Be Careful What You Wish For Read online

  The cottage cheese in her stomach had turned into a lump of lead and all she could do was pray she didn’t get sick all over their court-appointed elf’s crisp white shirt. Thank God she hadn’t had time for breakfast!

  “Cass, are you all right?” she heard Phil ask anxiously from the other side of O’Shea but she didn’t dare look up. If she looked up again she was going to puke—she just knew it.

  “She’s fine—just a little frightened. I’ve got her,” she heard O’Shea rumble.

  Pressed up against him as she was, Cass could feel the vibrations of his deep voice through her entire body. He smelled like leather and that same exotic but undoubtedly masculine spice she couldn’t put a name to.

  She wanted to slap him—it was excruciatingly embarrassing to be put in this position with a man (or elf) that she had disliked almost from first glance—but she didn’t dare. They were too high up in the air for her to show her true feelings. The best she could do was concentrate on not heaving her guts.

  “She’s a very headstrong girl. It takes quite a lot to frighten her.” Nana sounded worried.

  “I don’t think she likes heights,” Rory said doubtfully.

  “Will you please stop talking about me like I’m not sitting right here?” Cass’s voice was still hoarse but she managed to make herself heard.

  Taking a deep breath to calm her spinning stomach, she forced herself to sit up on the swaying couch. The left inside pocket of O’Shea’s jacket was pricking her again and she shrugged her shoulders irritably.

  “I’m fine,” she said with as much dignity as she could manage. “I’ve just got a little motion sickness—that’s all. If I had known that Jake here was going to insist that we ride in this flying nightmare, I would have brought some Dramamine.”

  “I have no idea what ‘Dramamine’ is or what it does, but I have asked you not to call me that, Cassandra.”

  O’Shea frowned at her but didn’t loosen his grip. His arm was around her waist now and he had one large hand firmly planted on her right hip. There was nothing sexual in the touch—it was purely a safety measure to keep her from falling, she could tell. His arm felt like an iron bar—completely immovable.

  Cass wanted to tell him to take his hands off her but though the couch was beginning some kind of descent, they were still high in the air. Like it or not, she would have to put up with Jake O’Shea’s hands on her for a little while longer.

  “Too bad,” she said tersely. “As long as you call me by my first name, I’m calling you by yours.”

  “But that is not my name,” O’Shea objected, still frowning.

  “Cass, could you maybe not insult our attorney right before we go to court?” Phil snapped with uncharacteristic irritation.

  “Look, this whole thing wasn’t my idea in the first place,” Cass snapped back. “It was your bright idea to sue our fairy Godmother not even twenty-four hours before my birthday. I was just forced to come along for the ride.” She glanced at O’Shea. “I just hope like hell I’m not expected to testify.”

  “Cassandra, really—” Nana began but O’Shea shook his head.

  “In all probability Judge Greenvine will require your older sister to do most of the talking since she’s the one that brought the suit in the first place. You should be prepared to answer in a respectful tone of voice, however, if he asks you a question,” O’Shea answered stonily.

  “Or she’ll be held in contempt of court?” Rory, who was a big Court TV watcher, asked eagerly.

  O’Shea smiled grimly.

  “You could call it that. But our court system is somewhat different from yours. Being held in contempt of court might mean receiving second degree burns over most of your body if your judge is a firedrake or being submerged in a vat of icy water up to your chin until hypothermia sets in if they are one of the water fae. And those are some of the milder punishments for angering one of our judges.”

  “What?” Cass couldn’t help the startled look she gave him. “But that’s…that’s crazy! You can’t do that to people!”

  “They can and they do, Cass,” Phil said from the other end of the couch. “The fae courts don’t use a jury system like we do. The judge has absolute power over the cases he or she sees and they rule according to their professional opinion.”

  “But…but how do you know you’re getting a fair ruling?” Cass asked. “What if the judge has a personal preference or a prejudice against one of the parties, or—”

  “That rarely happens,” O’Shea cut her off a little too quickly. Cass had a feeling that her question had struck a nerve. “The main thing to remember,” he said, frowning down at her, “Is that you should only speak when spoken to. I’m here to argue for you—it’s part of my job. So just answer any questions addressed to you and leave the rest to me.”

  “You’re asking us to put an awful lot of trust in you considering that we never saw you before this morning,” Cass pointed out in a hoarse whisper, glaring up at him. “How do we know you really have our best interests at heart?”

  Jake O’Shea’s face looked like it was carved out of granite.

  “I guess you can’t truly know that, Miss Swann,” he said icily. “If the fact that I have saved your life twice in the time since I met you this morning hasn’t induced you to trust me, then I suppose nothing will.”

  His pale dangerous eyes clashed with hers for a moment and then Cass looked away, biting her lip. He was right—he had saved her life, first from the trows and just now from plunging to her death from the flying couch. But damn it—something about him just got under her skin. She had no idea why she wanted to bait and insult him, she only knew he irritated her until she felt compelled to irritate him back.

  And there was something else, too. His cool use of her last name instead of her first didn’t make her feel better at all. Not in the least.

  “Look,” she began haltingly. “I didn’t mean to—”

  “We have no time for apologies now, although I will happily accept them later,” O’Shea remarked in that cool, maddening tone of his.

  Cass glared up at him with renewed irritation. Jerk!

  His pale, leaf green eyes bored into hers, daring her to say anything else. Cass stared back but somehow, when she looked into his strong features her words deserted her.

  After a moment the intensity of his gaze became too much. Though she didn’t want to lose the little staring contest she found herself in, Cass couldn’t help but look away.

  Trying to take her mind off the big elf, she glanced down, watching their spiral descent into a different part of the huge city. The sight made her stomach go lumpy again and she swallowed uneasily.

  Damn but she’d be glad when this whole thing was over with! It seemed amazing that her biggest worries this morning had been finishing her portrait of Brandon for the I.C.U. show and teaching at the Tight-Ass Academy tomorrow. She just wanted to see the last of Jake O’Shea and get back to her nice semi-normal life and her art.

  But she had a feeling that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  Eight

  The couch sat them down in front of a large pale peach building that seemed to rise into the sky forever. At last O’Shea loosened his grip on her hip and they all got off.

  Cass thought she had never been so happy to plant her feet on solid ground, even though one foot was bare. Deciding that she looked ridiculous in just one slipper, she took the Ernie slipper off her foot and chucked it in a nearby trashcan.

  The trashcan surprised her by standing up and waddling away on short stumpy legs, apparently to keep her from tossing anything else into it. As an afterthought, it spit the Ernie slipper back in their direction and Rory caught it reflexively and handed it back to her.

  “Hey, what the—” Cass turned to O’Shea to demand an explanation only to see him paying for their ride.

  He had a handful of thick heavy coins that looked like real silver in one palm and he was dropping them onto the couch’s red velvet cushions, righ