`Show me your wings, Tinkerbell.Ćhapter Ten Callie’s big green eyes grew even wider at his suggestion, and Nick had to ask himself why all this wasn’t enough to make him believe. For heaven’s sake, the greater miracle would have been that the Minuteman Motel raked in enough profit to remodel even one of its rooms into something that rivaled the VIP suites he’d seen in Vegas or Atlantic City. There wasn’t a place east of the Poconos with rooms this fabulous. `Ask me something else. Anything else.´ Was there a hint of panic in her voice? `Why? Don’t all faeries have wings?´ `Yes. But I’m not allowed to show anyone. That’s one of Freya’s strict rules. No wish granting and no«wing-showing. Period. Now, how about that leprechaun? Or a pixie? I can parade a herd of centaurs through your living room or maybe even a unicorn scratch that. I can’t do a unicorn.´ He grinned, not sure why he was enjoying this so much. `Why not? Maybe a unicorn would do it.´ `They’re only visible to virgins, Nick. I venture I’m about fifteen years too late for you to see a unicorn.Śhe matched his self-satisfied smirk. `Fourteen years, if you must know. How about you?´ Her jaw dropped, but she recovered her shock and matched his smile. `Two hundred and seventy-seven. And that’s only because I was a late bloomer.´ He laughed. `So you’re two hundred and seventy-seven years old?Ánd she’d taken offense at his remark about not thinking she was a runaway teenager? `That’s absurd. What kind of a Fae do you think I am? I’m three hundred and twenty-nine.´ He looked at her. `Okay, three thirty, but my birthday was last month. That’s the last time I grant a birthday wish.´ Nick eyed the hot tub and the faux waterfall that trickled down from mossy boulders into the frothy depths of contoured blue-green vinyl. `So you got in trouble by granting yourself a birthday wish?´ `No. Not me. I granted someone else my birthday wish.´ Her voice became distant. He turned and found her perched on the arm of the sectional sofa, studying her fingernails. `Her name was Felicia. My job was to help her find true love with Paul, her childhood sweetheart.´ `Let me guess: Paul wasn’t interested.Śhe gave him a shocked look and clucked her tongue. `Why do you assume it’s the man who has to be convinced of these things? Paul was not the problem at all. He loved her, always had loved her, but she didn’t believe it. Felicia was a bit of a Plain Jane. She’d never really spread her«wings«and she wanted to. She needed to before she could understand that what she had with Paul was the real thing.
She couldn’t see that he was the man of her dreams because her dreams involved another man, a man who naturally didn’t have the time of day for her.´ `And we’re back to my theory.´ Nick took the other end of the sofa and leaned back in the cushions. God, with a cold beer and that popcorn she’d been talking about, heaven was only a click of the TV remote away. `Please.´ `So what happened? You granted Plain Jane her wish, and she caught the eye of the wrong guy.Ćallie nodded. `It wasn’t supposed to be forever. I just wanted her to gain a little confidence. The other man Jack he fell hard and Felicia was thrilled. I’m ashamed to say it made me feel good to see her so happy.´ `Why should you be ashamed of that? Isn’t that your job?´ `No. My job is to do what Freya tells me. Felicia and Paul. They were the job. Felicia and Jack well, that was a disaster.´ `He hurt her?´ `Nope. She hurt him . Ripped out his lying, cheating, skirt-chasing heart and showed it to him.´ Nick paled. Heart-ripping didn’t bode well. `Not literally.Ćallie tossed her head and clucked her tongue again. `You see, Jack was like you. He loved for the moment, bounced from woman to woman, bed to bed ´ `I don’t bounce from bed to bed.´ Who was he kidding? He just didn’t like being reminded of it. `Jack had all the right moves, and his plans included using Felicia like he’d used a dozen other women before her, and then something bad happened.´ Nick leaned forward. `She killed him?´ `Of course not! He fell in love with her. Real, true love. The kind that doesn’t come along that often and stays with you for the rest of your life, no matter what else happens to you.´ `But she loved him, too, right?´ `Nope. She loved what he represented. She loved the freedom from the lifelong assumption that she’d end up with Paul.´ `So she broke Paul’s heart, too?´ `Shattered. It takes a lot to destroy true love, but with my help, Felicia managed to do it.´ Nick saw the color rise in Callie’s cheeks. The admission shamed her, and that bothered him. She’d tried to help someone and had gotten burned for it. It didn’t seem fair.
`So what happened?´ `Freya stepped in. She has the power to undo things«things done by Fae, anyway. She was able to negate the wish I granted Felicia and turn things back, but that came with a price.´ `Your banishment.´ `A price for Felicia as well. She never gained the confidence her relationship with Jack gave her. She loves Paul and he loves her, and they’ll be together forever as they should have been, but she’s always going to wonder what might have been. She’ll never act on those feelings. She’ll never see Jack again, and he’ll continue on as the womanizer he was because he’ll never fall in love the way he fell for Felicia. But no one gets hurt this way.´ Nick contemplated. Wasn’t it better when no one got hurt? `And for that, you«and me«we have to do this thing for Freya so we don’t end up like Jack?Ćallie nodded. `Don’t think you’re an innocent bystander to my train wreck, Nick Garrett. Freya picked you because you are Jack. You’re just like him, and she saw what happened to him when he cared for Felicia. It changed him completely. Having her in his life righted some kind of wrong that had shaped his psyche and made him a user.´ Nick’s brow wrinkled. A minute ago he’d felt sorry for Jack; now he wanted no part of his association with the guy. `His last name didn’t happen to be µthe Ripper’, by any chance? You’re making me out to be some kind of monster.´ `You’re not a monster, Nick, and neither was Jack, but without love, who knows what you’ll become. This is Freya’s gift to you, to all the men like Jack.´ Nick shifted on the comfortable cushions to face her. `Explain to me how being able to have my heart ripped out is a gift.´ `Do I have to spell it out for you?´ Her exasperated sigh echoed in the room, which seemed twice as large as it should be. `Yes, please.´ `To lose your ability to love will destroy part of your soul. You don’t want that, Nick. I know you don’t want to go from this«to this .Śhe punctuated her statement with a wave of the remote control in her hand. In less than the wink of an eye, their surroundings changed. Nick found himself sitting on a lumpy twin bed, facing a dusty mirror rather than a plasma screen. Callie now perched on a straight-backed chair near where the bubbling Jacuzzi had been a moment ago. `Does that illustrate my point?´ Nick blinked. Her disappearing act had been one thing, but this was beyond anything he’d ever seen. `How exactly do you do that?Śhe shrugged. `It’s magick, not science.´ `If you can do that, why can’t you just make people fall in love?´ `I can’t create love. I can only help it along, and right now, I can’t even do that without your help.´ `Hmm«so, if I help you, will you bring back the TV?Ín response, she launched the remote at him. He caught it, laughing. `I’m kidding. You’ve convinced me. I don’t understand any of this, but I believe it. I’ll help you.´ `Thank you.´ Nick shrugged, dismissing the sincerity in her tone. `Where do we start?Éven as he said the words, though, he had a sinking feeling he would live to regret them. Hours later, Nick rolled over and focused his bleary gaze on the alarm clock. Six AM. He had to search his tired brain for the date« Saturday, as he recalled. He’d crawled into bed just after two o’clock, leaving Callie curled up on the sofa under his NY Mets blanket, flipping through cable channels and scribbling notes on an old legal pad he’d found at the bottom of the kitchen junk drawer. She’d refused to evict him from his bed, and some previously undiscovered part of his psyche refused to ask her to join him. That alone made him question his sanity. Despite his grudging acceptance of her Fae nature, something would not allow him to take advantage of her. He told himself it was his long lost sense of chivalry bubbling to the surface. Or maybe it was the irrational fear that her Fae goddess was correct in some divine assumption that he was nothing more than a rutting male, fit for no purpose other than to serve as a punishment to an errant faerie. He groaned. He’d already taxed his brain to
o much for one morning. He gave the clock an evil glare and rolled back onto his stomach just as the tantalizing aroma of eggs, toast and fresh brewed coffee wafted into the bedroom. His stomach rumbled, and he decided sleep could wait. He rolled out of bed and followed his nose to the kitchen. He found her there, barefoot and dressed in loose gray sweats and the clingy Farley’s t-shirt. She looked hot and sweet and adorable as she tried to keep a dozen huge oranges from rolling off the kitchen counter. Despite the sudden yearning in his gut, Nick leaned against the kitchen doorjamb and watched her, fascinated and a little dumbfounded by what he’d gotten himself into. One softball-sized orange bounced onto the linoleum, narrowly missing her bare toes. She sighed in frustration and bent to retrieve it just as two others plunged from the counter. `Gravity be damned!śhe muttered. His laugh startled her, and she jumped at his intrusion. He crossed the kitchen and scooped up the fallen fruit for her. `What are you doing?´ The sound of sizzling eggs drew his attention to the frying pan on the stove where fluffy yellow mounds gave off a mouthwatering aroma. There hadn’t been a single egg in his fridge last night, or a fresh orange, or any of the other ingredients she had arranged on the counter and the kitchen table. `Pulp or no pulp?śhe asked, gesturing with the point of a very sharp knife before she sliced an orange in half. `You’re squeezing orange juice?´ `Of course.´ `They sell it already squeezed, you know.´ `I know.´ `When did you go shopping?´ The look she gave him answered his question. `Scrambled, right?´ `Yeah« If you popped all this into existence, is it«real?Ágain with the look. She handed him a piece of toast, which burned his fingers before he tossed it on a plate. `Feel real?´ `Why not just pop in some fresh squeezed orange juice? Or breakfast in bed?´ He moved over to investigate the eggs further. They looked perfect. He turned off the burner and shuffled the pan a little, thinking that even the women he slept with didn’t make him breakfast most of the time.
`Cooking helps me think. Plus, popping things into existence all over the place takes a lot of energy, and after a while, I’d start to fade. I have to admit, I went a little crazy last night at the motel. I wore myself out, and I actually fell asleep for a little while.´ `Hmm.´ Nick scanned the kitchen trying to figure out whose life he’d woken up in this morning. The table was set for two. The place smelled heavenly, and the beautiful girl who’d spent the night on his couch was handing him a plate of scrambled eggs. What if he got used to this? How had it happened? Yesterday he had a stalker. Today«a housekeeper. What would he have tomorrow? God help him, a wife? On that disturbing thought, his appetite fled. `Nick? Are you in there?´ `Hmm.´ He took a seat, and she handed him a steaming mug of coffee. He had to concentrate on not dropping it. She pulled up the other chair, sat and began slathering butter on a piece of toast. `I’ve been thinking about our options here. I considered starting an online dating service, but that could take too long to build a database of people and get them to meet face to face. What about an in-person matchmaking service? We can draft a questionnaire to hand out around town, put an ad in the Yellow Pages. Then we could find a place to get everyone together, like a hall or something Nick?´ `Huh?´ `Drink some coffee.´ `I’m not a morning person,´ he mumbled, raising the mug to his lips. `No kidding.Śhe arched a perfect brow and took a bite of toast. `I put an X through video dating, too. It tends to attract smarmies. I think we’ll have better luck if we keep things small and intimate very one on one. I’m going to apply for a waitressing job at Farley’s, and if you ask around at work tomorrow and get some more background on Teresa and John ´ Smarmies? `Slow down, Tinkerbell. The caffeine hasn’t reached my brain yet. A waitressing job?´ The thought of men hitting on Callie the way they hit on Diane and Hayden made Nick irritable. `That way I can keep an eye on Diane and Farley and make sure things go smoothly.´ Nick laughed into his mug. `If you wanted things to go smoothly, you shouldn’t have picked Diane and Farley.´ `Well, what do you suggest? In fact, we have to go back there tonight and find out how the flat tire worked. For all we know, we could be one down already.´ `You think it’ll happen that fast?´ He gave her a skeptical look. Her pert nose wrinkled. `Why not? True love happens fast. Why do you think we’ve only got sixty days? We’re expected to unite couples who are already meant for each other. It should be easy.´ Nick took another swallow of coffee. Damn, it was perfect coffee. `Aren’t you the cock-eyed optimist?´ he said after perusing the eggs on his plate. `There’s nothing easy about love, Tinkerbell. Nothing easy at all.Ćhapter Eleven After breakfast, Callie left Nick in the kitchen investigating the now fully stocked refrigerator. She made her way to the bedroom where she changed her clothes, choosing faded jeans and a denim work shirt over a plain white t-shirt. She surveyed her reflection in the mirror. She looked like a lumberjack’s bride, and the October chill made her feel like a Popsicle. She couldn’t even stretch her wings. She needed a good stretch, too, somewhere far away from Nick. Ever since he’d shown up in the kitchen, shirtless, his sun-streaked hair pleasantly messy and a night’s growth of stubble darkening his jaw, she’d felt unbalanced and oddly self-conscious. Sitting across the table from him, watching him through the steam rising from his coffee mug, she’d entertained the treacherous thought that he was too handsome for his own good, sexy in fact. That assessment in itself was understandable. Men who easily met society’s standards for good looks were often those more inclined to womanize. It made sense and fit with the way humans, and all animals, had been designed. Alpha males had a greater desire and a greater ability to spread their DNA. They attracted, and were attracted to, a greater number of females. Even though Callie’s very existence transcended science, she possessed a hearty respect for the irrefutable facts of biology. What bothered her was not that, as a female of her species, she could appreciate his muscular arms and smooth chest, sprinkled with fine blond hairs, or find his granite jaw and the cleft in his strong chin faintly endearing. No. What bothered Callie was that while she’d been savagely buttering a piece of toast that she didn’t intend to eat, her gaze had roamed unbidden down his denim-clad thighs and back up to those icy-blue eyes. Heavy-lidded, with a mixture of sleepiness and inherent male confusion, they’d drawn her in and destroyed the Zen calm she’d attempted to create with the project of cooking breakfast.
Callie had, very long ago, overcome the natural Fae fascination with humans as potential mates. Enough of her kind had tried and failed to sustain relationships with mortal beings for her to have learned a thing or two.
By all the gods! She hadn’t been sent here to fall under the spell of Nick Garrett’s irrepressible charm. She’d been sent here to learn a valuable lesson and to make recompense for her mistakes. She refused to allow herself to be distracted from her task, even for a minute. As she fluffed her hair and studied her reflection in the mirror, she thought of the Minuteman Motel. Why had she felt such a sense of relief when Nick returned for her? The magick she’d worked in room five had made it even more comfortable than his tiny, sparsely furnished apartment. Why hadn’t she stayed? Why had her Fae heart skipped a beat when he’d knocked on her door? `Stop it!śhe admonished her rosy-cheeked reflection. `Stop it right there!´ `Sorry. I wasn’t peeking. I just came to see if you needed something to wear.Ćallie whirled around to find Nick standing in the bedroom doorway, one hand shielding his eyes. She swore her hidden wings fluttered. Hadn’t he figured out she possessed an endless and portable wardrobe any human woman would kill for? `I’m dressed,śhe said when she’d recovered her composure. The only thing she’d forgotten was her shoes. She hastily gave herself a pair of tan work boots that complimented her suburban hiker chic. `I was wondering if you were stealing another one of my shirts,´ he said with a smirk, dropping his hand. He leaned against the door jamb, his coffee mug paused halfway to his lips. Callie forced her gaze back to the mirror. `I put your shirt back.´ He shrugged. `You could keep it if you want.´ `That’s okay. It was big on me anyway.Śhe held her breath for a moment, wondering what to do next. The best course of action, she decided, was to disappear for a wh
ile. So she did. `Callie! Where’d you go now?´ Despite his decision to accept the outrageous things he’d seen her do, it still left Nick strangely disconcerted to have her pop out of existence right before his eyes. Magicians performed similar illusions with mirrors, but the only mirror in the room showed just what he’d seen with his own eyes. Once again, she simply ceased to be standing right in front of him. `Where are you? Can you still hear me?´ The embarrassment of talking to an empty room battled with his frustration at her departure and won. He left the bedroom, shaking his head and muttering to himself. `What did I say to get her dander up now? Never met a woman so touchy in my life.´ Back in the kitchen, he confronted the remains of the meal she’d prepared for him. He decided to surprise her by cleaning up, and halfway through the task, the irony of it struck him like a freight train. He was cleaning up his own kitchen to impress the crazy faerie who had essentially moved herself into his apartment. A faerie, who, if her previous feats of prestidigitation were any indication, could have snapped her fingers and done the job in less time than it took to«well, snap her fingers. Maybe she had the right idea. Getting out of the apartment and clearing his head seemed like a better idea than scrubbing a frying pan, so he left everything half done, grabbed a shirt from his closet the blue plaid which now carried a lingering scent of roses and left with no intention of coming back for a good long time. Ted Farley stood behind the bar with his massive hands wrapped around an industrial-sized can of salted peanuts. With measured precision born of practice, he filled a dozen wooden bowls with the snacks, all the while muttering to himself about the inequity of life. Callie listened to him for a while, annoyance and empathy battling within her. Farley’s monologue centered on Diane and what Callie guessed was the fight they’d had the night before. Her plan to get them together over a romantic flat tire had failed with disastrous results. When she finally knocked on the oak-paneled wall to get his attention, she’d already banished her own disappointment. `We’re closed,´ he said as he jammed the plastic lid back on the peanut can. `Happy hour starts at four o’clock today, last call is at two AM.´ `I’m not here for a drink. I’m here for a job.´ Farley plunked the heavy can down on the bar, rattling the brimming bowls. A single peanut jumped ship and rolled an inch or two away from its bowl. `I’m not hiring.Ćallie lowered her gaze. `Oh.Áll she really needed to do was work a little magick and suddenly he’d not only want to hire her, he’d want to sell her the bar and work for her . Considering the trouble she’d already caused in Freya’s court, she decided this wasn’t the time to force things too much. The cranky scowl creasing Farley’s ruddy forehead told her even her best befuddlement might not work. This was a man who’d gotten up on the wrong side of the bed this morning an empty bed Callie decided. She’d seen enough heartbroken mortals to deduce that Diane might be the reason for his pique. `Thank you, anyway.Śhe turned to go, consoling herself with the statistics. She’d only been officially on the job for one day so far. A little failure was to be expected.
The Matchmakers Page 7
