Magic Gone Wild (16 page)

“Zane, you’re really serious about selling your home?” Gary grabbed his arm the minute he stepped outside of Carl’s.

He wrenched his arm away. “Yeah.”

“That’s too bad. Harrisonville won’t be the same without the Harrison homestead.”

That’s because it’d be ridicule free, but Zane didn’t say that. No one needed to think that he was getting rid of the house for any reason other than money. Not because the stories and the ridicule would never stop as long as a Harrison owned the house. He’d like to get married some day and have a family. He certainly didn’t want to saddle his kids with this infamy. He’d promised himself years ago that the Harrison stories would stop with him.

But then he drove home and opened the front door, shooting that theory to hell.

16

He’d walked into a real-life
Fantasia
.

Zane ducked under the vacuum-cleaner hose that was dancing along the curtain rod, then sidestepped the mop and bucket that were splashing water all over the hardwood floor, gaped at the small rug that was polishing the chandelier, and stared at the squirrels that were using their tails to dust the banister.

But he came to a full-on, mouth-dropping stop at the sight of Vana. She’d changed from the harem outfit into a pair of pink shorts and a lighter pink tank top, but she still wore her genie slippers. Nothing overly outlandish in that, but what nailed him to the floor was the fact that she was
hanging
upside
down
by
those
slippers
from the top of the frame around his great-grandfather’s picture, which was now gracing the second-story wall.

Meanwhile, she just licked the edge of a rag and wiped a smudge of dirt off Peter’s shoe as if what she was doing wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. The gossipmongers would have a field day with this.

Zane dropped his bags with a
thud
.

“Uh-oh. Company.” Merlin flew from the sconce on the wall and landed on Vana’s heel. Which he pecked.

Vana shook her foot and was now hanging by one—count it,
one
—curled piece of fabric. “Knock it off, Merlin. You know I’m ticklish.”

“Yeah, well, he’s puckish.”

Vana bent backward as if she were a ribbon acrobat at Cirque du Soleil. Without the ribbon. “Zane! You’re back!”

She did a half-kick move that would have had her taking a header onto the first floor if the chandelier-polishing magic carpet hadn’t flown under her feet to float her gently down in front of him.

She hovered right at eye level. “What do you think?”

What did he think? What did he
think
? He couldn’t think. Well, actually he could. About what would have happened if anybody but him had walked through that unlocked door. About trying to explain her slipper trick, the mop, the squirrels, the vacuum, and oh hell, were those rabbits sweeping dust bunnies off the floor with their tails?

This place was insanity.

He’d been completely crazy to come back. Utterly loco to open her bottle in the first place, and completely out of his mind to have even entertained the idea of allowing her to do anything around this house.

“That’s it. This is over.” He grabbed the mop, ignoring its squeal of protest—he wasn’t even going to go
there
—and started shooing the rabbits and their dust counterparts out of the foyer, flicking the vacuum switch off in the process. Which had zero effect on the vacuum.

Neither did pulling the plug from the wall; the vacuum kept sucking dust mites as if everything were fine.

Everything was
not
fine.

“Zane, what are you doing?”

He scattered the squirrels with a sweep of the mop along the spindles as if he were playing a harp. “I’m putting an end to this craziness.”

She shoved her hands onto her hips. “It’s not craziness. It’s magic.”

“In your world maybe. In mine, it’s crazy. Insanity. Foolishness. And the best way to get me committed, never mind all the bad press I can’t afford.” He shooed a raccoon out of the storage space under the stairs. “Vana, this has to stop.”

She clasped her hands in front of her chest, her eyes sparkling. “But it’s
working
, Zane. My magic is working! And I did it without kissing you.”

He didn’t find that cause for celebration.

God, just shoot him now. He either had to knock down her happiness or put up with…
this
. And as for no kissing, well, he’d already decided kissing was a bad idea, so maybe it was a good thing that she’d gotten a handle on her magic and was finally in control.

An image of her
out
of control flashed through his mind. Vana, naked and writhing beneath him, her hair fanned out on a silk sheet beneath her, sprinkled with rose petals.

Where the hell was this coming from?

He shook his head—and the mop. The one whistling, “Whistle While You Work,” if he wasn’t mistaken. Or out of his mind.

“Vana, look. I’m sorry. This…” He waved his hand toward the vacuum that was now playing cobra to a snake-charming squirrel. “Is
not
working. I wish you’d make it stop.”

Vana glanced at the vacuum, her bottom lip caught between her teeth, and when she looked back at him, it was as if the sun had turned in on itself and sucked all the life from the room. “If that’s what you wish.”

“It is.” Wasn’t it?

Vana blew a half-hearted kiss and the vacuum fell to the ground, undulating as gracefully as a ballerina at the end of a performance. Only instead of applause, there was a deafening silence.

Nothing had ever sounded better. Until he realized the room was too silent.

Vana and Merlin were staring at him. So were the bunnies and squirrels. Maybe even the vacuum, too.

Oh no. They didn’t get to make him feel guilty. He had a right to call the shots in his own home. And for now, that’s whose it was.

Zane grabbed the stuff he’d bought and strode toward the kitchen to get away from the looks. “What happened to just painting the back of the house?” he muttered, then slammed to a halt on the threshold of the kitchen.

Forget the foyer; this room was a disaster.

He dropped the bags and braced himself in the doorway, trying to take in the scene in front of him. A fine coating of flour decorated the walls, every cabinet door hung lopsidedly off its hinges, the drawers were pulled open, and a flock of pigeons had made nests in them.

“What. Happened. Here?” He hadn’t been gone long enough for birds to make nests in kitchen drawers.

“Holy smokes!” Vana bumped into his back. “I… I don’t know. I didn’t do this.”

“And the leprechaun who lives under the front porch did?” Zane pinched the bridge of his nose. He had a hellacious headache. “Think, Vana. What magic did you conjure while I was gone? Besides the menagerie out in the foyer, that is.”

Vana ducked under his extended arm and shuffled around the kitchen, tapping her teeth with a fingernail.

“I didn’t use any magic to paint, just like you asked. I did as much as I could with the paintbrush, but painting that way isn’t as easy as I thought it’d be. Nothing like painting a canvas. There are bugs and mildew and broken siding, not to mention climbing a ladder…” She dusted some flour off the edge of the table. “I was going to paint the front-porch spindles, too, but figured working on the inside would be easier. I found Peter’s picture in the attic. Since you weren’t here and neither was anyone else, I figured magicking it onto the wall wouldn’t be that big of a deal since he would love to have it hanging in his favorite place in the whole town. And then there was all the dust your cleaning lady couldn’t reach, and well, I could get it done before you got home.

“No one would be suspicious of a clean foyer. That’d be the first thing you’d touch up to make the house warm and inviting to prospective buyers, right? So I be-wished the vacuum to get the job done. Such a handy device. We didn’t have them the last time I was out of my bottle, and I’ve been dying to try one. Faruq would never fulfill that part of my requisitions list.”

With good reason. Zane could just imagine the thing getting clogged with rose petals.

What was it with him and rose petals? That damn image of her on a sheet surrounded by them rolled like a movie through his mind.

The one he was losing.

Vana picked up a dish towel and the rose from earlier rolled off, its petals cascading over the counter. That had to be what had gotten him thinking about rose petals.

“But, Zane, I don’t have any idea what happened in here.”

“Never mind, Vana. It doesn’t matter. Just… can you clean it up? Get rid of the birds?” And the dish towel.

“Oh, sure.” Merlin flew into the room and landed on the open door of the old-fashioned iron oven. “Blame it all on the birds. Surely it can’t be the genie’s fault. That ‘bird-brained’ term hurts, you know. And you know who came up with that? Obo. A cat. Tossed that into the lexicon centuries ago, and it stuck. And now you’re playing right to the stereotype, Tarzan. Did it ever occur to you that maybe, just maybe, we birds are victims of circumstance and not the instigators you and Hitchcock are so ready to brand us as? Besides”—he nodded at the pigeons—“do
they
really look capable of attempting something this grandiose, let alone actually pulling it off?”

“Vana, I wish the phoenix would be quiet.”

“Oh, no, you di-in’t.” Merlin was in the middle of a head waggle when Vana kissed the air, and his swagger turned into mimed sputtering.

Zane enjoyed watching the bird’s head undulate back and forth in direct counterpoint to the wing feather he was waving in Zane’s face.

“I’m sorry, Zane.” Vana spun around, her long hair fanning out behind her and brushing over his skin in one long sensuous movement that brought those rose petals and silk sheets and scented candles to mind again, this time with her hair no longer fanned out behind her but trailing down over his chest, his abs… lower…

God, he could almost feel it. Her lips, too. He swore he could taste them. Feel them against his. Feel them tracing down his neck and over his chest in delicious torture.

Zane scratched his chest for a second, then his head. What was wrong with him? Maybe he
had
taken one too many hard hits on the gridiron. Hanging out on the bench half the season might be a good thing.

Okay, now he really
was
going nuts.

He grabbed a set of steak knives from where they’d imbedded in the wall and dropped them into the closest open drawer. “Let’s just get this place cleaned up.” That was his focus. Not the woman in the clingy, pink tank top.

He sucked in a breath when she bent over to sweep up the rose petals.

Clingy pink shorts, too.

He blew out that breath and looked for something to straighten. There. The basket of apples that had overturned on the floor. When had he gotten apples?

Beneath the apples he found raisins. Thousands of them scattered on the floor like ants.

Which were also all over the floor.

This was going to take forever.

Merlin hopped off the oven door and onto the drainboard, knocking all the pots onto the floor in a loud mess, the only good byproduct of which was that it startled most of the pigeons into making a beeline out the open screen door.

The phoenix then started tapping his beak against the window, the staccato pings damaging to not only the glass, but also Zane’s eardrums. And then Merlin began sweeping his wings together like a giant bellows, sending the flour swirling in a mini tornado.

Zane sighed. Heavily. “Fine. Okay. Vana, I wish for Merlin to have his voice back. But one more nasty word,” he pointed to the bird, “and it’s the meat smoker for you.”

Merlin stuck his tongue out as he landed back on the oven door. Zane hadn’t even known birds
had
tongues.

Vana opened her hands, freeing a pigeon into the backyard. “I don’t understand what could have brought this on. All I’d wanted to do was get the foyer finished before you came home. I said nothing about the kitchen.”

“The whirlwind part of your wish might have had something to do with it, Van,” said Merlin, working his beak as if he’d been punched. Zane could only hope… “’Cause it sure looks like one came through here.”

“I’ll, uh, get to work on cleaning this up.” She scooped a pigeon out of a drawer. Holy smokes. This one had laid an egg. She released the bird outside, wishing she could take flight as easily. She
had
used the term “whirlwind” in hopes that what had happened in the kitchen would have happened in the foyer, swirling all the dust outside and making clean-up easier. She wished she knew why her magic was so haphazard; she’d thought she’d had it all figured out.