Free Charming Blue by Kristine Grayson

in jest. Please.”
    She frowned at him and continued.
    “You can’t touch a ward that’s made to protect someone from you. If you do, depending on the power of the ward, you could get hurt or maybe even killed. You can’t even spectrally cross a threshold that has a ward against you.”
    “Ever?” he asked, looking confused.
    “Ever,” she said.
    “Has that changed over the years?” he asked.
    “No,” she said. “That’s the nature of wards. They’ve always been like that.”
    “That’s not possible,” he said. “The village, at the end, the entire village had wards against me. Still, one of the girls who died, she was in a house with wards against me.”
    Jodi looked at him. His gaze was meeting hers and she had the sense that he didn’t even know he was doing that. She could see deep into those beautiful blue eyes, and she saw no deception in them.
    Maybe she was really, really susceptible to his magic.
    “That’s why my parents sent me away,” he said, “because even the most powerful wards designed to keep me away didn’t work against my twisted magic. No one was safe. So I left. I did. I stayed as far from people as I could. That’s why the Greater World was so appealing. America. Back then, it didn’t have a lot of people, and I could be by myself for a long time.”
    The idea of wards that hadn’t worked disturbed him. But it didn’t disturb her as much as the beauty of his eyes did.
    “Clearly,” she said, “whoever made the wards did it wrong. That happens. It’s not a common skill. Not all domestics have it.”
    “But you do,” he said.
    “Yes,” she said.
    “And you know you’re good,” he said.
    “Yes,” she said.
    He nodded, and finally his gaze left hers. She felt his gaze move away, as if he had been touching her and stopped.
    “Look,” he said, “it’s too risky. I don’t want to know how to disable those wards. Either you do it, or we wait until they decay.”
    “Tank wants to settle this Fairy Tale Stalker thing,” Jodi said, not sure exactly what she was trying to convince him of.
    “Yeah,” he said. “I understand that. Tell her that—well, hell, don’t tell her anything. I’ll look at this stuff tonight, and if I have nothing, I’ll have Hargrove call you. Otherwise, I’ll get permission to call you and give you the update, okay? He already got to see me interact with you twice.”
    “He wanted to see you interact with me?” she asked.
    Bluebeard smiled. It was a rueful look. “Yeah. He seems to believe that something about my relationship with women causes me to drink.”
    “And he thinks he can solve that?” she asked.
    Bluebeard’s smile became real for just a brief second. His eyes actually twinkled.
    “Well,” he said, “sometimes we all have delusions of grandeur.”

Chapter 9
    No matter what happened, that man left her terribly unnerved. Jodi left the rehab center with her head spinning. She believed that he didn’t remember much about the murders, just enough to convince him that he did it. She also believed that he was doing whatever he could to prevent another, at least consciously.
    The idea that his subconscious wanted to kill women who interested him… well, that was more upsetting than she wanted to acknowledge. Because she didn’t get a sense of evil from this man, and she usually got a sense of evil from evil people/creatures.
    She wondered if the attraction and the charm overwhelmed her own sense of danger. She didn’t know if that awareness-of-evil sense came from her domestic magic or if it was just a part of her. If it came from her magic—and she had never seen anything to convince her that it did or did not—then something he had done had overwhelmed it.
    And it would imply that he had done something to overwhelm those wards all those years ago.
    She drove back to her office with the top down and songs blaring, although once she got to work, she had no sense of what she listened to. A group of gnomes huddled in