Love Potion #2

by Margot Early

  He wanted to know Cameron as a lover

  The realization surprised Paul.

  “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again.”

  Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. Then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.

  He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.

  She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”

  Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him, because of her.

  Dear Reader,

  In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley, in the hope of pleasing Mr. Darcy, speculates that balls would be better if there were more conversation and less dancing. But then the events wouldn’t be balls, would they?

  In Love Potion #2, Cameron McAllister faces a similar paradox. Paul Cureux—and all men—would be much more understandable if they behaved more like women. More understandable but not nearly so much like men.

  It’s confusing to discover that what aggravates also attracts. Any woman who has had to persuade a man to seek medical attention for an obviously dislocated finger—or shoulder or knee—gets a fascinating picture of one way in which men and women differ. And then there’s that other thing—that women typically talk about their feelings and men often do not.

  Cameron perceives Paul as a Peter Pan figure who will never commit. She wants him to open up, to share his deepest emotions—or so she thinks. Only when unexpected challenges force her to rely upon him does she realize why he’s the man she can’t stop thinking about.

  Can best friends maintain enough mystery in their relationship to keep them interested and attracted over the long run? Maybe only if they are different enough.

  Wishing you happy reading and all good things always.

  Sincerely,

  Margot Early

  Love Potion #2

  Margot Early

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Margot Early has written stories since she was twelve years old. She has sold over three million books with Harlequin Books; her work has been translated into nine languages and sold in sixteen countries. Ms. Early lives high in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains with two German shepherds and several other pets, including snakes and tarantulas. She has studied herbalism and martial arts, and she enjoys the outdoors, spinning dog hair and dancing with Caldera, a tribal belly dance troupe. You can find her on Facebook.

  Books by Margot Early

  HARLEQUIN SUPERROMANCE

  1333—HOW TO GET MARRIED

  1357—A FAMILY RESEMBLANCE

  1376—WHERE WE WERE BORN

  1401—BECAUSE OF OUR CHILD

  1436—GOOD WITH CHILDREN

  1546—THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

  1589—HERE TO STAY

  For Chris

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Chris Chambers, for reading the manuscript and sharing birth knowledge and valuable life experience, and to Keiran Woodhouse and the other members of Rhesus, for their CD which became a sort of soundtrack for the writing of this book.

  All technical errors in this fictional work are mine.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  PROLOGUE

  All Saints’ Day

  Seven years past

  Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina

  TWENTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD

  Cameron McAllister had woken up happy. She’d woken up with Paul Cureux, her best friend from high school in Logan, West Virginia. Now, they were both students in their last year at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. The night before had been the best Halloween of her life, partying with her three best buddies, all guys. Her costume was Love; she’d worn a toga-like garment made of an ivory bedsheet—and lots of glitter. She and Paul had ended up kissing, and it was as if she’d swallowed her breath, all the breath she would ever breathe, then exhaled, and then she was screaming down a roller-coaster hill, and then they were in bed, making love, and it was great. It was exciting. It made her wonder all the things she didn’t know about Paul. It had happened at exactly the right time, and now, the morning after, she was happy. Things might have become romantic between her and another friend, the Adonis-like Sean Devlin. But Sean didn’t intrigue her as Paul did—especially now.

  Now, the morning after, she was happy.

  Paul woke up and blinked at her, his curly dark hair mussed, and he smiled, and it was a boyish smile, straight white teeth. His brown eyes, strangely innocent; his lips full and sweetly curved; his nose classically shaped, the most perfect she’d ever seen—it was a young and beautiful face but also a comfortably familiar face.

  Cameron had been in love. And off and on for the past two years, she’d considered trying to fall in love with her friend, Sean Devlin, who studied drama and wrote poetry and whose cheekbones could hew wood. There had been that one time, when she lost her virginity, but the chemistry just wasn’t there—not on her side, anyhow.

  On the other hand, last night… It had been so perfect. And Paul was her best friend. Surely, this was love.

  PAUL CUREUX peered down at his dark blue sheets. They were now sprinkled with gold glitter, as though he’d been visited by a fairy.

  But it wasn’t a fairy beside him. It was Cameron McAllister, the unofficial Hottest Body of their year at Logan High School. His surfing buddy through their years at college, whom he’d decided, maybe unwisely, to sleep with.

  It wasn’t that Paul was averse to sex or to casual sex. It was just that he’d had one, perfectly good, version of a relationship with Cameron. Now, she would want him to tell her he loved her. She would want dates, presents, girlfriend things. Being from Logan, she might even want him to marry her. All these ideas gave Paul a sense of time closing in, of the necessity of “settling down,” of graduation’s too-fast approach. Everything was going too fast.

  He drew his eyes from Cameron’s high, perfect breasts. Yes, she was hot, but this was going to ruin everything. He grinned at her, knelt up in bed to peer out the window, and said, “Yes!” turning the focus at once to the waves and hoping she would follow his lead.

  Cameron sat up, looking sleepy, and glanced out the window, too. She seemed dazed.

  Paul said, “This was great. Really great.” He made himself meet her brown eyes. “But I think it could wreck our friendship. I think we shouldn’t do it again.”

  He could detect little change in her expression. Not even stiffening in her body. She jumped down from the high loft bed, raised above his stereo and drawers. “Sure,” she said. “Can I borrow some clothes?”

  Paul said, “Yeah. Of course.” He watched her open his drawer, rooting for things that would be much too big for her.

  She did not look at him.

  He said, “Are you okay?”

  “Sure,” she repeated.

  He knew very definitely that she wasn’t, that he’d been a clod, that he couldn’t undo any of it, that he had wrecked things. Tendrils of adulthood and commitment inched toward him, crept around him, and he, too, jumped down from bed, effectively casting them off.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Logan, West Virginia

  The present

  CA
MERON MCALLISTER

  sat at a small damp table in The Last Resort, the downstairs lounge of a Stratton Street hotel, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation. She listened without much interest to Paul Cureux’s final set and tried to look like his girlfriend. She felt desperately sad, helplessly jealous and reckless. Her first reckless act of the evening had been to attend a family birthday dinner, where the man she most desired had shown up as her cousin’s date. And obviously mad about said cousin. Thus Cameron’s desperate sadness and helpless jealousy.

  The second reckless act had been to pour the contents of an innocent-looking vial into her wine glass and drink it. This was supposed to help her get over the man in question.

  Her third reckless act had come with Paul’s phone call, his insistence that one of his most infatuated fans was at his gig and not getting the message that he had a girlfriend.

  This was hardly surprising; Paul didn’t have a girlfriend. Paul had Cameron. Cameron, who was, she supposed, his best female friend and had been since they were thirteen. Cameron, who was willing to assume the public-only role of his girlfriend. The system worked well enough. The reasons she took part—at parties, gigs and such—were myriad and not something she ever fully examined. Paul’s reasons? Well, she wasn’t wholly sure about that, either, except that he didn’t want a girlfriend and her presence prevented his ever finding one. Though he occasionally slipped away for the night with the kind of woman he believed least likely to ever trouble him again—almost always at out-of-town gigs.

  Paul was the son of a midwife who brewed love potions for the occasional desperate petitioner. Love potions that he, at least, believed worked. And his sister, Bridget, claimed to have the same powers as his mother, though the little vial Cameron had bought from her (and dumped in her wine) was not a love potion. Paul held up his sister and mother as examples of the inherent untrustworthiness of the female sex. Because women were like this, he said, half-facetiously, he would never marry.

  Nonsense, in Cameron’s opinion. Paul would never marry because he was Peter Pan. He had told her many times that he didn’t want so much as a houseplant; the responsibility of marriage and children was not for him.

  Oh, if only Bridget’s concoction to “restore emotional equilibrium” would actually work. Cameron believed in the love potions, believed them to work. But this was a different kind of potion. One that was supposed to help her get over Graham Corbett. And that was absolutely necessary.

  Cameron’s cousin Mary Anne was beautiful, talented and her best friend. Local radio host Graham Corbett was the only man who had interested Cameron in at least three years. But Graham was smitten with Mary Anne, the attraction was mutual, and Cameron just wanted to be home with her dogs and a romance novel so she could start getting over it. If anything, anything, could distract her from the burning jealousy she felt…

  Cameron was rarely jealous. She made a habit of contentment. Someone had once told her that grateful people are happy people, and she counted her blessings daily. Decent looks, good health, two dogs she loved, her job as director of the Logan County Women’s Resource Center, and so much more….

  The girl sitting across from her said over the music, “So…where did you two meet?”

  You two. She meant Cameron and Paul, the supposed couple. The groupie was very pretty. Her name was…Ginny? Jenny? No, Genie. Or Jeannie. She was blonde, with fairy-perfect skin, taller than Cameron and skinny like a model, with high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Paul had said this groupie was “clingy,” but why should that bother Paul? What was wrong with having a gorgeous woman infatuated with you?

  And there was nothing to stop women from becoming infatuated with Paul. He had a fine tenor voice and made audiences laugh by spontaneously creating songs on the spot on whatever subject they requested.

  Now, Paul gazed at Cameron as he sang an original love song called “Years Ago.”

  “We’ve known each other forever,” Cameron replied, trying for patience. This woman should give up on Paul. She said, “Look, if you really knew him, you wouldn’t want him.”

  Cameron was again being reckless—not to mention sounding unlike a girlfriend—but someone should say something to this delusional young woman. And Cameron thought most women received too little good advice when it came to men.

  “You want him,” Ginny-Genie pointed out.

  Not really.

  Cameron looked at Paul, his dark hark hair waving appealingly, just messy enough, just long enough and no longer. Cameron cut his hair; she did this because he asked her to, claiming that he worried about his mother and sister using pieces of his hair for witchcraft. Because he didn’t simply go to the barber, Cameron suspected he liked her to cut his hair. He was classically handsome, his eyes perpetually alight with mischief. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered, nothing bulky about him. He looked like a construction worker in a television ad. Or the Marlboro Man. Or an Olympian god.

  In actual fact, he was a zookeeper and moonlighting folk singer who lived a self-serving existence and believed lasting marriage did not exist. Cameron had no desire to marry him, so this didn’t matter.

  “Look,” she said to Ginny, shouting too loudly over the song Paul was pretending to sing to her, “you’re very pretty, and you seem intelligent.” This might be stretching it, but undoubtedly Ginny-Genie’s low self-esteem was part of the reason the girl considered Paul satisfactory. No harm in a little confidence-building. “There are good men out there who would give their eyeteeth to have a girl like you, to marry her. Men who are okay with commitment.”

  Ginny-Genie sipped her own margarita, and there actually did seem to be a look of intelligence—or at least calculation—in her aquamarine eyes.

  Knowing she’d said too much, Cameron became intent on watching Paul tune his guitar. His hands were big, long-fingered, work-roughened. He had a bandage wrapped awkwardly around one thumb where he’d sliced it open erecting the new monkey enclosure at the zoo. He’d really needed stitches but had insisted he didn’t and was now, Cameron saw with much satisfaction and little pity, paying the price.

  As her eyes again skimmed the lounge, she saw a big, tall man enter the bar with Jonathan Hale, the manager of the local radio station. Cameron squinted through the darkness, and the big man seemed to gaze curiously at her. Hazel eyes, she saw, and those cheekbones. That full mouth.

  She smiled, and he broke free from Jonathan, crossed the lounge to her table. Cameron stood up to greet her first lover, who had only grown more fantastic-looking with age. Sean Devlin.

  “Cameron?” he said.

  “Hi, Sean. What brings you to Logan?”

  “Actually, I’m living here. I’m the new drama teacher at the high school.”

  Yes, the old one had died suddenly three weeks earlier.

  He looked down at Ginny-Genie, and Cameron introduced her, as well, not feeling possessive.

  But he seemed interested in her and asked for her phone number, which she gave him before remembering that she was supposed to be acting like Paul’s girlfriend.

  At the end of the song, Paul asked for requests, said he hadn’t made up a song yet that night. Now standing beside Sean, the groupie raised her hand.

  She was the only one.

  Paul lifted his eyebrows.

  “Commitment,” she said.

  “YOU DO NOT BELIEVE one single thing you said in that song,” Cameron chided Paul on the way home, remembering the song he’d created on the spot to satisfy the groupie.

  “I beg to differ. I believe commitment is a beautiful thing, and I said that. And you almost blew our cover flirting with your old flame.”

  “He was never a flame. We were first and foremost friends—not unlike you and I.” And she’d made love with each of them once. But there was a certain spice and bittersweet pain to the memory of the long-ago Halloween night she’d spent with Paul. With Sean—nothing, really, though he had been her first. “Anyway,” she told Paul, “you believe commitment is a beautiful thin
g for everyone else.”

  “May I beg to point out that I do have commitment in my life? I’m committed to my job and to my music. I’m just not committed to a house on Stratton Street, a wife and three kids and a golden retriever.”

  He pulled up outside the cabin where she lived. Two dogs got up from the porch. Wolfie was feral and didn’t let anyone, even Cameron, touch him, but he sometimes walked in and out of her house and had been known to steal her stuffed animals and bury them in the yard. Mariah was Wolfie’s daughter and was as well-trained as was possible under the corrupting influence of her father, who really did look like a wolf, a black wolf with gray under his muzzle. An old guy who, after being attacked by coyotes, had been darted, castrated and stitched up by the zoo veterinarian, then released to Cameron’s backyard. After that, Wolfie had decided he sort of trusted Cameron.

  “Whatever,” Cameron muttered, pushing open the passenger door of Paul’s pickup truck, an old Toyota 4Runner with camper shell. “Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and trod up her flagstone path, a rustic path interspersed with dirt and growing things, wilted away this time of year.