Hexed and Vexed

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Hexed and Vexed

Copyright © 2013 by Rebecca Royce

ISBN: 978-1-61333-574-1

Cover art by Tibbs Designs

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work, in whole or in part, in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

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Love in One Night

Hexed and Vexed

By

Rebecca Royce

~DEDICATION~

To Meredith Cole for suggesting I write a Tease
.

Olive had pictured Campbell in a black tuxedo many times. His tall, strong physique looked magnificent dressed in formal wear. She’d imagined him standing at the end of the aisle, waiting for her as she walked slowly toward him.

Only in her fantasies she’d been wearing white, getting ready to marry him. Instead, she found herself staring at the back of his head in the completely unheated church watching him wed her sister.

Tears had long since ceased falling from her eyes.
This is happening, this is actually happening
.

Campbell Bane had thrown her over for her sister, and now the two of them were going to go off and have a wonderful life together. Somehow she had to get over it; someway she had to make this okay.

Her dress scratched her, and she longed to take it off. When she’d walked down the aisle wearing the atrocious creation, Campbell hadn’t even looked at her. One bit of eye contact and she would have known….something. What, she had no idea. But a piece of information would have been passed between them that could have at least explained to her how this had happened, instructed her on how she’d failed in their relationship.

A man didn’t simply end a decade-long romance to marry the girl’s sister.

Did he?

Olive looked around the room at all the guests. Other than the Bane family and her parents’ assortment of upstanding, well-mannered friends, who were all talented and worked in jobs that allowed them to serve the community, the other people were employed in all facets of witchcraft, some of them the dark arts. Josa Rador took people on tours of the Amazon to look for special animal totems—some of her clients never came out. Dern Serge had been on a trial for murder. The only problem had been that they’d never found the body. Sara Tooks sold voodoo dolls. Olive never knew if they worked, but making and selling them had always seemed borderline creepy to her.

Why had Campbell wanted these people at his wedding? He’d barely spoken to them when she’d been with him. Another thing that had apparently changed.

Her mind itched, which made little sense to her since it wasn’t like she could wield any power, but typically, that was how witches described the feeling they got right before they did a big spell.

She shook her head. If she could get a little time alone with him, she’d find a way to make him explain it to her. If she couldn’t have him, then a few small seconds to talk to him would make the difference for the rest of her life.

Magic surged out of her. She gasped, unsure of what was happening. Nothing like this had ever occurred before—not to her, at least. Her hands shook and a white light suddenly bathed the sanctuary. A rainbow of colors swept out of her fingers and while everything else might have been visible to only her, everyone in the room could now see what happened.

The guests screamed, all of them alerted by their own magic to the surge in hers. Her sister hollered, throwing her bouquet on the ground. One second Campbell stared, his mouth agape, and the next second he vanished.

What the…?

She never got to answer that question. Instead, she disappeared, too. The world went white around her. She’d done magic, real witch’s magic. Only she had no idea what she’d done.

High tide smashed against the shoreline as the warm afternoon sun beat down on top of her skin. Olive sighed, loving the contentment of actually being warm. Her sensations might be somewhat askew. Realistically, she knew winter had only been really in full blow for about a month, but it felt like she’d been living in the cold for years.

Forever
.

Particularly, because hours earlier, she had been even more freezing than usual, standing in a drafty church where the heating system had only partially worked. January in New York City required working radiators, if not central heating.

Her pink, sleeveless, bridesmaid’s dress seemed much more appropriate for beach weather than the cold of winter in Manhattan. Olive’s sister, Cindy, had picked the damn thing on purpose, to make her even more unhappy than she already was at having to attend the occasion. Cindy didn’t even like pink. She’d selected the shade to be spiteful, nothing more.

Olive breathed in the ocean air.
This kind of weather is better for the soul
.

Everything would be downright perfect if her beach companion didn’t look like he wanted to toss her into the ocean. He’d been unconscious when they’d arrived, having not handled the time-space shift all that well. Now, however, Campbell stared at her, clearly wide awake.

“Tell me again how we ended up here. And speak slowly so I can understand every word you say.” A muscle clenched in his jaw.

“Well.” She might have preferred Campbell not bringing up her tendency to rush through speech when she felt nervous. “I think I may have, completely unintentionally of course, zapped us here.”

“You. Zapped. Us. Here.” He nodded in between each word like he needed to make sense of all of them individually before he could move on. He ran a hand through his dark hair. Strands she herself had once caressed on a nightly basis before he’d gone and decided to marry her sister, thus destroying her life.

“Exactly.” She hitched up her pink monstrosity of a dress and walked toward the inviting waves. The sea air tingled against her skin.

Campbell grabbed her arm. “Olive White, you’ve never successfully performed one spell. Not even
one
.”

“Yes, you would know that since you were with me every single time I bumbled one. The worst witch in witching school.” She hated that phrase and obviously, she’d made a spell work. Even if she hadn’t meant to. Maybe she could finally lose the nickname.

“Yes.” He smiled at her, letting her arm go. For a second, she saw his brown eyes sparkle like they had when he used to look at her, in the days before the whole world had shifted sideways. But then as fast as the adoration had appeared, it vanished. “Well, since you can suddenly make the gift of the ancestors work, zap us back.”

Campbell tapped his foot on the sand like she should hurry up and get the job done. She stifled a laugh, covering her mouth with her hand, at the image he portrayed.

He still wore his tuxedo. In the sand.

Dark hair, dark eyes, and dressed in a designer tuxedo, complete with a black bowtie that had to have been Cindy’s idea, he stood on the beach looking like a fish that had suddenly found itself in a bird’s nest. He really didn’t belong in his current habitat. At least, not dressed like that.

Olive covered her mouth to hide her smile. Campbell always fit in wherever he went, and even though it seemed mean to laugh, especially because it was her fault that he’d landed on the beach, she couldn’t help but find amusement in how uncomfortable he appeared. After her months of pain, he deserved the hours ahead of him.

He stood waiting for her to answer his declaration. Her sister’s fiancé wanted her to take them back immediately, if not sooner.

“I can’t undo the spell, Campbell. And I’m not sorry about it. Not even a little bit.” She closed her eyes and let the sun beat down on her cheeks. Her olive skin would very quickly start to take in the rays touching it. By the end of the day, she’d be a whole shade darker. Heck, she might even look better in her puke pink dress with a little bit of a tan.

“What do you mean you aren’t sorry? The love of my life is probably terrified, wondering what happened to me.”

Olive highly doubted it. She tried not to let the love-of-my-life comment make her nauseous. It did have that effect, but she wasn’t going to acknowledge that in front of him.
Nope, a little self-denial would work fine
. Besides, her sister didn’t deserve his anxiety. Cindy never really cared about other people’s welfare as long as she could find a mirror to look into.

“I’m not sorry.” She stared him straight in the eyes, looking for a trace of the man she had known better than she knew herself for a decade. Where had he gone? “And now that I have you alone, maybe I can finally figure out exactly what’s been going on. Once and for all.”

He scratched his head. “What do you mean?”

Pride had kept her quiet for six months. But they had nothing but time until either she or Campbell managed to concoct a spell to put them back where they’d come from. He would be more likely to be able to do that considering this one-time occurrence would likely remain that—a one-time occurrence.

“Something happened to you. One day we were in love and the next day you were in love with her. I barely had time to swallow that it happened and you were suddenly getting married.” She couldn’t look at him and turned to stare at the water. The oceans were something she could count on. The tide came in and went out. Campbell had been like that for her once.

“We understood this would be hard on you. Sometimes life does these things, and we all have to roll with the punches.”

She whirled around. “Stop quoting the company line. You’ve said one version of that statement or another anytime you were asked about it. You don’t even sound like yourself. Did Cindy come up with that trash? I don’t want to hear about life doing whatever life does. Talk to me, damn it. When did you stop loving me?”

Campbell remained silent. During the initial breakup, when he’d come to her with Cindy and they’d, together, informed her that they were destroying her heart, Cindy had done most of the talking. Campbell uttered something so close to the words he’d just spoken, she had to wonder if he’d lost the ability to say anything else.