Page 40 of Under Daddy's Spell

Hearing his sexy rumble as his brief away message played, “You’ve reached Coop. Leave a message,” made her weak for other reasons.

“Jordan?” she said after the beep. “Tessa. I called to inform you I’m unavailable for dinner tomorrow night.”

That was it.

If her genteel Southern mama hadn’t instilled good manners into her throughout her childhood, she wouldn’t have bothered. The way she ended the call, without an apology or, at the very least, a goodbye, rubbed against the grain, but Mr. Arrogance didn’t deserve, either.

Tessa went on cleaning, making plenty of noise but not enough to drown out her grumbling. She slammed drawers and the cooler door several times as she put things away. Then she stomped noisily across the tile floor to switch off the lights. She did the same when she crossed the front, stopping to tidy books on a display table here and there before moving behind the register counter.

Still fuming hours after the incident, she had to count her drawer three times before it came out even. After wiping the counter down with a Clorox wipe, she picked up her after-hours deposit bag, glad to be calling it a night, but, on the way out of the narrow space, she almost faceplanted on the tile. Her bag went flying when she caught herself on the counter’s edge. It dug into her ribs, but the pain in her shin took her to the floor.

Grabbing her throbbing leg with both hands, she hissed and rocked and muttered things she shouldn’t have. When she could bear to, she turned to see what had tripped her. The box of old books she’d shoved under the counter then forgotten about when the heat wave insideTournez La Pagehad struck, stuck out at an odd angle.

“Damn books. How did I know they’d be trouble?”

Pushing gingerly to her feet, she retrieved the deposit bag that had hit the floor twenty feet away and dropped it atop the oversized box that she hefted with a grunt. Until her dad could appraise them, they needed to be in her office for safekeeping and, more so now, out of the way.

Tessa limped toward the center aisle, but something jarred her memory, and she staggered to a halt.

“Dammit!” she said as a frustration reliever instead of stomping her foot, which would have only made her sore leg sore.

Turning sharply right, she hobbled to the other side of the shop because, in her infuriation with Jordan, she’d forgotten to cash out Angie’s register.

“Tessa?” a deep voice called.

She never thought she’d see the day she would be glad to have Seth rather than his boss walk her to her car, but here it was.

“I’ve still got a few things to do,” she called back.

“That’s what I came to tell you. I’m behind. I’ll be another thirty minutes. Whatever you do, don’t go without me, or you-know-who will be pissed.”

That would make two of them.

To Seth, she replied, “No problem. I’ve got plenty to do.”

Angie’s drawer came out even on the first try, but she was too mad for any of the 1001 other things she had to do, so she was ready to go in five minutes. While she waited, the peaceful quiet of her store reminded her of what it had been like three months ago before a gym opened next door.

She eyed the box containing the books she expected would appraise in the thousands.

“I could sell a few and put in soundproofing. That would take care of the Hulk.”

She pulled the box in front of her. “Or pay off some bills. I could pay Seth for one of these portable A/Cs and return the other two then I’d be prepared should this ever happen again.”

She took the lid off, sorted through the ones on top, then dug deeper until she found the one she didn’t think she’d ever part with. Who was she kidding? She was a book fanatic and would give up food before giving up first editions.

The book of poetry she was hunting for was all the way at the bottom with the leather-bound spell book.Curious about the unknown more than the comfortable and familiar, she pulled out the old, heavy book instead.

She ran her fingers over the engraved title. “Who were you,Ashural,and what kind of magic brought you to my shop?”

Black magic,a voice seemed to whisper.

She should have heeded the warning, but like Pandora with her box, curiosity overtook good judgment. Tessa opened it and began turning pages.

Abruptly, she stopped and moved to the sink to wash and thoroughly dry her hands. She’d done a summer internship at the Library of Congress in Washington while in college. When it came to rare antiquarian books, white gloves were a pervasive myth. They carried more dirt than clean, bare hands and led to damaged or torn pages during handling.

Feeling safer with the old tome, she carefully turned past several handwritten pages, which she’d have to decipher later when she had a lot more time, in search of a table of contents. Unlike modern texts, it didn’t appear to have one and jumped right to chapter one—Healing and Protection Spells.

The following chapters seemed to be grouped by purpose, but within them, there was no organization that she could tell, not even alphabetical. It jumped around from love and friendship to luck and fortune and weather and earth. Much of it read like poetry with a lot of thees, thines, and ’twases. It contained potions for everything from ague to winter fever, spells for prosperity and wealth, and an incantation to remove an obsession. The spell to infuse passion in the bedroom would have been more intriguing before her falling-out with the hunk next door.

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