LITMIR.BIZ

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He shouldn’t notice any difference in the taste.”

      “Don’t you need a piece of my hair or something?” Mary Anne asked, deciding not to repeat the question about the potion hurting Jonathan.

      The look the midwife gave her was withering. “No, I don’t,” was all she said. Then, seeing Mary Anne’s still doubtful expression, she seemed to take pity and explained, “Your essence is there. Believe me.”

      Mary Anne tore out the piece of paper. “What do I owe you?” If this was expensive, she was going to kill Cameron.

      “Twenty-five dollars.”

      Cheaper than highlights. Mary Anne readily produced the cash.

      Clare stared hard into her eyes and said, “Finally, the most important thing.”

      “What?”

      “Make sure the right person drinks it.”

      Cameron and Mary Anne both laughed. Mary Anne said, “Won’t be a problem.”

      CHAPTER TWO

      A TREASURED POSSESSION, a kind word, a secret good deed. Graham Corbett was the obvious recipient of all these things. “A terrible person,” Mary Anne murmured with satisfaction as she steered the car out of Myrtle Hollow.

      She had forty-eight hours in which to accomplish these tasks. Then, she could slip the potion into a drink for Jonathan at his engagement party. And watch her happiness unfold.

      Except that love potions did not work, could not work.

      Beside her, Cameron said, “I’ll come back to Nanna’s with you, then walk home.”

      A good three miles, but nothing for Cameron.

      “I can drop you,” Mary Anne said.

      “No, I want some books.”

      Aside from a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1969, nearly all the books at their grandmother’s house, where Mary Anne also lived, were romance novels. No pirates, nothing sexy. Also, nothing published since the early 1950s—Mary Anne suspected that sexy romances had been written before then, but Nanna owned none of them. In Nanna’s books, the heroines were constitutionally upbeat virgins who never smoked, drank or kissed on dates, not only because it might be bad for them but also because it might set a bad example for their peers. American heroes and heroines were fiercely patriotic and always punctual. No one ever even mentioned sex. The only historicals Nanna owned had been written by Barbara Cartland—Nanna didn’t even particularly care for Jane Austen. Mary Anne believed that this was because Lydia Bennet had lived in sin with wicked Wickham before Darcy had bribed Wickham to marry the ruined creature. Cameron countered that it was because Fitzwilliam Darcy stirred Nanna’s own repressed sexual nature. Pride and Prejudice was, Cameron maintained, an inherently sexy book.

      Both cousins, however, shared an enjoyment of Nanna’s selection of extremely unlikely romances. Cameron claimed that in her own case it was historical research into the evils of the repressed society from which all her clients’ problems sprang, the seeds planted generations earlier. Mary Anne just enjoyed the stories’ improbable plots. “I just finished Stars in Your Eyes,” she recommended.

      Cameron frowned. “Which one is that?”

      “The girl is driving to Mexico to take care of her brother’s daughter, when she gets a flat tire. A seedy character directs her to a mechanic at the nearest bar, where a total stranger greets her as though they’re eloping together. While he’s embracing her, he whispers, ‘I’m Drex. Danger.’”

      “And the heroine falls right into the act with him,” Cameron said, remembering. “Then, the corrupt Mexican military dude forces them at gunpoint to marry, with the seedy guy presiding as J.P.,” she filled in excitedly. “Then, the hero persuades her to keep up the pretense of the marriage—”

      “Without ever consummating it—”

      “For patriotic reasons involving espionage. Yes, I want that one,” Cameron decided. “Do you think Nanna has made us strange? I mean, she made your mother and my mother strange.”

      Mary Anne had little interest in this topic. Her parents lived in Florida and she lived in West Virginia. Another continent might be preferable, but you couldn’t have everything. “Do you think the love potion will work?” she asked. “No, I’m stupid. There’s no way it can.”

      “Paul says they do work. He says it’s scary.”

      “For someone terrified of commitment, I’m sure it is.”

      “It’s like this, Mary Anne. I work in a job that encourages me to believe romance is silly, marriages don’t last and happily ever after is a mundane matter of avoiding men who beat you. But your parents are still married and so are mine.”

      “Would you be in my mother’s marriage?” Mary Anne asked.

      “No. Nor my own mother’s. I’m just trying to say…” Cameron sighed. “I don’t know what I’m trying to say. Except that even if the love potion doesn’t work, you shouldn’t stop believing you can have an excellent future with someone.”

      “That’s the most depressing thing I ever heard.” It was depressing because she wasn’t in love with a random someone. She wanted Jonathan Hale. “So can you, by the way. Have an excellent future with someone.”

      “It doesn’t matter for me. I want to adopt children. I’m not a marriage-or-nothing-else kind of person.”

      “And I am?”

      Cameron said what Mary Anne knew on some level to be true. “Yes.”

      Mary Anne tried to think of a treasured possession she was willing to sacrifice toward the goal of achieving her heart’s desire. What were her most treasured possessions? She treasured the quilt Nanna had made for her and given her when she graduated from Columbia. No way would that find its way to Graham Corbett’s bedroom—a place she pondered only briefly as an imagined horror of dirty underwear and stinky men’s running shoes. What else did she treasure?

      Cameron said, “So you’re going to bestow all these things on Graham Corbett?”

      “Yes. I detest him.”

      “I’m not sure that’s the message you’ll convey.”

      Mary Anne heard a slight strain in Cameron’s voice.

      She really likes him.

      A brainstorm occurred to her. “How’s this? For the really nice thing I’m going to do for him?”

      Cameron said nothing, just waited.

      “I’ll set him up with you!”

      Cameron muttered something entirely uncharacteristic. “I don’t think I’m his type.”

      “But don’t you want to go out with him?”

      “I want him to want to go out with me,” Cameron corrected.

      “He’s truly a jerk, dear cousin. You have no idea. He says the most offensive things to me.”

      “I’ve heard some of them,” Cameron replied, sounding more dejected. “It’s called flirting, Mary Anne.”

      “Oh, no, it’s not!” Mary Anne replied. “But if you’re game, I can do a thing for him that is far better than he deserves, and set him up with wonderful you.”

      Cameron shrugged, as if she already knew that Graham would refuse. “Sure.”

      THE VALUED POSSESSION that Mary Anne decided to sacrifice was Flossy. It was ridiculous for a thirty-two-year-old to be so attached to a stuffed white rabbit with plastic fangs. She’d received it as a twenty-first birthday present from her college boyfriend, and she’d learned afterward that it had been made because of something to do with Monty Python.

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