“However long it takes for them to realize that Seb is always right.” She sounded rueful. There was a story behind that one, but Skylar wasn’t about to ask about it. “But for now, we’ll get him up in that guest room Dave was using.”
“Alright.”
A few signatures later, Dymphna was taking a cab with Selby back to Ward Manor. It had been decided that Leo and Skylar should go to the apartment and grab everything Selby would need for his stay there.
When Skylar came back into her old apartment, she smiled. It still felt a lot like it was hers, and yet not hers anymore. Selby had been right: this wasn’t really the place for her anymore. She frowned at the prospect. Leo came up with the packing boxes, and when he reached the doorway, looked around as if stunned.
“What do you think?” Skylar was nervous. This was a place she had taken from a boring apartment and turned into a home. She couldn’t paint the walls, so she had hung brightly colored paintings from a local artist all over the place. The cheap couches, including that bright green one, were accented with large throw pillows. It was cluttered, but in that way that just shows it is a well lived-in home.
“It’s clear that you decorated it yourself. It’s bold and vibrant, much like you are. I like it.”
She threw her arms around him. “I’m glad you do.” She kissed him soundly, the boxes in his hand falling unnoticed to the ground.
He really did taste good, she thought as she pulled away and Leo picked up the boxes. She knew there was this whole magical alignment thing going on, but she knew it was more than that. He was everything she would have looked for in a guy, and she felt more for him than she had even considered with previous boyfriends. Was that what Leo was? A boyfriend? That seemed too banal for what he was to her.
“Oh shit,” she muttered. He wasn’t just some crush, she wasn’t just falling for him. She had gone and gotten herself in trouble by completely falling in love with Dr. Pantaleon Ward. Not the smartest move in the book, she chastised herself. But she couldn’t regret it. Sure it was inconvenient timing to say the least, but she knew that love rarely came on anyone’s schedule, and most people spent a lifetime looking for what she just realized she already had.
Especially when he looked at her with concern in his baby blue eyes. “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, I, uh, stubbed my toe.”
He looked at her critically, and she belatedly started to bounce on her feet as if she was actually hurting. It seemed fitting that she was discovering that she wanted a life with Leo while she stood in the apartment that had been her world for many years.
“Sure. Now where do we start?”
Oh let’s see, there’s my old bed in the next room. We could complete this bonding thing now that I know I want it. But he may not want it. He may not love her as much as she already loved him. Besides, too much had happened already today that she couldn’t take much more.
“Selby’s bedroom is on the right. I’ll go load up clothes in the boxes if you’ll look around for any of those guy things that he might have left out and want to have later.” At least it gave her something to do without being so close to Leo that she wanted to pounce on him. As she folded clothes into boxes, she thought of fond memories of this place and all she and Selby had shared there.
131
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leo honestly did start looking for Selby’s personal effects. He gathered toiletries from the bathroom, a few things from the living room, etc. But then he came to the closed door that must lead to Skylar’s bedroom. He stared at the door for a full minute and a half before putting the box down and stepping inside. He just couldn’t help it.
Like the rest of the apartment, it was a riot of color, but it was more feminine. It smelled like her so much that Leo had to grin like a schoolboy with his first crush. He noticed the framed pictures, almost all of her and Selby, and resisted the urge to take rather than look. She was beautiful, and the pair had come through hell by themselves to get to where they were. Leo really wanted to know the full story, but there were parts that Skylar wasn’t telling him. Of course, he hadn’t told her everything yet either. There was no reason for her to totally trust him yet except the magical calling to each other. He felt it too, and he would trust her completely. Not the time, he reminded himself, but he kept poking around.
132
THE DOCTOR WITCH
There were certainly all the signs of a hasty retreat. She had clothes that she must not have wanted to bring left behind, some still on hangars while most were on the floor. Drawers were partially pulled out, with more scattered clothes about them.
He saw a glimmer of a frame on the nightstand, turned upside down. Since nothing else on the nightstand was disturbed, he thought that this photo frame must have been turned over deliberately.
“That was Jeremy,” Skylar’s voice came from behind him as she plucked the frame out of his hands. “I thought you were gathering Selby’s stuff.”
“I was. Then I would up in here.” She looked perturbed, so he swung her around and kissed her soundly. He snatched the picture right back and flipped it over before she could object. Skylar hung her head when she realized her objections were useless.
Leo took a good long look at the photo. The woman was clearly Skylar, with her blond hair framing her face like a halo as she pressed a hand down to keep her dress in place in the wind. Her smile was open and excited. He didn’t recognize the man beside her, but he was objectively good looking with black hair he was holding down. They looked happy. They were also standing outside Morgan’s, one of the nicest steakhouses in Boston. He had heard something in the news about it recently, but he couldn’t remember what.
While he was trying to remember that, he noticed the large diamond on Skylar’s ring finger. Her left hand was holding onto the man’s, and he surmised that the stranger was the one who put the ring there. She was engaged?
“Skylar?” He looked at her askance, noting the dark circles under her eyes and the mournful look.
She sunk onto the bed. “Like I said, Jeremy.”
“Want to talk about it?” He remained standing because he figured she probably didn’t want to be touched right at the moment.
“You know, in all the confusion these past weeks, I haven’t thought about him much at all.” She laughed bitterly. “Jeremy and I were engaged. God, we had such plans! Then, like the old cliche, he slept with one of my employees in the bed I’d be moving into in a few weeks when we married. Maybe it’s such a cliche because when it happens it hurts so much.”
Leo did sit down then. He could see how much she was hurting, and he wanted to make it better. He put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. She started to cry, large hiccuping sobs.
“Hey now. It’s going to be alright.”
She smiled weakly, despite the tears that still flowed down her cheeks. “It’s not him even. It’s everything. Selby almost died; I found out I’m a witch and that it’s not evil; I meet you; and I find out why I’ve never had a successful relationship. Then that one,” she waved at the picture, “that I tried so hard to make work, comes back out of the basement I had kept it in.”
“Should I ask why you still had it on your nightstand?”
“To remind me not to go full out when I don’t know the terrain. A lesson I should keep in mind, especially now.”
“Why now?” She pretended not to hear the question, though Leo knew she had. Well if she wasn’t ready to talk about now, she wasn’t ready. “Why Morgan’s? Did you two get engaged there?” Something primal in him that wanted to claim her as his own hated even discussing her former flame, but he thought she could probably use the shoulder he was lending.
She coughed out another laugh. “Nothing so easy as that. We met there. He was the new general manager, and I was the head chef. He took the place by storm. He did great work. When we started dating, we started dreaming about how the future would go. After he asked me, we started making plans. We would have this
great wedding in the restaurant. He was going to buy Morgan’s from the current owner, and it would be his wedding present to me. Our honeymoon would be mine to him. Between paying off my student loans, paying for the wedding, and paying for the honeymoon, I was lucky to have enough to pay rent at the apartment. We’d move into his place once we got back from the honeymoon in Paris, and everything would sort itself out from there.”
She stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “He arranged for me to find them. He called me over to help him with a question about the restaurant. When I got there, he was in the middle of toying with her. Mortified, I went back out into the hallway. When he finished, he explained that I couldn’t give him the love and support he needed from a partner. So, like the total jackass he was, he informed me that he’d be marrying that ditsy hostess whose name I don’t even remember. The wedding I had planned would be called off, but he still went on the honeymoon with that floozy. She came back pregnant, and he did indeed buy the restaurant. He also blacklisted me from all the nicer restaurants in the area, should I have wanted to work again. He said that I had embezzled money, and any restaurant owners who hired me should be careful.”
“My god. No wonder you’re so bitter.”
“Now that’s a word for it. Mild, but it’ll work.”
“What happened next?” He asked, but Leo didn’t know if he wanted the answer.
“I was unemployable. Selby stepped in for the rescue again, both emotionally and financially. My loans were paid off and all, but we still needed rent and car payments and so forth. So I got a job with the only man who would risk having me, and he kept a paranoid eye on the till. So within a matter of weeks, I went from a successful head chef at Morgan’s to a short order cook at Papa Luck.”
“Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was a dive of a diner out in no man’s land. I got almost no money, but it helped pay the bills, if just barely. Joe never did like me after I turned down his offer for a date. He said if I screwed my last boss, I should screw him too if I wanted to keep the job. But he couldn’t fire me for that for fear that I would bring the law down on him. Not that I would have, being that I needed the job. But when I asked for that leave of absence, Joe decided it was good enough reason to fire me.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” It felt so natural to move into his arms that Skylar did it without even thinking. Leo couldn’t say he didn’t appreciate the move.
“Well now I’ve basically spilled my entire pathetic life history to you.”
“It’s hardly pathetic. First, Jeremy and Joe didn’t appreciate you enough. I’ve never understood cheating. It seems so much kinder to just break off the relationship to see someone else than it would be to cheat on them. But the main reason it’s not pathetic is that you’ve always bounced back from whatever problems life has thrown in your way. That’s hard to do.”
There were tears in her eyes, though she had stopped the sobbing. Leo carefully wiped them away. She even grinned weakly.
“Let’s get done with the packing, and we’ll go.”
They ended up with two boxes of things for Selby, and by mutual unspoken consent, they didn’t talk about what Skylar had revealed. Skylar was relieved. She still felt raw inside, and she hoped that exposing her dark secrets wouldn’t harm whatever relationship she might have with Leo.
Back at Ward Manor, Skylar headed straight to the kitchen. When she was really stressed about something, baking almost always helped. There was just something about it that was highly cathartic. Besides, it was Selby’s first day in Ward Manor, and that was something to celebrate. Selby’s favorite cake was Red Velvet, so she stirred it up just right and slid it into the oven.
She was finishing the fresh cream cheese icing when Dymphna came in to get a smell. “A cake?”
“Absolutely. Will you want some?”
“Skylar, that thing smells divine and it’s not even done yet. Besides, after what I’m about to do, I’ll need a lot of sugar to replenish my energy.”
“What are you about to do? I mean, I know you’re going to try to heal Selby, but what does that really entail?”
“It’s hard to describe when you’ve never done it, but here goes. I essentially take my water magic and force it into his wounds. In Selby’s case, I will first heal any internal wounds. That’s today’s process. Then in future sessions, I will make his skin regenerate by pushing the burnt parts away and coaxing new skin to grow. It will be slow, because that kind of magic takes a lot out of you.”
“What D isn’t saying,” Leo added when he strolled into the kitchen, “is that when she does this, she feels a lot of pain as her magic leaves her body. Most water witches aren’t strong enough to even consider healing the kind of extensive damage that Selby has. Most of the strong ones wouldn’t be willing because of the magical drain and the ensuing pain. In fact, a lot of water witches don’t use their healing power at all because of the cost to them.”
“Cowards,” Dymphna scoffed.
“So essentially,” Skylar had stopped beating the icing at some point, “you’ll be hurting yourself to help my brother?”
“That’s right on the money. I’m a strong water witch, and that’s what I do. Leo will have to be in the room with me to keep me from doing something even more stupid than healing such a great amount of damage. Since he’s an air witch, he can sense when I’m on the edge of doing too much. I can often feel it, but sometimes I don’t want to stop while I’ve got the inertia going.”
“D’s been known to pass out from healing if someone doesn’t stop her.”
Dymphna blushed. “It’s happened. So I called in to my partners and told them I was sick and wouldn’t be at work for a few days. It’s hard to do that kind of thing in my line of work, but this takes priority. Besides, I recently finished a case, and my others mostly need research before I can get back with my client. I’ll be able to do a little research from home.”
“I don’t think so. You’ll get all the rest you can pack into your body so that you can be strong enough to work with Selby and not hurt yourself. If I even suspect you of working, I will take away whatever books I can find and your laptop,” Leo informed her.
“You’d do it too.”
He grinned. “Try me. I dare you.”
Dymphna’s shoulders slumped. “I won’t. But there’s no time like the present. Might as well go get started on the healing.”
“Skylar, she’s going to need a lot of that cake and whatever kind of food you can cook up. Preferably something with a high caloric value and vegetables.”
“You got it. Is there anything else I can do?”
“Stay away from upstairs. I hate to be like that, but even if you hear something, it will distract us both from the task at hand if you come close. Your fire magic won’t play nicely with D’s water magic while her shields are down, if you know what I mean.”
“Yeah.” Skylar got to work on the meal as the siblings left, trying not to feel too guilty about causing Dymphna to be in pain so that Selby would get better faster.
For dinner, she settled on steaks, though grilled on an indoor grill rather than over hickory like she would have liked, broccoli, and honeyed mashed potatoes with extra butter and white gravy. She hoped the whole meat and potatoes cliche would work for Dymphna today.
She was humming as the cake cooled, the potatoes boiled, and the broccoli was getting prepared for the steamer when she heard Dymphna scream out in agony. Going on instinct, she ran for the stairs, but before she got on the first step, she remembered Leo’s command to stay downstairs.
When she got back to the kitchen, she was no longer humming. It was one thing to think about her new friend getting hurt, and it was another thing to hear it. She really liked Dymphna, and she hoped that her fledgling friendship wouldn’t be hurt by needing the other woman’s help at such a great cost. Dymphna seemed brusque, but when it got down to it, she was really a very nice person. She was protective of her brothers, especia
lly Leo, and anyone else she cared deeply about. She even used her fancy law degree to help people who need it. Dymphna’s steak went on the grill as Skylar mashed the potatoes. When finished, the steak went into the oven at 200 degrees to keep warm. The others would wait to be grilled until Leo, and possibly Selby, would want to eat them.
As she frosted the cake, she couldn’t help but think about Leo next. What she felt for him went beyond friendship. If there really was this magical pairing, which she was still working on believing, then Leo was certainly her match. He was funny, handsome, especially when his long hair got in his face, and he had the same caring streak that his twin had. He was stubborn, and resistant to a change in his compartmentalized and orderly lifestyle, but that just made Skylar want to mess up that organization even more. Then he sat there and commiserated as she spilled her sob story about her ex-fiance.
She loved him too. What she had realized originally back in her old apartment just became even more clear after he listened to her so kindly. She wasn’t sure how to proceed with a relationship from there, but she felt she needed to try.
She was still sitting there, trying to figure out her next move, when the object of her musings came into the room.
“We’re done for today. She actually got more done than we expected, but it came at a cost.”
“I heard the scream.”
“Yeah.” He shook his head. “Yeah. Anyway, she’s very weak right now, but it would do her good to come down to eat dinner with us at the table. Selby’s not much better, really, because it takes a lot of energy to get healed as well. Will you come upstairs now and help me get D down here? Selby can come on his own, and he will in just a second, but D needs some support that Selby can’t give her right now.”
“Of course I will.”
He grinned, and her heart turned over.
“You’ll be surprised at how much good D has done here,” Leo said as they went upstairs. When they got there, Selby was sitting up and smiling.
The Doctor Witch (The Ward Witches) Page 10