by Nalini Singh
Will figured there was some truth to that, but he also thought Charlotte worried too much. “They’re proud of you, Charlotte. Even if they don’t always get you.” Will kept the ladder firmly in his hands so he wouldn’t touch her. He was frequently tempted to touch Charlotte and almost always managed to control himself. Occasionally he couldn’t resist and gave her a nudge or a shoulder rub or a quick peck on the top of her head, and she didn’t seem to mind that.
The one time he had given in to hope and tried to kiss her full on the mouth, five years earlier, she had shot him such a look of horror, asking, “What are you doing?” that he had pulled back quick like and had never made that mistake again.
He was in love with Charlotte, and he suffered that knowledge in silence.
It was a hard lot in life and he saw no end in sight to the dilemma. Eventually he figured one of two things would happen. He’d either drop dead of sexual frustration, or Charlotte would fall in love with some schmuck and get married. If it was the latter, well, he’d have to pull up stakes and move out of state, because he could not watch her carrying on with another man. No frickin’ way.
“What are you doing the rest of the day?” she asked him, with obviously no idea of the direction his thoughts had been running. “I’ve got to head to the shop in an hour for the Saturday night rush.”
Since Charlotte had defied Cuttersville’s fear of coffee with whipped toppings and her own family’s franchise disdain, and opened a Caribou Coffee, the Midwest equivalent of a Starbucks, right smack downtown, her business had been booming. It had become a favorite Saturday night hangout for a lot of folks, young and old alike. Will thought her business savvy was amazing.
“I guess I’ll just put up my own Christmas tree and call it an early night. I’m on morning shift tomorrow.” Not that work would stop him from staying up all night if he had a good reason—he just didn’t have a good reason. Unless Charlotte reacted the way he wanted her to his pronouncement, the way he knew she would.
She frowned at him. “You can’t put your tree up by yourself! That’s…that’s…”
A cry for help? He was well aware what he was doing, and he should feel pathetic that he was playing off her sympathy, but he was too determined to spend as much time with her as possible to care. He shrugged and tried to look lonely, but stoic. “It’s not a big deal.”
“Yes, it is. Tree trimming is something you do with the people you lo—family and friends. I’ll come over after work and we can do it together. It will be fun. I’ll make you watch cheesy Christmas movies with me, because you know how much I love those.” She glanced down at his arms. “Are you going to set that ladder down? It must be heavy.”
Yes. He was going to set the ladder down and he was going to close the three feet between them and he was going to put his mouth on hers, and slide his hand inside her jacket and cup her breast. His tongue was going in her mouth and taking possession, licking and sliding and mating, until she was weak with wanting him. Then when he stripped her clothes off and took her against the garage wall, she was going to understand, accept, embrace the fact that he wanted her as his friend, his lover, his life partner.
Or he could just shrug and lift the ladder onto its wall-mounted hooks.
But before he could do either, Charlotte’s eyes went wide.
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You look sort of…angry.”
It was lust, not anger. Pure sexual desire that threatened to make him lose control as she stood in the middle of the garage, her puffy coat covering all her curves, her fur-lined collar up around her ears, and her nose pink from the cold. He wanted her, he didn’t know what the hell to do about it, and he was starting to get weird and desperate. But before he could formulate any sort of reply, he felt movement on his chest.
Thinking there was a spider or something crawling up his coat, Will swatted at it, glancing down.
“What are you doing?” she asked, taking a step forward.
“There’s something on me.” And crazy enough, even though he couldn’t see a damn thing, his jacket zipper was actually descending. “What the hell?” It was just gliding right down, like someone was tugging it. It wasn’t falling, it was being pulled. By nothing.
“Uh…Charlotte…”
“Your zipper’s going down,” she said, coming to a halt. “How is that possible?”
If he knew, he wouldn’t be freaking out. He grabbed at it and tried to stop it, but the zipper was already undone at the bottom and the two sides of his jacket had fallen apart. “That was really weird. That’s what it was like when I felt someone touch my ass. It felt totally real.”
Charlotte was frowning. “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
He was starting to doubt that himself, since he was the one being accosted. “I’m a cop, I don’t believe in that stuff, either. But this is Ohio’s most haunted town according to those paranormal investigators.” Will shot an uneasy glance around the garage. It was an old structure, the garage originally a carriage house to the hundred-and-twenty-year-old Victorian Painted Lady that Charlotte lived in with her sister Bree. “And I know what I felt. And you saw what just happened.”
“It was just a defect in your zipper.” She was still frowning, her lips pursed together.
He would be willing to accept that if it made any sense at all, but it really defied the logic. “Okay, so let’s just get out of here and we’ll pretend nothing happened. I’m cool with that.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything.
Will took a step forward right as he felt the unmistakable sensation of his jeans unsnapping and the zipper starting to come down.
“Holy shit…” He stopped in his tracks and glanced down at his pants in disbelief. His black boxer briefs were showing.
Charlotte screamed. “Will!”
And just as fast as the zipper went down, it went back up, and though the snap seemed to struggle a little, it finally closed, too.
“Not only is this garage haunted, the ghost is a pervert,” Will said, holding on to his pants with both hands. If Charlotte ever saw him naked, it was not going to be because some frisky spirit yanked his drawers and had him standing in front of her buck naked from the waist down.
“Maybe you should go,” Charlotte said, wide-eyed. “I’ll finish putting all these leftover lights and boxes away. I’ll see you tonight at your place after I close the store.”
Then her gaze dropped down to the front of his jeans and the tip of her tongue peaked out and slid across her bottom lip.
Yep. Time to go.
Will almost ran into Charlotte’s sisters as he got the hell out of the garage and moved down the driveway, darting a glance back over his shoulder.
“Dude, watch it.”
Abby was holding her hand out in front of her, preventing him from slamming into her. They had parked behind him on the street and he hadn’t even noticed them getting out of their car.
“Sorry.” Testing the zipper on his pants to make sure it was still up and locked in place, Will tried to focus in front of him and reestablish a hold on reality. “What are you two up to?”
“Panties shopping,” Abby said, tossing her thick, dark hair over her shoulder, exposing a multitude of black and silver necklaces that looked like they were choking the life out of her. “And is your fly down or do you have to like go to the bathroom? You keep grabbing yourself.”
“Excuse me?” Will blinked at her. What was with the Murphy sisters today? They seemed determined to make him uncomfortable, and he was equally determined to ignore the question about his crotch. “Where were you?”
“Shopping. I bought a bunch of thongs,” Abby elaborated. She dug into the bag on her arm. “Black, and a pink pair, and one with cherries on it…You want to see?”
Only if he was a total sicko. She was a freakin’ baby. “No, that’s okay.” He glanced over at Bree, wanting some help. Somebody needed to rein Abby in, and it wasn’t going to be him.
Bree raised an eyebr
ow at him, a slight smile on her face. “Abby, Will doesn’t want to see your underwear. He only wants to see Charlotte’s naughty bits.”
“What?” He didn’t even know what the hell a naughty bit was, but he wasn’t about to admit wanting to see it. Even if he did probably want to see it on Charlotte.
The middle sister, and by far the most straightforward, Bree shook her head, fingering the star hanging from her neck, on the outside of her black, capelike winter coat. “I’ve been pretending I didn’t know this for about a million years, and I’m tired of keeping quiet. You’re in love with Charlotte. It’s totally obvious.”
Shit. “To who?” Please tell him it wasn’t obvious to Charlotte, because he was going to find himself seriously embarrassed if that was the case.
“To me. I’m empathic, remember? I can sense your feelings.”
Right. Bree thought she was a witch who could somehow know accurately everyone’s feelings. While Will wasn’t going to accept that witches existed just as a matter of course, he wasn’t inclined to flat out dismiss the possibility, either. But Bree had been saying that she was one ever since he’d met her and he’d yet to see her do anything magical. Even this revelation wasn’t all that amazing. He imagined it wouldn’t take much for someone to guess his true feelings for Charlotte if they spent as much time with him and Charlotte as Bree did.
“Can you sense that I don’t want to talk about this?” He zipped his jacket back up and dug in his pocket for his keys.
“She loves you, too.”
Will did not need to hear that. “No, she doesn’t.”
“She does?” Abby asked in amazement. “I thought they were just best friends.”
“Hello. Yes, she loves him. As more than a friend. She wants him naked, and he wants the same for her. And neither one of them will make a move. Yet we all know they’d make the perfect couple.”
It was really annoying and painful to stand there and listen to Bree feed all of his delusions. “Bree, just leave it alone.”
“If she gave you a very obvious sign that she was interested, would you go for it?”
He wanted to scoff and tell her it would never happen, but he figured the best way to get her to lay off was to be honest. “Yeah. Sure. But short of her kissing me, with tongue, which is never going to happen, I’m not going to believe she’s interested in me.”
Bree smiled. That close-lipped knowing grin scared him.
“Trust me, Will-sie,” she said. “Bree is going to make everything right.”
God help him.
Two
CHARLOTTE SHOVED BOXES UP AGAINST THE GARAGE WALLS with manic fervor, her hands shaking slightly. She had mentally unzipped Will’s pants. How the hell had she done that?
She had wanted it to happen. She’d visualized it happening. Then had watched the reality right before her eyes. His jacket, and then his pants, had come undone. The jacket had been wishful thinking. The pants had been some kind of a test to herself, to prove the jacket was a coincidence.
It wasn’t. She had mentally demanded his pants unsnap, and they had.
She had the power to strip men with her mind.
Wow. That was truly mind-boggling.
But it had to be a fluke. A coincidence. Not real. Right?
Charlotte remembered how she had mentally chanted, “Down, down, down,” while she had visualized Will’s zipper descending. And then it had.
Yikes.
“What’s the matter with you?” her sister Abby asked from behind her. “You’re like throwing those boxes around.”
Charlotte stopped shoving the huge empty Christmas tree box into the corner and grabbed the robotic reindeer and dragged him out, determined to be normal. She would put the deer in the yard, plug his ass in, and have a normal Christmas like normal people did, who weren’t witches and didn’t make men’s pants unzip with their minds.
“I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not.” That was Bree’s voice now, sounding concerned, but Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to look at her sister. Despite being totally different, she and Bree had always been close, and were only two years apart in age. Since they’d moved into their grandmother’s house together the year before when Bree had inherited it, they’d gotten even tighter. Bree would know she was hiding something if she looked at her.
Apparently she knew anyway. “Charlotte, come on. You’re really upset. Tell us what’s wrong. Is it Will? We saw him in the driveway looking a little freaked. Did you guys finally give into the inevitable and make out or something?”
She wished. “No.” Grappling with the deer, dragging him across the concrete floor, she glanced at Bree. “His pants just unzipped, that’s all.”
“Why would that make both of you freak out?” Abby asked, swinging a shopping bag in her hand. “You’re like almost thirty and you’ve known each other for half your lives. I don’t think seeing him unzipped would be that big of a deal.”
It really wouldn’t be if she wasn’t totally in love with him and she hadn’t made it happen by the sheer force of her sexually frustrated will. “I think I did it. With my mind. Which is impossible, of course, so clearly I’ve lost that same mind, and the fact that I have these feelings for Will is causing me to have a mental breakdown.”
Bree held up her hand. “Stop right there. You’re not having a mental breakdown. Now put down the damn deer and let’s go in the house and talk about this.”
“I have to finish with the Christmas decorations.” Charlotte got the reindeer to the driveway and switched her hands to his ears, hoping it would be easier to pick him up that way. He wasn’t heavy, just awkward.
Except that her sister yanked the reindeer away from her and slapped him down in a snow bank right next to the garage. “The deer can wait. There’s almost a month until Christmas. We need to talk.”
“No.” But she already knew she’d lost. Bree was much more stubborn than she was and she would keep at her until she confessed the whole thing. Might as well get it over with because she did not like confrontation or having her sisters annoyed with her.
“Go in the kitchen and sit.” Bree pointed at the back door.
“Fine.” Charlotte figured she could use a little reassurance.
Five minutes later they were sitting around the big round table in the kitchen that Charlotte had painted a distressed white, settled in creaky ladderback chairs, teacups in front of them.
“So what happened?” Bree asked.
Charlotte clutched her teacup with a yellow rose pattern, letting the warmth seep into her flesh. “Okay, this is totally embarrassing.”
“We know you dig Will. That’s not a secret, so don’t worry about it.”
“I didn’t know you dig Will,” Abby said, making a face at her cup as she sipped the tea. “Bree knew, though.”
Of course she did. Bree knew everything Charlotte was feeling. It was a creepy sort of ability her sister had, to get in tune with other people’s emotions. She was a good judge of character as well. “Okay, I do sort of like him. A lot. For a while now. But he’s not interested. So I was just looking at Will, thinking that it would be really, really nice to just unzip his jacket and run my hands across his chest. He has a nice chest, you know. Really, really nice. Muscular. He works out a lot. It’s a cop thing.” Charlotte set the tea down, no longer needing the extra heat. “And then his zipper just went down. Just like…” She gestured with her hand in front of her. “It was totally weird. So I thought, bizarre coincidence, right? So I focused on the zipper on his jeans, thinking while that’s what I’d really like to see come undone, it was never going to happen. So I sort of mentally chanted the word ‘down’ and pictured it unzipping, and then it just was. The snap came undone, and the zipper went down. It was crazy.”
Bree didn’t back her up on that crazy thing. Instead she just nodded, looking satisfied. “So we finally know what your magical talent is. I’ve been waiting for years for some kind of indicator from you…Abby and I have known all
along what our talents are. I can sense and alter other people’s feelings, Abby can insert herself into other people’s dreams, and now you can move objects. That’s very cool.”
Not cool. Charlotte rubbed her temples. “I can’t move objects. It was just some kind of bizarre coincidental accident. Like the wind did it and I just thought I did it.” Which was ridiculous and she knew it. The wind couldn’t have managed what she’d seen. “And I’ve never moved anything with my mind before.”
“This was different because you focused. You channeled your emotion—you are in love with Will, and love, grief, and anger are the most intense emotions we experience. All your want and desire was behind the urge to unzip his jacket, and then with the pants, not only did you want him physically and emotionally, you added a chant to your visualization. And it worked, obviously. You really need to hone and train your talent now that you’re aware of it.”
While she wasn’t going to argue that all her want and desire had been behind the urge to strip him naked, she took issue with the outcome of Bree’s conclusion. “I don’t want to be a witch! I’m not a witch.” She wore sweater sets from J.Crew, for crying out loud.
“It’s not like you have a choice. You are what you are.” And her sister looked downright gleeful about it.
“Bree, I’m telling you, I’m not a witch. I have no talent to hone. I’m unhonable.” Charlotte felt a little hysterical at the very thought of being Charlotte Murphy, the coffee-shop-owning witch.
“Now you have to go to the Jules festival on the winter solstice with us this year.”
“Not.” Bree had been trying to convince her to attend the witch ceremony for about five years and every year she flatly refused to go. Her sister gave her dire warnings about denying a piece of herself, but she usually dropped the subject after a week or two. But Charlotte had the feeling she was in trouble this year. Bree was going to hound her mercilessly now that she knew Charlotte had supposed magical powers.