Page 128 of Flirty Fall Fling

“Um. There’s a mark.”

His brows raise. “Guess I’ll need to return the favor.”

“Please don’t tempt me with a good time,” I say around a mouthful.

He reaches over and pushes my hair off my shoulder, then leaves his hand on the back of my neck a second longer. Goose bumps travel over me, and I like how I feel when we touch. It’s never forced or unwanted.

I finish my eggs. He finishes his bacon.

Behind us, a log drops in the fireplace. Out the window, the frost is starting to melt. The trees on the hillside have lost a ton of leaves since the last time we were here. It feels like a lifetime ago. In the distance, I can almost make out the ridge through those aspens. Soon, it will be bare, then covered in snow. The temperatures up here are in the twenties right now.

We finish eating; the conversation stays light. I stack our plates, and his hand rests on my thighs.

“Can we talk about it now?”

I twist my body so I’m facing him. “What do you want to know?”

He meets my eyes. “Everything.”

“Okay.” I put my hands on top of his and suck in a deep breath. “Teddy Marsh was my first real love. We dated for five years, and I thought we’d get married. Things ended badly. It took me years to get over it.” I take a breath. “I’d manifested him.”

“What does that mean?”

“I had cast a love spell for myself even though my aunt warned me against it hundreds of times.” My thumbs move over his knuckles. “I did it anyway.”

“And it worked.”

“My love spells always work. That’s what makes me dangerous,” I confess. “But just because it works doesn’t mean it will last. At twenty-one, I wanted somebody badly enough to force the universe into giving me my way. But our relationship was never quite right.”

“How so?”

I look up at him. I give him the truth, because we promised. “I wanted to be loved so much that I was willing to lose myself to have something that resembled what I thought love should be.”

He doesn’t say anything right away. His thumb moves back and forth over the top of my hand.

I let out a breath. “I’d walk into a room and could feel the energy was off before I ever opened my mouth. I could feel what kind of mood he was in, which determined which version of me he got that night. I became so good at being everything he wanted that I stopped being myself.”

“And what was he after?”

“A trad wife. He wanted me home, dedicated to him and our future children.”

His hands stop moving on my thighs. I rest my hands over his.

“He also hated the ‘witch shit.’ He was embarrassed by it. Of Flora. He told people I was a jewelry maker. Then he’d change the subject before anybody could ask what else I did. Then he wanted me to dye my hair blond.”

Jamie’s brows lift. “Really?”

“I almost did it,” I whisper. “But then I woke up, snapped out of it. Asked my aunt to do a cleansing spell, and things ended on Halloween. Five years ago.”

He shakes his head.

“Flora threw a costume party every year. The manor was always decked out. The front yard too. Everybody in town was invited. I’d always volunteer to come and pass out candy to the kids as everyone got trashed on witches’ brew. She read palms at a card table by the stairs, and they’d play music loud. It was so much fun.” I smile, thinking about the different parties over the years.

“I begged him since January to take that Saturday off. He could have requested it and been guaranteed not to travel. But he didn’t. The morning of, he broke the news that he wouldn’t be able to make it. He told me he was tired of my aunt encouraging my delusions and that I needed to stop with the witch shit.”

Jamie doesn’t say anything for long enough that I have to keep going.

“I dumped him.” My voice gets away from me. “That night, I hooked up with one of his close friends who was at the party.”