The Trouble with Magic (Loveswept)

by McComas, Mary Kay

  “No.”

  His brows rose perceptively. She was slow to wake in the mornings, but she usually wasn’t grouchy.

  He circled the work island and turned her to face him. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, distressed. “I did it again, didn’t I?”

  “What?”

  “Kept you up too late. I tried—”

  “No. I’m not tired,” she said, brusque in her dread. “Here. Eat. We need to talk.”

  He took the plate from her, his confusion plain on his face.

  “Okay. Let’s talk.”

  “Eat first.”

  “I see. We’re going to talk, not have breakfast conversation,” he said, following her to the table. “Must be serious.”

  “Eat.” She was afraid she’d lose her nerve, take a coward’s way out.

  The meal passed in silence, the tension between them escalating until Payton popped the last bite of toast into his mouth, finished his coffee, and cleared away his dishes. He sat opposite her, laced his fingers together, and ordered her to speak.

  “Let’s have it,” he said, a successful businessman who was used to getting to the point and facing problems head-on.

  Her heart felt as hard and cold as ice, and it hurt as if it had been dropped and cracked in a thousand places.

  “Payton, I don’t know how to tell you this without ...” Hurting you, she was about to say. The thought was impossible to voice aloud.

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake, Payton, and I ...” want to say I’m sorry, she thought. Sorry wasn’t enough. “What I’ve done is unforgivable.”

  “Come on, Harri,” he said, half-amused with her inability to complete a sentence. “You’ve spied on me, interfered with my business, and kidnapped me. How bad could it be?”

  “Bad. I ...”

  His brows rose higher to indicate his interest as he patiently waited for her to finish. There was no good or easy way to tell him, she finally decided, chewing her lower lip. She took a deep breath. “I let myself fall in love with you.”

  “Well,” he said, taken back. He wanted to laugh but sensed danger in the undercurrent of her words. “That is unforgivable.”

  “I promised you I wouldn’t, remember?”

  “No.”

  “I forced you to come here and to fall in love with me,” she said, words beginning to roll like an avalanche from her mouth. “I brought you to the island specifically to expose you to the magic, to show you it was real, so you could understand the importance of my keeping the island. I ... I thought I could handle it, that I’d keep my head on straight. I didn’t think I’d fall in love with you too. I thought I might learn to like you eventually, which would be proof enough for me that the magic worked. But then ... I didn’t mean to fall in love with you, and I certainly didn’t mean for you to love me. I thought you might end up liking me a little, but I had no idea how powerful the magic really was.”

  “Harri,” he said, touching her hand, trying to calm her and his heart at the same time. “You don’t really think I love you because I’ve fallen under some sort of spell or something, do you?”

  “Don’t you? Aren’t you convinced yet?”

  “I’m convinced that I love you, but the only spell I’ve fallen under is yours. It doesn’t have anything to do with the island, and it certainly isn’t magic.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I know, dammit,” he said, fear creeping like a fungus inside him.

  “You can’t know. And it would be so unfair of me to take advantage of you under these circumstances. So, tomorrow—”

  “Tomorrow, I’m still going to love you.”

  “Perhaps. But when the boat takes us back to St. Peter’s Bay tomorrow, I’ll be going straight to the sheriff’s office to confess everything I’ve done to you, and you’ll go back to your life. That was the deal.”

  “The deal?” he said, his eyes narrowed, his fear turning to excruciating pain. “The deal? Is that all this was to you?”

  “That’s not how it turned out, no. But it was a deal. I promised you that I wouldn’t hold you to anything when it was over. I shouldn’t have let it go so far. I can’t regret it for myself, but I do for you.”

  “This is crazy,” he said, as if to alert her to the world’s sudden madness. “It’s crazier than you kidnapping me in the first place.”

  Who knew better than she?

  “I ... I said I’d let you decide what to do with the island once we determined whether or not the magic was real. So, I’ll—”

  “Real?” He stood with enough force to push his chair over. “I’ll tell you what’s real. I’m real. You’re real. And what we feel is real.”

  “You’re right,” she said, reaching to touch him, needing to touch him, to ease his pain, to soothe him. He pulled his hand away. “But don’t you see, that’s the trouble with magic. It all seems so real, but it’s not. I tricked you. It’s not love we feel, it’s just the magic.”

  “To hell with the magic,” he bellowed, wanting to scream like a lunatic. “There is no magic. There never was. I can’t explain what happened to all your damned ancestors or how all this nonsense got started, but there’s no such thing as magic or love potions or anything else. If anything, we made our own magic.”

  “I know this must be difficult for you to understand. And I don’t like it any more than you do,” she said, the cracks in her heart beginning to bleed. “But I could never live with you, or myself, knowing that I’d tricked you, forced you to love me.”

  “You didn’t,” he stated, then suddenly decided to change tracks. “You’re right. You did trick me. You forced me to fall in love with you, and I demand that you accept responsibility for your actions. I insist that you stay with me until I fall out of love with you.”

  She stood before him with a bittersweet smile for his cleverness.

  “I wish ...” it were real, she wanted to say. But it felt too real to make it sound otherwise.

  “What? You wish what?”

  “I wish you great happiness, Payton. I wish you knew how much you deserve to be happy. And I hope ...” her voice faltered, “I hope you’ll let some other woman see what you’ve shown me. That you’re good and kind and loving.”

  He saw the tears in her eyes and wanted to shake her.

  “Harriet, stop this. I don’t want another woman. I want you.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I love you!”

  “Why do you love me?”

  “Because ...” He was a fast thinker, he could do this. “Because ...” There were a thousand reasons globbed together into one huge unexplainable emotion. “Because I do.”

  “You see,” she said gently. “It’s just the magic.”

  Payton wanted to tear his hair out; he wanted to tear her hair out. By late afternoon he was desperate to do something to get her attention.

  She’d spent the day gathering her personal possessions—things that didn’t belong to the house—and packing them into boxes.

  “I’ll arrange to have these removed from the house as soon as possible. They’ll need to go into storage with the rest of my things,” she told him in passing, stepping around him as he tried to impede her progress.

  “Storage? Why do you have things in storage?”

  “They aren’t yet,” she said casually, labeling the contents of a half-filled box. “But they don’t let you take a lot of personal stuff to prison, you know.”

  “For crissake! Will you stop? You aren’t going to prison. You know I won’t press charges.”

  “Yes, and I’ve been giving that some thought,” she said, calm and serious when she looked at him. “It is possible that it may take some time, several days, a week or more maybe for the magic to wear off, and you’ll feel more inclined to press charges then. I just wanted to mention to you that if the authorities can’t locate me here or in St. Peter’s Bay, that the only other place I plan to go is back to
Massena. They can contact me through the college, or I can write down my address for you, if you’d like.”

  He left the room, swearing and muttering unintelligibly, too dumbfounded to argue.

  He gave her plenty of time to reconsider between his next two attempts to make her see reason, not that it did any good. He entertained the notion of dropping something on her head to pound some sense into her, but decided that with his luck she’d develop amnesia and forget who he was altogether. During dinner he was tempted to choke her until she agreed to be logical, but the mere thought of his hands on her throat brought the customary clutching sensation to his abdomen. When she bid him good night at her bedroom door, it was all he could do to keep from dragging her to the floor and using all he’d discovered about her body to bring her mind to order. But he was all too conscious of who controlled whom in the throes of passion and thought it safer not to—for fear she’d convince him to have her sent to the electric chair before they were finished.

  It wasn’t until after he’d spent several hours tossing in bed, his muscles aching with tension, his mind weary with worry, that his fear and frustration took on the colors of anger and pain.

  Past and present merged, festered, and poisoned his perspective on the future.

  Effortlessly, he donned the old cloak of indifference that he called pride. He was not a man to make compromises in his life; he didn’t beg, and he wouldn’t be controlled. He didn’t feel pain, and he couldn’t be broken. Possessions were of little consequence to him—people even less.

  By morning meaningful dialogue was no longer an option. Harriet suffered quietly, stoically, seemingly calm and resigned to her fate. Payton agonized safe inside his shell, coolly superior, indifferent, sarcastic. Conversation remained at a one word minimum—two maximum.

  “Coffee?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Eggs?”

  “No.”

  “Stopped snowing.”

  “Swell.”

  “More toast?”

  “No.”

  “Finished?”

  “Need help?”

  “No. Thanks.”

  “Boat’s here.”

  “Swell.”

  “Hi, Tony.”

  “Tony Saone. Payton Dunsmore.”

  “Hello.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yes.”

  One of them turned lime-green on the way back to St. Peter’s Bay, but managed to retain his dignity—as well as his breakfast toast. The other, wisely, maintained a strict silence until they were soundly on shore.

  “Your room is still available at the inn,” she said, standing beside him after Tony Saone, their rescuer, dropped them at the end of the dock and proceeded on to the marina. “The limousine will be back at one o’clock to take you wherever you want to go.”

  “Fine.” Just to prove to himself that he could, he walked away from her—but he felt no satisfaction.

  “Payton?” she called after him. He stopped but didn’t turn. “I’m ... sorry.”

  “I’m sure you are.”

  “Payton?” she called again, stopping him once more. “I won’t forget you. Ever.”

  He turned to her then. Sad brown eyes met frozen emerald-green ones. His voice was equally cold but soft when he finally replied, “Ever is a long time, Harri.”

  Twelve

  PAYTON DUNSMORE HAD WASTED no time foreclosing on Harriet’s island. The mortgage and back taxes owed on Jovette Island were paid in full before the end of November, and the title changed hands via the attorneys and realtors. She neither saw nor heard from Payton during the transaction, though she waited daily for the police to appear on her doorstep.

  Christmas was a dismal affair. The campus was deserted, and the town of Massena burrowed itself in against the cold, for a holiday season of quiet family gatherings. Overnight, it became a new year. To celebrate, Harriet hung up a new calendar. Classes resumed, the winter term was well under way, and still there was no dulling of the ache she carried in her heart, no release from the longing in her spirit, no dwindling of the love she felt for the man she’d left in St. Peter’s Bay nearly three months earlier. The magic wasn’t wearing off as she had thought it would, as she had prayed it would with time.

  She sincerely hoped that Payton wasn’t suffering in the same state of suspended animation; that the force that had linked them so closely on the island had dispelled itself, left him free to resume his life without her.

  She hoped it, truly and with almost every fiber of her being—almost. For deep inside, so deep and so well buried in guilt that her conscious mind couldn’t acknowledge it; so deep that only her dreams could attest to the fact, she was watching for him, waiting for him, sure that he would come for her.

  “Bundle up before you go out this morning,” the radio announcer warned her. “It’s biting cold—excellent hog-killin’ weather for those of you who’ve got ’em.”

  Harriet turned off the radio; the daily farm report was her cue to leave the house within three minutes or be late for her first morning class. Why she knocked herself out getting to school on time, when most of her students didn’t wake up until after class anyway, was beyond her. She suspected it had something to do with responsibility and setting a good example and getting paid a regular salary, but an eight A.M. biology lab was too much, even for her. Next year she’d schedule differently.

  If there was a next year, she thought, locking her front door on the way out. She was always a bit surprised to walk out of her house and not find it surrounded by police cars, lights flashing, the officers armed and alert. How long was it going to take for the magic to wear off? How long before Payton came to his senses and took his revenge? She wouldn’t consider the possibility that he’d exact his vengeance by doing nothing at all to her. He wasn’t a cruel man, just slow to recover.

  The car keys slipped from her gloved hand. She fumbled blindly for them on the floorboard, her mind quickly reviewing the morning lesson plan.

  The used compact car she’d acquired to replace the pride and joy she’d driven three years earlier, when she could afford frequent timing adjustments and tune-ups from expensive foreign car dealerships, was nothing if not dependable. The engine turned over with the first twist of the ignition, though she could tell from its sputtering that it wasn’t eager to be disturbed so early and on such a chilly morning.

  Music filled the car.

  She glanced at the radio. It wasn’t on.

  It was a mellifluous tinkling, like a music box. The tune was familiar, but she couldn’t name it. She turned the engine off, and the car went silent. She turned the key in the ignition again, and the melody started once more. She opened the car door, then quickly closed it. The music was playing outside the car as well as inside. She turned the engine off and got out.

  Harriet was no mechanic, still nothing under the hood appeared to have been tampered with.

  With her hands on her hips, the only logical explanation she could come up with was that she was the victim of a practical joke. It hadn’t been so long ago that she couldn’t remember her own college days. Higher education hadn’t evolved much in those years, and its students were still half-adult, half-child creatures who needed an outlet, she thought, trying not to be too angry.

  She looked at her watch. She was going to be late. The questions now were, was she going to miss class completely while she tore her car apart looking for the source of the music; was she going to miss half the class walking to school or was she going to be a little tardy by driving to the science building in what now sounded like an ice-cream truck?

  Why me? she wondered, driving down Main Street, ignoring the curious glances, grateful that it was too early for the entire town of Massena to be out and about. Didn’t she have enough on her mind? Was she such an awful teacher? Was this retaliation for an eight A.M. biology lab? Or was she simply the easiest target, being the newest and the only unmarried female member of the staff?

  Heads turned, finge
rs pointed, and students produced a riot of laughter as she drove down the lane toward her office. She pulled into her parking space and quickly put an end to the infernal noise that announced her arrival.

  “Sorry. All sold out,” she said, responding to various requests for ice-cream bars and pops, trying to maintain the facade of a good sport while she felt red-cheeked and undignified. “No. I’m out of cherry Popsicles too. Better luck tomorrow.”

  She was pleased that her class had taken the initiative to begin the lab without her, though they were all under suspicion until she discovered who the uncouth car culprit was. Biology could be a disgusting science if one put her mind to it, she decided vengefully.

  This term, the lab was for junior embryologists, studying the development of animals from fertilized egg through the birth or hatching process.

  “So, if heat is all a fertilized egg needs to develop and eventually hatch, why wouldn’t turning up the heat a little, say a degree or two or three—why wouldn’t that speed up the process?” she asked the class.

  When no one answered, she looked up from the incubator she was adjusting—and that’s when she saw them.

  Bubbles. Thousands of free-floating bubbles pouring into her classroom through an air vent above the door at the back of the room.

  “Oh, this is too much,” she said, still half angry from the last prank she’d been on the receiving end of. “I want this to stop immediately.”

  The bubbles ignored her. The students looked confused—and more than a little amused.

  “I mean it. Whoever is responsible for this, please turn the bubbles off now.”

  She looked from one blank face to the next, and when she could not perceive any guilt, she marched to the back of the room and opened the door to the hall. Stepping out and looking up, she saw that the vent was one-sided, opening only into her classroom.

  “What is this?” she asked herself aloud.

  “Bubbles,” one of her more astute pupils answered.

  “I can see they’re bubbles,” she said, the strain on her temper quivering in her voice. “But where are the bubbles coming from?”