Chapter Twelve
Blair was a mess that night, the image of Belinda sitting on a bench that was later crushed by the Moonbeam Oak not letting her sleep.
She was supposed to be keeping her sisters safe and was failing miserably.
She’d had no progress on solving this mystery, no leads, and no idea of what to do next, except for a cryptic prophecy.
The festival is theirs. The three sisters. Witches. They want to destroy it. They want revenge on those who took their lives and legacy. It is justified. Trust must be earned again. Go to he who makes tall buildings. He is the key.
Why on earth would Blair, Belinda and Bianca want revenge?
And why was it justified? Blair and her family had always been treated well in Moonbeam Hollow.
Their parents had moved here after fleeing Zanzibar when witch hunters were closing in on them.
They had been scared and had a lot of anger for how witches were treated in the place where they were born. But they never sought revenge.
Maybe this had something to do with their father?
Blair didn’t think about his death often, mostly because it was too painful.
Their father, along with two other witches, had travelled to the southern US on learning that a witch family had gone missing after being accused of a ritualistic murder.
Her father and the others intended to help disprove the allegations so the family could come out of hiding, but the entire thing had actually been a trap by witch hunters who had killed the witch family.
The witch hunters killed Blair’s father along with the witches he had travelled with.
And of course, the local authorities had called it an accident.
It had been such a hard time for the Briarwood family, and Blair remembered how strong their mother had been through it.
She put on a brave face, still going to work every day as a pharmacist in the drugstore on Main Street, and carrying on with her routine to support her daughters, but Blair had heard her crying alone at night several times.
Mom did so much to protect Blair and her sisters, making them promise never to put themselves in harm’s way like their father had.
Mom never, ever wanted revenge on the witch hunters, despite having every right to after her husband had been killed. It just wasn’t her way.
Blair had no way of finding out if the witch hunters that had killed her father were behind what was happening here.
She didn’t even know who those witch hunters were.
Blair’s mother had not kept any reports, any documentation about their father’s death for fear that someone would see it and connect the surviving Briarwoods with the incident.
If the problems at the festival were somehow related to her father’s death, then Blair and her sisters had a very good reason for wanting revenge.
But how could they want revenge if they didn’t know what was happening or what was causing it?
Go to he who makes tall buildings, the prophecy said.
But Blair had done that. She’d seen Luke twice since she first heard the prophecy.
But other than managing a sort-of truce between them, she still didn’t know how Luke Caldwell was the key to stopping the destruction of the festival.
But there was nothing else for Blair to do.
No other options to try. All she could do was go to Luke again.
After finally getting some sleep, she called Travis in the morning to ask if he could cover the café.
Travis agreed easily, saying his boyfriend could study there while Travis worked.
Blair had no choice. It would be awkward to go to Luke today after neither of them said anything about them holding each other for dear life at the town hall yesterday, but she’d manage.
The conversation couldn’t devolve into an argument though, and Blair didn’t want to use a potion to help her, either.
The tree getting destroyed solidified it for Blair – if the Briarwoods’ magic was somehow causing the issues like the prophecy said, then it was best to stop using it until she knew what was going on.
Also, to be honest, she was still a bit weirded out about how malleable Luke had been under the effect of her agreeableness potion.
Blair got dressed in her lucky grey and white sweater, grey tights, a black A-line miniskirt and black boots. After putting on a little make-up and fluffing up her shoulder-length waves, she left the house, walking straight to Shirley’s Sugar Mountain and knocking on the glass door.
Blair had no idea what she was going to say when Luke answered the door, but it wasn’t him who answered it. It was the same contractor who’d opened the door last time she knocked, the woman with a hammer in her tool belt. She thought Luke had called her Iris.
‘Oh. Hi, I’m Blair from next door. Is Luke in?’ Blair smiled.
The woman snorted a laugh and then motioned to a solid door on the other side of the bakery. Blair knew it led to a small unit upstairs, but she didn’t know that Luke had leased both spaces. ‘Oh, is that his office?’ Blair asked.
The woman shook her head. ‘His apartment. Go on up. He’s there. Don’t bother knocking; he won’t hear it. He’s doing paperwork and always wears headphones when running numbers.’
Blair frowned. ‘I can’t go up without knocking.’
The woman pulled out her phone. ‘Sure, you can. I’ll tell him you’re coming and unlock it from here.’ She did something on an app. ‘There’s a second door upstairs – knock on it when you get to it.’
Blair wasn’t sure what else to do, so she went toward the door, hearing the woman closing the bakery behind her.
Blair opened the door and was met with narrow stairs with grey industrial carpeting and matte white walls. Clearly Luke was focusing all renovations on the bakery downstairs and not on this space. Would he fix it up for his mother to live in after the bakery was done?
There was no door at the top of the stairs, instead Blair found herself in a cramped living room.
An old couch, a TV on a table and a small round table with two chairs were on one side, with a very basic kitchen on the other.
Everything was old, without personality, and honestly, a little shabby.
She couldn’t believe a fancy big-city architect was living here.
But he clearly was. This place smelled like Luke.
There were three closed doors in the apartment, Blair assumed the bathroom and two bedrooms. Maybe she was supposed to knock on one of these doors?
But which one? Blair exhaled. She shouldn’t be here.
Blair didn’t know why she’d listened to that woman.
Blair turned toward the stairs, ready to get out of the apartment, when one of the doors opened and Luke came out.
Wearing a towel.
Nothing else, just a thin white towel wrapped around his waist. His hair was wet, and his eyes were wide with shock, probably about the fact that Blair was standing in the middle of his apartment.
And he wasn’t wearing clothes. Blair swallowed.
She’d seen him enough times since he’d been back in town to know that Luke Caldwell had filled out considerably in the last twelve years.
He wasn’t the scrawny teen he’d been the last time she saw him at this level of undress.
She didn’t know where to look, overwhelmed by the sight of him.
His hips were still narrow, but now he had muscles on his chest. And arms. She swallowed.
His biceps were unreal. And he had hair.
Dark chest hair, plus a line of dark hair from his navel heading down to—
‘Blair!’ Luke said. He blinked a few times, then the look of shock on his face was replaced with humour. One side of his lip quirked up in a smirk. ‘Did you take a wrong turn somewhere?’
Ugh, why did Luke have abs now? Luke Caldwell wasn’t supposed to have abs.
Blair squeezed her lips together, then gave an apologetic smile while forcing her gaze downward, which wasn’t exactly helping because holy calf muscles.
‘I’m sorry . . . I needed to talk to you.
The woman downstairs said you wouldn’t hear me if I knocked.
She told me to come up . . . I shouldn’t have, though.
I’ll go . . .’ Blair pried her eyes away from Luke’s everything and started to walk down the stairs, still babbling away.
‘I’m sorry for intruding. Please forget—’
‘Blair, wait,’ Luke said. She stopped on the stairs but didn’t turn around.
Mostly because she was afraid that if she had to see Luke’s rather delicious bare chest and stomach again, it would be impossible to ever wipe the image from her brain.
So, Blair stood halfway down the stairs without saying a word.
‘Will you come back up?’ Luke asked after a few long moments, a smile still in his voice.
‘Why?’ Blair said. And why did he sound so amused?
‘I need to talk to you, too. I was actually about to get dressed and go find you.’
Blair didn’t move or say anything. Why would he need to talk to her? She wanted to speak to him because her sister’s prophecy said he was the key to stopping the sabotage that nearly hurt her sister last night.
Did he want to talk about throwing himself on her when they heard the crash of the tree getting hit by lightning? Maybe. But Blair didn’t think she could have that conversation with Luke only wearing a thin towel.
‘Okay, how about we do it this way,’ Luke said, slowly. ‘I’ll go into my bedroom and put some clothes on. In about a minute, you come back up the stairs and wait for me in the living room, and we can pretend that the last five minutes didn’t happen. Does that work for you?’
Easy for him to say. He hadn’t just got an eyeful of what was easily the best-looking nearly nude body she’d seen in years.
‘Blair, does that work for you? Because I really do think we should talk.’