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That was the one and only date he got out of me. Not because he wouldn’t pay for something, but because dates were supposed to be fun and he’d been like a wet blanket, sucking all the fun out of the whole night.

Tyson watched me with a blank face through a curtain of dark hair that had fallen forward to cover part of his face.

I wished I knew what he hid behind that blank mask he wore on his handsome face.

“And if I can?” he asked carefully, even his voice betrayed no emotion.

“Can you?” My voice, however, betrayed everything. Not that I was trying to hide anything. Tyson gave me no reason to hide my emotions.

“Yes,” he whispered while still watching me through his hair.

I put my hands together below my chin in a silent prayer, made my eyes as big and wide as they could go and stuck out my lower lip, pouting at him. I was willing to bet I looked ridiculous, but did not care. “Please, please, please.”

I wanted him to do a reading for me, but I also wanted him to teach me. If he was willing to teach me then I wanted to learn.

He brushed his long hair back behind his ear with lean, tan fingers. His eyes lit with a happiness I had never seen in them before and he flashed me his beautiful smile, blinding me with his white, tooth paste a

d perfection.

I hadn’t realized until that moment that he might have been nervous about my reaction to either his bedroom or the strangeness that was his family.

“Sorry, sweetheart, but not today. Today we have something else to do. But, this weekend if you want we can play with tarot cards. I think I might even be able to scrounge up your own deck for you.”

I liked the sound of that so I smiled at him. Not a small smile either, but a full blown one. Tyson always seemed to give me what I wanted, this time I had to wait a few days for it but it was still coming.

His smile faded from his face and he suddenly looked far too serious for me. “You should smile more often, sweetheart; you’ve got a beautiful smile.”

That did it, and my smile melted from my face, the happiness shining bright in my eyes dimmed a bit.

“I’ve never really had much to smile about,” I told him honestly.

“That’s going to change. I promise.”

Again, here was another promise.

I had to change the subject. “What are we doing today?” I asked him.

He let me change the subject and I found myself liking him even more for it if that was possible.

“You’re going to learn some things about magic.”

Finally.

Now we were talking.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Tyson moved the huge pillows on the floor around until they formed a circle around the rug. He kept two out of the outer ring. Those he placed beside each other inside the circle, they were closer to the tv than the bed.

He instructed me to sit on one of the big pillows he’d placed inside the circle of pillows. I sat with my back to the tv, facing towards the bed on an orange pillow.

He told me that when he normally did serious ceremonial magic he pulled out the rug from underneath the bed and would put his circle around it because it was old and held a great deal of magic. Whatever that meant. I had asked but was told I wasn’t ready for that explanation yet. I left it alone but filed a little note away in my head to look it up on my own when I got a chance. Objects could hold great deals of magic? I had no idea. I knew nothing of magic.

For all I knew this whole thing could be a bust and they all had been messing with me this whole time.

I had to trust Tyson, that he knew what he was doing and he wasn’t lying to me. So I kept my mouth shut and let him do his own thing.

But I watched every single move he made. I took note of the questions floating around in my head and mentally filed them away for later. I had some serious research to do when I found myself on my own again.