Sorceress, Interrupted - By A. J. Menden Page 0,13

her—in this case, to a remote cabin in Montana, with pretty much what amounts to a memory wipe so he won’t just call the girlfriend and have her send him a ticket out of there. He’s now out of town, and you will no longer have to see him every single day of your dreary office existence. Correct?” I nodded for her to speak.

“Yes! But then—”

I cut her off again. “In return for me using my power to do as you requested, you owe me a favor. You ask a favor of me, I get to ask a favor of you. This is the standard agreement I make with all of my clients, unless you have information I need, which you don’t. So you owe me one.” I fixed her with my darkest stare. “I’m certainly failing to see the problem that has you in here screaming at me.”

She was either oblivious or didn’t care about my intense disapproval, because she started talking again as soon as I allowed it. “I just wanted to teach him a lesson! I wanted him stranded in the middle of nowhere for a while until he came to his senses!”

I shrugged. “So call him. I told you if you ever wanted to undo it, just call and talk to him. It won’t work if the girlfriend calls him, only if you do.”

“I did, but we got into another fight!”

“Look, if you want me to reset the spell, that’s going to cost you.”

“No!” She looked like she wanted to hit me. I mentally dared her to. “While I was here the other night, he called me and left messages on my machine begging forgiveness and asking me to take him back. He was crying over the phone, saying he loved me, that he wants to spend the rest of his life with me, and that the fling with Chelsea was a terrible mistake.”

I took the glass one of my djinns held out for me, bringing the glowing pink drink to my lips. “So you taught him a lesson, he came to his senses, and you got what you wanted. I’m afraid I’m failing to see how this has anything to do with me.”

She shot daggers at me with her eyes. “You sent him to Montana!”

“You asked me to,” I replied with equal venom. “It’s not my problem that you changed your mind and broke the spell almost immediately. If you want him back here, send him a plane ticket. Problem solved.”

“That’s just it!” Her eyes glittered and she looked a little insane. “I finally got hold of him on his cell phone to say that I forgive him and to come back home. But now he doesn’t want to! He thinks the fling with Chelsea was part of a midlife crisis because he was feeling trapped in his job. He wants to stay out there in Montana and live off of the godforsaken land or rustle cattle or something like that. He thinks it was a God-given miracle he was sent there.” She reached into her designer handbag and pulled out a cigarette, lighting it with shaking hands.

I smirked. “I’ve been called many things, but ‘God’ is definitely a first.”

She glared at me over her cigarette. “He’s living some stupid cowboy childhood fantasy.”

“So, go out there to be with him if you love him so much. That’s where he’s happy,” I suggested. “Maybe it is just a stupid childhood fantasy, or maybe it’s a wake-up call for him to figure out what he really wants in his life. Either way, you can go out there and be with him and try to work it out.”

“Me? Live out in some cabin in the middle of nowhere? Like hell.”

Now she was really pissing me off. There was a time in my life that I would have loved for someone to wave their magic wand and do something magically for my relationship that I couldn’t. Sending her cheating investment banker boyfriend away to Montana with a fuzzy memory seemed to have helped: at least he wanted to work it out with her, if in a new locale. How hard was it for her to go to Montana for this guy she was supposedly so in love with?

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’ve ruined everything. I had a great relationship before all of this mess. You were supposed to be making my life better, not worse.”

Was she kidding me? Her relationship was great while her boyfriend was a