by Camryn Rhys
She couldn’t trust him. Not when he hid potions in his pockets. She was going to have to leave Colorado.
Unless she and Brady could somehow cast the Confusion Spell and get him to the Denver airport. Or even drive him to Vegas. Leave him there. Figure out some spell from her mother’s spell book to cover their tracks.
Mattie grabbed her keys and ran for the truck. She didn’t like bringing Brady into her magick mess, but the only other options were Paul and Jamie, and Caleb would absolutely have her hide if she involved them.
She started the truck and drove down the hill toward the ranch. Tears wouldn’t stop falling. It’d been so hard to be without Will for twenty-eight years, and having him back even just for a day was enough to break what little remained of her heart.
Did she have the strength to be without him another twenty-eight?
Mattie would have to summon it from somewhere. No one was going to hurt her son. Not even his father.
Chapter Six
The garage door was open when Mattie drove back around the corner, from the forest back-road, to her ranch house. Her children never left the garage door open. They knew the critters would get into the garbage.
Her oldest son came racing out, the lines on his face hard, angry. He was practically running, his pace was so fast, but a few seconds later, Jamie came running out after him.
They made a strange pair, for those who didn’t know they shared no blood. Brady with his big, wide shoulders and sunkissed hair, like his father…and Jamie, small and dark-haired and fierce, just like her mother had been. The two of them had been raised togther, along with Jamie’s brother Paul, as full siblings, and as far as they knew, they were all blood kin.
Will’s appearance would ruin that as much as Paul’s affair with the Gallagher girl had almost ruined things, two years ago. Mattie had desperately been trying to keep her family together and protected from the outside world for twenty-eight years. If the world would just leave her alone, now, that would be just fine.
She pulled the truck to a stop and slammed it into park, jumping out into the fray.
“You can’t do this,” Jamie yelled, chasing her brother down the path toward the staff cabins. “She’s my staff.”
Brady’s long legs and longer steps made it hard for her to keep up, but she was doing a valiant job.
Mattie ran after them both, heart racing still. “Stop, now. Both of you.”
Her adult children both froze on the walking path that led from the house up to the rest of the buildings.
Two big barns—one with a stable, ranch office, corral, and one for the machinery, the new ranch bus—and the new accommodations they’d built the previous spring, for tourists and staff. The front entrance of the ranch was up that way, where they brought the tourists.
But this wasn’t a workday. It was Saturday. The staff had the day off.
“What the hell is going on, both of you?” she yelled, a little more on edge than she meant to be. “Why is the garage door open? And where is Paul’s truck?”
“He’s gone.” Her son’s body language couldn’t have been tighter if he’d been a wound guitar string. “He did it again, Mom.”
Mattie sucked in a breath and almost rolled her eyes at those words. Her younger son had been lost, ever since his rodeo accident and the loss of the Gallagher girl. His wake had a lot of broken hearts in it.
“And Brady fired Charity for it. Like it was her fault,” Jamie yelled back, turning on her brother. “But not Paul. No. Paul gets to keep his job.”
“Paul is your brother,” she said, matter-of-factly. “We’re not going to fire Paul.”
“Then we have to stop hiring female staff.” Brady clenched his fists at his side. “He is fucking his way through my people.”
“She was my person,” Jamie said, her shoulders back, defiantly.
The whole situation crushed down on Mattie like a straw about to break her back. She had enough to deal with, trying to keep Will Walker from ruining her life, but it looked like her kids were about to do a fine job of that themselves.
If they kept at each other like this, one of them was going to decide this communal living thing was more trouble than it was worth. Her heart froze. “Where did Paul go?”
“He went to blow off steam.” Her son shook his head. “I gave Charity ten minutes to clear out her stuff.”
“Can you believe it?” Her daughter glared at her brother. “We have our first trail ride coming next week, and he fires my chef!”
“She broke the rules.” Brady’s features tightened another click. “She knew, when I hired her, that she couldn’t fraternize with the staff, or with any of the family. It’s the only way to have trust on the trail.”
“Stop it, now. Both of you.” Mattie’s voice shook and she looked down to find her own hands in fists. She didn’t want to be angry with her children. She needed their support more than she needed calm, but the stress was starting to eat at her.
“But, Mom. What am I going to do? I have a full slate of people coming on Monday morning to spend a week—”
“We’ll cancel the trail ride,” Brady said.
“No.” Mattie sliced her hand through the air, demanding and end to the conversation. “I’m going to fix this.”
“How?” Jamie asked, her eyes full of concern.
It tugged at Mattie’s heart. Her adopted daughter and son had been so much a part of her blood, she didn’t often think of them as not her children. In fact, there were days when she was certain that Jamie had to be her blood daughter, because she acted so much like Mattie. Paul, too. He had her headstrong, lost-to-the-world-ness.
Brady. He was his father’s son. He had laser focus, and a heart of stone. Once he decided something, there was no swaying him. He wasn’t going to back down. He wouldn’t stop.
A flood of emotion caught her breath and stuck it in her lungs, burning them. Just like his father. Even as a teenager, Will had already been the kind of man who wasn’t going to give up on anything.
Twenty-eight years of looking for her… If nothing else, it should’ve proven to her, there was no stopping him. Just like there was no stopping Brady.
She should’ve seen it coming. Seen Will coming.
Sadness tugged at her heart. Life without Will had been hard enough already.
Maybe… just maybe…
She shook her head before the tears started for real. “I’ll think of something,” she answered Jamie’s question. “Just give me a minute.”
“I don’t want—”
Mattie held up her hand to silence her daughter. She knew what was about to come out of her mouth. ‘I don’t want you to just do it yourself.’ Jamie had been trying to assert her independence, by doing trail rides of her own, and Mattie wanted to respect that, although she helped wherever she could. Not this time. They’d have to find another solution.
“I’m not coming with you, don’t worry.” She waved her hand at Brady. “Go upstairs. I’ll meet you in the office in a few mintues. Jamie. Come with me.” She took her daughter by the arm and drew her toward the front porch of their sprawling ranch house.
The hand-hewn wood made a nice appearance for the tourists, and they’d continued that same look through the rest of the ranch, as they’d built it up. Most of the buildings on the property hadn’t been there when Mattie first took up residence with her five-year-old sons and three-year-old daughter, more than twenty years ago. It had just been the ranch house at that time, and not much of it.
Her little family had done well for themselves, and she couldn’t be more proud, but Will’s appearance had brought the day that she’d never wanted to come right to her doorstep. She couldn’t wait any longer to talk to Jamie.
“Look, honey.” Mattie took her daughter’s hands and sat down on one of the big, wooden rocking chairs, pulling her down with her. “Something’s happened, and I need to tell you about it, but you have to promise me, you won’t talk to either of your brothers about it.”
Her pretty features, which had been streaked with anger, now rounded in concern. Jamie gripped her hands and leaned forward. “What’s wrong?”
She took in a long breath. “I never wanted to have to tell you this, because it doesn’t matter to me, but the time has come for you to know.”
A quick tightening of Jamie’s eyebrows, followed a long look into her eyes. “Mom, wait. Are you trying to tell me that I’m adopted?”
Her mouth hung open, the words still on her tongue. She blinked. “Well…”
“You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“Wait… what?” Mattie shook her head in disbelief. “You… how did you…”
“I did a DNA experiment thing as a science project when I was a sophomore, where I mapped Paul’s and Brady’s and my DNA.” She waved a hand. “We all know.”
Her head snapped back. She tried to speak, but words wouldn’t come. She tried to think back to the year Jamie was a sophomore in high school. Had her relationship changed? Had they somehow grown differently after that point?
Mattie had been guarding the secret so close for so long, she hadn’t even considered the fact that it wouldn’t have an effect on them. Or if it did, they’d hide it from her.
“I watched for a long time,” Jamie said, her voice growing almost mournful. “To see if you treated Brady and Paul differently, or Brady and I, or Paul and I. But you didn’t. I think I reached a point, when I was in college, where I just didn’t care anymore. You adopted us, you never let us think we weren’t your real children.”
“But… didn’t you wonder about your mom?” She couldn’t help the wonder from creeping into her voice. She was genuinely shocked, and there was no way Jamie couldn’t tell.
“I guess I never felt like you weren’t my real mom.” Her daughter shrugged. “You told me about that guy Will when we were kids, who I always thought was my dad, but all I knew was to call you right away if he ever approached me.”
“You talked to Brady about his dad?”
“No. We haven’t talked about it since the DNA thing.”
Mattie thought back to when she and her oldest son had discussed his magick lineage, when he came into his power. He hadn’t seemed concerned about his other siblings having to deal with what he had to deal with, in finding out he was a witch.
She’d never considered that he knew they knew they weren’t his blood. She thought it’d been just Brady being Brady. Being the stoic, solid rock of a young man he’d always been.
“I am your real mom,” Mattie said, squeezing Jamie’s hands. “You were only a few years old when your parents died.” Emotion crawled up the back of her throat and she tried to swallow it down, but she couldn’t. Tears slipped out the corners of her eyes. “Your mother was my only friend. I had to come here to start over, and she was the only person who accepted me.”
She looked up at the dusty eaves of the house, remembering a day, so many years ago, she and Gabrielle had sat in these very chairs, and discussed what would happen if Mattie’s family ever found her.
‘I want you to take Brady,’ she’d said to her dark-haired, kind-eyed werewolf friend. ‘I want you to take my son if my family ever shows up. It’s the only way Brady would live, if they think he’s yours.’
Gabrielle had given her a sad look and insisted that nothing would happen to her, her family would never find her, and they’d never need to take Brady. ‘We’re more sisters than friends,’ the headstrong beauty had said, and the next day, Gabi had changed her will to give Jamie and Paul to Mattie in the event of death.
Neither of them thought Gabi and Mike would be the ones to die.
The moment was so visceral, she could almost see her friend’s face. It was so similar to Jamie’s.
Mattie had bonded with Caleb Gallagher’s sister over the perils of being magickal and mated to a human. For Mattie’s part, her mother had performed the Kindred ceremony as soon as the green-eyed-stuff had started with Will. Before the pregnancy. They’d dropped out of high school and lived together, looking forward to the day when Will got his diploma. They’d been together since before Mattie could remember, and if she could have made her Kindred a witch, she would have. Only then, her family would have been after him, too.
At least, as a human, he was safe from the Banfields.
Gabrielle, on the other hand, could have turned her human husband into a werewolf, but decided not to, precisely so she could have the kind of normal life that only Mike could provide. Living outside the pack—though just on the border of their lands—and raising her human children as humans. She had wanted Mike’s parents to have the grandkids from their only son that they deserved, and sacrificed longer life in order to have babies that would age like the rest of their family.
“Your mother was an incredible woman,” she said, tears soaking her skin now.
Jamie launched out of her chair and threw her arms around Mattie’s neck. “You are an incredible woman, Mom.” Tears shook her voice. “I’ve never wanted anyone else as my mother.”
Mattie’s heart swelled up up in her chest like it was going to explode. She’d wanted to hear those words so many times in her life, although Gabrielle would’ve loved Jamie and Paul just as well. Jamie would’ve loved her real mother, too.
But it had never seemed like a good time to tell her daughter the truth. If she’d known that Jamie found out in high school, she might’ve made more mistakes, and not raised her just the way she would have if Jamie had been her own blood.
“Fate brought us together, Jamie.” Mattie hugged her daughter, harder than she could probably stand. “And I’ve never looked back. To me, you and Paul are just as much my flesh and blood as if you’d been born from my own body.”
“Ick, Mom,” she said with a laugh, pulling away and wiping tears from her cheeks. “Let’s not talk about childbirth, okay?”
Mattie giggled, wiping the wetness from her own face. Jamie knew just when to apply the snark, and to lighten the situation. She was always the one saving Paul or Brady from getting really angry with each other. Her daughter had so much love to give in her heart. She wanted nothing more than for Jamie to have everything she’d ever wanted.
Unfortunately, that would probably not include getting her friend Charity back. Much as the two of them had been close since the young blonde had started on-staff at the ranch, Mattie had never really trusted Charity. Brady hadn’t, either. But they would find a way to fix Jamie’s problem.
And Brady’s.
And her own?
She couldn’t even think about what she was going to do with Will Walker. Her children had to come first, and if she just gave herself a few minutes to think in private, Mattie would be able to come up with a solution. She had to.
The Paralysis Spell wouldn’t last forever.
Chapter Seven
Mattie ascended the stairs to the ranch office, steeling herself for the sight of her son. He was starting to look so much like Will, she sometimes had a hard time remembering what Will’s face actually looked like. But Brady was the personality equivalent of his father, as well, and it helped to remember that when they had a conflict. Once Brady got something in his head, he was so focused.
Charity would be the unfortunate roadkill of that personality flaw.
When she reached the little room, he wasn’t there yet. The whole place was empty. On the desk was a pile of papers, in more of a mess than her son would usually have left them.
Her handbag banged against her back with each step. Mattie had brought the only weapon she had that could fix this situation. It was her own fault, after all, for not doing this months ago, when they’d chosen a new chef to go with Jamie on the trail rides with tourists.
She sat at the large desk and a spell came to mind. The Choosing Spell. Mattie fluttered her hands over the pile of resumes and spoke the ancient words. She stared at the papers, but nothing happened.
A few seconds passed and, still nothing. With a glance aroun
d the ranch office, she reached for her purse and pulled out her mother’s leather journal where the words were written.
“Of course,” she said, snapping the book closed. “I forgot to drop the antecedent.” Mattie cleared her throat and waved her hands again, saying the proper variation.
Papers fluttered on the hard, wooden desk, and one of them shot out. It sailed across the room and landed on the floor in front of the door.
She dropped the journal and ran over to pick it up, but her son’s boot stepped over the threshold and landed on the white sheet before she could reach it.
Brady looked down at her, a disapproving glare on his angular features. “Mom,” he whispered, shifting a glance back into the barn. “You’d better not be doing magick.”
“We can’t afford another Charity situation.” She reached for the paper, but he pressed his foot down just as she pulled on it. The resume stuck under his weight.
“That doesn’t mean you do magick.” His tone died down to a hiss on the final word, like it was dangerous to even say out loud.
“I’m protecting my family.” Mattie tugged at the paper, hovering her hand over Brady’s boot, and said another spell.
His foot lifted and the momentum sent him stepping backward. Like the athlete he was, he caught himself before he stumbled, and walked back into the office, slamming the door behind him.
“Mom. We talked about this.” He sighed and grabbed her arm, helping her up off the floor with reluctant obedience. “You can’t do magick in public. Anywhere.”
“It was just a quick spell.” Mattie flashed the paper in front of his face. “It could’ve been the wind.”
“Inside a barn? On the second floor office that doesn’t have a window? And no fan? On a calm day, where—”
“Brady William Banfield.” She dropped her hands to her sides, frustration rising in her. “You don’t have to be condescending. I’m the parent here, not the other way around.”
