Page 13 of Head Witch in Charge (The Sherwood Witches #2)
Leona…
I am trying my best to appear like I’m not freaking the fuck out when my older sister Effie sweeps in and strong-arms me away from Erik.
Oh, it doesn’t look like I am being moved by force from the outside, my sister is too good at making everyone think she’s just the sweetest thing since pink Pixy Stix for that. My sisters and I, however, know better.
Effie is a terror.
I might be the heir to our family magic, but as the oldest, Effie is the bossy brains and badassery of the family. Am I afraid of her? No. Am I knee-jerk gonna go to her for advice, and has she wheedled every secret I’ve ever had out of me for my entire existence? Oh yeah.
She’s my older sister. I’d step in front of a herd of stampeding water buffalo for her, right after I hexed the book she’s reading so the last chapter disappears. If you have sisters, you totally understand. If you don’t, you have way less mutual trauma and fewer closets to steal clothes from.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Effie asks as she looks over her shoulder at Erik. “With him?”
Yeah, she knows the whole story about what went down in Vegas (she got me to fess up within hours of me returning home).
From the staged meet-cute to the fake names, to the elevator sex to the handfast marriage under the full moonlight.
Like I said, if Effie wants to know something, she’s going to find it out.
“Don’t I look sure?” I straighten myself and tilt my chin up a few degrees, taking it from witch next door to untouchable bitch.
I can make that transformation in my sleep—no spell necessary.
My mom makes things happen by the sheer force of her personality.
She’s intimidated presidents, queens, and even a pair of trolls who quickly changed their minds about making her answer a riddle to pass over their bridge.
I’m nowhere near that good, but I’m working on it—as the heir, I don’t have a choice.
My sister looks me up and down before her lips curl into a self-satisfied smile, as if my resting witch face was all her doing. “You look exactly like you normally do—completely and utterly impenetrable.”
“So, like the Sherwood heir.” Which should make me happy, but instead just makes my shoulders slump a little lower.
She nods, trouble glimmering in her dark eyes. “The Sherwood heir married to the Svensen heir.”
“Shhhhh.” Panic rockets through me and I grab her arm, yanking her farther away from all the Sherwoods crowding the meadow and into the shadows, my heart pounding against my ribs the whole time. “Someone could hear you! Mom could hear you!”
I can already hear Mom’s I’m-not-mad-I’m-disappointed voice as she tells me that everyone had been depending on me to stick to the plan of marrying the right man from the right family for the right reason. Shit. Could I have fucked anything up more?
“What?” Effie shrugs. “Everyone is too busy getting all of the meet-cute-and-fell-in-love information from Tilda and Gil to pay attention to us.”
She glances over at our little sister and her obviously adoring brand-new boyfriend and gets the same sappy, happy grin on her face that’s on mine. We might give Tilda a hard time—she is the youngest, after all—but we love her more than words can say.
“They do look cute together,” I say, the truth tumbling out of my mouth before things click into place and I realize what my conniving sister is doing. “That is the worst attempt at changing the subject I’ve ever heard.”
Effie opens her eyes wide and presses her palm to her heart as if she’s been wrongly accused. “It’s true!”
“Of course it’s true.” That is like saying water is wet, newt muffins are delicious, Barkley is mostly evil, or my sister Juniper loves studying underutilized spells. “Hot professor type and our adorable little sister is a good pairing.”
“And the fact that they are obviously head over heels for each other helps,” Effie says with a happy sigh. “She does have that glow about her. Kinda like the hot pink aura you’re sporting right now. The one that says you’re in love.”
Heat blooms in my cheeks—the annoyed kind, not the oh-you-figured-out-my-secret kind. “You need to get your psychic vision checked.”
“Hmmm.” She cocks her head to the side and squints at me as she draws out the syllable.
Unease dances the conga up my spine like a parade of electric ants. “What?”
“What makes you think I have anything to say?” she asks, all sunshine and innocence.
Yeah, that bird is not flying. “You always have something to say. About everything. To everyone.”
It’s true. Maybe it’s because she’s the oldest, maybe it’s because she’s never been worried about rocking the boat, maybe it’s just because she’s Effie.
Whatever the reason, the woman has never hesitated to tell anyone what she was thinking.
Sometimes I’m jealous of that and other times I’m glad there’s a strong, working filter between my brain and my mouth.
“Is it my fault I see the solutions when other people only see problems?” she says, her tone making it plain that she doesn’t think it is her fault at all. “And just so you know, your aura is more red than pink.”
Before I can stop, I’m looking down at myself.
I don’t see red. I don’t see pink or blue or gray or anything other than my favorite pair of supersoft leggings and Fizzy Clementine band hoodie that I was wearing when the oops-you’re-frozen spell happened.
Unlike Effie, aura colors are not my area of magical expertise.
I deal with strategic magic, spells about logistics and organization.
I know.
It’s too sexy for words.
I’m gonna regret this, but I gotta ask, “So what does red mean? Anger?”
That would totally track. No one makes me as angry as Erik I’m-a-smug-asshole Svensen.
Effie all but vibrates with excitement; the woman loves nothing more than to stir the pot. “It means passion. Lust. Desire. Especially when you’re looking at your husband.”
Memories flash through my mind. The desperate need rolling through me as Erik stood behind me, his dick pressed against the small of my back as he cupped a breast with one hand and slid the other between my legs.
The thrum of our magic swirling together as I sank to my knees in front of him.
The feel of him inside me and that look he got in his blue eyes in the seconds before I came.
It wasn’t cocky satisfaction. It wasn’t a smug I-told-you-so.
It wasn’t a finally-now-I-can-get-mine. It was different than all of that, and part of me—a small, tiny part that barely made itself known—wants more than anything to see it again, something that definitely cannot happen.
So I stuff that idea down into a deep, dark well and fall into the part I play best—imperial Sherwood heir.
“I think being frozen really did mess with your magical abilities if you think my passion is leaning toward the sexy side instead of the murdering side when it comes to Erik Svensen.”
Effie rolls her eyes. “Would being married to him really be so bad? I mean, you saw something in him, or you wouldn’t have said your I dos under the full moon.”
Yeah. I saw a hot funny guy named Erik Phillips, not Svensen, who made smart jokes and treated me like I was Leona and not the Sherwood heir with a duty to my family that superseded anything I actually wanted.
Too bad what I saw was a lie.
“He is a Svensen,” I say between gritted teeth.
Effie shrugs. “So?”
“You know what they’re like.” Really, the stories are legendary. Blackmail. Thefts. Espionage. Vile threats. The Svensens are implicated in it all. “They can’t be trusted. They’re villains. I mean, come on, he used a spell to hide his identity in Las Vegas.”
For most witches, that would be enough to banish someone from their life for good. Effie, however, isn’t put off.
“Weren’t you using a camouflage spell too?” she asks. “Doesn’t everyone there?”
I let out an offended gasp. Of all the people to say that, it comes out of my sister’s mouth?! Where is the loyalty?
I sputter, but manage to get out the words to defend myself. “But the rest of the world does it for regular reasons, not so they could trap someone into marriage.”
A fact that she well knows because I tell her everything and she is supposed to be my ride or die.
Effie rolls her eyes. “Everyone makes mistakes.”
If my sister had just said that the sky is green, it couldn’t have been weirder.
Look, we all have those people in our lives who are the ones who when you say someone did you wrong, they remind you they have a shovel and land.
That’s my sister Effie, which makes her whole “everyone makes mistakes” comment about the guy who tricked me into marriage not just weird but totally bizarre.
Crossing my arms, I shoot her a don’t-fuck-with-me look. “What are you up to?”
She giggles at my pose, totally unfazed. “Nothing, but you should still listen to me and your raspberry-colored aura.”
None of that seems like a good idea—especially not with Erik Svensen.
I’ll be spending the next few hours with him, taking the ancient spell book to a secured location so the Council can’t use it to take over Witchingdom.
And because I’m the Sherwood heir and thus always figuring out how to use a situation to my advantage, I’ll also use the alone time with Erik to get him to agree to perform the spell that will dissolve our marriage.
Then I can go on with my life according to the plans laid out for me.
Never mind they aren’t exactly what I want.
No one gets everything they want in this world.
Life doesn’t work that way, so I’ll just suck it up and do what needs to be done per usual.
And maybe if I say that enough, it will start to feel less depressing.
“You wanna come with?” I ask my sister with a little more pleading than I meant to have leak out.
“Not a chance,” she says as she hugs me goodbye, “but if you need anything, just holler. I’ll be there. Flying monkeys couldn’t keep me away.”