Free Spellbound by Michelle M. Pillow

waved a hand of dismissal. She waited, but he didn’t answer her. When she opened her mouth to ask again, he stopped her. “I’m a little jealous that I wasn’t with them in the forest tonight. I didn’t know there were pretty women wandering around.”
    “Apparently, I moonlight as a shellycoat ,” Jane said.
    “Do ya now?” Iain chuckled and stepped closer to her. She was all too aware of the heat coming off his body. Moonlight caressed his skin, turning it a shadowed blue. The memory of his kiss kept her where she was. “I don’t believe it. I think ya would make a better wood nymph than a shellycoat .”
    “That is either very sweet or very strange,” she whispered.
    “Go with sweet.” A half smile curled on his lips as he leaned in for a kiss.
    She lifted her hand automatically, and he pressed his chest into it. The steady beat of his heart thumped against her fingers. With it came a drumming in her ears. Iain disappeared, and the garden lit with a bright light.
    “Try to run, but do not fuss. We like it when you play with us.” The child spirits from earlier giggled.
    “No,” Jane said. She couldn’t see the girls, but she felt them all around her.
    “If you choose to stay with him,” one said.
    “We can keep him in the end,” the other finished.
    “No?” Iain asked. The bright light instantly went away. He took a step back. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to presume. I—”
    “I have to go.” She kept her hand lifted as she backed away.
    “Jane—”
    “Goodnight, Mr. MacGregor. I’ll have some ideas put together for you tomorrow after the farmers market.”
    “Jane, wait—”
    Jane ran from the garden to the side yard, taking the long way home to avoid the forest.

Chapter 9
    “ Y ou are a hard woman to track down.” Sean lifted a tomato from the market table and bounced it in his hand. There was no place she could run. “If I didn’t know better, I would say you were avoiding me.”
    Jane had seen Sean coming long before he parked along the side of the country road. His shiny black car with silver trim didn’t fit into Green Vallis, just as its owner didn’t fit into her life. Her stepbrother was charming and beautiful with the attitude of a rock star facing his crowd.
    Sean turned his tomato-filled hand and pointed at her to punctuate his words. “You’re not trying to avoid me, are you?”
    She glanced at his car, wondering how expensive it was. “No. I have a lot of work commitments. Bills don’t pay themselves.”
    He followed her eyes. “Yes. It’s too bad your inheritance went to paying off your father’s estate.”
    The statement was sadly laughable. The last time she checked, Dana’s spa vacations had not been part of paying off her father’s estate. It didn’t matter now. Dana was dead. The past was the past. If she made life completely uninteresting, Sean would become bored and move on.
    “What will it take to get you to join me for dinner?” Sean continued. “It was your idea after all.”
    Jane started to speak, but a nearby figure caught her attention. She had never thought she’d be so grateful to see Mrs. Callister. The woman absentmindedly put produce into her basket while staring up at Sean. With each second, the woman inched closer to the man.
    “Making a sauce?” Jane asked the busybody.
    It took a moment for the realization to dawn on Mrs. Callister. She glanced at her basket full of tomatoes and frowned as if she hadn’t realized what she was doing. She set it down and pushed it toward the wooden crates Jane had on the table. “I can never stress enough the importance of setting a nice display even if it’s just vegetables.” She made a show of rearranging a few tomatoes, setting them on the table around the crates in a haphazard fashion.
    “So true,” Sean said.
    “Fruit,” Jane mumbled.
    “Excuse me?” Mrs. Callister frowned at her.
    “Scientifically speaking, tomatoes are a fruit because they are ripened ovaries with seeds.”