Page 1 of Drawn to the Demon Duke
CHAPTER 1
SHE’S A LITTLE RUNAWAY
SUSANNA
Twining my finger around the coils of the phone cord, absently watching through my window, I’m barely paying attention to my older sister as she’s telling me about the Bon Jovi and Skid Row concert she went to last weekend with her husband, Dan, and some of their friends over at the Hartford Civic Center.
Mindy is ten years older than me. Thirty-eight to my twenty-eight, she’s been like my second mom for as long as I can remember. Even after she had her own daughter a little over eight years ago, Mindy still can’t help but mother me. Considering she and Amy are the only family I have left, I usually take it with a grain of salt.
But not today.
“They even sang ‘Runaway’,” Mindy adds, and that little jab has my attention snapping from the window, frowning as I grip the phone handle with my other hand.
“C’mon, Min. I didn’t run away,” I begin, the same old refrain to a tired song. “The house in Madison was going for a good price. I couldn’t live with you and Dan forever.”
Sometimes I think Mindy would’ve preferred that I did. She was happy to take me in after Mom died during my senior year of high school, and with Dad having pulled a runaway stunt of his own when I was fourteen, my sister was all I had.
My sister—and my book.
The book that’s been part of my life for so long that, to me, it’s part of my family… and, to Mindy, the reason she wanted to keep me under her nose for as long as she could…
But while I did stay with my sister’s family for a couple of years, earning my keep by helping with the baby after Mindy had Amy,Iknew I couldn’t stay. The small inheritance I got from Mom’s passing was enough for a down payment, and the realtor I worked with suggested this one in Madison. Sure, it was farther from Mindy than she liked, but I got a solid job at the call center, I attend aerobics classes every Tuesday and Thursday to keep fit, and if I’m still single as I’m creeping up on thirty, it doesn’t bother me half as much as it does my older sister.
“I know,” she concedes, and if she gives in too easily about my having moved out four years ago, it’s only because she has bigger fish to fry. “Jeff missed you. He thought you’d be at the concert. Seemed real disappointed that Dan brought his cousin instead.”
I roll my eyes. “I was busy.”
“I know. That’s what you told me when I asked if you’d babysit Amy.”
Huffing, I turn slightly, tugging on the coils. “I promised Lissy that I’d have dinner after our shift was done.”
Even through the phone, I can hear the way Mindy arches her eyebrow in disbelief. “And that’s all you did? You didn’t spend last Friday with your nose in a book, did you?”
A book, she says. What Mindy really means isthatbook.
Of course she does.
I sigh, scratching my ankle with the heel of my sneaker, scrunching my neon pink leg warmer. After I left the call center earlier this afternoon, I popped some bagel bites into the toaster oven, then got ready for tonight’s Tuesday aerobics class. My hair is in its usual side pony, my leg warmers slouched down over my leggings, with the slightly oversized t-shirt a matching shade of pink covering up my navy sports bra. I was just getting ready to head out when the phone rang, and now I’ve been talking to Mindy for the last fifteen minutes.
And, no matter how any conversation begins, it always ends up with Mindy double-checking that I’ve stopped obsessing over the leather-bound antique of a book I bought at a garage sale when I was sixteen.
So I tell her what she wants to hear because, otherwise, I’ll only worry her—and that’s the last thing I’d ever want to do if I could avoid it.
“Not Friday. I was getting my Uncle Jesse fix instead.”
Mindy chuckles, and I swallow a sound of relief. So she thinks I watchFull Houseon Fridays because I have a crush on John Stamos. It might not be a real man, but I know it makes her feel better that I can be attracted toanyguy. As far back as I can remember, she’s had Dan. Me? Apart from a few stolen kisses when I was still in school, I’m single and not really ready to mingle.
I don’t know why, and I certainly can’t explain it to Mindy. I like guys, and I’ve found plenty of them attractive over the years—even if I can’t say the same about Dan’s buddy, Jeff—but… crud. It’s just never been right.
Like they’ve never been ‘the one’.
That, at least, is one thing that Mindy can’t blame on the book. Instead, she points out that if I stopped crushing onfictional characters—like Uncle Jesse or Jareth the Goblin King or Sam fromCheers—maybe I could find my own happily-ever-after with a real-life man.
Really? How boring wouldthatbe?
I don’t want boring. I don’t want ordinary.
I want somethingmore, and if it’s because I’ve spent most of my formative years convinced that I can find it in a centuries-old spellbook, well… what Mindy doesn’t know won’t hurt her. Besides, she has her own family to take care of. Dan and Amy should be her focus. Me? I’m doing okay.
