Chapter 12
Martin, the all-purpose butler and weekend chaperone, directed them to the aptly named Green Room, where dinner would be eaten. Dina glanced up at Scott, and found him studying her with a guarded expression. Laughter from the room ahead called their attention away.
The Green Room had been lavishly decorated for the dinner, and Dina was reminded again just how rich Eric and his family were. The huge vaulted room was flooded in the warm glow of tens, if not hundreds, of candles—not a single one of the electrical lights was switchedon.
Candlesticks of polished brass lined the center of the long table. Thick, bone-white pillar candles glowed in copper sconces on the walls. A chandelier of twinkling crystal scattered rivulets of light across the room, like light refracted through a diamond.
Almost immediately, Dina and Scott were pulled apart, as Dina’s parents wanted her to introduce them to more people and Scott was roped into helping Eric’s great-aunt find her seat.
“So, how’s the Hunting Lodge treating you?” Immy said, sidling up to Dina. “Has the Hunting Lodge made you blush yet?”
“The Hunting Lodge has been a perfect gentleman,” Dina replied through gritted teeth.
“Well, he can’t keep his eyes off you, that’s for sure,” Rosemary added, joining them. She was wearing a beautiful polka-dotted dress that flared out below the waist.
Dina looked across the room and locked eyes with Scott, who was currently surrounded by a gaggle of aunts, standing at least a head taller than all of them. One of them had reached up to squeeze his bicep and Dina felt a flare in the pit of her stomach.
“We’re just friends,” she said.
“I wish I had a friend who looked at me like he wants to rip my clothes off.” Rosemary grinned.
Dina felt a wave of desire wash over her and longed to throw her arms around Scott’s broad shoulders. His voice when he’d praised her earlier by the fire had just about sent her off the edge. She wanted him. Badly. Her pussy was slick with it, but she tried to push her focus away, at least for tonight.
“For tomorrow night…” Rosemary began, leaning in conspiratorially. “What time should we start?” Rosemary hadn’t been to one of their Halloween rituals since she’d lived in England, and Dina had added a few more magical components to it over the years.
“We’ll escape just before midnight to make sure the moon is still full. Immy, you said my mum arranged this all with Honeywell House. Will they have a bonfire for us?”
“Yeah, in the north field. I told Martin we were going to be dancing around naked and he appeared visibly unwell,” Immy cackled.
They took a turn about the room, smiling at guests, like three female leads in a Jane Austen novel. A lot more of Immy and Eric’s friends had turned up later in the afternoon, and the room was alive and buzzing. A few of Immy and Rosemary’s horror novelist friends waved them over.
“We need your opinions on something,” Ash said, sipping from a cocktail. “Deep sea horror. What’s the scariest thing you can think of?”
Dina, being a thalassophobe, shuddered at the thought.
“The Mariana Trench,” Immy said. “Those cliff edges inside the water where it’s darkness all the way down. So. Much. Potential.”
“Seconded,” said Jeremy, an editor at a film magazine.
“I’ve read that there’s a church in Austria that’s completely abandoned, and over the years it’s been covered with water so now it’s at the bottom of a lake, and you can only find it if you go looking,” Dina told the group.
“I’ve never heard of it. You’re sure this is real?” Rosemary said, pulling out her phone. “Oh my god, Dina’s right. It’s the fucking sunken place. Okay, Dina wins because that is absolute nightmare fuel.”
“What’s nightmare fuel?” Eric said, wrapping his arms around Immy and planting a kiss on the top of her head.
“Dina is regaling us with stories about creepy underwater churches,” Immy replied, leaning back into Eric’s hug.
“I would expect nothing less.” Eric grinned. “But I’ve been told by Martin, who seems very stressed, that we all need to take our seats for dinner.”
Dina glanced down at the place cards arranged on the table. Immy had seated Dina next to her and Rosemary, and directly opposite Scott. No surprises there. Eric was sitting beside Scott, and opposite his wife-to-be.
Dina was about to sit down when a deep voice behind her rumbled, “Please, allow me.”
Scott was standing behind her, close enough that she could smell his moss and sea salt cologne and feel his breath on the back of her neck.
“A consummate gentleman,” she joked. “I guess chivalry isn’t dead.” She could have sworn his pupils dilated as she turned and looked up, feeling the heat of him so close to her.
Scott pulled out the chair, and when Dina sat down, he slid her closer to the table. As he did so, he bent close.
“That dress really suits you,” he said, low enough that only she would hear.
In his mouth, the compliment sounded positively filthy.
Scott took his seat and she felt his eyes on her, hungry. His hair, curling at the ends, fell across his face in the most flattering way. Dina wanted to run her fingers through it. She kept glancing his way all through the first two courses.
“What do you do then, Scott?” Dina’s mother launched into conversation with all the subtlety of a nuclear missile. Of course, trust her mum to be asking about his job, just to make sure he was adequate material. Dina’s father met her eyes over her mother’s head, and he smiled apologetically.
“I’m a curator at the British Museum.”
“And what do you curate?” Nour pressed him. Thankfully, Scott took it in his stride.
“Well, at the moment I’m working on an exhibition about symbols of protection from around the world—symbols used by ancient mystics. Did you know that mistletoe was used by ancient Celts to protect their livestock? It’s fascinating.”
“Always useful if you want to snog a sheep too,” laughed Eric.
“Oh, Nour knows all about symbols of protection,” Dina’s father said, as Nour nodded sagely.
“I noticed that, actually. You had the hand of Fatima on your front door.”
Nour beamed. “Well, you can never be too careful. Dina has lots of them in her very successful café too, as you know,” she continued, purposefully turning the conversation to her daughter. Trust her mother to make sure all potential suitors knew how successful she was.
Is that what Scott was to her then—apotential suitor? Damn those tea leaves and their accurate predictions.
“How did you two meet, if you don’t mind my asking?” Scott said to Dina’s parents. He was handling their matchmaking like a pro, and somehow that made her like him even more.
“We were both in the same halls at university, but I was too shy to talk to her.” Dina’s father looked at his wife. “But I’d seen her around and would smile at her whenever I got up the courage. We’d never spoken though. Then, this one time, I was at the library searching for a book. I was walking through the stacks, looking for the last copy of this text on impressionist art, when I finally found the shelf. Only, the book wasn’t there. So I was looking around and I saw her”—Robert took Nour’s hand and planted a kiss there—“and she was sitting in a nearby cubbyhole with—you guessed it—the book.”
“Did you speak to her then?” Scott asked.
“I had to. She was so much lovelier up close, I must have seemed like a right buffoon trying to get my words out.”
“It was very endearing.” Nour smiled, patting her husband’s hand.
“We got chatting, and we were there for hours.”
“The librarian had to kick us out because they were closing,” Nour added.
“Then we sat on a bench outside, even though it was November and freezing. And then she told me to give her my hands.”
“That’s so romantic, Nour,” Immy sighed.
Dina felt her gaze straying to Scott, who was staring down at the table, studiously avoiding eye contact. As if he were arguing with himself about something.
Hearing her parents’ perfect love story jarred harshly with her own tragic love life. Dina suddenly felt short of breath. The air in the room was too close, it moved through her lungs like glue, and the warmth from the candles and people around her pressedin.
“Excuse me,” Dina muttered, pushing out her chair. Rosemary reached out to squeeze Dina’s hand as she stood.
“You okay?” she whispered.
“I’m good. Just need a minute.”
As soon as she stepped out of the Green Room, the chill of the drafty hallway raised goosebumps on her skin. But she needed more. She needed to see the sky overhead. She needed proper fresh air.
Dina marched down the hall and slunk through the heavy front doors of Honeywell House. The driveway and open fields unfolded before her, and she exhaled deeply.
The moonlight sunk into her skin, refreshing her. The moon looked full, but it wasn’t quite yet. Most people would find it hard to tell the difference—visually it was barely noticeable. But Dina could feel it in her bones. As if her magic was a vibration, and the moon was a tuning fork. The pitch wasn’t quite there, but it would be tomorrow night. For Samhain. For the full moon ritual. She longed for it, for the sense of power it imbued in her.
Right now, memories of the hex rose unbidden. Rory in the hospital, Eliza in the hospital. All these people she’d cared for. All of them hurt. But if she was careful, Scott would be fine. Even if she did kiss him, that didn’t mean anything. She could kiss someone without developing feelings, right? Maybe just a weekend fling? Just to get it out of her system.
But Scott didn’t feel like the sort of man who went in for flings or one-night stands. He had commitment written all over him. It was stitched into the elbow patches on his blazers and sweaters, and in the crookedness of his smile, and in the way he’d made sure she got home safe when she’d hit her head. She couldn’t stop her thoughts from straying to throwing herself at him.
It had been a while since she’d been with a man in bed. In Dina’s experience, women were much better at giving orgasms, and not nearly as greedy or competitive aboutit.
But then again, maybe she’d just picked the wrong kind of men in the past. She found herself picturing Scott again, the tattoos that wound their way up his arms and across his chest. The fresh scent of his cologne. She craved the feeling of him inside her, deep, thrusting, throbbing. This breath of fresh air wasn’t clearing her head as much as she’d hoped it would.
“Benti, where did you go?” Her mum stepped through the front door and joined her in the darkness. “They’re just clearing away dessert.” She paused. “I was worried about you.”
“I’m okay, Mama.”
Nour huffed.
“I gave birth to you, you can’t lie to me.” Her mother always had an uncanny way of guessing Dina’s thoughts. “What’s wrong?”
“Do you ever wonder what our lives might have been like if we weren’t witches? Maybe they would have been simpler, in a way. It would be harder for us to hurt people.”
Her mother fixed her with a curious look, circling around so that she was standing behind Dina.
“May I?” she asked. Dina nodded. Her mother reached her arms around Dina and placed her palms on Dina’s eyes so that the tips of her middle fingers were touching the center of Dina’s forehead. Dina closed her eyes and felt the sudden change as her mother’s spell came to life around her.
She felt the baking sun on her skin. Her feet sank into the soft earth that she knew instinctively would be a deep orange hue. The distant sound of farm animals carried on the breeze and, closer by, the hum of the wind sifting through the broad bean stalks.
Dina knew where she was. Her mother’s family’s farm, in rural Khemisset. Morocco. Her mother had grown up there; this was where her roots were. Where Dina’s were too.
“We’ve had our magic for as long as we have had our land,” her mother said. “It goes beyond spells and charms and evocations. It is an extension of our souls. We cannot imagine ourselves without it, because then we would not be ourselves.”
The spell dissolved around her, and Dina inhaled the grassy scent of the English countryside once again as her mother uncovered her eyes.
“I used to think like you did,” Nour said, stroking her daughter’s face. “Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if I couldn’t spit out a curse each time I was angry? Or if I didn’t scare away men when they saw what I could do? We are strong women, benti, as well as witches. And that will scare some people, sure, but the ones that matter to us, the ones we love most, they will love all facets of us—the magic will not frighten them away.”
Dina wanted to tell her mum so badly about the hex just then. She felt her mouth opening, the words ready to spill out, but then the front door swung open. It was Martin.
“I’ve been asked to let you both know that the party will now be retiring to the Western Parlor,” he said shortly, then vanished back inside.
“Are you ready to go in?” her mother asked.
“Yes, I’ll be okay.”
“I know it’s a lot, when you find someone like that it…feels scary. Like all your walls are collapsing.”
“Mama, this isn’t about Scott,” Dina replied. She was almost sure she was telling the truth.
“Of course it isn’t.” Nour threw Dina a wink over her shoulder then strutted back inside.
Dina took a moment more outside in the moonlight until her heart settled back into a calm rhythm. She looked up at the moon. “This weekend isn’t about me, or my baggage. It’s about Immy and Eric.”
Dina knew that this apprehension in her gut would melt away the moment she fell into conversation with her best friends, so she stopped dallying and stepped into the warmth of the house.
She followed the sound of laughter and clinking glasses to what she presumed must be the Western Parlor. The wedding group had thinned significantly. Eric’s parents, and Scott’s mums—along with a sleepy Juniper who had snored through the entire three-course meal—seemed to have taken their leave for the evening.
Immy’s writer friends were curled up beside a tall mahogany bookcase, and Dina heard snippets of their conversation, the words “Lovecraft” and “massive racist” being the more notable ones.
She smiled over at Rosemary but decided to leave them to it. Immy and Eric were sitting beside each other in front of a grand fireplace. Immy had kicked off her high heels and was toasting her feet beside the glowing hearth.
“Dina, come sit here!” Immy squeaked, beckoning her over. Scott, who was sitting on another sofa in conversation with Eric, looked in her direction, his gaze roving up and down. Dina offered him a smile and plonked herself down beside him, kicking off her heels.
“Mulled wine? Or is it too soon?” Scott asked, proffering a steaming jug scented with clove and other delicious spices. He’d taken off his suit jacket and uncuffed his wrists, offering a peek of the tattoos underneath. It was alarmingly sexy.
She flushed with embarrassment, remembering the way she’d fallen asleep in his arms.
“There are soft drinks too, or tea?” Scott offered.
“She’s just being difficult. Dina loves mulled wine,” Immy remarked.
“Fine, I’ll have some. But only because the bride says so.”
Chuckling, Scott poured from the jug and handed Dina an extravagant-looking crystal goblet of mulled wine, complete with cinnamon stick and floating star anise.
“You know,” Dina began, struck by a sudden flirtatiousness that had absolutely nothing to do with Scott’s sexy forearms, “they say that star anise is an aphrodisiac.”
Eric tipped his head back and let out a belly laugh.
“That’s not a problem for our man Scott. What was the nickname those ladies at the rowing club gave you? The full eight?”
“What does that mean?” Immy asked. Scott was rolling his eyes so far that Dina thought they would fall into the back of his head.
“In rowing, the eight is the biggest boat,” Eric explained. “And you have to remember we wore these tiny little Lycra all-in-ones that didn’t exactly leave anything to the imagination. So Scott became rather famous—or should I say infamous—for his, um, pronounced package.”
Dina squirmed involuntarily in her seat as desire lit her on fire.
“The full eight, huh,” she said, surprised at the huskiness in her voice.
Scott angled his face toward hers, and it sent a new ripple of heat over her skin.
“Eric is being hyperbolic.”
“No, I am being complimentary,” Eric countered, giving his best man a loaded look. There was some strong wingman action going on tonight, Dina thought to herself.
“And did you get to wear this tiny little Lycra thing too?” Immy asked her fiancé.
“I sure did.” Dina saw the want in her friend’s glance as the pair practically eye-fucked each other.
“Actually,” Eric cleared his throat, “I think we’re going to try and get an early night. Big day tomorrow, and all that.” They both stood up abruptly.
“Don’t they say something about the bride and groom being apart for the wedding night?” Scott teased.
“Tradition, schmadition. The wedding isn’t even tomorrow.” Immy laughed, before Eric practically carried her out of the room. Dina’s heart felt light, seeing Immy this happy.
“Are you going to bed too?” Dina asked Scott. She suddenly became aware that they were alone in the parlor. Immy’s writer friends must have trailed off to bed while they were chatting.
The fire crackled merrily in the hearth, the scent of burning cedar warming the air.
“I won’t if you won’t,” Scott all but growled, a challenge clear in his voice.
The star anise was clearly getting to her because she was just about ready to jump Scott’s bones.
She exhaled slowly. If she met Scott’s gaze, she knew she would be defeated byit.
“Let me read your palm,” Dina said, her voice hoarse.
Ever so slowly, she shuffled closer to him on the sofa, turning so she faced him. Her body was hot and slick and ready, and it didn’t help that she was imagining what Scott’s head would look like buried between her thighs, his rough, calloused hands gripping her ass.
Scott’s hair was jet black in the firelight. He rested the back of his palm on her thigh, and that touch alone was enough to send another surge of desire through her. Dina felt the heat of his hand through the velvet of her dress. Only a few inches to the right, and a little higher, and she’d be done for. What would that hand feel like caressing her clit, plunging into her now soaked pussy? Dina forced the thought away. If she was actually going to perform an accurate reading, she couldn’t let her own desire get in the way.
She delicately pressed the tips of her fingers, still cold from being outside, against Scott’s fingertips, opening up his hand.
“Your fingers are cold,” he said. He lifted her hand up to his mouth and blew gently on them, his breath warming her. Dina sucked in a trembling breath.
“There, now you can start,” he said. This man was going to be her undoing.
“You see this line here?” she said, as she stroked a finger across the center of Scott’s palm and down to the sensitive part of his wrist. She felt goosebumps rise on his skin as he shivered imperceptibly at her touch. “This is your life line. See how long it is, going all the way down to your wrist?”
Scott nodded, leaning in closer. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a good sign. It means you’ll live a long life.”
“I guess I’ll go ahead and book that skydiving trip then,” he joked, making Dina roll her eyes. He tipped his head to the side and laughed, the corners of his eyes creasing, making her stomach tumble. She felt positively giddy.
Dina drew a finger along the line that cut horizontally through the center of Scott’s palm. She could feel the thrum of his pulse.
“And that one?” he asked, his head bending closer to Dina’s. She couldn’t help herself; she inhaled the scent of his cologne again.
“This is your heart line. It’s…it’s deep.”
“What does it mean if it’s deep, Dina?” He growled her name.
“You’ll have one great love in your life. You’ll…be with them for a long time,” she whispered.
Dina felt part of herself deflating as she read Scott’s palm and thought of the woman who might be the love of this man’s life. She wondered if she would treat him like he deserved to be treated, with kindness and passion. At the same time, she mourned her own love life, knowing that because of the curse she could never be this person for him.
But then Scott reached his hand up to cup Dina’s chin, bringing her face up toward his. His eyes were a bottomless brown flecked with gold, and she could see the bump along his nose where he must have broken it. Their breath mingled.
Scott’s gaze flicked to her mouth, and she found herself biting her lip. Half an inch more, and their lips would meet. Maybe it didn’t matter that he could never love her.
“Ahem.” Someone obnoxiously cleared their throat nearby. Dina looked up, just about ready to throw a hex at whoever had dared to interrupt this moment. Martin, the steward of Honeywell House, stood in the doorway, holding a tray of half-empty glasses. Unfortunately, Immy would be very angry at her if she hexed the butler two nights before the wedding.
“I was just coming in to clear away the glasses,” Martin said peevishly. Dina screamed internally as Scott pulled away.
“That’s fine, Martin,” he said, suddenly composed. Dina did not feel composed. She had nearly kissed him, and what would it have meant to her? It would have been more than a kiss, she knew. She wasn’t in the business of lying to herself. But she couldn’t go down that road. After all, she’d be the one that got hurt in the end.
“We were just going back to the cottage anyway,” Scott said, reaching out for Dina’s hand. She wanted to go with him, she wanted to hold his hand. Desperately. But she pulled away, standing, smoothing out the crumples in her dress.
“I think I’m going to go for a quick walk, actually, just to clear my head.”
A weight pressed down on her chest. Before Scott could say anything, Dina ducked past Martin and out of the room.
She knew the night air wouldn’t make her feel any better. She just needed to get away from Scott, and the feeling in her gut when she was near him. Dina’s heart pounded in her chest as she fled into the woods. The weight of the forest settled over her like earth over long-buried bones.
“Please don’t let me fall in love with him,” she whispered to the woods—half spell, half prayer. But the forest, if it was listening, didn’t answer her.