Chapter 21
Annelise opened the door to her cousin, thinking it would start to smooth over the turmoil inside her. Instead, it did the opposite.
Jenna grinned, looking her up and down, clearly seeing what she’d done. “Damn, girl. You look like you got some—”
“Don’t.” Annelise cut her off. “Don’t.” The second time it came out like she was begging, because to be honest, she was.
It had been two days, and she was still shaky when she thought about it.
How he’d made her limbs tremble with need and how she’d somehow been transported back to the girl she’d once been.
The fool who didn’t know he’d side with his family when they betrayed hers.
She had to face the truth: she still wanted him.
And Annelise Lockheart did not want to face that.
Had all her spells failed her lately? The wards for the house hadn’t held. The barrier between her and Rowan had crumbled. Then she’d failed. Hadn’t even been able to say no.
She’d stayed in the office Sunday after he came and left like the tornado of emotions that he was. She’d stuck it out with sheer stubbornness until the middle of the afternoon when she realized she couldn’t eat, hadn’t gotten anything done, and couldn’t handle it.
She’d put on her shoes, gone for a run around the warehouse district—relatively safe during the week, she’d cast a spell for protection and jogged the empty Sunday streets alone. But it hadn’t been enough.
She’d gone to a restaurant. Taking a book, she’d ordered herself a steak, a salad, and a martini, spending money when she should have been saving it.
Even so, she was no good while she was barely keeping it together on the outside, and the inside of her was shaken to the core from what had just happened.
She’d tucked herself alone into a little booth for two at the far end of the bar hoping no one would notice when she moved her finger and the martini started to swirl, the little toothpick with the olive moving with it.
Looking down into the liquid, she asked, “Can I keep Rowan Velasco at bay?”
The martini not only moved to a stop, it slowly began swirling the other way. The olive said no. She’d almost had a breakdown right there in a Charlottesville steakhouse.
Story had said it so many times that Annelise could replay the audio for herself: change is coming to Belle Hollow.
Well, it’s here, Story. The change is that everything is broken. Including me. Are you happy?
Things had changed, even if Annelise completely discounted her own reckonings.
Only one family had been able to move back into their home, the one at the end of the street before the second row up.
They were a little higher than the others and, though their carpet had to be pulled and the house had to be aired out, the water hadn’t gotten high enough to destroy things like the appliances or the drywall.
They’d quickly repaired what they could, gave up on what they couldn’t, and moved back in.
They pitched in where they could to help the other families, but most people were having to return to their jobs or lose them.
Annelise understood that. Disaster leave wasn’t really a thing.
The six little houses that sat closest to the water stayed empty.
Story flitted from home to home, a welcome guest who always had an invitation extended.
Sometimes Annelise wondered if Story manufactured those, or if she’d just helped so many families in the Hollow that the doors really were open to her.
Either way, Annelise had only seen her grandmother once, at which point Story’s eyes had lit up just like Jenna’s did now.
“Oh girl.”
“Don’t!” Annelise had told her, too. She didn’t want to hear it. This wasn’t the change coming to Belle Hollow, because no matter what happened, his parents were still responsible. She blamed Martin Velasco for her mother’s death, and rightly so, no matter how much Rowan wanted to deny it.
She shouldn’t be fucking Rowan in her office when nothing was ever going to grow back between them.
So now she waved Jenna in, hoping that another woman’s presence in the place would help erase the memories.
She saw flashes where she was almost a third-party observer to Rowan pushing her back onto the desk and pushing into her over and over.
She saw herself, the way her head tipped back, the way she begged for it.
She would have been disgusted by her own actions, except she couldn’t shake the way his hands had felt, the magnetic need that had tugged the two of them closer and closer until they were connected as if it were inevitable.
“You’re not sleeping here anymore,” Jenna said as if it were a casual observation and she was merely commenting on it.
Her cousin didn’t know everything she’d commented about was a chain of dominoes falling down slowly, one by one, and leaving Annelise almost broken. She was so unsure of herself and the things that she’d known and believed for the last fifteen years all of a sudden.
“I just needed my own place,” she told her cousin. “I needed a bed to sleep in that didn’t belong to someone else.” And a bedroom to breathe in where no one could hear if I made those breathy sounds each night as I relived those moments together with Rowan.
She was also trying to reconcile the fact that she couldn’t cast the spell between them again. The guards she’d cast must have fallen as the floodwaters rose. Now Annelise wondered what other of her magics had been undone as the water had flooded the town.
After Sunday morning’s incident, she would have just restaked the barrier between them, but he found something—something he thought wouldn’t even have to go to trial.
He thought he could get the company to pay out just at the sheer threat of his lawsuit, and maybe even pay more than they owed her.
Rowan was off to talk to Story, who didn’t even know yet that Annelise had hired him, if they could call it that.
She wondered now if she’d paid her debt to him, or if he was still going to claim what she owed when she didn’t even know what it was and didn’t know how much more she had to give.
For two days she’d been mostly on her own, and the thoughts had swirled, dragging her under when they could.
She’d expended her energy fighting to the surface when she needed to be doing something else.
Anything else. Definitely not thinking about Rowan Velasco.
Not reliving the moments of making love to him or fucking him; she couldn’t really decide which it was.
She was using Jenna now as a buffer between her fears and her memories and her need to get something done—though her need to meet today was real and all of it was necessary.
“I bought us breakfast.” She pointed to the sideboard where she’d placed out small quiches, chocolate-filled croissants, and orange slices in a balsamic vinegar marinade.
“Damn,” Jenna replied.
“It’s my favorite place, and it’s what I put out for clients in the mornings.” Annelise fought the sigh and didn’t add that she just needed something normal.
As Jenna made herself a small plate, Annelise joined her at the sideboard. “No eating at any other place in this room. I made an exception the other night for the couch and the ottoman, but absolutely not the desk. Not that side table either,” Annelise said, pointing.
“Because the antiques go there.” Then Jenna added after she swallowed, “Oh my God, that’s so good.”
“I know.” Annelise smiled. That was why she bought it, and, “Yes, that’s exactly why. I’m a crappy dealer if I sell you a Tiffany lamp with a quiche thumbprint.”
Jenna laughed almost to the point of choking on her croissant bite, and finally it felt like some of the tension that had been wound into the room by her and Rowan was beginning to ease. Annelise added, “I want to pay you for this.”
But Jenna waved her away with just one hand. “I’m going into a regional marketing position. Your marketing is fantastic!”
Annelise smiled all the more because she was a water witch. She couldn’t move people or moods or emotions. Anything she’d accomplished in marketing, she’d done by sheer force of determination.
Jenna set down her now-empty plate and turned to look at her cousin, arms crossed. “You can’t pay me. This is professional development for me. We’re going to brainstorm, we’re going to share, and neither of us is paying the other.”
“All right.” With the food finished, they sat across the desk from each other, commenting about marketing strategies they’d tried—paid advertisements, what had worked and what didn’t, what kind of targets to hit.
Annelise suggested a new one for Jenna, and Jenna made a note.
Jenna discussed a new social media platform that she found was relatively good for spreading the word, and Annelise added researching that to her to-do list.
They were on a roll when the phone rang. Annelise had left her phone in her purse—because her head had not been screwed on right since that man had walked in the door. And she’d set her purse down by the front door. She’d come in only a few minutes before Jenna arrived.
“Can you grab that?” she asked Jenna, not wanting to stop writing for a moment. “It’s Ford.”
“Does he have a special ringtone?”
Annelise froze. Maybe it was time. If they hid this from Jenna for too long, she’d be mad, and rightly so. It was part of who she was. What she’d come here wanting to find out. She tried a subtle answer of, “No, not at all. I just know who’s calling.”
“How can you know that?” Jenna asked, but she was reaching into Annelise’s bag as the ring went off again, and she pulled it out, seeming a little shocked that the screen said it was Ford.
“You can go ahead and answer it,” Annelise told her, thinking that maybe giving her cousin something to do would unscramble her thoughts for a moment. She listened to the one side of the conversation.
“You need Annelise for what? . . . Where? . . . She’ll know? . . . Okay. Bye, Ford.”
“He needs something?” Annelise asked her cousin.
“He needs a stream moved?” Clearly, it didn’t make sense to Jenna. Well, she was about to learn. “Something about the deer and the flood.”
Annelise understood. Story had long since drilled it into her that everything the Lockhearts had they owed to the community who kept them from torches and pitchforks.
The people who hadn’t burned them at the stake, but instead made them valued members.
Belle Hollow had thrived under the Lockhearts magic in past centuries.
So today, in these modern times, they answered requests and pleas.
Ford Velasco was no different. Besides, Jenna was obviously starting to develop a little crush on her not-a-serial-killer savior.
Annelise didn’t mind nudging that along. “Come on. Let’s go. I’ll drive.”
Annelise knew what Ford was asking, and maybe this was the universe telling her that it was time to show Jenna what she really was.