A Celtic Witch - By Debora Geary Page 0,7

still hardly your most likely culprit."

"There's a cloaking layer on the fetching spell." She waited until he looked up. Interrogations worked better that way, although in this case, the subject was looking a little too honestly perplexed. "One of mine."

"Ah." The sound was more drawn out this time.

"Yeah. Nobody's going to sniff through that without magic. We're looking for a coding witch. A skilled one."

Marcus peered morosely at the bottom of his coffee cup. "Well, it's not me. If I had any time to code, I'd go undo that mess your most difficult daughter has created in my high mountain keep."

Nell rolled her eyes. No one in Enchanter's Realm had touched anything of Marcus's. Under Ginia's high decree, gamers with babies were exempt from sneak attacks unless they were actually present and accounted for.

He was probably in deep trouble the next time he put in an appearance, though.

She frowned at her mug. If he wasn't messing with her fetching spell, who was?

The witching world is full of miscreants. Marcus stood up and headed to the fridge. Faking an IP address isn't all that hard.

True. But that traveled into the territory of something more than witch tricks. Unless someone had been trying to get Marcus into trouble. Nell grinned and relaxed. That was a workable theory, and the potential list of culprits was long.

She'd set a snare when she got home.

Right after she finished her sandwich and figured out exactly what Marcus had done to make onions taste like candy.

He was out of the fridge now, carrying more supplies to the cutting board. Nell watched his eyes track over to Morgan and wondered if he had any idea how much his love showed. She dropped her voice out of range of Lizzie's listening ears. "How's parenthood these days?"

He stopped his first answer before it got out. And busied himself with some carrots and what looked like a really sharp knife. "Hard."

Not the tough-bachelor answer she'd been expecting. "What's going on?"

"Nothing." He guillotined carrots with a force that made Nell wince.

"No problems on the astral-travel front, right?" Global reports had been swift and full of gratitude - none of their very few living travelers were having trouble staying attached to their bodies anymore.

In their last spell together, Marcus and Evan had done very good work.

"I think we just need to take a trip or something. Get out of the infernal cold and wet."

A Nova Scotia winter would have made Nell bat-shit crazy, but she was pretty sure that wasn't Marcus's problem. People who lived here on purpose had stronger constitutions. Nell tiptoed into the sudden quicksand - maybe that way Marcus wouldn't chop a finger into his carrots by accident. "Sometimes parenting's hardest when there isn't a crisis."

His eyes bounced up.

She took that as evidence that her shot in the dark had hit some kind of target. "Nothing to fight, no windmills to tilt at. Just one foot in front of the other." And the knowledge that the road stretched long ahead. "Those days can be a slog."

It took a very long time for him to speak. "I thought it was just me."

She shook her head. No, you grumpy old curmudgeon, and if you let us see your heart more often, you'd know that.

He only stared down at his carrots.

Nell sighed and went back to regular speech. "Any parent who tells you otherwise is lying through their teeth." She looked over at Morgan, currently trying to push down Lizzie's pillow fort. "Even when we love them so much it hurts."

"I don't know how I'm going to do it." He pushed plates aimlessly around the counter. "How the heck is Marcus Buchanan, crotchety old bachelor, going to raise a girl?"

Ah. More going on than just the usual parenting slog. "It'll work out. Morgan will keep you wrapped around that little finger of hers, and together, you'll make it happen." She thought of her triplets and smiled. "Trust me, they have minds of their own."

"But there's all that girl stuff."

Nell resisted the temptation to make him squirm - he hadn't been nearly as obnoxious as usual today. "I grew up with six brothers, and my girls have still managed to cover half my house in glitter glue and shiny things." Maybe more than half.

"But you're a girl." His cheeks reddened as he set their plates back down on the table. "I mean, a woman. But you were a girl once."

Nell hid a grin. Marcus's happily sexist bubble was full of a lot of pinholes