But for now, with the engagement party coming up and her parents in town, maybe a small deception could be forgiven. Maybe, even though he’d been given the elixir, he loved her a little bit on his own. It could happen.
With that thought cheering her, she snuggled under the covers and dozed, telling herself she wouldn’t take more than an hour’s nap. She had to go home, take care of Daisy, and change for work. But she had time . . .
Two hours later, she had almost no time. She’d slipped into a deep sleep and only a knock on the door, which turned out to be someone with the wrong room number, saved her from an even worse disaster. Ignoring the expense, she took a cab back to her apartment.
In record time she showered, changed, took Daisy for a quick trip outside and then fed her. She glanced at the crystal ball and candles in the middle of the living room floor as she ran out the door. Griffin might think it was a little strange, but she’d make something up. She’d tell him she was practicing a routine for Anica’s party on Sunday night.
She wouldn’t use her precious crystal ball at the party, though. Just her luck it would get broken. Instead she planned to do a couple of tricks with her wand. It would be real magic, which the magical people in attendance would know, but the nonmagical folks would assume she was very good at sleight of hand and let it go at that.
Griffin arrived back at the office, determined to talk Kevin out of his idea of investigating Lily’s apartment. But he was in meetings until nearly four, when they’d agreed to go over to Lily’s.
Kevin breezed into Griffin’s office with Miles right behind him. “Ready to go?”
“No. It’s a bad idea. We can’t do this.”
Kevin turned to Miles. “Told you he’d try to back out.”
Miles stepped forward. “We gotta go over there, Griff. I was talking to Biddle today. He wants to know what’s up with you. You were the golden boy until this week, but now . . . he asked if you had some psychiatric problem he should know about.”
“Jesus.” Griffin shook his head. “So I missed an appointment. One lousy appointment and he’s convinced I’m a nutcase. If he’s that touchy maybe I should just quit.”
Kevin and Miles exchanged a glance.
“You missed more than the appointment, buddy,” Kevin said. “You were supposed to have lunch with Biddle at his club today. He was looking all over the office for you, but you were AWOL. I don’t have to think very hard to imagine where you were or what you were doing.”
“That lunch was today?” Griffin looked at the calendar on his desk and groaned. “I completely spaced on that. Man, I need to apologize. Is he still here?”
“Nope,” Miles said. “He’s gone home for the weekend. Said he’s taking his yacht out on the lake tomorrow for the first time, and you know what a big deal that is.”
“Yeah, I do,” Griffin said. “He loves that boat.”
“Yeah, well, apparently he was going to ask you to join him,” Miles continued, “but when you didn’t show up for lunch, he bagged that plan. He asked me to go, but I get seasick.”
“He didn’t ask me,” Kevin grumbled. “But then the short guy always gets passed over for you tall sonsabitches.”
“The point is,” Miles said, “you aren’t your normal self, Griff. A week ago you would never have forgotten that lunch date. Biddle’s treated you like a long-lost son, but that isn’t going to last if you keep up this bullshit.”
“Look, it’s my fault, okay? Lily didn’t hypnotize me or anything. I’m in love with her. Simple as that.”
Miles and Kevin stared at him, their mouths open.
“Don’t look at me like that. Lily’s a wonderful woman. Why wouldn’t I be in love with her? I know this is a little sudden, but sometimes love is like that. It strikes when you least expect it to.”
Kevin continued to stare at him as if he’d grown horns. “You love her.”
Griffin smiled, thinking of Lily snuggled into the king-sized bed at the Hilton. “Yeah, I do.”
“You’ve been dating her for three days, and now you love her? You’re thinking with your pecker, man. This isn’t love. This is exactly what I promised to save you from—letting sex screw up your life like it did to your parents.”
That jangled a warning bell in Griffin’s brain, but he ignored it. “This is different.”
“It is different,” Miles said. “This fixation seems like it’s more than just sex. Kev told me about his hypnotizing theory, and I’m all over that. If she’s studied how to do magic tricks, guaranteed she’s fooled around with hypnosis. Have you asked her about this whole magic shtick?”
“She . . . um . . . didn’t want to talk about it.” Griffin realized how damning that sounded.
“No duh,” Miles said. “I’m sure not, since she used her tricks to rope a lawyer who makes four times what she makes at the bar.”
“It isn’t like that!” Griffin wasn’t about to stand there and let his friends sully the reputation of the woman he loved.
“If it’s not like that,” Kevin said, “then we’ll find no evidence of her manipulating the situation if we pay a quick visit to her apartment. If we go there and find nothing, then Miles and I will do our best to keep you from shit-canning your career while you work through whatever is eating your brain.”
Griffin gazed at his calendar, with the Biddle lunch written in red, and had to concede that he wasn’t functioning optimally these days. In that case, he’d need his friends to keep him from making huge mistakes, and they wouldn’t agree to do that unless he allowed them to explore their pet theory. Once they discovered that was a dead end, they’d settle in to protect him from himself.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll go over there for fifteen minutes. If she ever finds out, I’ll say that I was worried about Daisy, and you two offered to go along while I let her out.”
Kevin frowned. “Who’s Daisy?”
“Lily’s golden retriever. She’s a great dog.”
Miles looked worried. “Does she bite?”
Griffin saw his opportunity. If he portrayed Daisy as unpredictable, Miles might reconsider the plan, and Kevin might not go if Miles backed out. But then they’d both still think that Lily had somehow used magic to make him want her, and that was ridiculous. He’d enjoy proving them wrong.
An hour later as they took a cab back to the bar, he still couldn’t believe that they’d walked in to find a crystal ball in the middle of the floor and at least twenty candles in a circle around it. Worse yet, a closer inspection of the magic books showed that they focused on more than just parlor tricks. There were incantations, spells, potions.
Miles had found an underlined section in a book on potions, and that underlining had been the nail in the coffin. It was called an adoration elixir, and it could be added to any normal beverage. He’d also found a potential remedy for the spell that involved sprinkling salt around the bed.
“But I don’t believe in this stuff,” Griffin kept insisting as they took a cab back to the Bubbling Cauldron. “Witches don’t exist. Magic spells aren’t real.”
Miles waved a hand at the sign over the door of the bar. “Do you think she works here by accident? I don’t think so. It probably fits in with her skills, mixing drinks for people.”
“For all we know, she puts stuff in everybody’s drinks so they’ll tip more,” Kevin said.
“Okay, that’s enough. Lily is not the sort of person to use whatever special talent she has to wring money out of people.” That much Griffin knew for sure. Everything else was up for grabs. “Anyway, I’m going to ask her about the magic. I’m going to ask her straight out.”
“That’s the worst idea you’ve had recently,” Kevin said. “And you’ve had some doozies. You can’t just ask her. If she knows you’re on to her, she’s liable to work some other spell on you.”
“Look, she cares about me. I know she does. She wouldn’t want to hurt me or anything.”
“Oh, I think she cares about you.” Kevin paid for th
e cab while Miles and Griffin climbed out.
“I don’t know,” Miles said as they stood outside the bar. “If she cares about him, why would she slip something into his drink?”
“Because he wasn’t paying attention to her, and she was crushing on him.”
Griffin wished his friends didn’t make such logical sense. He wished he hadn’t let them into Lily’s apartment so they could find the crystal ball, the candles, and the books. They might have snooped around some more, but he’d made them leave.
Daisy hadn’t liked them being there. Griffin had noticed her confusion, because she was happy to see him but suspicious of his friends. Obviously she hadn’t known quite how to act, whether she should be guarding the house or welcoming the new guests. Mostly she’d paced.
It had been a nasty business, this spying on Lily. Griffin didn’t want to know what he knew. He didn’t want to think that Lily, the woman he’d felt such a connection with, the woman he’d declared his love for, had engineered the whole thing by doping his drink. That went against everything he believed was possible.
And yet . . . he couldn’t deny the effect she’d had on him recently. There was something fishy about the whole thing, now that he looked at it more carefully.
Kevin lingered on the sidewalk outside the bar, as if reluctant to go in until they had a plan. “I think the potion was in the Wallbanger,” he said. “Remember Tuesday night you were going to order your usual vodka and tonic with a twist, and she suggested the Wallbanger.”
“I absolutely remember that.” Miles pointed a finger at Kevin. “That was the night Debbie was there and Griff asked her out. Lily wouldn’t have liked that, no sir. She fixed it so Griff wouldn’t go out with Debbie.”
“You’re making her out to be some sort of relationship Nazi,” Griffin said. “She’s not. She may be outrageous sometimes, but she’s also very sweet, and she loves her folks and her sister, Anica. They—”
“Wait a minute,” Kevin said. “Wait. A. Minute. Spells and incantations. What if she’s a full-fledged, bona fide witch?”
“I’m not ready to pin that label on her,” Griffin said.
“Okay, you don’t count.” Miles waved him away. “You’ve had amazing sex with her, so you want to believe she’s exactly as advertised. It’s up to Kev and me to ferret out the truth.”
“As I was saying,” Kevin continued, “if the spells and magic turn out to mean she’s a witch, then her sister is a witch, her mother’s a witch, and her father’s a wizard.”
Griffin’s head hurt. “I wish to God you hadn’t gone to Mardi Gras.”
“You’re going to be glad I did, buddy boy. Because my knowledge of witches and wizards is going to save your ass.”
“What if I don’t want to be saved?” Griffin was feeling irritable, to say the least. “What if I like the way my life is right now, with lots of great sex with an amazing woman?”
Kevin had the bulldog expression that he got sometimes when he wasn’t about to let go of an idea. Juries hated to see that expression. So did Griffin.
“I promised to keep you from making a mess of your life with the wrong woman,” Kevin said. “I didn’t expect to have to deal with a witch who had given you a love potion, but that’s life. You are not going to fall prey to her scheme.”
“And that goes double for me,” Miles said. “We’re going to be your watchdogs, keep track of you, be your monitoring system. Oh, except for tomorrow night, of course. We’ll be at the Cubs game tomorrow night, so you’re on your own then.”
Kevin glared at Miles. “We will leave the Cubs game if we deem it necessary.”
“What?” Miles looked outraged. “I got primo tickets from StubHub! It’s gonna be an awesome game!”
Kevin regarded him with disdain. “This is more important than a Cubs game.”
“But they’re leading the division!”
“Miles, we have a friend who has found himself smack-dab in a real-life version of The Witches of Eastwick. Are you going to abandon him at a time like that?”
Miles seemed chastened. “Guess not.” He glanced at Kevin. “So what’s the plan?”
“You make this sound like some kind of battle,” Griffin said.
Kevin nodded. “It is.”
“Bullshit. We don’t need a battle plan. You’re talking about the woman I love.”
“No,” Miles said. “She’s the woman you think you love because she gave you a magic potion. There’s a huge difference.”
“What if I really love her? What if I’ve overpowered the potion she gave me, and now what I feel for her is actual love?” Griffin wanted to believe that scenario. It was far better than thinking he was some puppet on a string.
“If that’s true, then you’ll be willing to try the antidote I found. If you still feel like you love her after you try that, then maybe we’ll start to believe you.” Kevin pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I would have liked to have more time, but you rushed us out of there.”
“You know I hated the snooping idea from the beginning.”
“That’s because you’re under a spell and don’t know what’s good for you,” Miles pointed out.
“Right.” Kevin consulted the notes he’d made. “Maybe we can research this online. Anyway, as I told you back in the apartment, the first thing you have to do is sprinkle salt around the bed and see if that makes you less attracted to her.”
Griffin blew out a breath. “That should be subtle. She’s ready to do the deed, and I’m busy with the carton of Morton Salt. Do you think she’ll get suspicious?”
“You get in there and sprinkle the salt when she’s not looking, moron.” Kevin shook his head. “I should go over there and do it tonight while you’re still with her at the bar. You could give me your key.”
“No, absolutely not.” Griffin cringed at the idea of his friends invading Lily’s apartment when he wasn’t even there.
“Yeah, that’s a bad idea,” Miles said. “The dog would eat you.”
“Then you have to do it.” Kevin gazed at his notes. “It says sea salt. Tell you what. Miles and I will bring that to you at the bar later tonight.”
Griffin rolled his eyes. “Also a subtle move. You and Miles show up with a container of salt. How are you going to explain that?”
“We’ll figure out a different delivery system,” Kevin said. “We’ll get it to you in a package you can conceal until you’re ready to sprinkle it around the bed. Surely you can take ten seconds to accomplish that.”
“It’s dicey,” Miles said. “She is one hot tamale. Once she gets naked, Griff might not have ten seconds to spare.”
“Will you two knock it off?” Griffin had taken about all he could. “I swear to you Lily is not out to get me. There’s an explanation for all this that will demonstrate she’s a decent person.”
Kevin sighed. “Buddy, your best hope is that she’s a decent witch.”
Chapter 18
Lily had mulled over Griffin’s declaration of love ever since she’d arrived at work. She knew it could be bogus, a product of the elixir she’d given him, but she didn’t want to believe that. She wanted to believe that the incredible times they’d shared in the past few days had created a loving bond that had nothing to do with the elixir.
That’s what she wanted to believe, but she had no confidence that it was true. Spending time with Griffin tended to reinforce that belief, so she was eager for him to arrive at the Bubbling Cauldron. He and his buddies seemed later than usual, and she hoped everything was okay at the law offices of Biddle, Ryerson and Thatcher. Now that she knew the name of the firm, it seemed more real and she felt a more personal concern about Griffin’s fate there.
At last Griffin walked in with his two buddies. Maybe she was being paranoid, but she could swear they looked at her more closely than they had in the past. She’d even say they scrutinized her.
So maybe Griffin had told them he was in love with her. That would make sense, if the three were as close
as she thought. With a confession like that, Griffin had moved her from girlfriend to serious girlfriend. Men who admitted to being in love tended to propose.
Yikes. She hadn’t exactly thought about that. Her father would give her no end of grief if she accepted a proposal from a man under an adoration spell. She wouldn’t feel particularly comfy about it, either. Enjoying good sex was one thing, but making a lifetime commitment was something else.
Because happy hour had started about thirty minutes ago, the first rush had subsided, so she had time to go over to Griffin’s table and take the order. She just wasn’t sure she wanted to. Kevin and Miles weren’t joking around the way they usually did when they first came in the bar. The whole table was way too serious.
But if she didn’t go take the order that would seem strange, so she lifted the hinged section of bar and walked through it. All the way over to the table she could feel Kevin and Miles evaluating her as a potential wife for their friend. If they knew the truth about her . . . but she didn’t intend for them to find out about her magic.
Griffin was a different story. If she ever hoped to take this relationship further, she had to tell Griffin. But she didn’t want to tell him yet, so she hoped he wasn’t working up to a proposal. That would change the timetable considerably.
“Hi, guys!” She gave them all a bright smile.
Kevin and Miles responded with what looked like really fake grins, as if they’d suddenly decided they needed to look cheerful. Griffin didn’t even try to look cheerful. In fact, he looked depressed.
She wasn’t about to address that. “What’s everybody having?”
“A draft,” Miles said.
Kevin nodded. “Make that two.”
Griffin glanced up at her. “I’ll take a draft, too.”
His expressive hazel eyes gave her a jolt. Instead of being filled with love, they reflected pure misery. How had that happened? Earlier today he’d seemed so full of good cheer.
She could think of only one explanation—his friends didn’t approve of her. They must have romped all over his declaration of love and maybe even tried to talk him out of sticking with the relationship. And that just made her mad. What right did they have to judge whether she’d make Griffin a good life partner?
Chick with a Charm Page 17