Free Love Charm for Carlotta (A Short Story in the Love Charm Series) by Carly Carson

Chapter 1
    Vroom! Vroom! Vroom!
    Carlotta Mason's heart stopped.
    That was the sound of her teenaged years returning in the
form of one bad boy hockey player and his motorcycle. She'd known the sound
when she was 17, and she'd recognize it again if she were 97.
    Not because it was the same motorcycle. No, that was
unlikely, as she hadn't seen Jace Burton in more than ten years. But the
reckless and cocky manner in which the bike was being ridden—that identified
the rider as surely as a trumpet call from the heavens would herald Armageddon.
    No one would speed on the narrow, winding lane that led to
her small house on Martha's Vineyard. No one, that is, but Jace, who'd spent
most every day of their senior year of high school riding up to this same house
on his battered Harley.
    He always drove too fast. He always rocked to a stop right
where the driveway ended by an overgrown hydrangea bush. He always waited for
her on the bike, with one long, booted leg touching the ground, the other
propped on the running board. His hair would be perfectly mussed from the wind
blowing through it, and his broad shoulders encompassed her entire world.
    She always ran out of the house to throw her arms around him
in joy, both at his appearance and at his safe arrival.
    But today, things were different. She was twelve years older
and a lifetime wiser. The impetuousness of youth had been drummed out of her by
the reality of life.
    She willed her heart to start beating again, and then she
ordered herself not to move from her spot in the kitchen. Her hands, buried
deep in a yeast-scented ball of bread dough, would surely anchor her in place.
    Boots clattered across the deep front porch, and now her
heart beat too wildly. The love of her life—No!
    The boy who'd broken her heart, when her
heart was a fragile, teenaged receptacle of hope and optimism.
    The boy who'd never looked back when he'd been offered a
chance to play with a professional hockey team in the National Hockey League.
    Carlotta kneaded the bread fiercely, reminding herself that
she'd practically killed herself to eliminate the impulsivity she was born
with. She would never repeat the mistakes of her youth. She no longer bolted
headlong into ill-conceived temptations.
    Except for that craziness last weekend when her friends
Ashley and Genevieve had talked her into casting a spell with that—
    She froze again.
    The love charm.
    A blue silk packet made up of a lock of her curly black
hair, a ground-up silver bean her friends had given her, and one of the
overblown blue flowers from the hydrangea bush at the corner of her yard. She
didn't believe in charms and spells, but she'd tossed the silk-enclosed bundle
into the moat at the deCordova benefit. The Venetian-themed ball provided such
a romantic setting, and when she'd seen the moat – yes, impulse had overtaken
her and she'd made a wish and thrown the charm. As she'd expected, no one
interesting had approached her that night, and she'd returned to the Vineyard,
the love charm forgotten.
    Now the memory swept into her kitchen, in a sparkle of
remembered hope. She shook her head to dislodge it.
    If that damned charm had brought Jace Burton back into her
peaceful life like a boomerang from hell, she'd find herself a voodoo witch and
hex the lot of them—Ashley, Genevieve, and Jace himself.
    She'd tossed that rotten heartthrob-without-a-heart from her
life a dozen years ago, and he was never coming back.
    A loud rap on the front door signaled that Jace didn't
realize he'd been banned from her life.
    Her hands clenched in the stretchy dough as if the bread
could trap her and save her from moving.
    She forced herself to begin kneading again. Maybe if she
focused on the work she loved, she could press out this compulsion that ordered
her to walk into the living room, approach the door, and open it wide.
    In welcome.
    She had to resist that instinct because she could never
welcome his re-entry into her life.
    She'd moved past that