Page 19 of My Blind Date is a Warlock

“I’m only asking because I don’t want to be the stupid one who gives her heart away to a man who’ll be leaving any day now. Or is this just supposed to be a summer fling before you head back to Boston and take over for Pig-chard? I guess I’m not sure where we stand. What is it exactly you want out of this?” I asked, flicking a finger between the two of us.

“First of all—” He groaned, standing up from the floor and stretching even though there was a perfectly fine bench not even a foot away from his spot by the window. “—I never said that I was going to take over for Pritchard; I’m not even sure I want to. But after what you told me about his conduct, I certainly will be bringing up the topic of his replacement to the school board. And secondly, whatever this is, it’s not a fling, and I’m hoping to use this time we have together to figure out what it is. Boston is not on the other side of the world. It shouldn’t be too hard for two mule-headed idiots like us to figure out a way to make it work long-term if we really wanted to.”

I put a cork stopper on the potion bottles and took off the protective gear, tossing it onto the workbench. “I can’t tell if you’re stupidly optimistic or very naïve. Maybe you’ve never been in a long-distance relationship and have no idea the toll it takes on people,” I told him, my eyes following the Book of Shadows he placed on the table, the pages open wide. I frowned at the vestiges of dark magic emanating from the journal, despite Jacob reassuring me that it was safe. Chairman Meow had taken one look at it and bolted into the woods. “You find anything interesting in there?”

I moved to stand between his legs when he perched himself on the top of one of my worktables as if it was the most natural thing in the world to do. Likewise, Jacob’s big hands came to rest where my waist dipped in before flaring out to my narrow hips. If he moved them a fraction lower, those hands would be resting on my denim-covered butt. As if he could read my thoughts, his hands twitched before digging into the skin exposed by my midriff-baring tank top.

“Loads. I am both impressed and terrified of the way Tiberius’s mind worked, and it also puts into perspective why my grandfather and father were the way they were. Daniel too, sadly.”

Making a calculated decision, I placed my hands on his thighs, watching for the minute changes in his expression and body. I felt his thigh muscles, broad and hard as steel, twitch and tense up. His eyes went molten and there was a sensual lift to the corner of his lips as he arched in eyebrows in a silent question. “I can’t get a read on how you feel about your family. You talk of your grandmother, mother, and sisters with a fond tenderness, but the male members of your family with a bittersweet tenderness.”

“Then I’d say you’ve read me really well, Fia.” He played with my beaded, turquoise, chandelier earrings. “All those reasons why you hate the general warlock population? The bigotry, superiority complex, the cruel arrogance, and autocratic high-handedness? That’s how the men in my family were raised. How I would have been raised had my grandfather not passed away while I was a baby and my grandmother not taken me in, away from my childhood home and my father’s toxicity. My older sister, though, she was not so lucky.” His eyes went a glacial blue, fractured through with sea-glass green that shattered out from the pupils. There was such keening pain reflected in them, it made my heart grow heavy with sadness.

“What happened to her?” I intertwined our fingers together and laid them on the desk on either side of his spread legs.

“She mated with the alpha of a leopard pack in Kenya. Mom and Dad had Jazz—that’s short for Jasmine—in their teens, so there’s a fifteen-year age gap between us. I was just starting out at Redwood when she met Aasir while doing a stint for Doctors Without Borders out in Nairobi. They were mated within three months of their meeting. When father found out, he disinherited her and told her never to darken his doorstep again. I remember him yelling at my sister, asking her why she’d lower herself to laying with an animal.” He ground out through clenched teeth. “The way he said it, as if Aasir was a mindless, savage beast instead of alpha to one of the biggest packs in Africa and the C.E.O of a successful communications company. I’d never seen him so livid before. I mean, I’d always known that he hated us having to associate with shifters or vampires or humans, even though there was not much we could do about it since he was a successful lawyer with most of his clients being humans. But when Jazz came home to share the good news and introduce her then-fiancé, that’s when I saw the first glimpse of the monster lurking within the man I used to respect, and I was powerless to do anything to help my sister.”

“Oh, Jacob, I’m so sorry you and your sister had to go through that.” I didn’t know what else to say to assuage the guilt that was clearly eating him up inside. But he was just a kid when all of that went down. What could he have done to stop his father from tearing their family apart? I kept this thought to myself, though. I got the feeling that it would not make him feel any better. “What about your mother? Did she try to persuade your father otherwise?”

He snorted, the bemused scoff eerily horse-like in its sound. “My mother is a sweet, soft-spoken witch who was raised to believe that a wife always stands behind her husband, and I do mean that quite literally. Unless my father says otherwise, she walks a step behind him and waits on him hand and foot. She became pregnant at sixteen and married my father a year later. She never got the chance to explore who she was as an individual. Her entire existence has been inextricably intertwined with my father’s. Though it breaks her heart that she cannot see her oldest daughter and grandson without my father blowing a gasket, she still maintains her distance from Jazz out of deference to him. My grandmother, Lorraine, married into the Buchanan family just like my mom, but she’s a strong woman who has never been afraid to speak her mind.” The shadows in his eyes lessened in intensity as he spoke about his grandmother.

“She always tells me, ‘Jacob, my boy—’” He mimicked what I assumed was Lorraine Buchanan’s stern voice. “‘—you find a girl who gives back as good as she gets. None of these flighty girls who’ll roll over on their back and let you bulldoze over them with your nonsense. You find a woman who’ll knock the sense back into that big, stubborn head of yours and hold you up when you feel like you’re about to drown. You find a woman who’s not afraid to soar high above the clouds with you and roll in the filthiest muck with you. You find her, you cherish her, and never, ever make her feel like she’s less than the gum beneath your shoe.’”

As he spoke, he didn’t take his eyes off me. And I couldn’t take my eyes off him. My throat and mouth had gone dry.

“She sounds like a wise woman, your grandmother.”

“She is. When she realized that Father was raising me to be just like him and my mother was doing nothing to stop him, she got me and my younger sisters out there and revoked his title as heir of the family. For all that he was super traditional, at least grandfather had the sense to name her head of the family before he passed. I’m just glad that she didn’t name my aunt as the heir either. Goddess knows she would have let Daniel run our family into the ground long before now.”

“No offense to your family, but you make me glad that the only thing I have to worry about in my family is a meddling, matchmaking grandmother.”

That startled a laugh out of him. He threw his head back and chortled, dispelling the heavy atmosphere that had settled around us.

“You know, I’ve been hearing talk about that, and every time I step into a store or just walk about town, random people come up and ask me if we’ve made it official yet. So, that stunt with the dinner date was Beverley setting us up on a blind date?”

“Yep,” I said, popping the ‘p’ for emphasis. “And she wanted to give you your great-great-grandfather’s journal.” I ran a finger over the aged paper and faded ink, gasping when I felt a dark jolt of power run up my arm and settle somewhere in my chest.

“Even though it’s full of questionable things, I’m glad I got it back. Not only can I keep it safe from the wrong hands, but it is a family heirloom—even if some of the stuff written here makes Tiberius come off as a megalomaniac. There’s a spell in here that he never completed, but from his notes, it sounds like he was trying to find a way to compel other beings into servitude for witches and warlocks, stripping away their free will.”

“Yikes. If you start feeling the urge to take over the world, please let me know. I wouldn’t mind knocking you upside the head once or twice.” I curled my hand into a fist and pretended I was going to bonk him on the head. Jacob grabbed it with ease and jumped off the table.

“Duly noted. But enough talk of all my bleak family life. I am ready to take you out on that date now, Fia. What say you?”

“I say you better charm my socks off. And, Jacob?” I cut him off when he would have started celebrating. “If you want to kiss me now, I wouldn’t be too mad about it.”

He froze for a moment, and then he didn’t waste any time. Between one breath and the next, my feet were swept off the ground and then I had the hard surface of the work desk underneath my butt. Jacob grabbed my face in a rough hold and kissed me brutally. It was not as sweet and gentle as I thought our first kiss would be, but a savage branding, a clash of teeth and tongues and fighting for breath in between.

It was only when we heard a soft thump followed by Chairman Meow’s loud yowl that I pulled away reluctantly and tried to blink away the stars in my vision and clear the cobwebs clouding up my brain. Our chests rose and fell in sync, both our pulses wild and erratic.

“Let me, uh…” I lost my train of thought when he began to trail down my neck, giggling when he started sucking at the ticklish spot just below my ear. My body gave an involuntary jerk when his fingers snuck under my shirt and brushed against my bra—if I weren’t wearing one right then, I would have been a puddle at his feet. Already my bones were liquid and he’d done nothing more than kiss the ever-loving heck out of me and cop a feel.

“Jacob,” I moaned in protest even though I leaned into his chest. “I need to feed Chairman Meow and then we can go on that date I owe you.”

“How about we skip right ahead to dessert?” he rumbled, his bristly whiskers rubbing against my cheek, no doubt leaving a trail of red marks. Anyone who saw me would know right away that those marks were beard burns.

“That’s fifth…no, sixth date stuff. So how about it, big guy? We’ll never get to a sixth date if we don’t have this first one.”

With a groan, he stopped his ministrations and stepped away from me, letting me drop to the floor with my jelly legs.

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