“The first six weeks are the hardest,” Amy said.
“It’s been seven since Mark and I split.”
“Okay, so maybe the first seven weeks are the hardest. What do I know? I’ve been married since I was in the cradle.” She leaned over and gave Meghan a quick hug. “You’re young. You’re cute. You’ll find someone new.”
Amy was the nicest of all the instructors at Hot Yoga off Route 1 in Princeton. When Meghan first hooked up with Mark the plan had been to drive down to Florida and set up shop as personal trainers, yoga a specialty. She wasn’t exactly sure how they landed in New Jersey, but first the car broke down, then Mark broke his toe, and next thing Meghan knew she was working part-time at Hot Yoga while he screwed the girl in the apartment across the courtyard.
So there she was, working the front desk and teaching six classes a week while she wondered what to do next.
Maybe she should just pack up her crap, toss it in the back of her Toyota, and head down to Florida on her own. Half the people she’d trained with under Yogini Sirubhi were down in the Miami area. It wouldn’t be hard to find a place to stay and pick up some part-time work while she came up with a plan.
And if she didn’t come up with a plan in Miami, she’d hop over to Nassau in the Bahamas and get a gig dealing blackjack on Paradise Island until she did.
She would land on her feet. She always had. If she didn’t teach yoga or deal blackjack, she could always parlay her pre-law studies into some temp work until something better came along.
Maybe she would start calling some of her Miami friends tonight and get the lay of the land, so to speak. She’d pour herself some red, fire up the laptop, and start making lists. Miami friends. Job skills. Short-term goals. Long-term goals. What she wanted for Christmas, even though nobody had asked lately.
Christmas
. Just the thought of it made her feel like she had a migraine, too.
Her mother had been all over her the last few days, spamming her in-box with crazy messages about Luke and some knitting chick he’d supposedly knocked up, but she hadn’t gotten around to answering any of them yet. She and Luke were close. He would have told her if he’d found someone.
Bunny tended to go off the deep end anytime one of her kids went off the reservation and start imagining all sorts of nutty stuff. Despite making detective with the Boston PD, Luke had been the black sheep of the family for most of their lives, but Meghan liked to think she was in the running for the title.
Then again, if he had secretly started a new family up there in snow country, maybe she had her work cut out for her.
She added Luke to the list of phone calls she planned to make, then walked back to the ladies’ locker room to light a fire under the stragglers.
“We close in ten,” she said to the two women who were blow-drying their hair in the bathroom, “but if you need a few more just let me know.”
“No problem,” said the younger of the two, “but thanks.”
She paused in front of the door to the men’s lockers and rapped twice. “Ten minutes to closing,” she called out.
She waited for a response and when there wasn’t any, she rapped again, harder.
“Ten-minute warning!”
It had to be him. Only one guy had taken class today and he was romance-novel-cover hot, all chiseled and sweaty and borderline dangerous. Everything she loved in a man over and over again.
She pushed the door open a crack and listened. It was as quiet as a church in there. Not that she had been to church lately, but she had a good memory. No sounds of water running. No blow-dryer. No radio blaring sports or, God forbid, talk radio.
Maybe he was gone. He probably left while she was in the ladies’ locker room, slipped right out when she wasn’t looking.
But she’d wait a few just to be sure.
She went back to the desk, gathered up her stuff, and tossed it all into the big leather tote she’d been carrying since college. The two women waved good-bye on their way out the door, but there was no sign of Fabio.
The easiest way to lose her job at Hot Yoga would be to lock a paying customer in the studio, so she slung her bag over her shoulder and marched into the locker room to make sure there were no bodies slumped over a bench or circling the shower drain.
Better safe than unemployed.
THREE HOURS LATER
His kisses were slow and wet and deep and if they went on any longer Meghan was reasonably sure they’d kill her.
Pleasure could kill a woman if she wasn’t careful, and she was anything but careful when it came to love.
Which this wasn’t, of course. Not love. Not now. You didn’t fall in love with a total stranger in three hours even if the total stranger walked straight out of fantasies you’d never told another living soul.
Everything about him was perfect. She could get drunk just looking at him, touching him, breathing in the smell of his golden skin.
“I have to close the studio,” she whispered, coming up for air. “I can’t afford to lose my job.”
“You won’t lose your job.” He did something with his tongue that made her forget her own name.
“We shouldn’t.”
His hands dipped lower.
“What if someone walks in while we’re—”
His fingers began their magic. “They won’t.”
“The door is wide open. Anybody could—”
“I know,” he said. “That makes it even more fun.”
Oh, God, he was right ... so right....
She moved against his hand, straining for the ultimate pleasure that he kept just out of reach. A cry was building up in her throat and she sank her teeth into his muscular shoulder to keep from making a sound.
“Bitch,” he murmured into her hair, spreading her legs wide with his knee. “You know what I like.”
She bit him again, harder this time, hungry for something she hadn’t known existed until that moment, with that man. He filled her to the breaking point, taking her to the outer edges of madness, until there was nowhere left to go.
She stopped caring if someone walked in and saw them. She stopped caring if she lost her job or what was left of her sanity. If he had asked, she would have walked across fiery coals to be with him.
Suddenly all that mattered was his hands on her body, his mouth on hers.
He took the keys and threw them across the room. The sound as they hit the floor made her jump. Her heart slammed her rib cage hard and she felt sweat break out on the back of her neck.
“Scared?” He stood over her, filling her line of vision.
“Should I be?”
“Depends on what you’re afraid of.”
Spiders. Snakes. Spending another long dark night alone.
She knew the answer he wanted to hear.
“You,” she said and suddenly she wasn’t lying. “I’m afraid of you.”
“Good,” he said. “That’s a start.”
CHLOE
“Maybe this wasn’t such a bright idea after all,” I muttered a few mornings later as I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop and an enormous glass of orange juice.
Bettina Weaver Leonides was watching the shop so I had until two o’clock to sit around in my maternity sweatpants and Luke’s old shirt. I had a basket of yarn samples to swatch, designs to format and convert to pdf’s, and enough paperwork to keep me busy until the baby arrived, but the phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Indie dyers, a shepherdess from Brunswick, Luke’s mother.
“Hope I’m not calling too early, honey,” Bunny MacKenzie said briskly, “but I wanted to get you before you started work.”
“Not too early at all,” I said, glancing at the clock and wincing at the hour. “Actually I’m not going into the shop until this afternoon.”
“No problems, I hope.”
“Only if you consider paperwork a problem,” I said with a laugh. “Sometimes I get so busy with knitters at the store I can’t get anything else done.”
“You work too hard,” she said with maternal certainty. “I saw you bustling around that shop.”
“More like waddling around the shop.”
“You’re carrying beautifully, honey. I wish I’d carried like you, but I blew up like a hot-air balloon every time.”
We chitchatted pregnancy for a few minutes, then she got down to the reason for her call.
“I lost the name of the restaurant we’re meeting at on Sunday.”
“Carole’s Lakeside Inn.” I spelled out the name of the town. “North shore of Lake Winnipesaukee.”
We chatted a few seconds more, then I hung up, feeling very smug. That wasn’t hard at all.
Ten minutes later she phoned again. This time it was to find out if children under twelve were welcome at the buffet.
Five minutes after that it was to tell me Luke wasn’t answering his cell phone and would I please tell him to phone home immediately.
After the third “tell Luke” call I turned off the ringer and let Bunny roll into voice mail. It had to be done.
“And what have I been telling you, missy.” Elspeth, our unwanted houseguest, suddenly appeared by my side, a three-foot doughnut of a woman with hair the color of a yellow cab. “Nothing good comes from truck with humans. All those foolish contraptions ringing and buzzing day and night just so they can keep an eye on each other’s business. Best to keep them at a distance, I say.”
“I’m half human,” I reminded her, studiously ignoring the fact that Elspeth lived to spy on everyone’s business. “My baby will be three-quarters human. I want to meet her family.” I wanted her to
know
her family.
“There will be a time for that.” She had a way of making a simple statement sound darkly threatening. “This weren’t it.”
Grammar aside, even I had to admit that traipsing two hours away from home in the last few weeks of pregnancy probably wasn’t my brightest idea, but I had checked with Brianne, the Quebec healer who would help deliver my baby, and she had okayed the plan so long as we did it this week.
“There be too many of them,” Elspeth said as she peered over my shoulder at the computer screen. “I’ve seen rabbits with smaller litters.”
“Don’t you have anything that needs doing?” I asked, glancing over my shoulder at her. “You’re in my space.”
She made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a Bronx cheer, then disappeared. I was about to send up a cheer of my own when she reappeared, doll sized, on my touch pad.
“Hey!” I yelped as the cursor danced across the page.
“’Tis Samuel’s fault plain and simple,” she said, stomping across the keyboard. “I am here to see your child safely into this world of yours and then good-bye.”
It probably shouldn’t have bugged me that she didn’t want to be here any more than I wanted her to be. I mean, I would have given away all my qiviut, with a baby camel chaser, to get her a one-way ticket back to Salem, but Samuel’s last wish was immutable.
Aerynn’s mate, the man who had fathered her only child, had been a powerful sorcerer who had gathered up every micron of magick left to him at the end of his earthly life and wrapped it around me and the foul-tempered troll with the yellow hair, binding us together until the next generation of Hobbs woman had safely entered this world.
Believe me, I had tried every spell I knew (and a few new ones I invented) to send Elspeth back to the lighthouse where she had kept house for Samuel all those years, but nothing worked. Worse, they left an intradimensional trail that told her exactly what I had been up to.
Last week I did manage to conjure up a charm that afforded Luke and me a zone of privacy where Elspeth was concerned. Without it she would think nothing of marching into our bedroom at five a.m. to complain about the birds singing outside the window.
And without it, Luke might have walked into the Atlantic with Lorcan.
“You’re blocking the screen, Elspeth.” I didn’t mean to send her flying over to the caps lock key when I hit the backspace. It just happened. The fact that she also disappeared was a very lucky break.
Over time Sugar Maple had developed a system for living as magick in a nonmagick world. Many of our children ended up going away to top-notch schools in the human world. (Janice, for instance, went to Harvard.) But without birth certificates, medical records from a licensed practitioner, and valid SAT scores that education couldn’t happen, so we improvised.
Okay, so we lied. We had a close call a year ago when the powers-that-be in the state capital became very interested in our “missing” birth and death records, but with Luke’s help we had managed to dodge that bullet. But I considered it a wake-up call.
If we were going to continue to live in the world of humans, we would have to at least pretend to play by their rules. My human side might have felt guilty, but my magick side didn’t bat an eye at translating our own meticulously kept records into something viable for the world beyond Sugar Maple.