Page 6 of Charming the Cowboy
This is it. I’m Sleeping Beauty, and his mouth is going to break my curse.
Everything I’ve ever wanted or needed is here, in this moment, in this breath.
Then he’d just…turned away from her.
And nothing before or since had made her feel that alive, that excited, thathorny, quite frankly.
Which seemed unfair. It also made it hard for her to completely let go of the idea of magic and curses.
She opened up the front door and was greeted by Fleetwood Mac playing on her grandmother’s old record player. Eliana raised a fist in the air and bopped into the kitchen, where her mother was standing in the corner, in front of an easel, paint spread out all over the table. It was always like this. It was warmth and chaos, and no order whatsoever. It had always been like that. And Eliana felt very lucky to have the family that she had.
“Hi, Mom,” she said.
“Hi there.” She didn’t look up from her canvas. Her hair was piled on top of her head, her salt-and-pepper curls still streaked with copper and held there by what looked like a fork and a paintbrush. She knew better than to ask questions.
“Busy?”
“Yes.”
“I hope it’s going well.”
“It’s not at all. But I’ll figure out what’s wrong with the painting if I stare at it long enough.”
“Okay,” Eliana said, opening up the fridge and grabbing a tray of sliced cheese from inside. She always sliced cheese at the beginning of the week and left it there in the fridge to paw through when she got off work. She was on her very last portion of cheese. She reached up into the cabinet and grabbed a sleeve of crackers, shutting it with her elbow before she turned out ofthe kitchen and went back into the living room. She assumed her grandmother was somewhere in the basement, working on her pottery wheel.
She hummed along to the music as she went upstairs and then lowered the ladder that led right up to her attic room.
She climbed it, balancing the sleeve of cheese and crackers. She had a stash of drinks up in her room to make her life easier and more hydrated.
She set the crackers and cheese down on her bed, then turned back around and pulled the ladder up, along with the hatch. Her room still looked much like it had all through her teenage years. Mismatched carpets all over the scarred wood floor, scarves hanging on the walls. She had a beaded curtain over the window that looked out at the ocean.
She had always loved it up here. Her own little world.
She had crystals scattered on the windowsill, and all over her dresser. Little pieces of protection, encouragement, empowerment.
So,shedid believe in magic, maybe a little bit more than she was ready to admit.
She opened up her mini-fridge and took out a can of Diet Coke, and then sat at the center of her bed, legs crossed, facing the window. She grabbed hold of two of the crystals there, and held them in the palm of her hand. “I’m a little bit tired of this curse. I think I should be allowed to change it. Or at least have hot sex.” She shook her hand, and set the crystals back on the windowsill.
That was not an official spell of any kind. She hadn’t tied it up in a bag or said an incantation, hadn’t lit anything on fire, or written out any intentions. But, she wasn’t all that serious anyway. It was very nearly the busiest time of the year for her, and she had bigger issues than her perennially stale sex life. If only that didn’t immediately make her think of Cooper. Who hadnever had anything to do with her sex life, and had only ever starred in it in her dreams.
If there were two people less likely to be compatible on Earth, it would be hard to find them. Well,romantically.
Sexually…
“No,” she said. “There will be none of that.” She needed Cooper to help her with the haunted hayride. As for anything else…
Well, there was nothing else. Cooper was her brother’s best friend, her impossible crush. That was all. As for her love life across the general romance spectrum?
It was doomed.
Because she was a cursed Sanderson, and romance was just never going to be in the cards for her.
Chapter Two
He should’ve known Eliana would text him first thing in the morning. He also should’ve known that she would’ve immediately gotten exactly what she wanted.
It was just how she was. A magical, infuriating, ridiculous human being. Always had been. From the moment he’d first laid eyes on her, she had shifted something inside of him.
