Page 2 of Best Hex Ever
“It’s a nazar amulet, right?” he said matter-of-factly. “Like your necklace.” He nodded toward Dina’s throat, where a hamsa with an evil eye set in the center rested. Her fingers reached up for it, and she felt the blush rising in her cheeks. She had no business letting a strange man—albeit a very attractive strange man—do this to her.
“Similar, yes. They’re both protection from the evil eye.”
“Should I be worried that it broke when I walked in?” He smiled, a mischievous glint in his eye.
“No, it’s fine, I break my pendants all the time,” she said, fiddling with her hamsa necklace. “It means it worked.”
“So it protected you?” The man leaned forward, resting his forearms on the counter, his voice husky. Dina could smell his cologne—cedar and something citrusy.
“It protected me.” It was odd. They were in the middle of her busy coffee shop, yet Dina felt like they were the only two people in the room. She hadn’t met someone so interested in her evil eye before, but he was looking at her with a calm, knowing inquisitiveness that sent shivers rippling down her neck.
She glanced down at the broken pendant on the counter. When it broke, had it protected the café, Dina, or this man? Either way, when she glanced at him, she felt unmoored. That was a bad sign. She couldn’t let his evident sexiness distract her.
“So”—she cleared her throat, willing the blush to fade from her cheeks—“what can I get you?”
“I’ll have an Earl Grey, and one of your croissants.”
“Any milk or lemon?” Look at her, keeping it super professional. She was definitely not staring at his flexing bicep as he pulled his wallet from his back pocket.
“Just black, thanks.”
Dina was about to duck under the counter to grab the jar of loose Earl Grey (she’d foraged the bergamot herself on a trip to Italy), when she heard a loud crash from one of the tables.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” a customer said, looking down at two cups of spilled coffee that had smashed on the floor. Dina smiled at the customer and was about to go and grab her mop from the store cupboard when she heard an awful rattling sound, followed by a pop. This wasn’t exactly unexpected—bad luck had a way of following Dina around.
“Coffee machine just broke!” Robin shouted.
Dina inhaled deeply, her hand curling into a fist. She glanced up at the handsome stranger, who she would probably never see again. His gaze was already on her.
“Robin, can you man the till? I’ll sort out the machine and spill,” Dina called. She walked away before the man could say anything else—anything that might make her turn around and do something foolish.
The coffee machine just needed a little elbow grease, she thought—and by “elbow grease,” Dina meant another punch of strong magic. Soon the spill was mopped up, the hot drinks replaced.
As Dina looked up, she saw the stranger leaving the café, sipping his Earl Grey. In another life, perhaps.
“Oh, I love a man in a turtleneck, it makes them look so studious.” Robin was standing beside her, grinning. Dina swatted them with a tea towel, and they both got back to work.
Chapter 2
Scott Mason ran a hand through his hair and tried very hard to think about work. He had to approve the exhibition posters, write his speech for the opening gala, and go to the archives for research. He had to think about anything other than that barista, who’d looked like she’d walked straight out of his daydreams and into reality. What idiocy had compelled him to leave the café before getting her number? Damn, he should have offered to get down on his knees and clean up the spilled coffee if it meant he could have continued speaking with her. He didn’t even know her name.
Scott sat in his office in the British Museum and stared at his laptop screen. His office was crammed full of as many books as it could hold—some left over from the curator who had worked here before him—and the towering stacks had a tendency to fall on him when he least expected it. There was a radiator in the corner that occasionally let out a metallic grunt but never actually seemed to warm up, and a family of pigeons had set up roost right outside his window. His desk chair creaked whenever he sat down, and the desk itself was stained with a century of ink spills, but now that he had hung up some postcards and prints from his travels and the previous exhibitions he’d curated, it was starting to feel like home.
Each time Scott had taken a sip of the delectably sweet Earl Grey tea from the café, his mind had strayed back to the barista. She’d reminded him of those Grecian goddess statues, all voluptuous curves and soft open features; those mahogany curls flecked with purple, eyes such a deep brown they were almost black. And those lips…“kissable” didn’t even begin to coverit.
He’d gone on a few dates since he’d moved back to London, mostly through the apps, and there was nothing wrong with the women he’d met up with. They’d all been attractive, intelligent, and funny, but something just wasn’t clicking. It wasn’t that he was still hung up on Alice; more that after being in a long-term relationship for a while he was bloody tired of going over the same first-date questions again.What do you do for work? What sort of stuff do you do on the weekends?All of these dating apps, and none of them could tell you anything about how chemistry worked in real life. It grated on him.
Scott hadn’t been able to get himself out of that funk. Until now. That barista had lit up something within him, like a ray of sunshine finally breaking through the clouds after a storm. She even had him thinking in cheesy similes. For the first time in ages, his body—his senses—felt awake. And hewanted.
This was Scott’s first year as the curator of the permanent collections, and he couldn’t help but feel that apart from Dr. MacDougall, who had stuck her neck out to hire him, some of the other curators and board members looked down their noses at him. Not all, mind you. It just happened to be the most powerful ones.
He’d done his best not to get distracted all afternoon. Dr. Jenkins and Dr. Garcia, two curators who far outranked him in seniority, weren’t pleased with his plans for the summer and autumn exhibition schedule. They had shuddered when Scott had dared to utter the phrase “interactive exhibition.” To them, a museum was not a place for children to learn aboutembalming mummies, or for anyone without a PhD to have access to the round Reading Room.
He remembered how shocked some of them had been when he’d explained that their idea for an exhibition based around the ancient sewage systems of Mesopotamia wasn’t likely to draw in big crowds.
Again, his mind was pulled back to the smile of the barista, the way she had blushed and touched her neck when he’d drawn attention to the hamsa necklace she wore. Maybe he should go back and offer to buy her a new amulet to replace the one he’d broken? Was that too much? He didn’t want to come on too strong.
Although their interaction had only lasted a moment, it had been delightful to talk about his passion for historical objects with someone else, especially anything related to talismans of luck or good fortune. Eric—Scott’s best friend—was always happy to listen but didn’t really reciprocate his interest. Alice had never been keen to talk about Scott’s work with him, and when she had, it was always to sneer that he could have made more money doing anything else. How many times had he explained that becoming a curator was not something a person did for money?
