Page 13 of Wind Called

“Maybe I should talk to her again,” he said. “She didn’t have anything too helpful to offer when we spoke yesterday, but that was before I had this dream about the safe.”

Now his grandmother’s blue eyes — so like his mother’s — had an amused twinkle in them. However, her tone was serious enough as she said, “That might be a good idea. If nothing else, you could describe the house you saw in your dream and find out whether it was an accurate representation of the place where she’s staying. That would tell you whether the safe was some sort of random element or whether it really was supposed to mean something.”

He hadn’t thought of that angle to the problem. If the home he’d seen in his dream turned out to be exactly the same as the house Bellamy was caretaking, then he’d know his magic really had been trying to tell him something.

“Do you have Bellamy’s phone number?” he asked. Only an hour earlier, he wouldn’t have been caught dead asking his grandmother to give him a girl’s number, but now he knew he needed to reach out to her and try to get to the bottom of this whole mess.

Tricia smiled. “Let me get it for you.”

5

On that Sunday afternoon,Tantrum Wines was a bit more crowded than Bellamy had expected. Not so much that she wasn’t able to snag a seat on a purple velvet couch positioned a few yards away from the spot where Bree had her chair and microphone stand set up, but just enough that Bellamy couldn’t help feeling the teensiest bit guilty about taking up the whole sofa.

Well, she’d buy a couple of bottles of wine to take back with her to the house just so she wouldn’t feel like an utter freeloader.

Bree had inclined her head and offered Bellamy a smile as she came in and sat down, but because she was in the middle of singing an old folk song from the seventies, something about a bayou, she wasn’t about to pause and offer any kind of real conversation.

Which was fine. Bellamy knew her friend was working, and honestly, she’d only come here because she thought she might start climbing the walls if she had to go back to the house and pretend to do something productive. It wasn’t like the place needed cleaning — Ike had already told her she didn’t need to worry about housework, since he had someone come in once a week to make sure the house was spotless — and it was really too hot to do anything outside.

So, here she was.

She sipped some of her white blend and did her best to relax against the back of the couch. Although she would never have referred to herself as a Type A kind of personality, she also knew it still felt a little weird to know she was done with school and needed to find her rhythm when all she had to do now was work a regular nine-to-five job and not have to fit in her enology certification coursework on top of everything else.

No, now she was supposed to function like a real adult…whatever that meant.

She didn’t recognize any of the faces around her, which wasn’t too strange. Most locals tried to visit the various wine tasting rooms during the week when things weren’t quite so busy, so she guessed most of these people were probably tourists getting in a last drink or two before they headed back down to Phoenix or wherever it was they’d come from. Cottonwood and Jerome and Sedona got lots of day-trippers, since Phoenix and its surrounding cities were only a little over an hour away, depending on where you were coming from.

But then the tasting room door opened, and Marc Trujillo walked in.

Bellamy had been in the middle of swallowing some wine when she caught sight of him, and it took everything she had to maintain her composure and not choke on the liquid as it was halfway down her throat. Somehow, though, she managed to gulp it down and even look as though she hadn’t been startled out of her skin by his sudden appearance.

His eyes met hers, and he smiled even as he came over to the sofa where she sat. “Mind if I sit down?” he asked, keeping his voice pitched low so it wouldn’t interfere with Bree’s performance.

“No, go ahead,” Bellamy replied in a murmur, and scooched over so he’d have room next to her.

Noting this new addition to the listening crowd, her friend Bree lifted an eyebrow, but it wasn’t as if she could make some kind of comment, not when she was mid-song.

And Alyssa, the girl working the wine counter today, approached them and asked Marc in an undertone what he’d like to drink.

“Whatever she’s having,” he said, and inclined his head toward Bellamy.

Alyssa smiled and said she’d have it right out, and hurried off to pour a glass for him.

With her gone, Bellamy was all too acutely aware of how close Marc was, even though it wasn’t as if he’d sat down right next to her and tried to invade her personal space or anything. Still, the sofa was small enough that he was still a lot closer than she should have been expected to handle.

As usual when she wasn’t sure how she should react to a given situation, she retreated to sarcasm. “Are you stalking me?” she murmured, and Marc grinned.

“Lucky coincidence,” he replied, then paused as Alyssa came back with his glass of white. “I was actually about to text you, but I thought I’d come in and have a drink first.”

Bellamy wanted to lift an eyebrow at that comment — how had he even gotten her phone number? his grandmother? — but she was forced to admit that lucky coincidences tended to happen among witch-kind more often than they did with the regular population.

Besides, hadn’t she been kicking herself earlier for not giving him her contact information, or at least asking for his?

“Well, you made a good choice,” she said. “The wine here is great, and you also lucked out because my friend Bree is performing today.”

His gaze slid toward the other woman, who’d now moved on to another folksy song, this one by a musician from way back when named Neil Young. However, he didn’t seem to be awestruck by Bree’s beauty, which Bellamy had to admit was something of a relief. Never in a million years would she admit to being jealous of her friend, and yet it still started to get old whenever the two of them went out together and everyone paid attention to Bree like she was some kind of goddess descended from Mount Olympus or something.

“She’s really good,” he commented, but his tone was casual, almost absent. “Does she play here every weekend?”

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