Crystal Cove (Friday Harbor #4)(2)

“I’m afraid that reading about fantasy men might raise my expectations at a time when I need to lower them.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’ve never thought your expectations of men were all that high to begin with.”

“Oh, yes they were. In the past, I would only go out with a guy if he had a good personality, a decent body, and a job. Now I’d settle for a man who isn’t currently married or incarcerated.”

“Reading about fantasy men won’t raise your expectations. It’s just a nice escape.”

“And of course you need an escape,” Justine said dryly, “from your hideous troll of a fiancé.”

Zoë laughed. Alex Nolan, a local builder, could be legitimately called many things, but “hideous troll” was not among them. He was a singularly attractive man, dark-haired and lean, with austerely perfect features and glacier-blue eyes.

No one would have paired the cynical and hard-drinking Alex with someone as gentle-natured as Zoë. But during the process of remodeling a cottage on Dream Lake for Zoë over the summer, Alex had surprised everyone, including himself, by falling deeply in love with her. He had stopped drinking and had straightened out his life. It was obvious to everyone that Zoë had him wrapped around her finger. She could manage him so sweetly that he didn’t seem to notice—or care—that he was being managed.

Although Justine had never experienced real love, she knew it when she saw it. When Zoë and Alex were together, they tried to be casual, but the emotion was still too new and raw for either of them to be easy with it. Their intense awareness of each other was emblazoned in the air no matter how discreet they were. Sometimes it was even in their voices, as if love had filled them until they had to remind themselves to breathe.

You could feel terribly lonely, being around that kind of love.

Snap out of it, Justine told herself sternly. You have a great life. You have everything you need.

Most of the things she had longed for had finally come to her. Caring friends … a home … a garden … a front porch with potted impatiens and trailing verbena. For about a year she’d even had a boyfriend, Duane, a biker with tattoos and big sideburns and an easy laugh.

But Duane had broken up with her just a few weeks ago, and now whenever they happened to cross paths, he was distantly friendly, his gaze never meeting hers. They had broken up when she had inadvertently scared the hell out of him.

Her gaze lowered to the romance novel. She pushed the book away like a sated diner refusing an extra piece of cake.

“Thanks for bringing the book,” she said, while Zoë turned on the ovens and went to pour herself some coffee. “But I wasn’t actually planning to read it in the first place.”

Zoë cast a quizzical glance over her shoulder. “What were you going to do with it?”

Self-mocking amusement twitched the corners of Justine’s mouth as she admitted, “Burn it and buy you a new copy.”

Zoë fumbled with a spoon as she stirred cream into her coffee. Turning to Justine, she asked blankly, “Why were you going to burn my romance novel?”

“Well, I wasn’t going to burn the whole thing. Just a page.” Seeing her cousin’s confusion, Justine explained sheepishly, “I was planning to sort of … well, cast a spell. And it called for setting fire to ‘words of love scripted on parchment.’ So I thought a page from a romance novel would do the trick.”

“Who were you going to put a spell on?”

“Me.”

Judging from Zoë’s expression, an inquisition was about to start. “You’ve got some cooking to do,” Justine said hastily, “and I need to roll out the coffee cart to the lobby—”

“The coffee cart can wait” came the gentle but inflexible reply.

Justine sighed and settled back in her chair. Silently she reflected that although she was known as the bossy and opinionated cousin, Zoë was the one who got her way more often. She just happened to be quieter about it.

“You’ve mentioned this stuff about spells before,” Zoë said. “And I remember when I was having problems with Alex, and you offered to put a curse on him. I thought you were joking, trying to make me feel better. But now I’m getting the impression that you weren’t kidding.”

No. Justine had not been kidding.

She had never made a secret of the fact that she had been raised in the pagan tradition. What she hadn’t admitted outright was that she, like her mother, Marigold, was a hereditary witch.

So many varieties of witchcraft existed that the word itself was practically meaningless without a qualifier. There was classic witchcraft, eclectic witchcraft, monotheistic witchcraft, Gardnerian, goth, Wiccan, and so forth. But Family Tradition witchcraft was a rare, centuries-old category of natural-born witches … those with magic in their DNA.

Throughout Justine’s childhood, her mother had instructed her in the ways of the Tradition. She had taken Justine to festivals, camps, classes, often moving the two of them at a whim with no regard for school schedules. One year they had lived in Oregon, and the next they’d stayed in a pagan community in Sacramento … then a few months in New Mexico … Alaska … Colorado … Justine couldn’t remember all the places they had stayed. But they had returned most frequently to Friday Harbor, which was the closest thing to a home that Justine had ever known.