Birthday Shift

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Pink Petal Books

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Additional Titles
by the Author

Lucky Mr. M
Stranded
Uprooted
Magic At
Midnight

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and
incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or
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BIRTHDAY SHIFT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Copyright © JASMINE AHERNE, 2011

Cover Art ® 2011 by WINTERHEART DESIGN

Edited by MARY K. WILSON
ISBN# 978-0-9832624-0-4

Electronic Publication Date: January 2011

This book may not be reproduced
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from the publisher, Jupiter Gardens Press,
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, LLC.,
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, Grimes, IA 50111

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Birthday Shift
Spellbound Treasure

Jasmine Aherne

PPB

Spellbound Treasure

What did you buy?

http://spellboundtreasure.com

An
online auction house based out of Crossroads, a place that is nowhere, and yet
is the nexus of several worlds. Etienne and her partner Robin sell magical artifacts
from every world imaginable. With powers untold, these artifacts make their way
into their buyer's hands. And sometimes, a few of them even bring love.

Meet
the people of Spellbound Treasure, discover the artifacts, and explore the
worlds at our website.

Chapter One

“Happy Birthday!
I hope this gift makes all your dreams come true,” Molly Jenkins read from the
card on top of the large box that had been sitting outside her apartment door
when she’d arrived home. “Who left this here?” she wondered aloud.

She bent and
hefted the box, noticing the air holes.
Hmmm.
The only kind of box with air holes has
something alive inside.

She leaned her
face close to the box and peered in. Black fur.

“Meow!”

Now Molly
grinned. A kitty!

She loved cats.
But who had dumped this mystery feline on her doorstep, and why hadn’t they
left their name?

Shelving the
curiosity for now, she leaned the box against her hip and twisted her key into
the door. She half-walked, half-nudged her way inside, toeing the door shut,
and then set down the box.

Unable to wait
any longer, especially when the cat mewed again, Molly opened the lid and
looked upon the most sleekly beautiful black cat she'd ever seen. Smooth
obsidian fur covered his body, and when he looked at her, emerald green eyes
held her own in an entrancing gaze.

A shiny silver
collar curled around his neck. When he shifted in the box, Molly noticed a
little card under his foot. She reached for it, and the cat rubbed his nose
against her wrist, flicking out his little pink tongue to lick her briefly.

Molly giggled
with pleasure. “Aren’t you a cutie?”

She slid out the
little pink envelope and opened it. The plain card inside read:
From your best friend, because you need
company sometimes!

Now Molly’s
giggle turned into a full blown laugh. Yes, as a freelance writer she did tend
to get lonely, living on pasta dinners for one, and cereal for lunch. She
walked to clear her head, sometimes only talking to herself or her notebook.
But she preferred it that way, and besides, her forays into romance had never ended
well – if they had begun properly or at all. She just didn’t do so well at
getting along with people.

Her best friend,
Lil, whom she’d known since college and a constant in her life, had decided to
take action.

“And I’m glad she
did, yes I am,” Molly chuckled, scooping the cat from the box and cuddling him
close. She looked for a name tag on his collar, and spied a shiny metal disc
that read simply Cade.

“Then Cade you
shall be.” She snuggled the cat close, and he purred his pleasure, the sound
making Molly’s heart soar. Maybe Lil had been right. She did need company. And
if Lil was determined to get her a friend, this had to be one of the best
outcomes.

As Molly stroked
Cade’s fur something under the tissue paper in his box caught her eye, and when
she saw it she smiled. Lil had thoughtfully included three sachets of cat food,
and a small ceramic bowl, split into two for water and food, along with yummy
treats.

The
ever-thoughtful best friend had even included – Molly laughed out loud – a hot
pink litter tray and a small bag of cat litter. Lilac scented. Molly had to
love her friend’s sense of humor.

Unfortunately,
presents and cuddles with the cat didn’t detract from the fact that Molly
needed a shower. Being on the subway with lots of men who perhaps didn’t
deodorize as much as they should had seriously taken its toll, and the hot
spray of water would wake her up after the hours of researching in a
stale-aired library. She set Cade down on the wooden floor of her poky, or
cozy, as New Yorkers called a one bedroom apartment, and headed to her bedroom,
where she stripped off her clothes, laying them on her double bed, then
gratefully escaping into the shower, where hot water beat down on to her skin
and cascaded through her long, strawberry-blonde hair. She let the heat wash
away the stress and scents of the day, and a few minutes later, smelling
sweetly of coconut and almond body wash, she wrapped a towel around herself.

 
She’d totally forgotten that the door was
ajar, and when Cade mewed as she passed him, Molly swallowed a shriek of
surprise.

“You scared me,
baby,” she murmured, leaning down to pet him. He rubbed his soft, silky
forehead into her palm and purred his little feline heart out. Molly melted.
She scooped him up into her arms, cuddling him against the towel. “Hope you
don’t mind that I’m a little damp,” she whispered into the back of his neck.
Cade snuggled, his purring vibrating his long, warm body.

“Time to call Lil
and thank her,” Molly said, more to herself as she padded bare-footed into her
bedroom.

The bedroom was
small, but in
New York
, Molly knew lady luck had
smiled on her to be able to afford a separate bedroom at all. Most of her
friends made do with a studio apartment where a standing Chinese screen
separated the bed from the living area, or a fold-away bed that became a couch
in the day time.

She set Cade down
and he curled up, green eyes fixed on her.

Retreating
briefly to the living area to grab her cell phone, Molly padded back into her
bedroom and flopped down on the bed as she dialed. Cade came to lay next to
her, wiggling his warm body in beside her own.

“Hello?” Lil
answered, on the third ring.

Molly idly
stroked Cade’s soft as silk fur as she spoke. “Hello stranger! Thank you for my
new friend.”

“You’re welcome!”
The smile came through in Lil’s voice as she replied. “I’ve always said I’d get
you a man, didn’t I?”

Molly smiled
wryly. “I suppose Cade’s going to prove more reliable than any man I’ve ever
met.”

“Well.” Lil’s
tone turned sympathetic. “I sort of wanted you to have someone who’d always be
there when you came home.”

Molly’s heart
squeezed.

“So!” Cheerful
again, Lil asked, “Are we going for birthday drinks this week? You should
celebrate. You only get a birthday once a year, you know.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“Okay. Let me
know. You can’t be a hermit all the time, much as you seem to enjoy it. God! My
animals are driving me insane,” Lil continued, talking about the menagerie of
pets she kept in her sprawling, inherited house in
Queens
. “I’d better go. It’s feeding
time.”

Laughing, Molly
hung up. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Lil had given Cade to her from
Lil’s own mini-zoo.

She put the cell
phone down and, sensing the opportunity, Cade crawled on to her stomach and
began to play with some loose threads on her towel. Molly giggled. “You are so
much fun.”

As she lay back
and relaxed, thoughts of the day running through her head, Lil’s words came
back to her.
A man who’ll be there when
you come home.

It was certainly
true that Molly’s luck with men seemed to have run out even before she'd
started dating. Peter, her first love, wanted to play the field before settling
into a serious relationship – but told her this only after she found him in an
interesting position with someone else. Tom, a workaholic, had had a more
meaningful relationship with his blackberry than with Molly, but two weeks
after they broke up he promptly got engaged to someone else. Anton, a gorgeous
Albanian, doted on her, but had forbidden her to have any male friends.

And on it went.
Molly felt sure she could fill an entire book with her disastrous romantic
entanglements.

So, she’d decided
it was so much easier just not to bother. She relied on herself, and she got
along just fine. No one to break her heart. No one to stand her up. No one who
ranked her second.

But today, Cade
had made her too happy to dwell on her atrocious romantic history. “Time for
dinner and then a book in bed,” she told the cat, untangling him from her towel
threads. “Mommy needs to get dressed and eat some dinner – and you need feeding,
too, don’t you, baby?”

Cade sat up on
the bed as Molly hung up her towel and slipped into her favorite at-home
clothes, a pair of satin pajamas which had been last year’s birthday gift to
herself. They’d been worth every cent, although her purse had rolled over and
cried shortly afterwards.

Feeling freshened
up, Molly headed into the small kitchen area adjoined to her living space to
make dinner. Much to her delight, Cade hopped off the end of the bed to follow
her. She laughed. “Applying for the job of my shadow, are you?”

Cade meowed his
agreement.

She fed him
first, filling his water bowl and opening one lamb flavored pouch of food. He
dug in hungrily. As he ate, Molly looked in her freezer for food. A few pitiful
microwave meals stared back at her, along with some breaded chicken. She opted
for the chicken with a generous handful of frozen vegetables.

Later, after
she’d washed the dishes, Molly curled up in bed with her laptop to write a few
articles for submission to
New York
journals and magazines. Freelance
writing was by no means easy, but she made do with editing on the side for a
non-fiction publisher, and she did okay.

She’d always been
ambitious, though. Perhaps that was why men lost interest in her, she thought
sadly, chewing on her bottom lip as she wrote. For a long time, trying to get
her name known, all she’d done was work. Lil had chided her for it many times,
now she seemed to have given in, and that was probably how Cade had come about.

Somehow knowing
she had thought about him, Cade jumped up on the bed, circled a few times, then
curled up by Molly’s feet. Cute snores emanated from his body within seconds.

His sleepy state
made Molly yawn. “I’ll be right behind you, sweet stuff,” she murmured,
stretching.

She managed four
hundred more words, then, eyes drooping, she saved her work. A trip to the
kitchen rewarded her with a mug of hot cocoa, and then she reached for the racy
bestseller on her bedside table. Her writing might be cool and professional,
but recreationally, she loved nothing more than old-fashioned, toe-curling
romance.

Four pages into a
steamy sex scene, Molly’s body tingled with longing. A serial monogamist at
heart, she couldn’t remember the last time she had done the delicious
horizontal tango with a man, and the description of the hero’s varied and
insistent ministrations on the heroine had heat and dampness gathering rapidly
between Molly’s thighs.

One thing a
failed love life
didn’t
get her was
regular sex.

Sighing, she slid
her bookmark between the pages and set the book on her night stand. Molly
teased her nipples to hardness, gasping as she pinched them through the thin
silk of her satiny pajamas. Before long, the keen arousal
 
could be ignored no longer, and Molly slid
her hand underneath the waistband of her pajamas and stroked herself slowly at
first, rubbing herself in small circles, her hips lifting off the bed in time
to her ministrations. As she got more excited, panting, breathless, she
increased her strokes, until an orgasm exploded through her, white lights flashing
behind her closed lids.

Heart beating
erratically, Molly gently stroked herself as her climax subsided, replaced by a
soothing tiredness that relaxed all her muscles. With a sleepy moan of
pleasure, she switched off her bedside lamp and fell into a deep sleep.

~ * * * ~

She had the most
wonderful dream.

Molly dreamt she
awakened to feel a long, heavy presence lying beside her. When she opened her
eyes, a naked man shared her bed. Her heart jumped with the twin emotions of
panic and pleasure. A fine specimen, his pale golden skin emphasized his coal
black hair and sparkling green eyes. He smiled at her, a slow-burn smile that
made her heart slow down, but other parts of her quickened considerably.

She started to
open her mouth to speak, but her dream lover gently pressed a finger to her
lips. “No need to talk now,” he whispered in a liqueur smooth, English-accented
voice.

When he moved to
cup her face, then stroked her neck and finally cup her now aching breast, she
didn’t see the need to say anything at all.

She arched
forward into his palm as he gently tugged on her nipple, stroking it to
hardness and squeezing it gently between finger and thumb until she moaned with
intense pleasure.

“Touch me, too,”
the man bade her.

Molly responded
eagerly, her hand reaching out until she connected with his firm, bare chest.
Her fingers curled into the crisp sprinkling of dark hair on his upper body,
then she slid her palm down, down, over his hard stomach, reveling in the slide
of his skin against hers. Finally the head of his erection brushed against her,
and she cupped him, drawing a sharp breath at the pleasure she experienced just
by touching him. He groaned in kind, thrusting his hips into her hand.