Annette Blair

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

My Favorite Witch

A
Berkley
Book / published by arrangement with the author

All rights reserved.

Copyright ©
2006
by
Annette Blair

This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

For information address:

The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address is
http://www.penguinputnam.com

ISBN:
0-7865-6115-7

A
BERKLEY
BOOK®

Berkley
Books first published by The Berkley Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

BERKLEY
and the “
B
” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

Electronic edition: January, 2006

With love to Chris Cabral—
awesome friend, calming force, revitalizing spirit, who enhances my life and every life she touches without ever using a wand.

NHL
Wizard Jason Pickering Goddard left the battered podium to a round of applause and sat beside his grandmother on the gym stage of St. Anthony’s Home for Boys. “Dreams die,” Jason whispered. “Life sucks.
That’s
what they should learn. I didn’t do them any favors with that ‘dreams do come true’ crap.”

His grandmother bristled without ruffling a manicured feather. “Reality, they’ve got,” she said. “
Hope
is what they need.”

Jason winced. She might as well have said, “They’re a hell of a lot worse off than you are, so stop feeling sorry for yourself,” and she was right. But he sure as hell wished the boys heading for the gym exits would stop looking back at him with all that misplaced hero worship.

Damn it. He’d screwed up. It didn’t make sense, him talking about dreams, not after he’d drunk himself senseless and lost his.

Wait a minute. . . .

Jason raised his chin and gave the woman who raised
him a sidelong glance. What he saw should not have surprised him: a manipulating matriarch running a power play. Well, well, well. He relaxed in his chair, stretched his legs to ease the ache in his knee, and folded his arms across his chest. “Gram, why did you really drag me here today?”

“What? Well . . . you never get to see the good that the Pickering Foundation does.”

“Good? This place is falling apart.”

Every inch the society matron, his grandmother barely winced before she tilted her head in belated approval. “My point exactly.”

She was angling for something, Jason knew, but what? “You want a bigger donation, just say so.”

The benevolent old fraud cleared her throat, fidgeted with her Dior handbag, and looked everywhere but at him before she patted his hand. “Thank you, dear.”

“I’d rather write a check any day than—”

“Raise a finger to help?” Sheer annoyance filled Gram’s snapping hazel eyes. “You and every other member of the idle rich!” She rose, braced on her ancient umbrella, chin high, head at a regal angle, indignation in the set of her shoulders and the straight of her spine.

“Give me a break,” Jason said. “I wouldn’t be idle if—”

“Enough with the self-pity.” She tapped his cane with her umbrella. “
This
is only a setback,” she said, echoing his tired litany.

Jason squared his shoulders. “I
will
play hockey again. I’ll be back on the ice in no time. You’ll see.”

“Not according to the majority of your doctors.”

“The majority of them are wrong!”

“Of course they are, dear.”

“Don’t take that patronizing tone with me, young lady.”

Bessie Pickering Hazard, seventy-seven-year-old chairman of the board of the Pickering Foundation, laughed like a schoolgirl.

Jason grinned. Glad the old twinkle was back in her
eyes, he still wished to hell he knew what she was up to. He’d seen this act before, and it didn’t bode well for the poor sucker she’d picked as her latest mark . . . him.

Gram had accomplished some great deeds in her day, and to pull them off, she’d played some steep angles. Just thinking of the ways she might try to play him made Jason’s tie so tight, you’d think somebody pushed a choke switch.

Best rebound now, he thought, self-preservation riding him. “How the hell does a gimp jock fit into whatever scheme you’re trying to hatch this time?” he asked.

“Jason, dear, whatever are you—Ah, here comes the director. You remember Sister Margaret?”

They were force-fed sugar cookies and watered-down cherry punch in the old art deco reception room, a showplace of mission furniture and teeming glass-faced trophy cabinets. Untouched by time, the room remained the sanctum where hopeful childless parents met with more-hopeful potential adoptees.

Gram had purchased the turn-of-the-century, brick-and-granite school building in the fifties specifically to house St. Anthony’s, likely to keep herself busy while his grandfather pursued other “interests.”

That she’d named it
Saint
Anthony’s after her faithless husband, Anthony Bannister Hazard, was one of Gram’s private jokes with God. Or perhaps she’d thought to redeem the philandering old buzzard. No one knew but Gramps himself whether she succeeded, because he had resided in the hereafter for more than twenty years now.

What Jason liked best, and feared most, about his grandmother was that in her entire life, she’d let nothing and no one stop her. She was the strongest person he knew, man or woman, and he loved her in the rare way she loved him, faults and all.

As Jason opened the outside door, the scent of pine-pitch wafted up from the sun-soft, cracked-tar schoolyard,
reminding him of the afternoons he’d spent waiting for Gram to pick him up and sneak him off to hockey practice. She’d said these boys needed hope, and hope, by damn, he’d had aplenty back then.

Now, as then, Chilton, her octogenarian driver, saw them and came around to open the door of her pristine, sixty-three white Rolls, and stood waiting at attention.

The moment they exited the building, the boys at play hushed and stood like statues, making Jason’s awkward cane-clicking trek across the yard seem endless.

“I wish you had let me drive my Hummer,” he told his grandmother, as if that might have given him control over anything but the next brick wall that got in his way.

After the last brick wall, his glory days of voluptuous female groupies and instant male bonding had come to an abrupt, if temporary, halt.

Like the fans who’d once rushed and crushed him, but now avoided meeting his eyes, the boys from St. Anthony’s emanated a kind of disappointment and pity, and remained a safe distance away.

As if to disprove that theory, a three-foot carrottop began a lone, tenacious approach his way, from across the schoolyard, capturing Jason’s full and curious attention.

Though they had already made eye contact, the eager boy found it necessary to tug on Jason’s cuff when he arrived.

Jason grinned despite himself while something pulled at his chest like an invisible thread that connected his shirtsleeve to his heart.

Ignoring the pain in his knee, Jason stooped to the boy’s level, bit off a groan, and received a wide, deep-dimpled grin for his efforts. “I’m gonna play hockey, too,” the outgoing boy said.

“Good for you,” Jason said. “What’s your name?”

“Travis. Travis Robinson.”

“Well, Travis, if you want to play hockey, you do know that you have to practice every day?”

The tip of his grandmother’s umbrella made hard contact with Jason’s right shoulder blade.

“Ouch! What?” he asked, turning.

“No rink to practice,” Travis said, reclaiming Jason’s attention. “No money for ice time, Sister Margaret says.”

An incoherent apology died on Jason’s lips when the boy threw his small but steely arms around Jason’s neck. “Take me home,” Travis said, his voice choked and desperate. “I want ’dopting
bad
. You don’t even have to teach me hockey.”

Poleaxed, Jason inadvertently embraced the tiny, reed-thin body in a bid for balance, and when he felt those fragile bones against the muscles in his arms, a wave of protectiveness assaulted him. His cane hit the blacktop with a clatter, but it didn’t matter, because the boy’s stranglehold kept him from falling on his ass—figuratively as well as literally.

An old nun rushed forward ringing a handbell. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said as the schoolyard cleared of boys and she grabbed Travis by the shoulders and wrenched him from Jason’s arms. “Don’t mind him,” she said. “He asks everybody to take him.”

Chilton handed Jason his cane.

His name is Travis!
Jason wanted to shout at the nun as he rose and watched the boy get dragged away, his green eyes huge and pleading as he looked back.

Hope now had a face—dirt-smudged, freckled, and about six years old.

A minute later Jason slipped into the backseat of the limo beside his grandmother and released a long slow breath. “Son of a—”

“Watch your language!”

“I hang out in locker rooms, Gram,” Jason said, stretching his leg and rubbing his knee. “Believe me, I
am
watching my language. Did you pay him to do that?”

“Don’t be an idiot, and don’t let him rattle you. You
heard Sister Estelle, Travis asks everybody to adopt him . . . as if he wants parents as much as you wanted to play hockey.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Gram shook her head. “What boys like Travis Robinson have to give can’t be bought; it’s called love. Scares you doesn’t it?”

Jason did a double take. “What scares me? Love? Hell no.”

“Possibly not. Possibly you haven’t learned to recognize it. Who could blame you with parents like yours? Plus you’ve been kissing too many starlets and models, on and off that absurd celebrity reality show.
The Best Kisser in America,
indeed.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t realize my contract said I had to make an ass of myself. You know damned well that as soon as they called the show ‘promo,’ I was tied to it. Hell, Gram, give me a break, I gave the prize money to the foundation.”

“Yes, and we’re grateful, but it wasn’t enough.”

“Ah, here it comes,” Jason said with relief. “Play your angle and get it over with. You’re killing me here.”

“Angle? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” His grandmother opened an engraved oval compact—a twenty-four-karat guilt gift from the rogue—and pretended to check her hair in the mirror.

Jason silently applauded the innocent act. “Gram, nobody plays more angles than you.”

“Except maybe you.”

“Hey, I learned from the best.”

“Your grandfather?”

“Yeah, right.” Jason knew he’d inherited his “unfortunate roguish ways” from his grandfather, but his skill for playing angles was pure Gram. “Give it to me straight, damn it. I’m tired and my knee is killing me.”

“Straight? You don’t hear straight.”

Jason clenched his jaw, trying not to snap. “Try me.”

“The doctors give it to you straight and you don’t listen.”

“ ’Cause they’re wrong! All I need is six more months off the ice and I’ll be leading the Wizards to the Cup.”

“Fine then, give
me
those six months.”

Another double take. “Instant replay, please.”

“The Pickering Foundation is in trouble,” his grandmother said, “therefore, St. Anthony’s, which we were founded to support, is also in trouble.”

“
Money
trouble.”

“Of course, money trouble. Is there any other kind? Think of it this way, if the foundation’s floundering, then Travis and all his friends—”