by Abby Knox
Alice could not contain her giggles. A few weeks back, Alice and Fern had gone to the sandwich shop for lunch, and the way that Davis had fawned and fussed over Fern was lost on nobody in the shop except for Fern. It was such an obvious crush. And who could blame Davis? Fern was a stunner, and talented, and freakishly smart. But not smart enough to stop being oblivious when ordering a sandwich from the man every day.
Even better, Alice knew for a fact that Fern’s bag contained two foot-long sub sandwiches. Davis would either be very pleased or very over it.
“Have fun!” she stage-whispered to her friend as she and her date passed by her and exited the stage.
Next came a peculiar little brown bag that wasn’t exactly a bag, but had once been a bag. It looked as if the brown paper had been torn up and reassembled as a large papier-mâché egg. That would be the meek young lady who sang at the coffee shop last night. Alice was starting to wonder if this woman was a genius or the village idiot. The poor girl’s very unappetizing “bag” was sold for a pity-bid of $15 from the fire chief. He was the only bidder, and yes, raised his own bid twice.
When it was time for Alice’s brown bag, it was anonymously brought to the podium by the mayor. Alice watched the crowd as the bidding began at $5. She soon wished she had not scrawled pictures of coffee cups on the outside of her bag, because to her extreme horror, there was Drew from the brew pub, bidding on her brown bag.
Shit.
After someone upped the bidding to $10, Drew shouted “$20!”
That was quite a jump for a modest fundraiser.
Lord goddess, please don’t let this twerp ruin my day; he already ruined last night.
Jack Partridge, the barber, bid $22. Bless his heart, the old grandpa saw the look of horror on her face and was evidently trying to help her out
But it was no use. Apparently $22 was his upper limit, since his wife was elbowing him in the ribs to knock it off. Why he was there in the first place was anybody’s guess.
After the $22 bid, Drew shouted “$50!”
Everyone looked around. This was higher than the first brown bag item, and it wasn’t going to be sold anytime soon. Pretty soon, another gentleman randomly offered $55. But then the insufferable Drew upped it to $75, then $90 after yet another man jumped in with an offer. Around the room they went, until the bidding war was up to $150, and everyone was glued to the scene. All of the other random guys had fallen away except for the guy from the bike shop/print shop/party supply store. That guy was far too busy to be going on a date, Alice thought. But he upped each of Drew’s bids by one or two dollars each time. Drew always counter-offered in $10 increments. This didn’t seem like fair play, but the crowd was into it. They volleyed back and forth until the total was $265.
The auctioneer pointed at bike shop, etc. guy, and said, “Can you go any higher?”
He sadly shook his head, no. Goddess bless him. He was always very attentive at their downtown merchant meetings, unlike Drew, who always seemed a little hungover. Although Alice did not find bike shop guy attractive at all, he seemed like he would have been a pleasant enough date.
Drew, the opposite of pleasant (except, of course, with the way he used his lips), appeared to be the one to win her brown bag lunch. “$265 going once, twice…SOLD to the gentleman up front in the Clapton shirt.”
Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
Chapter 5
Drew
“What do you think of my pad?”
Alice looked around and sniffed. It was definitely a bachelor pad. A wood-paneled depressing little apartment above the bar. And it looked every bit of an apartment above a bar. It was drab. The tiny rooms were a mess with piles of clothes everywhere in dubious states of cleanliness. There was no kitchen table at which to eat her painstakingly prepared authentic colonial cuisine.
“Where do we eat?” she asked, dreading the answer.
Drew slid open a glass door that led onto a steel grate fire escape overlooking the courthouse parking lot. Out there were two dusty plastic chairs and an overturned milk crate that served as a table.
She bit her lip and chided herself for being such a judgmental snob. Drew had won fair and square, so she sucked it up and sat down. Drew sat down across from her, a shit-eating grin on his face, and said, “All right, let’s dig in, girlfriend.”
Alice handed him the bag. From it, Drew removed a takeout box and opened it. “What is this?” he asked.
“Scrapple,” she replied. “I’m sorry, I forgot forks. Do you have some?”
Drew looked around as if forks might somehow appear out of thin air. “Ah…I usually get takeout and use the sporks that come with the stuff. I guess I should have saved some…”
Alice rubbed her eyes with her thumbs and took a deep breath. She finally blurted out, “I can’t do this. Let’s just go downstairs or across the street to my coffee shop where we have actual tables and chairs, which are indoors and not freezing?”
Drew grinned at her. “It’s my date. I won you. Don’t I get to say where we eat?”
“If this is how you normally charm the ladies, you have some work to do,” she replied.
“I don’t charm the ladies. I buy my dates, obviously.”
“I’m sure,” she said, shaking her head, not wanting to think about what else he meant by that.
“Well, Miss Priss, if you insist on relocating, we should go to your place,” he said with a shrug.
“My place? No can do. I live on Colony Hill. Only residents allowed up there unless a tour has been pre-booked.”
Drew leaned back and pulled a wad of cash out of his back pocket. It was thick with twenties. “How much for a tour right now?”
“Nobody’s dressed in period costumes. It’s a whole production. We have to prepare.”
He laughed. “Somehow I don’t see the Sisters turning away perfectly good money because they didn’t have time to put their bloomers on.”
Alice locked eyes with him. She could not believe she let this man kiss her last night just so she could figure out where the fuse box was and magically disarm it while distracting him.
Still, it was a nice kiss. Better than nice, actually. Pretty hot, if she was honest with herself. If she was being brutally honest, it was also pretty hot hearing him talk about her costume bloomers, too.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
Chapter 6
Alice
“So this is where you live?” Drew was looking around the room, seemingly unimpressed. Because he had paid so much money for this date, and on top of that had shelled out four times the price of a private tour of the grounds of the museum, she had gone to the trouble of showing him every nook and cranny. Dressed up in full Puritan-era costume, even.
“Not exactly,” she said. Alice gestured around the room and said, “This is the replica of the courthouse where many of the original women colonists were accused, tried and sentenced to death. “
“So let me ask you a question,” he said, smirking as if he’d caught her in an untruth. “If these women were sentenced to die, then how come you all can claim to be descendants? Wouldn’t the line have died out after that?”
Alice smiled generously as she did when a very smart child posed that question on a school tour. “Good question, Drew! Some of the lines did die out, yes. Some of them had children who survived. But a few very clever women were presumed dead but managed to fool the executioners and escape before being buried alive.”
“So what’s your connection?” he said, sliding into a wooden bench.
“My great-grandmother—times eight greats—was one of the clever ones. She managed to convince the judge that she wasn’t a witch. We have a very meticulous genealogical archive here, if you’d like to see it? We pool our resources with local libraries all over New England to keep it updated and share information, it’s very impressive—”
Drew cut her off. “She saved her own skin. That’s impressive.”
Alice’s face grew hot at the implication. “She ra
n on foot all the way to Boston. She got help, came back here and saved more people. Over her lifetime until her death, she helped dozens of women escape being hanged or burned alive.”
He looked genuinely sorry he’d said it. “I didn’t mean to be glib. I guess this is real history to you.”
Alice straightened up. “This is real history, period. Doesn’t matter if it applies to me or not. It happened and that’s why we’re here. To teach people not to repeat history.”
He yawned. “Can we go eat now? My circadian rhythm is way off, being awake this time of day. I’m starving.”
“It’s noon,” she said.
“Like I said, early for me. But since I’m up, I’m feeling the need to feed my face.” She felt his eyes gaze over her slowly as he stood up. Something was coming over his expression. She didn’t know what it was, but it oozed danger.
“Sure, let’s eat at my cottage,” she said.
“Lead the way, beautiful.”
No man had ever called Alice that in her life. She didn’t want to be one of those women who swooned and fell to their knees anytime a man called her that, but it felt pretty damn good hearing it in a low, slow, male voice. Even if he was crude, loud, obnoxious, messy and a lousy business neighbor.
She led him out of the replica courthouse and past the glass blower hut, past the smiths, and past the little cluster of cottages where most of the Sisters lived. Then she picked up the trail that led to the woods.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see.”
“It feels like you’re taking me into the woods to kill me and dump my body in a shallow grave.”
“You must be psychic.”
“Nope, just experienced in being ambushed.”
“Tell me about that,” she said.
“Some other time. It’s not a pleasant subject.”
“No,” she said. “I imagine it’s not. Well, I’m not going to murder you. I’m taking you to my cottage. It’s deeper in the woods. I work with people all day long and I just like a little more isolation when I get home.”
The clearing by the stream that babbled by Alice’s little yellow cottage looked like something out of a story book, which was why Alice loved coming here to be alone and to think. She wasn’t sure why she was sharing this precious spot with Drew at the moment. They could have shared the picnic out in public, closer to her Sisters. But something else was driving her besides her brain, she supposed.
Inside her small, sunlit breakfast nook, he sat, looking as if he felt entirely too big for the space she had provided. She felt his eyes at her back and she unpinned her starched costume bonnet and placed it carefully on a shelf. Then she put out her mismatched pieces of fine china and silver and sat down to eat while Drew watched.
“This is creepy. Why are you watching my every move and not eating?”
“Because you’re sexy. Nothing sexier than watching a woman eat,” he said.
“Why are you being so nice to me after last night? I thought you wanted the date with me just to get under my skin,” she asked.
“Because we never got to finish what we started.” He got up and screeched his wooden kitchen chair closer to her. This made Alice uncomfortable yet irrationally hot down in her panties.
She recalled the kiss, which she had sort of instigated in order to get access to his breaker box to kill the loud music. She felt guilty now. He couldn’t handle the truth that she was the one who had sabotaged his Valentine’s Day Eve party.
“Oh, that’s sweet, Drew, but you don’t want me. I’m not right for you.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know, because you tried to ruin my evening with your party?”
He laughed. She noticed his dimples when he laughed. Dammit, why did he have to have dimples? “Or you could look at it the other way—maybe you were trying to ruin my night.”
Oh shit. Did he know? Did he come on this date with me as a long, drawn-out way to confront me because he knew everything that had happened last night?
She huffed. “How could I possibly have ruined your night?”
Then Drew reached out and stroked Alice’s hair and she did not back away. “You kissed me first. In fact, you were pretty insistent on getting into my office to do some down and dirty business, and then left before we finished.”
Alice cleared her throat, unable to make eye contact with this brute. “Well, I don’t know what came over me. I guess I got all hot and bothered and mistook that for arousal. The two are sometimes indistinguishable. So it’s a good thing the power to the stage went out.”
She watched him study her for a second, thinking. He continued to stroke her hair and she allowed it. It felt pretty good. It had been a while since somebody ran his fingers through her hair. A first for a man.
It was almost as if he could tell what she was thinking, because he asked, “So, what do you and your so-called Sisters do up here, really? I’ve heard some pretty wild stories about your full moon dances. Lots of nakedness, leading to…other things.”
She studied his gaze. No. He wasn’t ready to hear the truth. “What we do during our sacred rituals is just that. Sacred. I can’t let you in on them just for the sake of male titillation.”
“I thought we were trying to get to know each other.” His hand left her hair and was now stroking her neck. Was it her imagination or was he inching closer and glancing from her eyes to her neck in rapid succession?
She smiled coyly. “I’m fulfilling an obligation of the fundraiser by being on this date with you. That’s all.”
“You sure about that, sweetheart?”
“Yes, I’m sure. And also, you seem like the kind of guy who would get turned on by information about nude women empowering each other, and I’m not going to provide you with any masturbation fodder.”
He showed his dimples again and leaned in closer to her neck. “Too late. You already made me jerk off last night.” Then he landed a kiss on her neck, his hand caressing the fine hairs on her nape.
“Is this supposed to turn me on, because it’s just crude.” Except it wasn’t. It totally was turning her on. What was the matter with her? Was she going to let him kiss her again? “I thought you were hungry,” she said.
“I am,” he said. Then he planted his mouth on her neck and had a taste. Last night had been a kiss with a goal of sabotage. Right now, this was a genuine wish to feel his lips on her, despite everything she disliked about him. He smelled delicious. He had wind and waves in his blood. She pushed further and there was something else. Something that made him different from non-magical people. Was he hiding something from her?
Her eyes fluttered closed and she let herself fall into his kisses. Finally, their lips came together in a blast of heat. He went deep right away. He wasn’t holding anything back, he was pressing her with force, tasting her lips in a way that let her know this wasn’t just a guy having fun. He was claiming her.
She reminded herself she had no experience with men. Her only sexual contact had been in performing sacred spells and rituals with her Sisters. None of that was about ownership or exclusive commitment. She felt like this was different. This man’s mouth was forcing hers open and not waiting for her to kiss him back. He kept at it until he finally pulled her small frame on top of his lap. His hands quickly found their way to hiking up her skirt as he penetrated her mouth with his tongue.
Everything about him against her body felt right. His strong shoulders, his huge pectorals. He had a slim waist, and then she felt his cock rubbing up against her. They could do it right here without anyone knowing. She had always wondered what it would be like to make love to a man. Maybe this attraction she felt up close to him was temporary. Maybe it was just plain natural urges, only it felt different because it was a man. Surely she could let it happen this once and then be done with him. She could do a spell on him if it felt like he was getting attached.
She pushed away any thought that such a spell might also be necessary
to do to herself. No, she would never need to worry about feeling attached to such a man. Certainly not.
Chapter 7
Drew
She helped him lift her stiff woolen skirt and petticoat, and opened her legs wider and scooted in closer. He let out a growl of pleasure at getting closer to her body. She responded by slipping her hands up under his shirt. She touched his ribs and felt the sides of his washboard abs. He angled up at her touch, letting her feel all the bumps and hard muscles.
Alice had no idea how sexy she was or how her blood called out to him. He was hungry for her blood and for her.
She may look at him as if he was some kind of meathead, but he had her fooled. It had not taken him long to figure out what she had done to his electrical breaker box after she had taken off so abruptly last night. He wasn’t as clever as she was, but he was no dumbass.
As pissed as he was at having to pay the band who weren’t even able to finish a whole set, and as frustrating as it was to watch all his bar patrons up and leave, he was still totally turned on by the feel of her on his skin and in his mouth. After locking up his business for the night, he still had to go upstairs to his room and take care of…the other kind of business by himself.
He had known Alice was going to be at the ridiculous brown bag auction that morning, and he knew which bag would be hers. Coffee cup decorations? Please. She may not give him credit for being a good booster for the town, but he paid attention.
He had planned to get back at her by taking her on this date, fucking her and never calling her again. But that wasn’t working. He couldn’t help it. He liked her. And, truth be told, he was kind of a dick last night. He had known for weeks she was planning her first open mic last night. He had come up with the idea of a loud bawdy classic rock show in response. Why? He didn’t know. Other than some childish need to get her attention.
Dumb. And yet, it had worked. She showed up. They argued, they kissed, and then she left.
