by Vivi Andrews
Thirty-seven years of great food, crappy service and mismatched atmosphere.
In the summer, when the chipped Formica tables were covered with expensive linens and the blinding fluorescent lighting was ditched in favor of candlelight, the prices doubled and all the locals migrated down the road to the Parish Diner. But in the winter, Blanche’s kitchen still produced ambrosia and all the locals flocked to pay homage to her greatness.
Biz wove through the empty tables to her usual spot where Gillian waited with both hands wrapped tight around a to-go coffee from the stand down the street. Biz slid in across from her and tossed a friendly wave to Molly—pink-haired teenage existentialist and the latest of Blanche’s granddaughters to take a turn providing indifferent service to the winter customers. Molly didn’t budge from her seat at a booth in the back, didn’t even lift her eyes from the Kierkegaard text she was buried in, but she flicked her fingers in a return wave.
“She likes you better than me,” Gillian complained. “I never get a wave.”
Biz grinned, irrationally gratified to be the teen philosopher’s favorite. “I understand her existential ennui.”
“Can you understand her into taking our order? I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes. I’m dying for one of Blanche’s Magic Mochas.”
“Aren’t you on call today?” The magic in Blanche’s Magic Mochas was a double shot of Scotch.
“No one gets sick on Fridays. It’s like a rule.”
“Since when?”
“Since Dave lost the Friday shift to me. It’s so slow. Last week I nearly gave myself an adrenaline shot just to make sure my heart hadn’t stopped from boredom.”
Dave and Gillian were the only two doctors at the Parish Island Health Clinic ever since Dr. Lindy retired. Whoever was officially on call at any given time had more to do with the dynamics of their marriage than any set schedule. It might have been disconcerting to know that the clinic schedule was typically determined by which of the Drs. Hale had most recently lost a bet to the other, if not for the fact that they both wanted to be the one on call, twenty-four/seven. And whenever a patient came in, they would fight over who got to treat them. It was odd, but oddly comforting.
“You want something?” Molly appeared suddenly at their table, her eyes fixed on a point on the wall three feet above their heads. She wore a blank Hello, My Name is… sticker and held a pen poised over an order pad, even though Biz had never once seen her write a single order down.
Biz and Gillian quickly ordered, before Molly’s whim for playing waitress evaporated. She slunk off toward the kitchen door with her still-blank order pad, and Gillian leaned across the scarred Formica.
“I’ve got the scoop on Mark Ellison.”
A stab of trepidation pierced Biz’s gut. Did she want to know anything more about him? Would it be better to just lock herself in her house for three weeks and cut off all contact with eligible men? If she knew too much about him, would that somehow trigger the curse? But maybe he didn’t want anything from her but her story… Maybe he’d be easy to send away if she just knew what lies to feed him…
Biz swallowed her doubts. She could argue in circles until doomsday. That certainly wasn’t going to break the curse. She needed to know more about Mark.
Because of the curse. Only the curse. It had nothing to do with the little shivery awareness she’d felt in his presence. Absolutely nothing to do with dimples or moonlit almost-kisses.
“Tell me.”
“He’s a reporter for the Raleigh Gazette—”
“I knew that already.”
Gillian rolled her eyes. “You knew he told you he was a reporter. He could have been a lying scumbag serial killer. Though, in this case, he wasn’t. We checked up on him and he’s legit. He does mainly human-interest stories. Puff pieces about reuniting long-lost siblings and good Samaritans doing stuff for others. That kind of touchy-feely crap.”
“So he really is just here for a piece about Valentine’s and depression? He doesn’t—” Biz stopped herself before she finished her sentence with suspect anything.
“What else would he want? And even if he is just here for the depression thing, he’s a slime bag. How dare he use you—”
“Gillian. What else did you find?”
Gillian made a face at being derailed from her rant but obediently went back to her report. “He used to do hard-hitting news stuff before he moved over to the lighter side. Politics, mostly, and some investigative stuff. He may be doing softball news, but don’t mistake him for a creampuff.”
Biz visualized Mark Ellison. Tall, chiseled and immoveable. No, she wasn’t likely to mistake him for a pushover.
“We tried to get more details out of him, but he’s good, Biz. Slippery. He charmed Mrs. Whittaker in under five minutes. She keeps calling him that sweet boy. She’d probably adopt him if he weren’t over thirty.”
“He’s over thirty?” Biz perked up, then kicked herself for paying more attention to his vital stats than the danger he represented.
“Thirty-two. Never married. Has a sister in Fayetteville with two kids, but he doesn’t get down there as often as he’d like. His parents retired to Arizona a few years back, and he flies out to spend every Christmas and Thanksgiving with them.” Gillian rolled her eyes. “Mrs. Whittaker didn’t seem to understand we weren’t trying to vet him as a possible husband for you.”
Biz seemed to be having a hard time remembering that fact herself. Much too hard a time. The curse was really doing a number on her this time.
“Has he been asking any weird questions?”
Before Gillian could answer, Molly appeared with both arms full of Heart Attack on a Plate. Gillian and Biz fell silent for several minutes to give Blanche’s cooking the proper respect. With her mouth full of powdered-sugary, cream-cheesy goodness, suddenly the curse looked a lot less terrifying.
Until the door to Blanchard’s opened and Mark Ellison walked through, dimples flashing.
Blanche’s Double-Stuft French Toast turned to sawdust in her mouth.
Chapter Eight—Modesty and Other Mythology
Had he gotten more gorgeous since the last time she saw him? Or was it just the shock of seeing him for the first time in good lighting? The face was still mouthwatering, but it was the arms her memory had failed to honor. In spite of the winter chill, he wasn’t wearing a jacket, and his sleeves were shoved up to the elbow, revealing tanned, corded forearms. Those arms made him seem capable, somehow. As if like Atlas he could lift the world.
“Ms. Marks. Fancy seeing you here.”
He smiled. Biz’s heart rate doubled.
She forced herself to swallow the sawdust and gave him a pathetic smile. “Yeah. Fancy.”
“That’s him?” Gillian asked in the world’s loudest whisper. “You said he was a hunk, but I thought we were grading on the Parish Island curve. God’s balls, he’d be a stud at a Hollywood premiere. Move over, McDreamy.”
Biz shot her a please-for-the-love-of-God-shut-up look. Where was a muzzle when you needed one?
Mark wove his way over to their table, a sly little smile saying he’d heard every word. Conceited jerk.
His eyes rolled over her from the top of her head to the table’s edge and back up again. Biz squashed the urge to check her hair. She hadn’t brushed it after falling out of bed, but she refused to feel self-conscious about her sloppy knot.
Even if he looked like he stepped right out of a catalogue, starched, groomed and gorgeous. Biz probably looked like she’d survived a cyclone flying away with her trailer. His expression was appreciative, but she needed him to stop staring. Only a deeply cursed man could appreciate her when she resembled a half-groomed yeti.
“Are you stalking me?”
“Good morning to you too, Biz. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”
Before she could reply, Molly materialized at his side as if by teleportation. “Can I get you anything?” she asked breathlessly, her eyes locked hypnotically on h
is face, Kierkegaard forgotten on the back table. “Anything at all.”
Mark ducked his head, and Biz thought she saw a touch of rose on his cheekbones. Was he blushing? Had Molly’s slavish adoration actually embarrassed him? “Just an orange juice. Thanks.”
Molly nodded five times in rapid succession, channeling an existential bobblehead, and then darted off to collect the nectar for her new deity.
“Cute kid.” He coughed, the red on his cheeks brighter.
Biz fell all over herself—literally—in his presence, and he just got cockier. Gilly compared him to a movie star and he took it as his due. But little Molly Kinneson decided to worship him and suddenly he was modest? Where had that come from? Biz began to wonder if she would ever see the real Mark Ellison beneath his chameleon surface.
Not that she wanted to know the real Mark Ellison. Not at all. She just wanted him to leave.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, not caring how rude she sounded. He’d avoided the stalking question, she noticed. Couldn’t a girl enjoy the best breakfast on the Eastern seaboard without being reminded of the day of death steadily approaching?
“I was walking by and I saw you through the window. What can I say, I felt compelled to come talk to you.” He slid into the booth beside her, his large body crowding against her. “Mind if I join you?”
Compelled. Oh, God. Last night she’d been so stupid to stay in his presence for even a nanosecond. She needed to keep her distance.
She scooted her hip away from his. “Would you leave if I said yes?”
“Not if I can change your mind.” His smile said he was sure he could. The man certainly didn’t lack for confidence.
“You know, at some point that arrogance is just sickening.”
He leaned closer, revealing little crinkles around his eyes when he smiled. “Do I sicken you, Biz?”
No, sir. That definitely wasn’t the problem.
She put her hand on his chest and shoved him back. He let her move him but gave just enough pressure that she felt the imprint of his muscles against her fingers. Yum. “Does no one ever say no to you?”
“No is just a point to begin negotiations.”
“No means no, honey.”
“Does it? Do you mean it, Biz? If you really mean it, just say the word and I’ll leave.”
“Before or after you get your interview?”
He shrugged. “There are other stories. This may come as a shock to you, but lots of people want to be interviewed by me.”
She’d buy that lots of people probably fell all over themselves to give him their stories—over and over and over again—but she didn’t believe he would give up and walk away so easily. He was lying, or at least not giving the whole truth, and not just because he was trapped by the curse. There was something else.
Molly appeared suddenly at the table, carrying the largest glass of orange juice Biz had ever seen and all but trembling with eagerness to serve. “You can interview me,” she vowed breathily.
Biz stole a look at Mark’s face. Definitely blushing.
“Thank you,” he said gruffly, inclining his head to indicate the gratitude was for the juice, not her adoration.
When Molly continued to hover, Gillian rolled her eyes. “Molly, can we get our check?”
The girl made a small protesting sound in her throat but backed away from the table, her eyes still fixed on Mark.
When she disappeared into the kitchen, he draped his arm across the back of the booth behind Biz and leaned toward her with an inviting gleam in his eyes. “See? Some people like me.”
“I don’t dislike you,” Biz admitted grudgingly.
“Is that why you sicced the town on me?”
Biz glanced guiltily across the table at Gillian who shrugged, her eyes flicking back and forth between Mark and Biz. “Don’t look at me. I’m just a spectator.”
Mark leaned closer. “I’ve been interrogated more in the last twenty-four hours than most terror suspects.”
“Not so much fun when you’re the one answering the questions, is it?”
“As a matter of fact, I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Fascinating town you’ve got here. You wouldn’t believe some of the things I was asked…let alone some of the things I was told.”
Nervousness filled her stomach with lead-winged butterflies.
“Ghosts, witches. It’s amazing what people believe, isn’t it?”
Oh, crud. He knew. Somehow he knew everything. “You don’t believe in ghosts?” she asked, her voice sounding choked and unnatural, even to her own ears.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…” He grinned. “I believe in possibilities, but the spirit of loved ones living on after their death seems more like a coping mechanism than truth to me. Like all those suckers who pay out the nose so some medium can reconnect them with their dead father one last time. It’s wishful thinking.”
Relief flooded her. He couldn’t know. You couldn’t know something if you didn’t believe it existed.
She should have just shut up and let it go at that, but his words were a challenge to her world view, and in her relief she couldn’t keep quiet. “You don’t believe their father’s spirit is still out there, watching over them?”
“It’s not the father’s spirit I don’t believe in. It’s the medium. If Daddy was really watching over you, he’d keep you away from conmen like that.”
“So what if there were unexplained events that showed Daddy was looking after his kids? A stray breeze that opens a door when your arms are full or a door you’re sure you locked being open when you’ve forgotten your keys? Maybe a radio stuck on his favorite station?” Or a chef preparing all your meals for you for a year after his death… “How would you explain that?”
“Maybe it’s coincidence. Hell, maybe it is Daddy. I just think we’re too eager to read into those events what we want to see in them.”
“Such a cynic.”
“Such a realist.” He grinned, suddenly intimately close again. “What do you believe, Biz?”
A warning voice told her not to talk to him, to walk away and leave him with his rationalizations, but she’d never been very good at listening to warning voices. “If you were chasing down a story and you kept hearing a certain rumor over and over and over again, would you start to believe there might be some truth in it?”
He shrugged. “I would believe that was what people believed, but popular opinion and fact diverge all the time.”
“Not if it’s history. History is popular opinion.” She shook her head. “I’m explaining it wrong. Take the flood. Noah.”
“The Bible guy?”
“Yeah, but he wasn’t just the Bible guy. Pretty much every culture that existed at that time had some version of the flood story. Not necessarily with the whole two-by-two bit, but the story was universal.”
“Yeah, antediluvian cultures are fascinating. What does this have to do with anything?”
“People from all different geographic regions came up with the same myth independent of one another. And because of that historians now believe there really was a flood. God commanding Noah to build an ark is a faith thing, but the existence of a flood is a fact.”
“Because of popular historic opinion.”
“Exactly.”
His mouth twitched, but his eyes gleamed with interest. “I still have no idea why we’re talking about this.”
“Witches.”
“Witches,” he repeated.
“The concept of magic, especially women as conduits for magic, has sprung up in countless cultures around the world since the beginning of recorded history.”
“Okay.”
“So there must be some truth in it.”
“That’s an interesting theory. Of course, it ignores the fact that superstition has always been used to cover the gaps in our scientific understanding, and women, as the non-ruling gender in most early cultures, would have been blamed for anything the men needed someone to take the
fall for.”
“So if I told you I came from a long line of witches, you would tell me I only thought that because I was a victim of a superstitious patriarchal society?”
He grinned, leaning forward and getting into the challenge of the debate, when a cough from the other side of the table startled them both. Gillian smiled blandly as Biz scooted as far as she could get from Mark on the narrow bench seat.
Where had her brain gone just then? Why was she sitting here arguing with him and trying to convince him witches existed when she should be running as fast as she could in the opposite direction? Dear God, she’d practically confessed to being a witch herself.
Gillian gathered up her coat. “As much fun as it is to sit here and be ignored by you two, I really need to be getting to the clinic.”
“No!” Biz blurted then blushed when both Mark and Gillian looked askance at her. Gillian couldn’t leave her alone with Mark. Even with a chaperone, she’d practically told him her deepest darkest secrets. Who knew what she would do if they were alone together? “You said yourself the clinic is never busy on Fridays.”
“And yet I still go to work. My dedication to life-saving is an inspiration, even to myself.” She stood, gathering up her windbreaker. “And if I skip a shift, Dave’ll try to steal it back from me. You two have fun now.”
“Gillian, wait, I’ll walk with you.” Biz started to shove Mark out of the booth, but Gillian was already out the door—and probably halfway down the block.
Mark stayed immobile on her side of the booth. “Alone at last.”
Panic spiked, hard and deep. When Gillian had been there—even when she’d forgotten Gillian was there—her presence had been a buffer. Biz had been able to forget about the curse for a moment—was it really so terrible to spend time with him in a group? The curse wouldn’t react to that, would it?