Page 21 of Head Witch in Charge (The Sherwood Witches #2)

Erik…

We’ve been on the road for three hours, and LeLe is looking at me like I’ve grown a second head. (For the record, that only happened once, and it was because I agreed to let Cy try out one of his new spells on me. Trust me, that will never ever fucking happen again.)

“This is a classic,” I say, taking a break from singing Johnny Cash’s promise to walk the line. “How do you not know this song?”

LeLe finishes adjusting the elastic band she’s using to keep her hair back as we fly down the highway with the top down. “Because I wasn’t born a million years ago.”

“Good thing we’ve got a few days to educate you, wife.”

LeLe opens her mouth as if she’s going to tell me for the billionth time not to call her that, but there must be something in the air as we drive through flyover country, because instead of saying anything, she just shakes her head and relaxes back into her seat.

And because I’m a smart man who knows when to accept small victories, I don’t push it but instead start singing along with Johnny again.

The sun is out, the weather is unseasonably warm for the early fall, and the traffic on the back road we’re traveling is sparse.

The last car we passed was a tractor with a bright green hay baler attached to the back.

There have been a plethora of red barns, field after field of corn bracketing the two-lane highway, and a limited number of stoplights in the towns we’ve driven through.

That means there’s no one but LeLe looking at me strangely as I belt out the lyrics to a song that was released the same year Bessie came off the assembly line in Detroit.

Normally I wouldn’t be singing along to the radio when anyone besides my sister or brother is in the car. I learned early on in life not to show that I enjoyed anything, because that would always be the first thing Dad would take away when he decided I needed to learn a hard lesson.

But singing (badly) in front of LeLe makes her smile even if she still isn’t talking to me. Finding that crack in her icy facade is pretty much worth any kind of personal embarrassment.

We make it through Patsy Cline’s greatest hits and are just starting on the brilliance of Dolly Parton when we pull into another one-stoplight town. This one, however, has a mom-and-pop ice cream shop that promises the best soft-serve cones in three counties right next to a gas station.

“Are you a vanilla or a chocolate?” I ask as I pull into the small parking lot and find a spot.

She looks over at me and grins. “Swirl.”

Of course. LeLe is rarely what I expect.

She hops out of the car as soon as I cut the engine. I’m about to open my door when my phone vibrates. My dad’s face fills the screen and my good mood evaporates in a flash. It rings a few times and then stops—not that the old man has given up. He’ll keep calling until I pick up.

“I gotta take this,” I say, letting my hand fall from the door latch. “You go ahead and get a cone.”

She cocks her head in question. “You want one?”

Not anymore. “I’m good.”

“Your loss,” she says before setting off across the lot, her hips swaying.

The phone stops buzzing while I watch LeLe go, unable to look away.

I should have been more specific about the packing spell.

I’d requested her favorite jeans; I hadn’t realized they’d be my favorite too, considering how they fit her phenomenal ass like a glove.

Looking away isn’t an option, not even with knowing who had called and would definitely be calling back.

She joins the short line in front of the ice cream shop window and immediately starts chatting with the mom holding a baby on her hip in front of her. It takes all of about five seconds before they’re chatting like old friends and LeLe is making funny faces at the kid.

She looks so relaxed and happy. I try to remember the last time I felt like that, and the only thing I can come up with is last year in Vegas with her when I was pretending to be someone else.

Well aren’t you a sad sack, you fucking chump.

I’m tempted to say fuck it and join her in line, but my phone starts up again. Putting off Dad will only delay the inevitable and give him time to work himself up into a narcissistic rage at being kept waiting.

I tap the answer icon.

“You got her in the car or what?” my dad asks without preamble.

“Got who?” I ask as I watch LeLe playing hide-and-seek behind her hands with the baby.

“Don’t play dumb with me, son. You give chase to those thieving Sherwoods who stole The Liber Umbrarum from us, magic that idiotic car of yours in from where in the fates knows, and then you message your sister that you’re gonna be gone a few days.

Even your sorry excuse for a brother could have figured out what was going on.

You better be making that move on the Sherwood heir that you should have made in Vegas. ”

When he’d found out I was late to that meeting with the Kiehls, I had to make up a story quick so he wouldn’t devote any time to thinking about what I could be up to.

So I stuck to part of my truth—I was in Vegas on LeLe’s trail to try to get her to marry me for access to her family’s money—and his truth—I am a failure who fucks up everything.

As far as my dear old Dad knows, I rolled snake eyes with LeLe.

I can’t let him know about the handfast until everything else is in place for my plan to work.

I need him a little more desperate, a little more on edge, a little more willing to do whatever it takes to save his own skin, his family be damned.

Not to mention that if Dad knew the truth that LeLe and I were married, he would have been at the Sherwoods’ house faster than the twitch of his nose to make his demands.

He probably would have siphoned off half of their money by now.

Not that I give a shit, but this isn’t about him, it’s about me getting my revenge.

“I’m working on something,” I tell him, keeping my voice steady so as not to betray just how much I hate him.

If I don’t, he’ll lash out at Cy and Sigrid, making them pay the price for my slipup. He’s done it before, and I’ll do just about anything to make sure it can’t happen again.

“Good. The clock is ticking. We’ve got a payment due to the bank at the end of the week.

I don’t have time for you to fuck this up again.

” He pauses, and I can picture him in his study.

He’s probably sitting behind the huge mahogany desk that has been in the family for generations.

It sits on a platform that’s a few inches higher than the rest of the floor so that he’s always looking down at whoever is sitting across from him. “So I repeat, is she with you?”

There isn’t any purpose in lying on this point. The man has spies everywhere. He probably already knows the answer. “Yes.”

“Then use that supposed charm of yours and woo the homely chit,” he snaps. “Once our houses merge, our debt becomes Sherwood debt, and they’ll have to quietly pay it all or face societal censure themselves—something they really can’t afford with the Council gunning for control.”

In Witchingdom, image is everything. You are powerful because you look powerful.

Once that is no longer the case, though, that’s when your enemies come for you—and our family has nothing but enemies.

It’s happened before. The Peks had it all one day and lost everything the next when it turned out their family accountant was embezzling before disappearing without a trace.

When the checks started bouncing, the invitations stopped coming, the opportunities dried up, and avoidance spells became the rule, not the exception.

For the Peks, it was all over in a matter of weeks.

Witchingdom is like that; the only ones the witches look out for is themselves.

At least we Svensens are up-front about it, unlike the rest of the families.

“And we won’t stop with them paying off our debts. Fuck no,” he says with a cruel laugh. “We’ll bleed those sanctimonious Sherwoods dry.”

“What’s your endgame here? Why not just use The Liber Umbrarum to get what you want?”

“Because I’m not a complete idiot,” he says, his tone making it clear that he thinks I am.

“Right now the Council thinks the Sherwoods have the book, and they’re wasting all of their time trying to figure out how to get it back from them without causing a war out in the open.

The last thing I want is to turn the Council’s attention to us.

I haven’t been playing both sides of the divide for the past ten years to have it blow up in my face because I was shortsighted enough to use the most powerful spell book in Witchingdom to pay off a few debts. ”

I glance over at Bessie’s glove box with its magical wards carved into the shiny walnut surface protecting the book inside. “Then what are you going to do with it?”

“Nothing that you need to concern yourself with. What you should be worried about is what will happen to Cy and Sigrid if you don’t do your job and marry the Sherwood heir.”

Heat rushes through me, making it feel like I’m boiling from the inside out. “I’m well aware of what’s on the line.”

“Are you sure? You’re not going soft, are you? We don’t have time for you to turn into your mother.”

Everything fades into the background. The ice cream shop, the parking lot, and the baby LeLe has been charming, they’re all gone.

I swear I can hear my heart beating in my chest, feel the electric pulses of my brain synapses firing, and hear the sound of my own hatred simmering in my gut.

“I told you not to talk about her ever again.”

“Don’t like to be reminded how you fucked that up, huh?” he sneers.

I know what he’s doing. He’s been goading me like this my entire life, poking at any perceived emotional weakness and exploiting it. The bastard knows exactly where to land the sucker punch.

It takes almost all my control, but I manage not to give him the reaction he’s looking for. Instead, I keep my voice ice-cold as I tell him, “Consider your message delivered.”

“I sure hope so, otherwise Cy and Sigrid will pay the price for your failure just like your mother did.”

Dad hangs up and I just sit there white-knuckling my phone and staring out at nothing.

That’s a lie. It’s not nothing. I’m seeing my mother’s face the night the Council came and took her away in the dead of night.

I know it’s not happening right now, but as the memory plays in my mind, everything tightens and I can barely breathe.

Her eyes are red-rimmed and she’s begging my dad to help her.

He just stands to the side, his face stony. Then she’s gone.

I’m not sure how long I stay like that, trying to get my pulse to settle and my jaw to unlock while I’m banishing the echo of the worst day of my life. It’s not until I hear LeLe’s cheerful “It was great to meet you” that I manage to pull my shit back together.

She strolls over to the passenger side of the car and pauses, her hand resting on the door handle.

“Did you change your mind?” She holds up her half-eaten swirl cone, the bottom of which is wrapped in about a million bright purple napkins. “I can go back and get you one.”

Something inside me shifts as I look at her.

She’s got a huge grin on her face, the tip of her freckled nose is starting to burn, and there are enough golden highlights in her red hair that the sun going through it looks like she’s standing in the middle of a spotlight.

All of a sudden it’s a little easier to breathe, and some of the tension ebbs out of my shoulders.

Finally, I unwind my fingers from their death grip around my phone and shove it into the center console.

“Hard to drive and eat a cone.” I put my sunglasses back on before looking over at her. “Unless you’re going to hold it for me?”

She scoffs. “Not a chance.”

“You’ve done it before.”

It had been our second morning waking up together in Vegas.

We were having breakfast in bed, both of us naked, and I kept getting distracted by the sounds of absolute unrestrained pleasure she made when she ate a strawberry dipped in whipped cream.

She noticed and said she wanted to share her breakfast, so she dipped a strawberry in the whipped cream and then used it to draw a line of cream around her hard nipple and told me to have some. She hadn’t had to ask twice.

“I’m not the person I was in Vegas,” she says, her harsh tone yanking me back to the present. “Neither are you.”

She’s right, of course. The guy she’d thought he’d been was a fucking paragon. He was a stand-up guy. He didn’t lie and cheat. He didn’t do whatever was necessary to do what needed to be done. He got to fall for the girl and have her fall for him. He got to be happy.

I’m not that guy and I never will be.

I’ve really fucked things up. Usually, I’m better at minimizing my dad’s plots, but he pulled out the big guns this time by putting Cy and Sigrid into the line of fire already.

I’d figured that would be his last-ditch effort once he realized my plan to force him to give up the family power, but he did it early, which only means he’s got more bad shit looming over his—and therefore my—head than I even know about.

I pull out onto the highway and after a few miles sneak a glance over at LeLe.

She’s given up on fixing her ponytail, and strands of hair are flying in the breeze as we head down the highway.

We have another day—maybe two—of hard driving ahead of us before we get to the secured facility and LeLe realizes this has all been an elaborate con, so I might as well enjoy the view.

Yeah, like I said. I’m an asshole.