Page 30 of Captivated
“Couple months.” He glanced around the yard. “I need to buy a lawn mower.”
He’d need a bush hog before much longer. “Yes, you do.”
“But I kind of like the natural look.”
“You’re lazy.” She felt some sympathy for the daffodils that were struggling to get their heads above the weeds. She walked to the front entrance with Luna streaming regally behind her.
“I have to get motivated,” he told her as he pushed open the front door. “I’ve mostly lived in apartments and condos. This is the first regular house I’ve had to myself.”
She looked around at the high, cool walls of the foyer, the rich, dark wood of the curving banister that trailed upstairs and along an open balcony. “At least you chose well. Where are you working?”
“Here and there.”
“Hmm.” She strolled down the hallway and peeked in the first archway. It was a large, jumbled living area with wide, uncurtained windows and a bare hardwood floor. Signs, Morgana thought, of a man who had yet to decide if he was going to settle in.
The furniture was mismatched and heaped with books, papers, clothes and dishes—possibly long forgotten.More books were shoved helter-skelter into built-in cases along one wall. And toys, she noted. She often thought of her own clutter as toys. Little things that gave her pleasure, soothed her moods, passed the time.
She noted the gorgeous, grim-faced masks that hung on the wall, an exquisite print of nymphs by Maxfield Parrish, a movie prop—one of the wolves’ claws fromShape Shifter, she imagined. He was using it as a paperweight. A silver box in the shape of a coffin sat next to the Oscar he’d won. Both could have used a proper dusting. Lips pursed, she picked up the voodoo doll, the pin still sticking lethally out of its heart.
“Anyone I know?”
He grinned, pleased to have her there, and too used to his own disorder to be embarrassed by it. “Whatever works. Usually it’s a producer, sometimes a politician. Once it was this bean-counting IRS agent. I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he added as his gaze skimmed over her slim, short dress of purple silk, “you have great taste in clothes.”
“Glad you approve.” Amused, she set the unfortunate doll down, patted the mangled head, then picked up a tattered deck of tarot cards. “Do you read them?”
“No. Somebody gave them to me. They’re supposed to have belonged to Houdini or someone.”
“Hmm.” She fanned them, felt the faint trickle of old power on her fingertips. “If you’re curious where they came from, ask Sebastian sometime. He could tell. Come here.” She held out the deck to him. “Shuffle and cut.”
Willing to oblige, he did what she asked. “Are we going to play?”
She only smiled and took the cards back. “Since the seats are occupied, let’s use the floor.” She knelt, gesturing for him to join her. After tossing her hair behind her back, she dealt out a Celtic Cross. “You’re preoccupied,” she said. “But your creative juices aren’t dried up or blocked. There are changes coming.” Her eyes lifted to his. They were that dazzling Irish blue that tempted even a sane man to believe anything. “Perhaps the biggest of your life, and they won’t be easy to accept.”
It was no longer the cards she read, but rather the pale light of the seer, which burned so much more brightly in Sebastian.
“You need to remember that some things are passed through the blood, and some are washed out. We aren’talways the total of the people who made us.” Her eyes changed, softened, as she laid a hand on his. “And you’re not as alone as you think you are. You never have been.”
He couldn’t joke away what hit too close to home. Instead, he avoided the issue entirely by bringing her hand to his lips. “I didn’t bring you here to tell my fortune.”
“I know why you asked me here, and it isn’t going to happen. Yet.” With more than a little regret, she drew her hand free. “And it isn’t really your fortune I’m telling, it’s your present.” Quietly she gathered up the cardsagain. “I’ll help you, if I can, with what I can. Tell me about the problem in your story.”
“Other than the fact that I keep thinking of you when I’m supposed to be thinking of it?”
“Yes.” She curled up her legs. “Other than that.”
“I guess it’s a matter of motivation. Cassandra’s. That’s what I decided to call her. Is she a witch because she wanted power, because she wanted to change things? Was she looking for revenge, or love, or the easy way out?”
“Why would it be any of those things? Why wouldn’t it be a matter of accepting the gifts she was given?”
“It’s too easy.”
Morgana shook her head. “No, it’s not. It’s easier, so much easier, to be like everyone else. Once, when I was a little girl, some of the mothers refused to let their children play with me. I was a bad influence. Odd. Different. It hurt, not being a part of the whole.”
Understanding, he nodded. “I was always the new kid. Hardly in one place long enough to be accepted. Somebody always wants to give the new kid a bloody nose. Don’t ask me why. Moving around, you end up being awkward, falling behind in school, wishing you’d just get old enough to get the hell out.” Annoyed with himself, he stopped. “Anyway, about Cassandra—”
“How did you cope?” She had had Anastasia, Sebastian, her family, and a keen sense of belonging.
With a restless movement of his shoulders, he reached out to touch her amulet. “You run away a lot. And, since that just gets your butt kicked nine times out of ten, you learn to run away safe. In books, in movies, or just inside your own head. As soon as I was old enough, I got a job working the concession stand at a theater. Thatway, I’d get paid for watching movies.” As troubled memories left his eyes, his face cleared. “I love the flicks. I just plain love them.”
