveway to find Jed frantically moving some tools into his part of the house. It was cloudy, the banks of wispy fog moving over the waxing moon in patches. Given the dim lighting, I wondered how he was able to see. I would have smashed my face into the porch steps by now.

Jed practically flinched when he saw my car, such as it was, pulling to a stop on the gravel. Irritation, fueled by the gnawing tension left behind when I bared my soul to the vampires, flared in my belly. Really? He wanted to avoid me that badly? The sight of my seminudity was so unappealing that he was eyeing the open front door with desperation?

That seemed like an overreaction.

I threw open the car door. As my sight adjusted to the scant light of the porch lamp, I watched his eyes dart from me to the sky and back again. He seemed skittish,
like a colt not quite sure of his master’s goodwill. His sandy hair fell over his eyes, giving him the perfect excuse for not looking up. A strange energy emanated from his entire body. A sort of restlessness of his cells, as if he was going to jump out of his skin at any moment. Was he on something? He seemed so healthy, too healthy to be a drug user. And his jumpy, erratic energy was different from that of my mother, who’d made enthusiastic use of every recreational substance she could get her hands on. His head snapped up, and he pulled an angry face, as if he could feel me staring at him.

“What?” he demanded, keeping a wary eye on the moon as the clouds slipped away. He was nearly flinching, as if he expected a slap instead of silvery light.

“Jed, is everything OK?” I asked, following him up the porch steps, under the protective shelter of the porch. The closer we moved to the house, the less agitated he seemed.

Once inside his front door, he said, “I’m sorry. I’m bein’ rude. I’ve just had a long day. Work stuff. I was just about to warm up some chicken and dumplin’s. How about you take over the stove while I take a shower? And then you can help me eat some of it?”

“You invite me to dinner, and I end up cooking? What sort of swindle is this?”

“You’re not cookin’, you’re warmin’ up,” he told me, eyeing the leather portfolio in my hand with some interest before turning that handsome grin on me.

“And I can’t use the microwave to do this?”

I was firmly antitechnology when it came to tea, but
I didn’t see the point in dirtying up a bunch of dishes if I didn’t have to.

Jed unbuttoned his shirt and tossed it into a little laundry room off the kitchen. Oh, come on, now. I was starting to think he was doing this to provoke me. “Mrs. Reilly’s dumplin’s have been known to explode when nuked.”

I thought about the warmed-over chicken and rice casserole in my fridge and the prospects of trying to piece together a meal at this time of night. “Yes, if you explain to me what a dumplin’ is.”

He chuckled and dropped a heavy leather toolbelt near the front door. “You have your choice; you cook, or you eat dinner with someone smellin’ like he’s been diggin’ ditches all day.”

“Cooking sounds like the lesser of two evils,” I said, shuddering.

I placed the sketches in a drawer in my own kitchen, peeled my contacts out of my dust-plagued eyes, then locked my front door before rejoining Jed in his kitchen. He was setting out a large pot, French bread, and butter on the counter.

“Next week, I’ll invite you over to make me dinner,” I muttered, feigning indignation and trying hard to ignore the way he was stretching his massive arms over his head, making his shirttail ride up. This just wasn’t fair.

“Well, it would be the polite thing to do,” he said, grinning at me while he kicked off his boots, and I was thankful that he at least left the jeans on. I opened the fridge, boggling at the sheer number of labeled Tupperware
containers stacked inside. “Just keep stirrin’. You don’t want it to stick.”

“If you don’t want to discuss your harem of church-lady caterers, can we talk about your tendency to strip in front of me?” I called after him. I dumped the congealed dumplings into a pot as he jogged up the stairs.

“Don’t pretend you’re not lookin’!” he called back.

I rolled my eyes but stirred as instructed. The food smelled delicious, particularly after I warmed up the loaf of crusty bread in the oven. Standing at the stove gave me time to look around Jed’s side of the house, which was considerably more comfortable than my own. He’d painted the walls a light, creamy beige, making the rooms airy and bright. It was a vast improvement over the dark, cavelike spaces on my side. The polished living-room floor was covered with an extra-large blue rag rug. He’d added a few sturdy, no-nonsense pieces of furniture in each room, but there were few personal touches. No pictures, no knickknacks. Several large bookshelves flanked his windows. When I got closer, I could see that they were full of language guides.
Moon Phases, A Chinese to English Dictionary, Hieroglyphics, Translating Gaelic, The Dummy’s Guide to Understanding Ancient Sanskrit
. The rooms told me very little about Jed as a person, other than that he had good color sense and hated reading subtitles in foreign-language movies. Or he’d bought a bunch of coffee-table books at a garage sale.

By the time Jed trotted down the steps, smelling pleasantly of Dial soap, I had the table set and the dumplings dished. I was bending over the oven to retrieve the bread
when I heard, “This is why men like to watch women cook. It has nothin’ to do with bein’ sexist. It’s the bendin’ and liftin’.”

“Which is also sexist.” I turned to offer a rude response, only to find him wearing another pair of arse-cupping jeans and a T-shirt that showcased his indecently large biceps. I was standing in the presence of living, breathing arm porn.

“Oh, come on!” I cried, throwing up my hands and nearly flinging the bread across the room.

“What?” he asked, crossing to the window and closing the curtains.

“You know what,” I shot back. “When you go out and buy a shirt like that, do you actually calculate the number of bicep curls you’ll have to perform in order to do it justice?”

“I don’t work out that much,” he said as he held my chair away from the table.

I sat down, glaring up at him. “Well, then clearly, you have discovered some sort of magic testosterone tree in the back garden.”

“I can take it off if it bothers you,” he offered, peeling the hem away from a tanned expanse of stomach.

Please,
I prayed,
don’t let there be such a thing as a magic testosterone tree
.

“Stop that!” I yelped, a laugh bursting from my chest as he dropped his shirt back into place. “Why do you think all situations can be improved by the removal of clothing?”

He snickered, taking his own seat and offering me a
slice of bread. “Well, first—nah, that’s too easy. Anyway, I do it because it freaks you out, and that’s pretty damned adorable.”

“You are an altogether bizarre personality.”

“Right back atcha, honey.”

I giggled. I couldn’t help it. This strange, thrown-together meal was the first opportunity I’d had to relax since I’d arrived in the States. And here was a beautiful, peculiar man sitting in front of me, who didn’t know anything about me or my family or what we could do. I could be normal with him, or what seemed to pass for normal between the two of us. It was lovely.

“So, I noticed the quote-unquote ‘car’ in the driveway.”

“Hey, it’s transportation,” I protested. “And when I find a job, it will get me there, so I will eventually be able to pay for an upgrade.”

“What brings you down to the Hollow, if you don’t mind my askin’?”

“I just needed a change of scenery. Too many northern winters,” I lied smoothly. “What about you? How long have you lived here?”

“A couple of months,” Jed said, taking a large bite of dumplings. “I’m from a little town in Tennessee, just a few hours’ drive from here. I do carpentry work and general construction, especially in older buildings where the restoration work can be delicate. Jobs in my area were dryin’ up. A contractor from the Hollow put an ad in the paper, lookin’ for people who could handle that sort of work, so I moved. My boss, Sam, was hired
to renovate this house. I needed a place to stay, so the owner agreed to give me a break on rent while we completed the work.”

“What does your family think of your moving here?” I asked, trying to avoid questions about potentially angry girlfriends who might not appreciate his constant state of shirtlessness in my presence.

“They’re not happy about it,” he admitted. “We’re pretty close-knit, and I’m the first one to move away in a long time. But it was just somethin’ I had to do. You know?”

“Oddly enough, yes, I do,” I said. “And it’s nice here, so far. The people seem friendly. A little strange sometimes, but I think that’s expected anytime you move somewhere new. That reminds me, have you seen anything weird around the house at night? Like a big dog in the back garden?”

A flicker of surprise warped his features for just a second, before he tamped it down. “No, nothing weird. Unless you count our neighbor Paul, who’s built a full-size wrestling ring in his backyard. He and his friends have ‘matches’ on the weekends.”

Well, that did qualify, I supposed. “Do they wear the spandex and tights?” I asked, struggling to keep a straight face.

Jed nodded. “If he invites you over this Saturday, just say no.”

I shuddered, and we fell into companionable silence as we ate.

“So what’s your deal?” he asked suddenly.

“Beg pardon?”

“Your deal,” he said again. “Married? Boyfriend? Vow of celibacy?”

“Do you always pose personal questions so abruptly?”

“You get more honest answers that way.”

“Boyfriend,” I told him.

He nodded. “Is he gonna be movin’ here anytime soon?”

I burst out laughing, picturing Stephen attending the monster-truck rally scheduled at the McLean County fairgrounds that weekend. As much as the “woo-woo supernatural shite” irked Stephen, his apprehension around my family had a lot to do with our “earthiness.” Living in the Hollow would be the equivalent of a permanent migraine for Stephen. “No, I don’t see him moving here.”

Jed shrugged. “I give it six months.”

I choked on a bite of bread and downed a large gulp of water to clear my throat. I spluttered. “What is wrong with you?”

“Long-distance relationships don’t work. And you said yourself, you’re makin’ a life here, and you don’t see this guy movin’ out to the Hollow. So you either didn’t think this move through, which is doubtful because you seem the type to think everything through. Or you did it on purpose, because you knew that movin’ out here would eventually kill off the relationship. You broke up with him without havin’ to be the bad guy.”

I stared at him, my spoon frozen halfway to my mouth. “Are you on medications I should be aware of, or is this some sort of personality disorder at work?”

“Neither. I just don’t like it when ladies use the long-distance boyfriend as a human shield,” he retorted. “Why are you making that face?”

“I’m trying to determine whether this dinner is good enough to put up with your nonsense or if I should abandon my bowl and storm out.”

He nodded and took another bite. “Come to a decision yet?”

“Curse Carol-Anne Reilly and her devil dumplings,” I grumbled into my meal. Jed laughed. “But honestly, you can’t say that sort of thing to people.”

“Why the hell not?”

“The bounds of common courtesy?” I proposed. “Conversational filters that most people grasp by the time they’re ten?”

“Your prim Yankee voice sayin’ ‘common courtesy’ while you look over the top of your little wire-rim glasses is doing strange things to me,” he said, grinning impishly. “Do you think you could put your hair up in a bun when you say that?”

“Of course.” I sighed. “You have a librarian fetish.”

He shook his head, all innocent brown eyes and choirboy smiles. “Not a fetish, more like a fascination. So what do you say?”

“I really don’t want to ruin our burgeoning friendship by reacting honestly to that.”

“Fair enough,” he said, offering me another slice of bread and none too subtly moving the knife to his side of the table. “So where do you think you’ll look for work?”

And that was the end of the confrontational portion of our conversation. Jed seemed to sense how far he could push me. All discussions of Stephen were off-limits from then on. We talked about his hometown of Hazeltine and about his family, which seemed almost as large and “colorful” as my own. I got the impression that there was a lot of information he was leaving out. That was fine, since I gave him a heavily edited version of my own childhood—growing up in Boston, the only child of Anna McGavock and her physician husband, moving in with my grandmother after my father died.

Jed was a good listener, although there was a lot I couldn’t tell him. I could have said that my parents had divorced but not that when my dear departed mother met Martin Leary, an American medical student touring through Dublin, she assumed she would be marrying into money. In her mind, “doctor” equaled “rich,” although Dad was traveling as cheaply as possible. Dad’s parents, who had died when I was a baby, had saved for years to send him overseas as a graduation present.

Getting pregnant with me as quickly as possible seemed like the best way to secure her future, or so she thought. She wasn’t counting on marrying a student who was working his way through medical school while bartending. Dad said the look on her face when he brought her home to his tiny walk-up apartment over a pizza shop had been priceless.