by Camryn Rhys
“It’s complicated.” Jamie kicked her horse to a faster pace and passed him, but he kept up.
“We have time.” He pointed up at the rise where the corral sat in the open, through the white trees. “It’s gonna be another hour or so before the group comes back. I’m sure we have time for you to uncomplicate it.”
Brady came out from around the Jeep, having apparently heard their voices, because he gave a big wave. He looked as surprised to see them as Jamie had felt when she saw the purple smoke drifting down from her mother’s fingers.
She shook her head. “Not right now.”
“Don’t think you’re getting out of this, missy.” The hard squint of Kyle’s eyes belied the casual tone. He still didn’t know what was coming, and Jamie wasn’t sure she could be the one to break it to him.
They’d been tricked. Duped.
And there were no spices left in the camp, so if they didn’t eat soon, their love would just fade, anyway.
What would that be like?
She looked at him, at the cut of his jaw, the sparkle in his blue eyes, the broad shoulders that looked like they could carry every burden in the world for her. She’d lose all that.
And just when they’d had a clean slate.
Or she thought they had.
Brady came out into the cut path, shaking his head, and smiling. “Somehow, I knew you’d be able to bring him back, Jame.”
“She sure did.” Kyle waited for her brother to grab the horse before he swung down onto the ground. “She wooed me right back.”
Jamie kept her seat and tried to think of a clever reason to leave Kyle, take Brady and yell at him until her lungs were tired. Her mother might’ve thought lying for twenty-three years was okay. But her brother hated lying. He’d take her side, for sure.
After she yelled at him awhile.
“Get down, Jame. I need to hear the story.” He grabbed her reins, but she didn’t move.
“I should get back up to the—”
“Nope.” Kyle shook his head and reached for the horse. “You’re not going anywhere until you tell me what was going on with your mother in the kitchen.”
Brady’s eyebrow shot up and his face lined in concern. “Wait. What happened with Mom?”
“Nothing.”
Kyle gave Brady an exaggerated roll of the eye. “She’s been doing this with me since I asked her. I don’t know what happened, but when I came up into the house, Mattie was standing over a bowl of spice blends, like she was throwing them out, and Jamie freaked. And when she came back outside, it was worse.”
Her brother’s fingers tightened around the metal bit and Jamie could see the gears turning in his head. He was putting the pieces together. Spice blends. Mom. Kitchen. Jamie mad. And Kyle didn’t know.
She nodded, as though she could read his mind and confirm what had really happened.
Her brother let out a long, slow breath and dropped the reins. “So you know?” Brady asked, bypassing Kyle completely and staring at his sister.
“I do, now.”
“Know what?” Kyle asked.
Brady touched Jamie’s leg. “Good. I’m glad.”
The simple act of compassion just about loosed another round of tears, and she swallowed them down. “I’m not wild about her lying to me when there were…consequences that…” She choked on the words and she couldn’t help glancing at Kyle. “Consequences that I’d have to pay.”
“Tell me what the damn hell is going on. Right now.” Kyle’s voice was dark and heavy, and it sent a thrill right through her. It had a hard, possessive edge to it, and he reached for her hand. “Jamie. Talk to me. It’s like we haven’t learned anything from the last week at all.”
She sighed and looked down at her hand. She didn’t have the power to do what her mother had done. To make the purple smoke come out of her fingers. She gripped Kyle back and pulled his hand flush with hers so that their fingers laced together.
Jamie didn’t want to give up this feeling that lodged inside her when she touched him. The feeling that he belonged to her.
“I think you’re gonna have to show him, Brady.” She didn’t look at her brother—didn’t want to lose one second of seeing Kyle like this. Because once he realized what was going on in her family, and what Mattie had done to him, he was going to flip out and leave.
This time, there would be no bringing him back.
Chapter Nineteen
Kyle didn’t like the desperation in Jamie’s eyes. Almost the promise of tears—a sheen as gray as the rain clouds. They were supposed to be done with that look.
“Show me what?” he asked.
She held his gaze, and he didn’t dare look away, not even to see what Brady was going to produce. It could have been a hopping toad, and Kyle couldn’t have looked away from Jamie’s eyes.
After his own lies and hers, and her hot-cold routine, and Charity and Lana… Good lord. What could make her this desperate?
“This.” Brady’s voice was almost a whisper, and Kyle didn’t look until Jamie released him.
When he finally glanced at Brady’s hand, he blinked to make sure the flickering thing was what he thought it was.
Brady held a small flame in his hand. It touched his skin, but Kyle didn’t smell burning flesh. And where the hell had the fire come from in the first place?
“Mother of Dragons,” he whispered, like a curse, reaching for the flame.
But Brady whispered a few words and it was gone.
“Holy shit balls…” Kyle kept reaching until his fingers touched his boss’s palm. It wasn’t even hot. He pressed his fingers into Brady’s flesh. Nothing. He looked up at Jamie’s brother. “Do that again.”
Brady glanced at his sister and whispered the same words. The flame appeared again, only this time, it was blue.
Kyle shook his head. “Holy. Shit. Balls.”
He ran his fingers through the flame this time, but there was no heat. He chuckled and moved his hand again. Still nothing.
Brady made the fire go away again and Kyle couldn’t help staring.
His boss didn’t have a long-sleeved shirt on, so he wasn’t hiding a flint and line—not that he could’ve sparked a flame without contact anyway. And not that he could’ve made fire that didn’t burn his skin.
“That’s real magick,” Kyle whispered. “Ho-ly. I mean. That’s like, Vegas-amazing.”
Jamie’s little sound of disgust brought his attention up to see her concern-lined face. She shook her head.
“Oh, jeez.” He slid his hand up her leg. “Is that the thing? Like, real magick?” He gripped her calf. “Jamie, we just spent a week lying to each other. A little fake fire is not gonna scare me.”
She climbed down from her horse, and her frustration had only intensified. She grabbed him by the shoulders. “You realize this means that magick is real.”
“Okay.” He took a breath. “Then magick is real. That’s not a stretch, given some of the things I’ve seen this week. I mean, come on, it’s not like he breathed fire or something.” Kyle smacked Brady on the shoulder. “Wait a minute. Can you breathe fire? Cuz that would rock.”
“Will you stop.” She gripped his arm hard and pulled him back to her. Her face had so much concern etched in it, he wasn’t sure he had gotten the whole of the story.
Would she be this worried for no reason?
“What’s wrong?” Kyle looked between her frightened eyes, searching for some answer.
“All this,” Jamie said before she choked on the words. She blinked and looked away. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, and his heart lurched.
“What?”
“All this is magick.” She nodded at the chuckwagon. “My mom makes magick food to make people fall in love.”
His heart kept dropping, and he didn’t think it would stop. “That’s why she wanted me to use the spices all the time.” Kyle walked through his first meeting with Mattie. Her pressing the tins into his hands.
She’d been vague,
but he had a strange sense that she thought there was something magic about those blends. Like they were going to make a difference in people’s futures.
And it was all because… they were.
“Wait. That Cowboy Matchmaker blend,” Kyle said. “With the thyme and ginger. She had me eat some of that before I went out and saw you fall off the horse.”
“Before you saved me from a broken neck.” Her tears were back. “Yeah.”
“But… it doesn’t make sense.” He shook his head and stepped away from the horses, looking out over the campsite. He tried to remember the first moments, from almost a week ago. “She couldn’t have made me fall in love with you. I mean…I wanted you long before I ate any of that.”
“She did. That’s what the spells were for.” Her hand slipped onto his shoulder. “She calls them revealing spells. They make you be in love with someone.”
“No. They reveal love,” Brady said, before Kyle could process exactly what he meant. He turned around, nodding.
“Yeah. That’s more like it.” He grabbed Jamie’s arms and pulled her within inches of his face. “Revealed. It didn’t make me love you. I wanted you long before that. Since the first time I saw you.”
Jamie’s eyes filled with tears and she was shaking her head, but Kyle didn’t care. She just didn’t know.
“No. It can’t have made me love you. I mean, the fire is one thing, but I remember wanting you this way from the minute I saw you piling hay into the wagon, before I even knew your name.”
She pressed her palm to the side of his face. “But what about me? I didn’t love you when I first saw you.”
Kyle leaned into her touch. “That doesn’t matter. If it didn’t make me love you, it didn’t make you love me.”
The lines of concern didn’t evaporate like he wanted them to. She just didn’t trust feelings that she felt had been fabricated. But he could deal with that. He took her face in his hands and pressed his lips to hers.
Kyle teased her mouth open and deepened his kiss until she sighed and fell against him. “How I feel about you, and how you feel about me… it’s not magick,” he whispered against her lips. Jamie melted against him, her head under his chin, her body plastered to his. “It’s love.”
“It’s magick.”
“It’s love.” He lifted her chin and kissed her nose. “It’s love, it’s love, it’s love.”
She snorted, but she pressed her forehead against his cheek. “Brady, do you know anything about these spells?”
“I know they don’t last forever,” he said from behind them.
Kyle’s heart lifted, just a touch. Just a little sliver of hope lit its way through the clouds of doubt that Jamie would be lost in. He just needed to give her the time she needed. “I’ll tell you what.” He kissed her forehead and pulled her back to arm’s length. “However long Mattie said to wait, we’ll wait double that. I’ll stay away from you, for as long as you want. As long as you think you need.”
“But—” Her nose wrinkled in the cutest, most adorable way that made him want to kiss her again. “Don’t you want to savor these last moments that we have?”
“They’re not going to be the last moments,” he said, packing his words with as much surety as he felt flowing through his veins. “I promise you.”
Jamie didn’t answer, but when he began his descent to the chuckwagon, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Kyle couldn’t believe that magick had fabricated the kinds of feelings he’d uncovered in himself. Or the ones that he saw written on her face.
No magick was that powerful.
Chapter Twenty
Jamie was counting the minutes that’d passed since the last couple walked in to Gallagher’s restaurant in Springhill. She kept expecting Kyle to follow, and he didn’t.
One minute was reasonable. Two minutes was understandable. Three minutes was okay.
Four minutes was worrying.
Was he not coming at all?
She hadn’t spoken to him, on his request, since Thursday morning. Brady had taken over as the leader of the trail ride, since it was his business and he didn’t want Paul out there with Lana on their own any more than was absolutely necessary.
An emergency was one thing, Brady had said.
But it was more than rule-following that her brother was worried about. They were all hoping that Paul would heal. Get back out on the rodeo circuit. Stop lying around and chasing girls.
And Brady wasn’t about to give Paul another excuse.
When her oldest brother stalked through the door, five minutes after the last couple, Brady made a bee-line for the bar and sidled up to her. “I didn’t see you over here.” He raised his brows. “You know Kyle is here, right?”
Jamie’s heart jumped, just hearing his name out loud. She nodded. “I know.”
“So, does this mean you’re still, y’know…?” He rolled one shoulder and let his sentence trail off, but Jamie knew what he meant.
Still in love.
She had been cleaning out her system for two days, hoping that whatever magick had been running through her veins was now done and gone. But the thing that hadn’t gone away was her desire for Kyle.
“I don’t know,” Jamie lied, leaning on the bar and reaching for her shot of tequila. She knocked it back, relishing the burning sensation as it slicked through her body. “I don’t want to plant him six feet under the barn, if that means anything.”
Brady tipped his cowboy hat. “That won’t last long, don’t worry. First time he leaves the seat up, and you’ll get out your shovel.”
She smacked his arm hard. “I knew you guys would be here. I just wanted to see him, that’s all.”
“See who?” A sultry voice sounded behind her and all the nerve endings in Jamie’s body went on high alert.
Kyle.
He wore a dark green button-up shirt that set off his eyes and made them almost sparkle. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and the dark stubble of his beard was starting to come in nicely.
Jamie could still remember the feel of that beard on her thighs when he… She wiped at her face, certain she was sweating, but her skin was dry. With a slow smile, she tried for nonchalance. “Hey, Kyle.”
“Yeah. Fancy meeting you here,” he said, drawing up one corner of his mouth. He leaned on the bar behind her and she had to turn sharply to keep him from being at her back.
Except she wanted him behind her. And on top of her. And beside her. And all over her. She wanted him everywhere.
Blood pumped hard in her ears and she had to take a shallow, slow breath to keep herself from exploding like a bomb. Need to diffuse some of the desire.
“I should leave you two,” her brother said, catching someone in his gaze across the bar. He nodded at them and looked about to engage in another conversation, but Jamie couldn’t take her eyes off Kyle.
For almost two days, she’d been thinking about him. Wanting him. Imagining him. And now, here he was. All dressed up, all done with work for the week, and all smiles and smolders.
She fisted her hands and dropped them to her sides. “So, how was the trail?”
“Good.” Kyle made eye contact with the bartender and pointed at her shot glass. “I’ll have what she’s having.”
“It’s tequila,” she said, glancing up at the new guy behind the Blue Moon bar.
He wasn’t a Gallagher, but he had the look. Dark eyes, bald head, tall, sort of broody. Maybe he was a relative. It must be a thing with rural Colorado guys. Even the new ones had to have the brooding look to fit in around here.
“You want a top off?” he asked, a bit of a Boston accent in his vowels.
“Sure.” Jamie pushed her glass toward him and he gave her another couple of fingers. Hair of the dog.
“Should I put it all on the Banfield Ranch tab?” the bartender asked.
“Sure,” she said.
“Sounds good, then.” His East Coast accent was even heavier, the more he talked. And when he set the bottle back on the co
unter, she could see double-circles of dark tattoos on his wrist, just like Caleb Gallagher.
Hmmm. Seemed like a nice enough guy, and it feels like a big step to admit that. If Kyle hadn’t been there, she might’ve struck up a conversation. Not to flirt or anything, but just to satisfy curiosity. To pass time.
It felt like that was all she’d ever really been doing with men. Passing time. Like they were all dudes who could just as easily not be there.
But with Kyle…it was different. Jamie took in a good eyeful as he downed his shot of tequila. He was attractive, sure, but there was something else about him. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. He was…good.
Not to say that other men were bad. But there was something trustworthy about Kyle. She wanted to trust him.
“Here’s the thing,” she said, waiting for the hulky bartender to leave. Jamie set her shot glass on the bar between them and narrowed her vision onto Kyle’s blue-rimmed eyes. “I like you.”
“Good,” he said, matching her gesture.
The smack of the glass on the bar drew a few eyes, but she didn’t care. “And liking you hasn’t gone away in two days.”
“Good.” Kyle leaned forward, just a touch, and Jamie’s pulse responded to his nearness.
“But here’s the other thing…” She swayed, and it cut in to her thoughts. “Wait. Am I drunk?”
“I don’t think so.” He slid his hands up her arms and gripped her shoulders. “What happened?”
“I just…it felt like the earth was moving.” Her gaze landed everywhere else in the bar, except on Kyle. She just couldn’t look at him, like an eclipse. It was frightening, standing on the edge of this kind of abyss.
Admit you love a man, and it pushes you over the edge. Wasn’t that why they called it falling in love?
“The earth is moving, Jamie.” Kyle drew her toward him and when her body was pressed against his, she lost all control of thought or speech.
The earth was moving. Not like an earthquake, but like those first few moments of being buzzed, when the alcohol was about to take effect, but a person could still remember what it felt like to be sober, and suddenly, the whole orientation of the world shifted.
