by Vivi Andrews
She’d almost kissed Mark.
That hadn’t been part of the plan. She’d meant to explain about the curse and make sure he understood what a danger she represented to him, but instead, somewhere between her third and fourth schnapps-loaded cocoa, she’d started wanting to use the curse. Sure, she had to find the counterspell, but until she did, he wanted her and since she sure as hellfire wanted him back, she might as well enjoy a night of romance.
It had to be the Parish Cocoa.
Because if it wasn’t, then she was a pathetic, lonely spinster who was so desperate for affection she was willing to risk men’s lives just so she could get the cheap thrill of feeling pretty and special for one lousy night.
“Two years,” she said to the library, not caring if the ghosts were there or if she was officially a nutter talking to herself in the middle of the night.
Two years since Gabriel died and she realized her spell had become a curse. Two years of avoiding unmarried men like the plague, pushing away everyone who wanted to be close to her. Two years without a single match made because she couldn’t risk being around unattached men.
Tonight, when Mark told her the guys were all terminal, it seemed to prove their deaths weren’t entirely her fault. And even if Mark was already caught in the curse, she couldn’t undo it no matter what she tried, so she finally let herself enjoy it. Enjoy him.
Right up until the moment he’d almost kissed her.
She didn’t know which she regretted more—that she’d let it get to that point or that she’d run away before she seized her chance to get a taste of him. She’d bet the store he was a damn fine kisser. Doubtless worth the years in purgatory she’d earn by kissing him.
The floorboards groaned in the doorway. Biz didn’t turn to look. There wouldn’t be anything to see anyway. Just another ghost.
“Nice place. If the charm business ever dries up, you can always open a bookstore.”
Biz spun, the breath whooshing out of her lungs in a rush. Mark stood in the doorway, hands shoved into his front pockets, rocking on his heels as he studied the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves built into every wall.
“How did you get in here?” she asked, loving the sight of him and hating herself for it. If he was here, it was a sign, right? He was definitely cursed. Might as well live it up ’til the bitter end.
“Door was open.” His blue stare dropped from the bookcases and landed hard and hot on her, but he didn’t twitch so much as a finger in her direction. “I’m sorry about… I shouldn’t have pushed you.” He ducked his chin, the self-mocking grin tugging his lips. “I’m usually not quite that much of an ass. I don’t know why I can’t seem to leave you be.”
She wasn’t going to get a better opening. Biz took a step toward him, just a token gesture since the width of the library still separated them. “I do,” she admitted. “There’s something I’ve been trying to tell you. Something important. Though, to be honest, I haven’t been trying very hard.”
“Whatever it is, you can tell me.” His grin quirked. “You can’t shock me. I’ve heard it all.”
She doubted he’d heard this. “I wanted you to kiss me.”
A smile split his face and he took two quick steps forward before she held up a hand to stop him.
“No. Don’t.” She pressed her fingers to her temples, trying to find the clarity to make the words come out right. “You only wanted to kiss me because I wanted you to.”
“Is this some pheromone thing?”
She sighed. “No. It’s a magic thing.”
“Magic.” He arched a skeptical brow. “Like the witch thing.”
“Yes, a witch thing.” She took a deep breath to remind herself to breathe. All or nothing. “I’m a witch.” Her voice broke up a little on the last word, but considering it was the first time she’d ever said the words out loud without the shield of sarcasm, she thought she did a pretty good job of it.
Mark just smiled. “Okay.” He started toward her again.
Not exactly the reaction she’d expected.
Biz backed away, circling around the courting couch that dominated the center of the room. “I’m not kidding.”
“I didn’t think you were.” He kept advancing, a small, tolerant smile on his expressive mouth.
Anger flashed through her blood. He was humoring her. “I won’t be patronized. I am a witch. A spell-casting, charm-making, real live witch.”
“I’m very impressed.”
“My mother was a witch too. She died when I was a little girl, and I was raised by my grandmother—also a witch.”
He continued to stalk her in slow circles around the room, his eyes alight with wicked intent. “Fascinating.”
“From the time I was a little girl I’ve had the touch. I can sense when two people are meant to be together and sometimes I give them a little nudge toward romance. None of my couples have ever gotten divorced.”
“Impressive.”
“Then, a little over four years ago, my grandmother passed away. She left me the house and the shop, but all I could think of was how she’d left me all alone.” She bumped against a hip-high table, realizing too late she’d gotten distracted and backed toward the reading nook.
“I’m sorry.” Mark was suddenly in front of her, so close, cutting off her only avenue of escape.
Biz’s breath tangled in the back of her throat, but she pressed on. She had to tell him all of it. “Everyone I knew had someone, but I was so lonely. So that Valentine’s Day, I polished off an entire bottle of Cuervo—”
“Uh-oh,” he murmured, sliding his fingers along the base of her neck, beneath her hair. “I’ve seen what a lightweight you are. That can’t have been pretty.”
“I’d helped so many people find love. It didn’t seem fair that I was alone.” Biz swallowed around the heavy lump of remorse in her throat. “So I cast a spell. For myself. Which was the one thing I’d been told I must absolutely never do.”
He bent closer until each exhale ruffled her hair. “I love a woman with a rebellious streak…”
Little tingles began racing over her body, shooting out from the delicate brushing of his fingers against the sides of her neck. “I cast a spell to call men to the island who would love me.”
“And here I am, is that it?” He chuckled, and she felt the vibration against the sensitive shell of her ear.
“No,” she whispered. Good God, what had happened to all the oxygen in the room? How was she supposed to breathe? “Paul and Gabriel and Tony came. But the spell went wrong. Every year, on the anniversary of the day I cast it, the man who had been drawn to me died suddenly.” His lips grazed her neck just beneath her ear and electric energy shot down to her core from the touch. “It’s a curse, Mark.”
“Mmm.”
He nibbled his way down her neck, and Biz angled her head to give him better access. How was she supposed to warn him when he was doing this?
“I didn’t mean to…”
He hummed against her skin. Her knees felt like Jell-O. She clutched his shoulders to keep from sagging to the floor.
“It was an accident, but I called down a death curse.”
“Mm-hmm.”
His hands cradled her jaw, tipping her head back until his bright blue eyes swam into view.
“Mark,” she whispered when his lips were less than a breath away. “You’re next.”
His mouth settled over hers in a searing kiss, burning away the last fragments of her will to resist.
Chapter Fourteen—Casper the Jealous Ex
Biz tasted like a dream. A smooth, sweet, cotton-candy dream.
Maybe she was right. Maybe there was magic at work, because no earthly woman could ever taste this good without supernatural assistance.
He deepened the kiss. Her tongue stroked against his and sparks of want ignited inside him, cascading down to his fingertips. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see colored sparks shooting off them both. They could have floated right up off the ground and all he
would have cared about was the way Biz leaned her body into his, the press of her lips, the way her fingers curled into the muscles of his shoulders.
A loud slam jolted him back down to earth when Biz jerked away. Her face was flushed, her breathing quick, and he was no better off.
Her eyes met his, wide and startled—but he knew that surprise was for the stunning intensity of the kiss, not the bang of a giant book falling from the top shelf. Masculine satisfaction coiled deep in his gut at having put that dizzy look in her eyes.
“I… Gabriel must’ve…” Biz waved vaguely toward the massive book that had crashed down and broken them apart, and Mark took particular pride in her inability to form a coherent sentence. “He always was the jealous type.”
She slipped past Mark, careful to avoid brushing against him. “I’m never really alone.” Kneeling next to the book that was nearly as big as her torso, Biz hefted it up and slid it onto a coffee table already covered with slimmer volumes. She waved toward the papers, her face still delightfully rosy. “They’ve been helping me look for the counterspell.”
He glanced around the massive library. “These are all…”
“Spell books. My grandmother collected them. If there’s a spell or counterspell in existence, it’s in one of these books.” Her shoulders slumped. “At least, I have to hope that it is. I’ve been going through them all one by one, but one person, hundreds of books, most of them with no indexes since they were written for personal use by the people who wrote them—sometimes it feels impossible.”
Mark felt something suspiciously in the vicinity of his heart give a lurch at the dejected expression on her face. He liked Biz. He respected her ability to cope with the tragic senselessness that life kept throwing her way. Her coping mechanism was an elaborate delusion, but that didn’t make her belief in it any less sincere.
She was trying to take control of her life. Trying to find a way to fight the helplessness that came with being powerless to save people she cared about. To Biz, that meant a counterspell for a curse.
It made sense, in a weird sort of way. And he had to admire the tenacity of her beliefs.
He didn’t believe in curses any more than he believed in ghosts—heavy books fell from hundred-plus-year-old shelves all the time without supernatural assistance, and some curse certainly wasn’t responsible for his attraction to her—but he knew Biz believed in them.
She needed to find the counterspell. And he needed to give her whatever she needed to be happy. He couldn’t stand the hopelessness in her eyes. It made his whole chest ache.
He walked toward the nearest shelf and pulled down a book at random. Letting it fall open, he began paging through it absently. “So, tell me what I’m looking for.”
A flicker of confusion crossed her face before a slow, radiant smile burst through. “You’re going to help me?”
He’d walk across hot coals if that was what it took to replace her earlier hopelessness with the bemused wonder she now exuded. He shrugged, tossing her a lecherous smile. “It’s either that or try to seduce you again, but I don’t think Casper here would appreciate that.”
She smiled and a pleased blush tinted her cheekbones. That blush promised he would have other opportunities to see if she tasted as magical as he remembered. Soon.
But for now, he had a few thousand books to read.
“Where do we start?”
Biz was trying to concentrate. Really she was. But the view was just so distracting.
Mark stood atop the ladder, stretching for a book on the top shelf, his muscles flexing and bunching beneath the worn grey T-shirt he wore. Faded blue jeans hugged an ass that could have won awards it was so beautiful. If they gave out a Pulitzer for the best butt, Mark would win, hands down.
“Have we checked this one yet?” He pulled down a slim volume and twisted to show her the cover.
Biz surreptitiously wiped away her drool and squinted up at the insignia scratched into the leather cover. “I think so. Honestly, I can barely remember which ones we looked at already this morning, let alone all the ones I’ve checked in the last year.” She sighed. “I should have kept a list.”
“Yep.” He turned back to the shelf.
At his matter-of-fact agreement, she didn’t know whether to laugh or chuck something at his head. He didn’t sugarcoat things, but he also didn’t dwell on past mistakes. It was refreshing—as if the only truth was the truth of the moment. The past didn’t matter, but he never lied to spare her feelings. She’d been stupid not to keep a list. She’d made a massive error when she cast the spell in the first place, but he just acknowledged her mistakes like the facts they were and moved on.
Tony would have pretended she hadn’t done anything wrong. Gabriel would have moped and grumbled. Paul…she wasn’t even sure what Paul would have done. Had she really known him? She’d built up an idea of him in her head—the attention-hog ghost, the playful rebel—but all three of them had become caricatures rather than memories.
Mark was so real in comparison. His presence filled the room—not with a breeze or a chill, but with his personality. His charm.
She was relieved to have someone living helping her, relieved that she wasn’t tangled up in that alone-but-never-alone feeling anymore, but also filled with a fizzy delight that it was him there with her.
Ever since the kiss, she kept finding a dopey grin sneaking onto her face at random intervals. She tried not to think about it, tried to keep her distance, but now that she’d let it happen once, the dam had already broken and her resistance was eroding by the second. It had been reckless to dance with him, irresponsible to kiss him, but regret couldn’t make her stop reliving each second. A little voice in her head kept whispering What’s the harm? He’s already in too deep. But the responsible side she’d been trying to listen to more lately told her to keep as much distance between them as possible. To protect him, but also, selfishly, to protect herself. Don’t get attached, Biz.
She couldn’t forget that the clock was ticking. They were down to less than three weeks to Valentine’s.
And while she may feel dizzy and special and magical in his presence, he was only being sucked in by the curse. As soon as it was broken, he would be out the door, wondering what he ever saw in her.
If he survived.
“Gilly’s probably opened the clinic by now. Tests for rare fatal diseases wait for no man, Mark.”
“If I get tested this instant or tested tomorrow it won’t matter if I’m diagnosed with some rare, incurable disease. I might as well enjoy blissful ignorance for a few more hours.” He stretched up to replace the book on the shelf.
Biz bent over her book with renewed determination. She would find the counterspell. And then she would find a cure for whatever Mark had, if it came to that. Biz closed her eyes, concentrating on the whispers of the books. Please help me find the answer.
“What about this one?”
She looked up to check the book Mark held up for her inspection—just in time to see a monster of a book rocket off the top shelf, straight for his head. “Mark!”
The book connected with his skull with a sickening thwack. His hands went slack around the book he held and for a breath everything—the two books, the ladder, and Mark—seemed to hover, suspended in the air. Then they all crashed down together, falling so fast his body hit the floor before she could do more than throw out her hands in a pointless reflex attempt to cushion his fall.
His body lay terrifyingly still, sprawled on the hardwood. Oh Jesus, was he even conscious?
“Mark.” Biz scrambled over the arm of the couch and fell to her knees beside him, shoving away the books that had tumbled around him. “Oh God, Mark. Don’t be dead. It isn’t Valentine’s yet! You can’t be hurt. You just can’t.”
She felt for a pulse, her own drumming so loud in her ears it took her a moment to realize his was just as strong—though not nearly as fast. Her heart was racing like a jackrabbit while his plodded along steadily. That was good
, right? He was fine. No bones were sticking out at odd angles. He had to be fine. So why didn’t he wake up?
Worry flickered and kindled into a bright, burning rage. “He’s trying to help us!” she screamed at the ceiling. Those damn ghosts. “He isn’t poaching, you idiots! He can’t steal me from you. He wants to free you, dammit.”
No curtains fluttered, no piano strings twanged. The ghosts held their silence—just when she needed a direction to aim her anger.
Mark groaned, and Biz’s attention lasered back down on him. “Mark?”
He winced and reached a hand for his head. “Who wants to free me?” His baby blues opened and relief surged through Biz.
“Are you hurt? Of course you’re hurt. You fell almost ten feet. Where does it hurt the most? Don’t try to get up. Spinal injuries aren’t supposed to move. Does your spine feel severed? Can you wiggle your fingers?”
He obligingly wiggled the fingers he’d already raised to his head. “I’m fine. If you don’t count the elephant tap dancing inside my skull.” He levered his shoulders off the floor, and Biz slapped her hands on them, slamming him back to the hardwood with a little more force than she’d intended. He grunted and she blushed.
“Sorry. You aren’t supposed to move. Just stay right there until I get Gillian, okay?”
He lifted his hands in surrender and dropped his head back to the floor, then groaned at the movement.
“Stay,” Biz reminded him, racing for the kitchen phone and wishing for the first time that she’d gotten a cell phone when service first came to Parish. She’d always thought it was stupid before, but right now she’d give anything to have a phone on her person so she didn’t have to leave Mark’s side for a second.
Seeing him fall, that flash of panic, had shifted something inside her. Nothing was going to happen to him. Not this time.
She wouldn’t let it.
Chapter Fifteen—Let’s Get Physical
Mark managed not to flinch as the flashlight burned into first one retina, then the other.
