Spellbound (4 page)

Hunter sighed impatiently. “Morgan, I—”

“Look, I’ll be fine. Now stop fussing and let me go home.” Had I ever been so forthright with Cal? I had wanted so badly for Cal to find me attractive, felt I had fallen so far short of the kind of girl he would want. I had tried to be a more appealing Morgan for him, as stupid and clumsy as my attempts had been. With Hunter, I had never bothered. It felt very freeing to say whatever came to my lips because I wasn’t worried about impressing him.

We stared at each other in a standoff. I couldn’t help comparing his looks to Cal’s. Cal had been golden, exotic, and astoundingly sexy. Hunter was more classical, like a Greek statue, all shapes and planes. His beauty was cool. Yet as I looked at him, the desire to touch him, to kiss and hold him, grew in me until it was almost overpowering.

He shifted in his seat, and I almost flinched when he brought a cool hand up to stroke my cheek. With that one touch I was mesmerized, and I sat very still.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice low. “I’m afraid for you. I want you to be safe.” He smiled wryly. “I can’t apologize for worrying about you.”

Slowly he leaned closer, his head blotting out the moonlight streaming through the windshield. Ever so gently his warm lips touched mine, and then we were kissing, kissing hard, and I felt completely exhilarated. When he pulled back, we were both breathing fast. He opened the door again, and I blinked in the glare from the dome light. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and seemed at a loss for words. I licked my lips and looked out the windshield, unable to meet his eyes.

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow,” he said softly. “Drive carefully.”

“Okay,” I managed. I watched him walk up to the front porch and wanted to call him back, to throw my arms around him and press against him. He turned then, and I wondered with embarrassment if he had picked up on my feelings. I stepped on the gas and sped off.

With witches, you never know.

3

 

 

“Your folks don’t mind you skipping church?” Bree’s dark eyes were dimmed by the ribbon of steam coming from her coffee mug. We were in a coffee emporium in a strip mall off the main road. It was popular on Sunday mornings, and people surrounded us, drinking coffee, eating pastry, reading sections of newspaper.

I made a face and loaded my currant scone with butter. “They mind. Somehow they would be more comfortable about my being Wiccan if I also remained a good Catholic.”

“And that’s not possible?” Bree asked around a mouthful of bear claw.

I sighed. “It’s hard.”

Bree nodded, and we ate for a few minutes. I studied her covertly. While she was very familiar to me, still, we were both undeniably different people from who we had been three months ago, when Wicca and Cal came into both our lives. We were feeling our way back to being friends again. Things were still awkward between us sometimes, but it felt good to hang out and talk, anyway.

“I like a lot of things about Catholicism. I like the services and the music and seeing everyone,” I said. “Feeling like I belong to something bigger than just my family. But it’s hard to wrap my mind around some of it. Wicca just feels so much more natural to me.” I shrugged. “Anyway, I just wanted to skip it this week. It doesn’t mean that I’m never going back.”

Bree nodded again and tugged her black top into place. As usual, she looked chic and beautiful, perfectly put together, though she was only wearing jeans and a sweater and no makeup. Usually I felt like a lumberjack around her, with my flat chest, strong nose, boring hair, and lame wardrobe. Today I was surprising myself by feeling strong beneath my looks, as if the witch inside might someday be attractive enough for the Morgan outside.

“How’s Mary K.?” Bree asked.

I stirred my coffee. “She’s been kind of down lately. Since the whole Bakker fiasco, it’s like she’s walking around waiting for a ton of bricks to fall on her.” Bakker Blackburn, my sister’s ex-boyfriend, had twice tried to use force to get her to have sex with him.

“That prick,” said Bree. “You should put some awful spell on him. Give him Robbie’s old acne.” In October, in a fit of experimentation, I’d made a magick potion to clear up the terrible acne that had marred Robbie’s looks for years. It had had some unexpected side effects, like correcting his bad vision so that he no longer needed his Coke-bottle glasses. Without the glasses and the acne, he turned out to be startlingly good-looking.

I laughed. “Now, you know we’re not supposed to do things like that.”

“Oh, like that would stop you,” she said, and I laughed some more. It was true that I had either bent or flat-out broken quite a few of the unwritten Wiccan guidelines for responsible use of magick since I had first discovered my powers. But I was trying to be good.

“Speaking of Robbie,” I said leadingly, raising my eyebrows.

Bree looked down at her plate. “Oh, Robbie,” she said vaguely.

“Are you going to break his heart?” My voice was light, but we both knew I was serious.

“I hope not,” she said, and tapped her finger against her plate. “I don’t want to. The thing is—he’s just throwing himself at me, heart, soul, and body.”

“And the body you want,” I guessed.

“The body I’m dying for,” she admitted.

“You don’t want anything else from him?” I said. “You know Robbie’s a really good guy. He’d be a great boyfriend.”

Bree groaned and dropped her face onto her hands. “How can you tell? We’ve known him since we were babies! I know him
too
well. He’s like a pal, a brother.”

“Except you want to jump him.”

“Yeah. I mean, he’s gorgeous. He’s . . . fabulous. He makes me crazy.”

“I don’t believe it’s only physical,” I said. “He wouldn’t tie you up in knots if there weren’t some emotion going on, too.”

“I know, I know,” Bree muttered. “I don’t know what to do. I’ve never had this problem before. Usually I know exactly what I want and how to get it.”

“Well, good luck,” I said, sighing. “So, relationships are heating up all over,” I added. “Raven and Sky, Jenna and Simon . . .”

“Yeah,” Bree said, cheering up. “Sky and Raven are freaking me out. I mean, Raven’s a boyfriend machine.”

“Maybe what she was looking for all along was a girl,” I said, and we made dorky oh-my-gosh faces at each other.

“Could be. And you think Jenna and Simon?” Bree asked, taking a sip of her coffee.

“I think so. They seem to be interested in each other,” I reported. “I hope they do get together. Jenna deserves to be happy after Matt was such an ass to her.” I stopped suddenly, remembering that Raven had tried to nail Matt primarily to get him to join her coven—the coven that Bree had also been a member of. The old Kithic.

For a moment Bree looked uncomfortable, as if she too were mulling over the convoluted events of the last month. “Everything changes, all the time,” she finally said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Anyway,” Bree said, “what’s with you and Hunter?”

I choked on my coffee and spent the next minute coughing gracelessly while Bree arched her perfect eyebrows at me.

“Uh,” I finally said hoarsely. “Uh. I don’t know, really.”

She looked at me, and I shifted in my seat.

“It just seems that you guys set off sparks when you’re together.”

“Sometimes,” I admitted.

“Do you still love Cal?”

Just hearing his name, especially spoken by Bree, made me wince. Bree had thought she was in love with him. They had slept together before Cal and I started going out, which, as I saw it now, Cal had done partly to drive a wedge between Bree and me so that I’d be all the more dependent on him. I still found it hard to stomach the fact that Cal and Bree had had sex, and he and I hadn’t, despite how much I had loved him and thought he loved me.

“He tried to kill me,” I said faintly, feeling like the coffee shop was too small.

Compassion crossed her face, and she reached across the table to touch my hand. “I know,” she said softly. “But I also know you really loved him. How do you feel about him now?”

I still love him, I thought. I am filled with rage and hatred toward him. He said he loved me, he said I was beautiful, he said he wanted to make love to me. He hurt me more than I can say. I miss him, and I hate myself for being so weak.

“I don’t know,” I finally said.

 

As I was opening my car door in the parking lot, out of the corner of my eye I saw a guy come out of the video store next door to the coffee place. I glanced up, and my heart stopped beating. He was looking down at a piece of paper in his hand, but I didn’t need to see his face. I’d run my fingers through that raggedly shorn dark hair. . . . I’d kissed that wide, smooth chest. . . . I’d stared so many times at those long, powerful legs in their faded blue jeans. . . .

Then he looked up, and I saw that it wasn’t Cal after all. It was a guy I’d never seen before, with pale blue eyes and bad skin. I stood there, stunned in the bright sunlight, while he gave me a funny look, then walked to his car and got in.

It felt like a full minute before my heartbeat returned to normal. I climbed into Das Boot and drove home. But the whole way, I couldn’t help checking my rearview mirror to see if anyone was behind me.

 

Later that day the phone rang. I raced to answer it, knowing it was Hunter.

“Can I come over?” he asked when I picked up the receiver.

When I’d gotten back from seeing Bree, Mom, Dad, and my sister were already home from church. I felt guilty about not having gone with them, so since then I had been trying to do good-daughter-type stuff around the house—shoveling the front walk, picking up my crap from the living room, unloading the dishwasher. Having Hunter over would kind of wreck my attempts at scoring points with my family.

“Yes,” I said quickly. My heart kicked up a beat in response to his voice. “How will you get here?”

Silence. I almost laughed as I realized he hadn’t thought about that.

“I’ll borrow Sky’s car,” he said finally.

“Do you want me to come get you?” I asked.

“No. Are your parents there? Can we talk alone?”

“Yes, my parents are here, and we can talk alone if you want to stand out on the front porch with my whole family inside wondering what we’re talking about.”

He sounded irked. “Why can’t we just go to your room?”

What planet did he come from? “I’m sorry, Your Highness, but I don’t live by myself,” I said. “I’m seventeen, not nineteen, and I live with my parents. And my parents don’t think it’s a good idea for boys to be in my room, because there’s a bed in there!” Then of course the image of Hunter on my bed made my cheeks burn, and I was sorry I had ever opened my big mouth. What was wrong with me?

“Oh, right. Sorry—I forgot,” he said. “But I need to speak to you alone. Can you meet me at the little public park that’s by that big grocery store on Route 11?”

I thought. “Yes. Ten minutes.”

He hung up without saying good-bye.