Free Never Been Witched by Annette Blair Page A

Destiny what he was running from, and why, because he didn’t quite know, himself.
    “Are you some kind of priest?” she called after him.
    He stopped. “No, damn it!” he shouted and started running.

Chapter Eleven
    DESTINY expected Morgan back before she finished the dishes, but he remained absent. She filled glass containers—beakers, cruets, jelly jars, and measuring cups made with swirls of color, of milk glass, or of opalescent glass—with the assortment of flowers and grasses she’d found. After distributing them to every room in the house, and setting her candles in old, unmatched candlesticks on every mantel, she wandered like a forlorn idiot, though her Samhain decorating cheered her somewhat.
    She decided that she needed to occupy her mind, so she went to the room where she’d left the giant pickle jar of Chinese lanterns, maple sprigs, and marsh grasses, the room where books lined the walls. You could learn a lot about a man through his reading material, so she got nosy.
    No doubt about it, Morgan’s how-to books dominated his collection, five to one, and his fiction tastes varied widely, revealing hidden depths.
    One stack of books, on a bottom shelf in a far corner, however, caught her eye simply because they’d been placed binding side in and shoved much farther back than the rest. She took them out, read their spines, and came face-to-face with a possible explanation for the priestly garb she’d found beneath the stairs.
    This particular set of how-to books were about sex, mostly about how to keep a woman happy in bed by giving her multiple and long-lasting orgasms. Go, Morgan. The book about how a man should cultivate this skill through practice looked dog-eared and well-read. Hmm. A man who practiced his staying power. Destiny grinned while her body heated deliciously. She shivered.
    In a clerical tome, which outnumbered his sex books—another clue—she searched for a picture of the priestly garb she’d found and finally identified the item. “Cassock: close-fitting, ankle-length garment worn by the clergy in the Roman Catholic church.” The picture looked the same: black, long sleeves, buttons down the front. A stiff white band centered the thin, black, stand-up collar.
    In Morgan’s makeshift art studio, Destiny began to paint a picture of a male version of Meggie: Morgan wearing a cassock as a boy, a bit, but not much older than Meggie had been when she died.
    How could she see Morgan wearing a cassock at such a young age, when she usually saw the future, not the past? She continued painting, hoping to see more of his past, of his and Meggie’s pasts together, but those visions eluded her.
    She heard a heavy step on the sloped plank path from the marsh toward the lighthouse—sloped, because the lighthouse sat on an oval stone base about sixty feet around and twelve feet deep, according to Horace, three-quarters on marshland, hence the plank, and one-quarter extending beyond the natural beach into the sea.
    In case it was Morgan, Destiny left the painting in an empty drawer of an old bureau in the studio and scooted into the bedroom, hoping she would look like she’d been asleep for a while when he came up.
    If he came up.
    He poked around downstairs, and when she finally heard the creak of the stairs, she closed her eyes.
    He came in and stopped next to her side of the bed. She heard him breathing. Difficult to keep your eyes closed and pretend to sleep when the person you were playing possum for stood watching you.
    She swallowed the hitch in her breathing as he traced her silver chain down to the butterfly between her breasts, around its filigreed wings, and back up to her nape. The butterfly, her symbol for fate, destiny—for coming out of one’s cocoon—seemed to have a strange effect on Morgan, as if he was shedding his inhibitions at this very moment.
    When he stopped, she might have cried out, if she wasn’t trying so hard to let him think she slept to allow him to be