his own unflinching. "I can handle it."
She pursed her lips and turned her head away. "We don't do any of that stuff, Alex. My God, where do you get those ideas? This is a spiritual belief system, not a cult." Lowering her head, she shook it slowly. "You created the show - are you telling me you didn't do any research at all?"
"Of course I did. I just - lately I've learned some things that contradict what I thought I knew."
"From whom?"
He shook his head. He wasn't going there, not with her.
"Tell you what," she said. "I'll loan you a book or two, so you can read up on the subject. And then we'll talk some more. All right?"
She's lying.
He frowned, ignoring that whisper in his mind. "You're going to give me one of those light, fluffy, 'harm none' books, aren't you?"
"Harm none is one of the core values of the Craft, Alex."
"So you all keep telling me."
"We all?" she asked. Then she frowned. "You sound as if you've been doing some digging on your own."
He nodded, getting to his feet, frustrated and angry. Even more angry that he didn't want to leave this spot, this woman. He wanted to stay. For her, not the information he sought. "I really hoped you'd be different. Willing to tell me the truth," he said. "I'm disappointed that you're only giving me the same party line as the rest of the so-called Witches in town."
"So-called?" She got up as well. "Maybe if you told me just what it is you're looking for?"
He sighed, shaking his head. "Look, Melissa, not every character in this show is a do-gooder. I mean, we need opposing forces. Villains. The polar opposite of good Witches who play around with white light and moonbeams."
She stood very still, pinning him to the spot with her eyes. "Alex, don't mess with the dark stuff. You don't want that kind of energy clinging to you, trust me on this." Then she frowned. "You've already been messing with it, haven't you? That's where all that negative energy came from."
He held her gaze. Eyes like black velvet, deep and dark and potent. "Don't be so dramatic. It's not as if any of this is for real."
She closed her eyes as if praying for patience. "It's for real." Her words emerged as a whisper, one that sent shivers of reaction creeping up his spine, into his nape, tingling along his scalp. But not so much as when she opened her eyes again and they locked onto his, held them.
Something moved between them. Some energy he couldn't have put a name to even if he'd tried. It tagged him, bodily, so much so that he swayed forward. He gripped her upper arms, and she tipped her face up. And then he lowered his head to kiss her.
She turned her face away, so his mouth only grazed her cheek.
"I don't... I can't..." She drew a breath. "Go, please," she whispered.
God, the woman pulled him in like gravity. What the hell was that? Since when did he hire a woman he knew nothing about and proceed to make a move on her?
He turned and hurried back up the stone steps, around the little beach house, and to his car. He would get his answers, just apparently not from her.
He drove back to the gloomy mansion that belonged to him, pulled into the driveway, and sat there for a long moment, just staring up at the huge granite stones of the place, thinking about the events of the past several weeks, as if thinking about them, analyzing them, would cause them to make sense. They didn't. They hadn't then, and they wouldn't now.
And now there was one more inexplicable event unfolding in his life. An attraction to a woman he'd just met that felt like the most powerful force in the entire universe. God, maybe he needed therapy.
Part Three CHAPTER 3
Mists rose from the river far below, engulfing the suspension bridge and the couple who stood upon it. Melissa stared through the rising mists at the man, who bore a striking resemblance to Alexander Quinn, except that he wore black ritual robes and an inverted pentacle of solid gold with diamonds winking at each of its five points. The woman stood near the railing, her back to the man, her flowing white dress dancing in the mist-laden breeze like a living thing. Her wild golden hair was damp with the kiss of the moist air. Melissa couldn't see her