Suddenly Sorceress (7 page)

Matt was always clean-shaven, his hair always combed, and his clothes freshly laundered. But he wasn’t sexy. Not even a little. What had I been thinking? Jackson Blake rocked the sexy so hard it bordered on dangerous—for me anyway—and it thrilled me as much as it terrified me. No way in hell was I his type.

“Did you hear me, Ivie?” He waved a hand in front of my face.

“Hmmm?”

“I asked if you’d studied magic anywhere.”

“Study? Like at Hogwarts? No.” I swallowed a giggle. “I’d never attempted magic before. Never even
thought
about it. I didn’t actually attempt it this time, either. I just lost my temper and…
bam
!” I slammed my hand on the table and bit back a grin when he flinched. “He was an animal. Totally unplanned.”

“So you don’t practice witchcraft or belong to any Wicca groups or covens?”

“Me? No. I’m a teacher. I belong to the PTA. I don’t have a crystal ball, a broomstick, or even a broom—I have a Swiffer. I’ve never mixed a potion, other than the rare margarita, and I don’t mix a very good one of those either.”

“Were you drinking last night?” He grinned.

Did I look like a lush? Did my breath smell of alcohol? I think not. “I had a few glasses of wine. I wasn’t drunk if that’s what you mean.”

“Sorry. I had to ask.” He looked at me from under thick lashes.

I leaned in and started to place my hands on his. I let them fall on the table instead. “I need help. That trick you did with the snake, could you teach me to do that?”

“Sure. I can help you.” His face lit up as if he held back a smile. “Have you ever heard of a convergence of magic?”

Eight

C
onvergence of magic, my ass!

Tamping down my anger as well as could be expected, I climbed into the driver’s seat of Matt’s red BMW and slammed the door. I had stuck around long enough to hear his explanation, but if Jackson Blake thought I would trek into the woods with a complete stranger to attempt some sort of spell in the middle of the night, he had another think coming.
How gullible did I look?
I’d seen enough slasher movies to know better than that.

But oh, my God, what a way to go.

I narrowed my eyes at him, still sitting in the booth, a forkful of waffle poised at his kissable lips and flashing that damn sexy grin at me through the plate glass window. He waved one last time, and I shifted, averting my eyes from his smoldering stare. No more crazy ideas. I needed to regroup and try something else. There had to be another way. I’d gotten myself into that mess; surely I could get myself out. So what if brushing against Jackson Blake’s leg under the table was the closest I’d been to the tingle I felt when doing magic? That didn’t mean
anything
. If I was being honest, I would admit I was more afraid of myself than the stupid hot magician. Hell, it had taken everything in me to keep from straddling him right there in the booth.

Time to go home and try the spell again. After all, I’d managed to change Matt three times without help. Focus. That’s all I needed. Right.
Focus
.

I spent the better part of the drive home
focusing
on how Jackson Blake smelled, like clean sweat and spicy deodorant, all musky and manly and… I squirmed against the seatbelt. I needed to focus on something else—like being on the rebound. I should be getting over a horrible breakup and downing gallons of Ben and Jerry’s while listening to Air Supply, not trying to get a hold of Jackson Blake’s magic wand.

Besides, could I even call it a breakup? I didn’t give him back the ring, even if he had asked for it. But I doubted his first words when he resumed his douchey humanness would be, “Let’s try again!” So I guess
technically
, I was single. There’s nothing wrong with a single girl lusting after an attractive guy, and holy Houdini was he beautiful. But that’s entirely beside the point. No matter how gorgeous Jackson Blake was, I would not—under any circumstances—go into the woods with him.

I took the highway off-ramp a little too fast, and my tires screeched. Damn Jackson Blake and his stupid panty-melting grin for distracting me from miles away. I’d known him all of two hours and I already liked him better than my snake of an ex-fiancé.

The streets on my side of town were deserted, and I contemplated running the red light.
Who would know?
Instead, I fiddled with the radio. My fingers froze on the classic rock station as the crescendo of “Magic Man” blared through the speakers. If I had been standing, my knees would have buckled. Incredibly bad timing? Or a sign from above? Either way, I was screwed.

I gunned the engine a split second before the light changed to green and turned left onto the main drive. I wasn’t going home. Despite my better judgment, I headed straight back to the stupid Awful Waffle and the ridiculously hot magician eating eggs and waffles in the booth where I’d left him. I only hoped he would still be there.

An icy gust of wind swirled my hair around my face, and I pushed it back with an unsteady hand as I struggled to follow Jackson Blake through the underbrush. It had been a short drive from the diner—maybe twenty minutes in the opposite direction from home—but we’d been trekking into the thick of the woods for several minutes since parking our cars. Keeping up with him was brutal.

He seemed unaware of the dropping temperature. Even dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, I felt the wintry air soak into me and shook like Bruce Banner in the throes of a temper tantrum. “Why is it so damn
cold
?” I muttered. He didn’t answer. I didn’t really expect him to.

I tripped over a tree root and narrowly avoided genuflecting at his feet. Jackson Blake threw me a disapproving scowl and rolled his eyes when I pointed to my wedge heel boots. What did he know about trudging through the woods in heels? Nothing, that’s what.

All he’d told me was he knew the perfect place for some kind of magical ceremony. A convergence, he called it. I would have to take the professional magician’s word for it. What I knew about magic would fit on the inside of a bubble gum wrapper.

An owl hooted in the distance, and I flinched. At least, I
hoped
it was an owl. The damn farm was looking positively civilized now. Not a good sign.

There aren’t any wild goats in the woods, are there?
“Remind me again why we’re wandering through the woods on the coldest night of the year,” I demanded through chattering teeth.

“You’re exaggerating. There have been worse nights than this,” he argued with an audible grin.

I grumbled out my dissent. “When?”

He laughed and kept moving forward, his path illuminated only by his cell phone. He didn’t seem to have trouble navigating the obscure path.

Why do I suddenly feel like the Blair Witch?
“Do you even know where we’re go-
oh
-ing?” I stumbled over a loose rock.

“Just try to keep up.”

Really, I
was
trying. The wedge heel boots were officially a regrettable choice. They wouldn’t have been good to run in either, as it turned out. “So Jackson Blake…” I half-jogged to catch up to him, moving with the unsteady gait of a drunken baby learning to walk.

“Jack,” he said over his shoulder.

“Right. Sorry. J-Jack. You said your family was magically inclined, so I’m guessing you’ve done this convergence thing before?” I tried to gauge his expression in the dim light.

“Not exactly,” he said with a quick sideways glance. “I’ve read about it though. Piece of cake. You’ll see.”

He lengthened his footsteps until he was a stride and a half ahead of me again and we walked in silence for another several minutes.

We’d hiked for ten minutes past the point where I felt comfortable when we finally stepped into a small clearing. A blackened spot in the center marked where a fire had burned in the recent past. The charred-wood smell, acrid and unmistakable, hung in the frigid night air.

“Where are we?” I searched for a possible, yet nonexistent, escape plan. Without shelter from the trees, the gusts of frozen air whipped freely around us. The biting wind made me wonder if it might snow. It rarely did in Atlanta, even in the dead of winter. October shouldn’t be so cold. “Do you come here often?” I swallowed a nervous giggle at my unintentional pick-up line.

He smiled and muttered under his breath as he dug through his pockets.

Surely, I must have heard him wrong.
I shivered as much from his ridiculous suggestion as the chill. I was crazy to be out without a jacket and he wanted me to…

“Take off all my clothes?” My voice came out in a strangled squeak.

He nodded, pulling a lighter from his pocket with a satisfied grin.

“You’re joking, right?” I stared at him, gnawing on my lips.
They’re
probably a lovely shade of cornflower blue by now
.

He stared back. I shuffled back and forth in a feeble attempt to generate heat and waited for him to crack a smile or laugh. He did neither.

“It’s crucial,” he said.

A glance at his serious expression set my heart on a collision course with my throat. I couldn’t speak for a full minute. “Why? Why…
naked
?” I whispered the word as if it had power.

“Ivie, you told me you did research. Surely you learned that witches do their best spells when free of constraints.”

“Like clothes?” I asked, sarcasm dripping from my voice.

“Exactly. Like clothes.”

I
had
read that. But I’d chalked it up to silly superstitions, not fact. Tightening my arms over my chest, I tried to tuck myself into a fetal position while still standing. “Look, I don’t know you.” My teeth chattered as I spoke. “A few days ago, if anyone had told me I would be wandering deep into the woods with a total stranger—a club magician no less—I would have laughed at them. Hell, I probably would have had them fitted for a straitjacket. So if you think, for even one fraction of a second, I’m stupid enough, or crazy enough, to strip out here in the woods with
you
, well then you’re—”

He stopped fidgeting with his lighter and folded his arms, a self-satisfied grin on his handsome face. “The only guy who knows how to help you with the spell you’re trying to do?”

He had me there. “But it’s c-c-cold outside,” I complained. “I can’t feel my toes.”

He glanced to where the moon would be if it wasn’t hiding behind the clouds. “We need to draw our powers together where they can supercharge. Our clothes will block the connection.” He gazed at me, and his blue eyes looked almost black in the dark. “You don’t want to impede the power exchange, do you?”

I exhaled. “No.” I covered my face with both hands and peeked at him through my fingers. “But we’re going to freeze to death. You know that, right? Can we at least leave our underwear on?”

“I think that would be okay,” he conceded. “But if there isn’t a power surge, we may need to take them off.”

I groaned. We really needed to have a power surge. I had less than three days to change Matt back or I’d be calling in sick again on Monday—
from jail
.

He stalked away and gathered up loose limbs and twigs, throwing them into the burned-out center of the circle. “Help me. We need to build a fire.”

I helped him collect enough leaves and branches to start a pathetic fire that didn’t give off much heat. The illusion was almost enough to propel me to take the next step though. I pulled my hands into the sleeves of my turtleneck and stopped to glare at him. “Turn around. This is hard enough without you watching me.”

“Sure.” He turned his back to me.

Before lifting my shirt over my head, I edged closer to the pitiful flames and waited until I felt a flicker of warmth. Then I folded the turtleneck and placed it on a large flat stone by my feet. Jackson Blake pulled his white Henley over his head and dropped it, letting it puddle at his feet. He had a nice back. His muscles bunched when he moved, like a swimmer’s. Then he unbuttoned his jeans, and my mouth dropped open.

He chuckled. “Now who’s watching who?” he said with his back still to me.

My teeth clamped down on my bottom lip, and heat moved from my chest to my hair. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” I spun away from him. “I don’t usually do things like this.”

He chuckled again. “Things like what?”

“Take off my clothes in an open field,” I replied with a nervous giggle. “With a total stranger.” I pulled off my boots one at a time and slid them under my folded shirt.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I don’t do this either.”

“No. It doesn’t make me feel better,” I mumbled as I finished undressing.

Of all the nights to wear a slinky thong, I chose the one night I end up naked in the woods. Once my jeans were folded and added to my pile of clothes, I said, “Okay, now what?”

“Now we have to get closer. Our bodies need to come in direct contact,” he said.

I shuddered at the thought.

“It’ll channel the magic, and it’ll help keep us warm.” I wasn’t sure, but I could have sworn he sounded nervous. I spun around to see his expression. “I’m freezing my ass off.” He blew a white cloud into his hands with an obvious shiver.

Right. Cold. Not nervous. “So do I come to you, or do you come to me?” I asked with a tremor that was most definitely
not
from the weather.

“That all depends. I can come to you… if you trust me to turn around.”

“I’ll come to you. Don’t turn around,” I blurted. He stood about six feet away, facing the dark woods, and I tiptoed across the moist grass until I stood behind him, close enough to feel his body heat. “Okay. Now what?”

“Put your arms around me. We need to be as close as possible.”

I wrapped my arms around his waist and tucked myself against him, pressing my cheek against his warm back. It felt good—strange but good. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been that close to Matt. “Now what?”

“Now we concentrate on drawing our magic together. You focus on mine, and I’ll focus on yours. It should cause the convergence to occur. We should be able to feel it.”

“
Ooooh
-kay.”

“Close your eyes,” he whispered.

I squeezed my lids shut and concentrated on drawing the magic. “They’re closed.” I should have felt the magic surge. I knew that much. Even in bitter cold, I should have felt the warmth. “I don’t feel anything. It should be growing. Do you feel anything?”

“I definitely feel something growing,” he choked out in a husky voice.

“It’s not working.” I pouted. “Can we get closer to the fire?”

“We can try that.”

We moved together until we were less than a foot from the crackling flames.

“Still not working,” I huffed, watching my breath swirl.

“Maybe we need to…”

I held my breath, waiting for him to say we needed to remove the thin layer of undergarments still between us.

“Maybe…” He cleared his throat. “Maybe we need to be face to face. So we can see into each other’s eyes.”

I bit down on my lip. That sounded so personal. As if what we were doing wasn’t personal enough. But desperate times… I tipped my face up to the night sky where the thick clouds hid the moon. “Okay.” I lowered my arms and closed my eyes as he turned around to face me.

“You can open your eyes,” he whispered, his warm breath in my hair.

“I’d rather not.”

“Please, open your eyes.”