Chapter 8
“I just keep pulling the Five of Swords.”
Gwyn was sitting at a back booth at The Cider Shack, a new restaurant in Graves Glen that had opened last summer. It had quickly become one of her favorite haunts and had seemed like a safe spot to take the Baby Witches for their second magic lesson.
They were a little disappointed, she suspected, no doubt hoping for something a little more mystical than a place that served pumpkin chili and something called Macbeth Mash, but after Saturday, Gwyn had decided they might need to start a little slower and with magic that could safely be done in public.
Hence a tarot lesson.
And if she’d made the focus of that lesson “See if you can get a read on, oh, I don’t know, what Wells Penhallow is building across the street,” so be it.
She’d sworn she wouldn’t use magic to get to the bottom of Wells’s project, but he’d been at it for over a week now, and the curiosity was finally getting to be too much.
Besides, using someone else’s magic wasn’t all that bad, right?
Now, Gwyn put down her Broomstick Burger and tapped the card in front of Parker.
“And what does that mean to you?”
Parker sighed, tilting their head back even as Cait scooted closer to them and said, “You know this one.” She looked up at Gwyn. “They totally know this one, Glinda.”
“There’s no right or wrong answer,” Gwyn reminded Parker now. “It’s intuition based.”
Screwing up their face, Parker thought. “Swords are air. Air is thought, intellect.”
“Good,” Gwyn said, nodding. “And?”
“Fives are in the middle of the suit, so conflict . . . ”
Sam started singing “Bad Blood,” making Cait laugh, and Gwyn rolled her eyes even as she smiled at them. They really were good kids. All three of them had been helping out at the store as a kind of exchange for these sorts of lessons, and Gwyn saw what Vivi meant about them being talented witches.
“You keep working on it,” Gwyn said, wiping her hands on her napkin, “while I go grab a cider.”
Sam scooted out so that Gwyn could leave, and as she walked toward the bar in the back, she could already hear them arguing over which card was worse, the Tower or Death.
The Cider Shack was crowded for a Wednesday night, and Gwyn saw several familiar faces. One of her regular customers at the shop, Sally, was at the bar with her husband, and there was Elaine’s friend Nathan.
Over at a table in the corner, Gwyn spotted Jane. She was there with her fiancée, Lorna, and she and Gwyn did the same little awkward wave they did every time they bumped into each other. Which, given that Graves Glen wasn’t a very big town, was fairly often.
The breakup hadn’t been bad, and Gwyn genuinely liked Lorna and was happy for Jane, but it was a reminder that her romantic life had been fairly dead for almost a year now.
She’d dated a little after Jane, gone out a few times with Daniel, the guy who ran the Coffee Cauldron, and Vivi had set her up with one of her history teacher friends, Beth, but that hadn’t really gone anywhere, either.
Honestly, she blamed Vivi and Rhys. Seeing her cousin that happy, that . . . right with someone had made her pickier. She didn’t just want someone to have a casual conversation and some hot sex with. She wanted . . . well, she didn’t know.
To catch someone’s eye and know what they were thinking. To be in a room full of people and know that that person was yours. To not just enjoy someone, but enjoy the person she was with them.
Gwyn shook her head slightly.
Yeah, all Vivi and Rhys’s fault, making her this mushy out of nowhere.
What she needed was some obnoxiously named cider and to get back to her students, so she moved forward and placed an order for something called The Wicked Queen’s Poisoned Apple.
Gwyn had just gotten her glass when she spotted a familiar figure moving toward her.
Wells was holding a bottle of plain lager rather than one of the bespoke ciders, and in a sea of T-shirts and jeans, the man was wearing neatly pressed trousers, a button-down, and, Goddess help her, a vest.
No, this wasn’t a vest, she amended as he got closer. This was a waistcoat. Surely that’s what he called it.
He didn’t seem to see her until he was almost on top of her, his mind clearly a million miles away, and when he did, he visibly startled.
“Ms. Jones.”
“Llewellyn Penhallow, Esquire,” she replied, and his lips drew together in a thin line.
See, that was the thing. He was too easy to tease, and it was too fun to stop.
“What brings you to The Cider Shack?” she asked him. “You seem more like a . . . I don’t know, a Champagne Chateau kind of guy.”
Gwyn thought he might have considered smiling at that, but if he had, the impulse was gone pretty quickly. “You certainly have a lot of opinions about me given that we only met two weeks ago, and you’ve spent maybe five minutes in my company.”
Smirking, Gwyn folded her arms over her chest. “We didn’t meet two weeks ago,” she said, and he frowned at her, confused.
“What? No, I’m certain we never met before. I would have . . . ”
His eyes moved over her face briefly, and Gwyn felt a sudden prickle of awareness, a slight bit of heat sliding up her spine.
Okay, no, she told her treacherous body. I know I was just thinking about how I’ve neglected you lately, but please get a grip.
He was handsome, she could admit that. And he had very nice eyes, and she’d always liked a man with a beard, but he was still Llewellyn Penhallow, total snob and Non-Attender of Weddings.
Now he took a sip of his beer and shook his head. “If you say we’ve met before, maybe we have, but I certainly don’t remember it.”
“Maybe you’ll figure it out,” she suggested with a one-shouldered shrug, and there it was again, those pressed lips, those hard eyes, that barely perceptible stiffening of his spine.
“Indeed. Nice to have seen you again,” he said, even though it was very clear it had been anything but. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I only popped in for a quick drink. I still have work to do tonight.”
“Oh, right,” Gwyn said, casual as possible as he moved past her. “I thought I saw you in that dingy building across the street. What are you working on?”
She thought she’d been subtle, but then, Gwyn had never been great at subtle, and it was very clear from the smug smile spreading across Wells’s face now that she’d failed on that score yet again.
“Maybe you’ll figure it out,” he said, and if Gwyn hadn’t been so infuriated, she might have been a little impressed.
Then he turned and looked across the restaurant, frowning. “Are those your employees? I recognize the one with the blue hair.”
“Not employees, mentees,” she corrected him. “Now that the Jones family magic runs this town, we’ve started working with some of the younger witches, teaching spellcraft, guiding their practices. I assume you think it’s all silliness and plastic witch hats, but believe it or not, we are actually doing serious things with magic here.”
“Hmm. Well, right now, they’re seriously putting tarot cards on their foreheads,” he said, and Gwyn whipped around.
Yes, Cait was licking the back of a tarot card and sticking it to her head as Parker and Sam tried to guess which one it was.
Great.
“That’s actually a new technique for readings that they’re trying out,” she replied, holding her head high. “I guess it hasn’t reached Wales yet.”
“Hmm,” he said again, and then, as he turned away, she caught the barest hint of that smile.
“Good night, Ms. Jones.”
Gwyn didn’t bother with a parting shot, making her way back to the table and plucking the Empress off Cait’s forehead.
“Seriously?” she asked the group, and Cait gave an unapologetic shrug.
“You were taking forever and we got bored.” Twisting in the booth, she looked after Wells.
“I haven’t seen him up close before. He’s hot.”
“He’s not,” Gwyn lied even as Parker murmured, “Super hot,” and Sam said, “I mean, that family has good genes, it must be said.”
“His hotness,” Gwyn reminded the three, “is neither here nor there. What you were supposed to be doing was figuring out what he’s doing.”
She looked at the cards still spread out on the table. The Five of Swords was still there. So was the Six of Swords. No surprise, since that card usually meant some kind of sneakiness was afoot.
A third card was slightly covered by Parker’s napkin, and Gwyn pushed the piece of paper out of the way.
The Lovers stared back at her.
“I pulled that one, like, nine times in a row,” Parker said, nodding at it. “We even reshuffled the deck between pulls, and still, every time!”
Gwyn picked up the card along with the others, shoving them back into the deck quickly, trying very hard not to think about that weird moment earlier when Wells had looked at her—really looked at her—and she’d felt . . . whatever that was.
“Clearly this lesson was a bust,” she told the witches now. “So I guess we’ll just have to wait and find out what he’s up to over there the old-fashioned way.”
She wouldn’t have to wait long.