Charmed, I'm Sure

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling of my bedroom, at the white-painted beams and the little crystal chandelier that hung from the center of the space. Usually, when I woke up the day after a big event, I always had a sense of well-being, even if I was tired from being out so late the night before. Still, weariness could never take away the satisfaction of knowing that I’d steered yet another wedding to a successful completion, or the realization that I had an entire day to myself before I had to hop back on the merry-go-round to take another ride.

That particular Sunday morning, though, I mostly felt irritated…and I knew exactly why. Despite my best efforts, I kept seeing the flash of Allan D’Alessandro’s smile, hearing the warmth of his voice, which hovered somewhere between tenor and baritone and was strangely reassuring. Or maybe I’d only found it reassuring because he’d been the one to intercede with Lewis Lowell on my behalf. Either way, I couldn’t seem to get Allan out of my mind, which annoyed me no end.

This goddamn curse would be a lot easier to deal with if my hormones would just cooperate.

I sat up in bed and pulled off the scrunchie I always wore to sleep to keep my long hair from tangling overnight. It fell against my shoulders, dull copper in the soft light slipping past the bedroom curtains. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could have sworn I’d noticed Allan giving my hair an admiring glance the night before.

Still, it didn’t matter if he admired my hair, or whether he thought I was this generation’s answer to Helen of Troy. I absolutely couldn’t see him.

All right, that wasn’t exactly the truth. Sure, I could see him. I could even sleep with him if I wanted to. The one thing I absolutely could not do was allow him to have any real feelings for me.

Well, if I was going to start brooding about the curse for the millionth time, I definitely needed some coffee first.

I slid out of bed and went over to the closet so I could put on yoga pants, a pair of Uggs, and a sweatshirt. Thus attired for my morning, I headed out to the kitchen.

Not a moment too soon, as Mr. Mittens, my cat, appeared in the hallway and gave a loud meow to let me know what he thought of my sluggish behavior this morning.

“Like you’re not used to it by now,” I remarked as I got out a can of Blue Buffalo chicken paté and then dumped it into his bowl. “Wedding last night, remember?”

Of course, he didn’t respond, because he already had his head in his bowl and was chowing down. I had to say that for my feline friend — unlike a lot of cats, he ate pretty much whatever was put in front of him, although I was careful about what he ate, since I wanted him to stick around for as long as possible. Noting that it looked a little low, I refilled his water fountain setup and put it back down on the floor next to his food dish.

The cat taken care of, I could now attend to my own needs. I got out a K-cup of French roast and stuck it in my Keurig, then pressed the button to get the brew cycle going. Almost at once, the warm scent of coffee began to fill my small kitchen, and I pulled in a breath, savoring the aroma.

Unfortunately, thinking about coffee led my thoughts back to Allan. He hadn’t seemed that disappointed by my rejection the night before. Maybe he’d asked someone else out for coffee after I turned him down, although it had looked to me as though he left the reception almost immediately afterward. I hadn’t really been able to check for sure, since then it was time to wind things down, to have the band play the last dance and for the partygoers who still remained to say good night to the bride and groom before the couple headed upstairs to their suite. And once that custom had been followed, I was busy helping to get the site tidied up, switching into flats once the guests were gone so I could get some actual work done.

All through the routine, though, I’d kept thinking about Allan D’Alessandro — and during the drive from downtown to my house in Santa Monica as well, although by that point, I was tired enough that the only thing I really should have been concentrating on was getting home safely. That sort of behavior was very unlike me. My business brought me into contact with quite a few men, actually, whether they were vendors or relatives of the bride and groom or managers at the various event spaces I utilized. I would never say I didn’t notice some of them, because that would be a lie. However, I’d gotten pretty good at noting a man’s good looks and then moving on, and making damn sure I had a repertoire of believable excuses in case any of them showed the slightest sign of interest in me.

True, I’d done that with Allan D’Alessandro at the reception, turning him down as soon as he made the request. What I hadn’t done, though, was file him away and move on. No, I’d kept thinking about him, which was definitely not a good sign.

The Keurig machine beeped, and I went to get a mug from the cupboard and fill it with my morning dose of caffeine. I always allowed myself one cup, but after that, I drank green tea all day — my work usually kept me wired up enough that there was no need for me to do much more than maintain a very mild caffeine buzz during the rest of my waking hours. Sleeping was hard enough without being completely juiced when I finally went to bed each night.

To my big, empty bed.

“Stop it,” I said aloud, and Mr. Mittens gave me a semi-curious glance from his big amber eyes before he stalked over to the back door, the one that opened on the yard, and gave a peremptory meow. He had a litter box, but he much preferred to go outside. Since he’d never shown any interest in exploring beyond the backyard — which was fairly large by Santa Monica standards — I went ahead and let him out.

My cat’s commands obeyed, I could finally allow myself a sip of coffee. Strong and black, exactly what I needed after getting barely six hours of sleep. During the week, I forced myself to go to bed by eleven, just so I could try to get around seven hours, but it was tough. There was always one more email to read, one more website I needed to visit, something else I needed to add to my to-do list for the next day.

Not that I needed to do any of those things this particular Sunday. No, while there were a few chores I needed to manage and errands I should run, there probably wasn’t enough on the schedule to prevent my thoughts from straying back to Allan. As far as I’d been able to tell from reading the gossip sites, he’d been lying low ever since his relationship with Nina Nomura flamed out, but I wasn’t sure whether that was because he’d been nursing his wounds for the past month — or however long it had been — or because TMZ and that lot really had no reason to be following the romantic exploits of a Hollywood agent, no matter how successful he might be. It was Nina the gossip-mongers were interested in, not Allan.

Was I the first person he’d approached since being dumped? I hated to think about how I’d shot him down when he was probably still stinging from Nina’s rejection, but I really didn’t have much of a choice. The last thing I wanted was to lead him on. And that was all having coffee with him would have been. A relationship with me was doomed to failure before it ever got started…all thanks to my great-great-great-to-the-umpteenth-power-grandmother.

According to my mother, Carson women had been witches going back into the hazy mists of time. Our powers weren’t strong enough to make us really stand out from ordinary women, but we’d always had a little something extra. My ancestors had always been able to fly under the radar, though…until Harriet Carson came along.

Family legend said she was a beauty with flaming red hair. I had to take that on faith, though, because no portraits of her had survived. At any rate, sometime around 1720 in Massachusetts, she’d fallen seriously in lust with a man named Thomas Sinclair, who just happened to be married to a rival witch.

As you can imagine, Thomas and Harriet’s affair didn’t turn out well for anyone involved.

When Thomas’s wife Jane found out he’d been doing the horizontal mambo with Harriet, she flew into a fury. Unfortunately for Harriet, all that fury was directed at her, and not at Jane’s own wandering husband. Drawing on all her anger, Jane fashioned a curse strong enough that it had dogged the Carson witches through all their succeeding generations.

Aye, Harriet Carson, you and all the daughters of your line will never know the love of a man or the security of a husband. You will be cursed with only daughters, and calamity will fall upon any man foolish enough to care for you and your own.

As curses went, it was a sticky one. My mother had never gone into detail about exactly what had befallen those men who’d lost their hearts to Carson witches from there on out, but my grandmother had let slip one particularly gruesome tale where the unfortunate soul had been thrown from his horse onto a frozen pond, where the ice promptly cracked under his weight, submerging him in the icy water beneath. No one even knew what had happened to him until the ice on the pond melted the following spring. Anyway, thanks to incidents like that, for three hundred years, my female ancestors had to struggle to survive on their own, each Carson witch having exactly one daughter to carry on the line, and no more.

Of course, my mother had a fairly neat solution to the problem — she was gay, and had been happily with the same woman for more than thirty years. In fact, the house I lived in actually belonged to my second mom, Faye. Even twenty years ago, she and my mother had realized the property was too valuable to sell, so they’d rented it out until I was old enough to move in and live on my own. Otherwise, even though I made a comfortable amount with my business, I never could have afforded the place, not when even a modest two-bedroom house like the one I occupied was going for nearly two million in Santa Monica’s crazy real estate market.

I never knew anything about my father, except that he’d been the sperm bank donor who appealed the most to Faye and my mother. All right, I also knew he’d been twenty-four at the time he donated his sperm, and that he’d been tall and had red hair and a degree in biology.

“And that’s all you need to know,” my mother had told me in junior high, when I was feeling restless and wanted to find out more about the man who’d contributed to half my genetic makeup. “They’re very careful to keep those donors anonymous. Faye and I are your parents, and that’s the important thing.”

While even at thirteen I understood intellectually what she’d been saying, I still wished there had been a way to learn a bit more than the bare facts that my father’s donor profile had contained. Had I gotten my face shape — slightly narrower and with more of a pointed chin — from my father? What about the hint of green in my blue eyes? I had a pretty singing voice, when my mother couldn’t carry a tune. Had that come from my father as well, or was my musical talent…undeveloped as it might be…something that was just the luck of the draw?

I’d never gotten the answer to any of those questions, and most of the time, I didn’t let the mystery of my father’s identity bother me too much. In another part of the country, being raised by two women who were obviously romantic partners might have raised a few eyebrows, but even twenty years ago, no one in Santa Monica had batted an eye. My childhood had been a happy one, and Faye was so much a part of my life that most of the time, I forgot we weren’t related biologically.

The only real blot on that idyllic childhood had been the Carson curse. My mother had explained it to me as soon as I was old enough to understand its ramifications, around about the same time when I really started to notice boys…and they started to notice me. She’d let me know in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t encourage male attention. In fact, she’d even hinted that I would lead a much happier life if I could follow the same path she had.