Be Careful What You Wish For Read online

  “At the risk of sounding like my sister Phil, that was completely inappropriate. You can’t talk to kids like that!”

  He shrugged.

  “I find it’s better to be truthful with children and not talk down to them. I work with them a lot in my pro bono cases. In fact, when I took your case I was under the impression that you and your sisters were children”

  “Well you just can’t talk about things like that!” Cass fumed. “And I am not a child.”

  Jake gave her a penetrating glance and reached out to brush a stray curl out of her eyes. “So I’ve noticed, Cassandra.” He caught her eyes and held them and Cass felt completely incapable of looking away.

  “Okay. Well, thanks again for everything,” she babbled. “I’d better get back to the class now. I mean, back home. I mean…”

  Jake frowned. “Are you so anxious to get rid of me? I think you’re forgetting that we have some unfinished business.

  “Unfinished business? What…what do you mean?” Cass clenched her hurt hand behind her back and swallowed hard.

  Jake gave her another penetrating glance. “Let me see your hand, Cassandra.”

  “No.” She squeezed the hurt hand into a fist and yelped when the motion resulted in a stabbing pain. “I mean, it’s fine. You don’t need to worry about it,” she lied weakly.

  “I will be the judge of that.” Jake’s deep voice was stern now. “Show it to me. As your protector, I am charged with your well being. If you have an injury I can heal it is my duty to do so.”

  “It’s not your duty to do anything.” Cassandra backed away from him. The memory of how she’d felt the last time he’d healed her was still fresh in her mind. The warm waves of pleasure radiating through her entire body until she almost…Well, she’d already made a fool of herself crying all over him. She didn’t need to add anything else to that. Especially not going into some kind of weird sexual heat the moment he started healing her.

  Jake seemed to read the emotions passing over her face because he smiled reassuringly and stepped forward, holding out his hand.

  “Just let me see it, Cassandra. I think I know what you’re worried about but you can rest easy on that account. The bite of a soul-sucker is bound to be much too painful to allow any pleasure you may feel at the touch of my power to overcome you.”

  “Seriously?” Cass looked at him uncertainly. She had never dreamed that the idea of having too much pain would be a good thing but now she welcomed it. If the bite hurt too bad to let her make a fool of herself, so much the better.

  “Yes, seriously. Now, please—your hand?” Jake nodded at the hand she was hiding behind her back. Reluctantly, Cass held it out to him. It was the first chance she’d really had herself to examine it since the soul-sucker had bitten it and what she saw alarmed her.

  “Holy crap!” She stared down at her puffy, discolored palm with red streaks running up her wrist. “That looks really bad.” From the stern look on Jake’s face she could tell he thought the same but he only nodded curtly. “Well?” Cass looked up at him. “Aren’t you going to heal it?”

  Jake shook his head. “Not here. This is a very serious wound. I need to take you back to my center of power in order to deal with it.” He pulled her closer and put an arm around her.

  “Wait a minute.” Cass tried to shrug the heavy, muscular arm off her shoulders without success. “Where is this center of power? Are you taking me back to the Realm of the Fae? Because I’ve had about as much of that place as I can stand.”

  “No,” Jake said but he didn’t offer any other explanation either. “Hold tight to me,” he murmured in her ear and then, putting his other arm around Cass’s waist, he pulled her out of her world and took her someplace else.

  Sixteen

  “Whoa.” Cass blinked, wishing that everything would stop spinning. She felt dizzy and disorientated from the strange trip. Magical travel might be nearly instantaneous but she would still rather drive—at least riding in a car didn’t give her an instant sense of vertigo and nausea. Any form of transportation that made you want to hurl the second you engaged in it was a no-go as far as she was concerned.

  “Are you all right?” The deep voice in her ear made her realize that she was clinging to Jake for dear life as she waited for her heart to stop pounding and her stomach to stop lurching.

  “I’m fine.” She made her good hand unclench from his charcoal gray suit jacket and took a step back, even though she still felt a little off balance. She looked around at a room that seemed to be all dark, somber colors and dim golden light. “Where are we?”

  “My center of power. Otherwise known as my home.” Jake made a sweeping motion with one large hand. “Please, make yourself comfortable while I gather the things I need to heal you. I’ll just be a moment.” Stepping away from her, he left her alone to look around.

  Cass wasn’t about to waste the opportunity. Already her imagination was working overtime—Jake O’Shea was an irritating but fascinating man, er…elf, she admitted to herself. Would his home reflect his personality at all? She bet he was the kind of guy to have all his suits lined up just so in the bedroom closet and his shoes arranged in order in a neat military row beneath. Probably if she looked in his underwear drawer she’d see that his boxers were color-coded and his socks were all in perfectly matched pairs.

  Cass herself was so messy that she never had a matching pair of socks. That was one reason she’d started wearing all black in the first place—not as an artistic statement but because everything always matched. The way she looked at it, every precious minute of her life she spent doing mundane chores like laundry was a minute she could have been creating something new. But she bet that someone like Jake O’Shea loved having a tidy sock and underwear collection—the kind of clutter she lived in would probably drive him crazy.

  Dragging her mind back from the possible contents of her court-appointed elf’s underwear drawer, Cass saw that the area he’d left her in looked more like a living room than a bedroom. In fact, it looked disappointingly like any other bachelor pad she’d ever been in. A lot neater than most—that was true—but still, it just looked like a place where a guy lived by himself. That was what she thought, anyway, until she started looking around and noticing the little details.

  For instance, there was a fireplace in front of the dark blue leather sofa but the flames that were popping and crackling quietly to themselves in the hearth were navy blue with pale green flickers. The colors put her in mind of Jake’s eyes. They were strangely beautiful, reminding her of a driftwood fire she’d seen once but they weren’t the only odd thing in the room.

  To one side of the fireplace, on the wall where a regular human man might have hung his plasma TV, there was a wide oval that seemed to be filled with inky black liquid. How the liquid didn’t spill out and run down to wet the plush dark blue carpet below was beyond Cass—magic she supposed—but it was still weird to see what amounted to a large puddle apparently defying the laws of gravity and hanging on a wall.

  Curious, she walked forward and touched just the fingertips of her unhurt hand to the black liquid. A ripple of color spread from her point of contact and suddenly a woman’s face with long blue hair and silver eyes appeared.

  “Good evening, Counselor O’Shea,” the face purred in a voice that fairly throbbed with sensuality. “And thank you for tuning to U-News, the only magical news broadcast tailored specifically to your life. In family news tonight, your father, the Spell Singer of Landolin isn’t getting any younger and soon will reach his time of fading. Your mother remains disappointed that you chose not to follow in his footsteps but believes you will see the error of your ways before it is too late.”

  The beautiful face with silver eyes faded for a moment to be replaced by a picture of two elderly people standing together and staring at what Cass had begun to think of as the screen.

  The man (or elder elf) had pure white hair and dark eyes and though he was old he was still standing straight and proud