Read Logan: Her Warlock Protector Book 3 Online
Authors: Hazel Hunter
Logan: Her Warlock Protector Book 3
LOGAN
HER WARLOCK PROTECTOR
BOOK 3
By Hazel Hunter
LOGAN
Her Warlock Protector Book 3
Caitlin Monroe is used to taking care of herself, thank you very much. After witnessing the grisly death of her parents, she’ll do anything to make sure that she and her sister are safe. But a witch with the rare and powerful gift of seeing the future can’t stay under the radar forever.
Although General Logan MacCulloch finds Caitlin dealing cards in a casino, her gift of prophecy is no match for his of luck. But as he gets to know her, he realizes they’re both struggling with similar wounded pasts. Not only does he vow to bring her into the Wiccan fold, he can’t help but want to make her his own.
But a chance brush of their hands suddenly shows Caitlin their sensual and heated future. Confused and frightened, she can only think to run from him, straight into the waiting arms of his arch enemy.
“SO DO YOU see wealth in my future?” the older woman croaked, her voice made husky by years of too much smoking.
Caitlin forced herself to concentrate, letting her gift wash over her, that connection to the unseen world that allowed her to understand far more than others could. Pushing a long red ringlet of hair out of her green eyes, she sighed. It wasn’t hard to see much in this crowd. There was at least something fun when Hopkins or Towson sorority girls rented her out for crystal ball readings at their parties. Also free beer. When she was set up in her nicest silk dress and the old pearls inherited from Grandma Mildred, when she was working for the trust fund crowd as a gimmick at fundraisers, then she mostly saw the boring and predictable. The woman in front of her, easily fifty if she was a day, although the botox freezing her forehead was striving to turn back time, held a future cliché enough for the
Lifetime
channel.
The man she was pursuing would marry her. It just wouldn’t last. Someone young and blonde about ten years down the line would see to that.
However, none of that information would help Caitlin earn her keep, and it wasn’t the kind of dirt she was looking for. She forced a smile to her lips.
“Madame Monroe knows everything. I see love in your future.”
The woman pursed her thick lips, already enhanced to life preserver status.
“Really?” Her voice practically trilled as she glanced over at the tall man in the corner eating his third pig in a blanket. “Is Roger going to finally pop the question?”
“Not tonight, my dear,” Caitlin replied, playing up the fake eastern European accent she affected for gigs like this. “Within the year, though, I guarantee you’ll be dress shopping.”
And ten years later looking for a good attorney but that’s another story.
The woman shrieked again, and Caitlin covered her ears out of reflex. At least the party was almost over, and she could go home. It was important, what she did, and it helped people. Sometimes knowing the secrets of the vapid and rich came with that. The woman stood, handed her an extra twenty for the intel, and sauntered off, ample hips swinging behind her.
Caitlin had never met anyone like herself, someone who could read futures. When she went into the herbalist shop and found the crystal ball, she’d never expected anyone there to be…what? Witches or psychics? They didn’t really exist. She was just weird—singularly so. It wasn’t like her parents had ever gone around reading palms or looking at tea leaves, and her little sister, Sheila, had never made a peep about these things. Of course, Caitlin couldn’t read Sheila’s future either. She’d sat with her in front of the crystal ball and made her drink enough tea to become as addicted to the stuff as a Brit would be.
Nothing.
Anyone else though?
She could read their futures, see them come to her in clear images, no matter what she used. It could be the crystal ball or playing cards. With concentration and more deliberation she could probably learn other methods, but reading coins, bones or leaves held little interest for her. If she concentrated hard enough, Caitlin could read pasts, see the traumas that had befallen others too, but that was always fuzzier, just beyond her reach.
She hadn’t always been like this. One morning it started with a flash after college, just glancing at the lines on her roommate’s hand and getting a glimpse of danger, which then revealed itself as a car accident a few days later. Then came the curio shop and the crystal that had been calling her name. Now?
Now she’d gathered her skills and rented herself out, party psychic.
Except what she saw was real.
And, like her roommate long ago, sometimes she saw death. Thank the Goddess that hadn’t been what she’d seen tonight.
STEPPING ONTO HER porch, Caitlin arched her back and stretched. The loud cracks of her spine rewarded her. It was hard work hunching over the table, both on the side and at her regular day job. Sometimes it felt like all she did was read, that her life was at one table or another. It certainly wasn’t based in anything interesting between her sheets. Her keys were turning in the lock when the next door neighbor in her Baltimore duplex stepped outside. That surprised her a little, and Caitlin arched an eyebrow at him. It was past midnight, surely he had more interesting things than to pop his head out now.
Not that she exactly minded the view.
Darryl—it was Darryl wasn’t it?—was tall, well over six feet with shoulders like mountains. While his sandy blonde hair had one or two flecks of grey growing in, he was a man who clearly seemed like an athlete in his youth, maybe college football. Hell, now he looked like he could bench press her one hundred and fifteen pound frame with no problem. Sharp, coffee brown eyes looked back at her, belying an intelligence that so far chit-chat over the mail hadn’t quiet drawn out of him in words.
The fact that his flannel pants hung low on his hips and his white tank top hugged and outlined every muscle was just a bonus. Too bad Darryl didn’t sleep in just boxers. Of course, with the way her stomach was doing flip-flops at the sight of him, and heat was flushing through her, Caitlin might have flat out combusted if he’d worn that little.
It would have been worth it.
“Hey Darryl!” she called, offering her nicest smile and readjusting her purse over her shoulder. “What are you doing up?”
Goddess, please tell me that he’s up alone.
Sharp eyeteeth glittered back at her with his easy smile, and yet something didn’t quite reach the depths of his eyes, almost like there was a mask in place she couldn’t quite pull off. Maybe he wasn’t used to her in evening wear. Usually she was just frumpy in her work uniform. Hmmm. Was she confounding him?
Cool.
“Just heard you on the porch. I was double checking it wasn’t a burglar.”
“Yeah right.”
“Well it’s Hampden,” he pointed out, leaning against the railing that split their porches into their respective sides. “You can never be too careful with the things that go bump in the night.”
“Well, I’m a flattered you think I can be tough.”
His intense gaze was leveled right at her and her breath caught in her throat. “I think you can do a lot of things. Night, Caitlin.”
“Night, Darryl.”
He chuckled a little and rubbed the back of his head. “Oh, it’s Darren, but I get it. I never liked my name much either.”
“Sorry!” she called, wishing she could crawl in a hole. Great, way to embarrass herself in front of hottie neighbor. This was so why Schnapps was the only man in her life. “Well, Darren,” she corrected, offering her brightest smile. “Thank you for looking out for me.”
“Always.”
With that, she eased in through the front door and locked the main lock as well as the deadbolt—it was Baltimore—behind her. Maybe some of the locking wasn’t about crime. Caitlin wasn’t sure that she could explain her house aesthetic yet. The few friends she had always met her at their houses or coffee shops. Sure, Sheila came over but she never questioned much about Caitlin’s decorating motif. Caitlin assumed her little sis was thinking she was going through a phase.
Shuffling off painful high heels, Caitlin sat down on the wood floor cross-legged and started to light the candles at her altar. They were a collection of fat lavender-colored candles of various heights circling a single, thin white candle that blazed the brightest. There were herbs there, aconite and saffron as well as a silver pentacle charm leaning against the tallow of the ivory candle. It was the only other thing besides the crystal ball that she’d purchased at the curio shop. It was as if both items had called to her.
It wasn’t as if Caitlin would call herself a Wiccan completely. She’d never sought out other practitioners. Most of what she did know, she’d patched together from Google, movies, and a few spell books she’d found deep in the bowels of the anthropology section at Hopkins’ library. At first, she only rented them while in college out of curiosity and because her “sight” was growing stronger. Caitlin had only expected context and not actual spells. Most didn’t work for her; that was true. It wasn’t like she could shapeshift into a puma or fly or astral project. As enticing as those abilities sounded, none of those spells seemed to work worth a damn.
However, she realized spells that were based around telling the future worked great. The first time that, as gross as it sounded, she’d added the thyme and dill to butcher’s blood to read futures in the bowl, she’d been able to predict the coming cancer diagnosis of a co-worker. Other things worked like that, tea leaves for impressions or chicken bones and incantations for quick flashes. Nothing, however, worked better than the crystal ball for seeing everything in Technicolor.
That’s where she’d made notations in the spell books, long since stolen from the dusty library shelves. They were hers now and, as ideas came to her for better precognition recipes and remedies, she put them in the book. Reaching down, she moved the false board from the floor directly below her altar. Her forefinger slid easily into the small blackened notch as she set it aside. Pulling out the book, she ran her hands over the pages wishing that she could share this with her sister, but scared she’d never understand the spells. Sheila was sweet, but she could only be so supportive. It was one thing to have an altar and pick up some items from the internet. It was something completely different to have a spell book with handwritten incantations she’d created herself and the complete truth—strange as it was—that she could see into the future.
At least for some people.
Some days it’d be nice to do a reading for herself, see if there was anything more interesting in her future. She had a decent job, her craft that she dabbled in, and sometimes a little more with her side work. It didn’t feel like enough. It was hard coming home after long days to an empty duplex and only Schnapps for her comfort.
Speaking of which…
Caitlin finished going through the prayers, the sections from earlier in the book that didn’t necessarily work for her but had been written long ago so she assumed must be correct.
“Goddess protect this house and everyone in it, and help me make the best decisions I can to help the universe, so may it be.”
Picking up the small silver cup, she used it to smother out each flame in a clockwise circle until she reached the center one.
“By three times three, I’ll follow thee,” she said, then put it out and finally stood.
After her book was properly hidden again, she walked into her bedroom and smiled. Being so exhausted and busy, she’d worked on just slipping on a comfy sweatshirt to do her rituals and hadn’t come yet to see the man in her life. The cage in the corner smelled a bit, and she knew she’d have to change the litter box before she collapsed in her bed. Totally worth it. Opening the door, she reached in and picked up the rotund ferret inside. Schnapps was a sable, darkly furred with a little face mask that made him look like your average Ranger Rick raccoon.
