Love Potion #2. Margot Early

      “Sure,” she repeated.

      He knew very definitely that she wasn’t, that he’d been a clod, that he couldn’t undo any of it, that he had wrecked things. Tendrils of adulthood and commitment inched toward him, crept around him, and he, too, jumped down from bed, effectively casting them off.

      CHAPTER ONE

      Logan, West Virginia

       The present

      CAMERON MCALLISTER sat at a small damp table in The Last Resort, the downstairs lounge of a Stratton Street hotel, now in its fifth or sixth incarnation. She listened without much interest to Paul Cureux’s final set and tried to look like his girlfriend. She felt desperately sad, helplessly jealous and reckless.

      Her first reckless act of the evening had been to attend a family birthday dinner, where the man she most desired had shown up as her cousin’s date. And obviously mad about said cousin. Thus Cameron’s desperate sadness and helpless jealousy.

      The second reckless act had been to pour the contents of an innocent-looking vial into her wine glass and drink it. This was supposed to help her get over the man in question.

      Her third reckless act had come with Paul’s phone call, his insistence that one of his most infatuated fans was at his gig and not getting the message that he had a girlfriend.

      This was hardly surprising; Paul didn’t have a girlfriend. Paul had Cameron. Cameron, who was, she supposed, his best female friend and had been since they were thirteen. Cameron, who was willing to assume the public-only role of his girlfriend. The system worked well enough. The reasons she took part—at parties, gigs and such—were myriad and not something she ever fully examined. Paul’s reasons? Well, she wasn’t wholly sure about that, either, except that he didn’t want a girlfriend and her presence prevented his ever finding one. Though he occasionally slipped away for the night with the kind of woman he believed least likely to ever trouble him again—almost always at out-of-town gigs.

      Paul was the son of a midwife who brewed love potions for the occasional desperate petitioner. Love potions that he, at least, believed worked. And his sister, Bridget, claimed to have the same powers as his mother, though the little vial Cameron had bought from her (and dumped in her wine) was not a love potion. Paul held up his sister and mother as examples of the inherent untrustworthiness of the female sex. Because women were like this, he said, half-facetiously, he would never marry.

      Nonsense, in Cameron’s opinion. Paul would never marry because he was Peter Pan. He had told her many times that he didn’t want so much as a houseplant; the responsibility of marriage and children was not for him.

      Oh, if only Bridget’s concoction to “restore emotional equilibrium” would actually work. Cameron believed in the love potions, believed them to work. But this was a different kind of potion. One that was supposed to help her get over Graham Corbett. And that was absolutely necessary.

      Cameron’s cousin Mary Anne was beautiful, talented and her best friend. Local radio host Graham Corbett was the only man who had interested Cameron in at least three years. But Graham was smitten with Mary Anne, the attraction was mutual, and Cameron just wanted to be home with her dogs and a romance novel so she could start getting over it. If anything, anything, could distract her from the burning jealousy she felt…

      Cameron was rarely jealous. She made a habit of contentment. Someone had once told her that grateful people are happy people, and she counted her blessings daily. Decent looks, good health, two dogs she loved, her job as director of the Logan County Women’s Resource Center, and so much more….

      The girl sitting across from her said over the music, “So…where did you two meet?”

      You two. She meant Cameron and Paul, the supposed couple. The groupie was very pretty. Her name was…Ginny? Jenny? No, Genie. Or Jeannie. She was blonde, with fairy-perfect skin, taller than Cameron and skinny like a model, with high cheekbones and a wide mouth. Paul had said this groupie was “clingy,” but why should that bother Paul? What was wrong with having a gorgeous woman infatuated with you?

      And there was nothing to stop women from becoming infatuated with Paul. He had a fine tenor voice and made audiences laugh by spontaneously creating songs on the spot on whatever subject they requested.

      Now, Paul gazed at Cameron as he sang an original love song called “Years Ago.”

      “We’ve known each other forever,” Cameron replied, trying for patience. This woman should give up on Paul. She said, “Look, if you really knew him, you wouldn’t want him.”

      Cameron was again being reckless—not to mention sounding unlike a girlfriend—but someone should say something to this delusional young woman. And Cameron thought most women received too little good advice when it came to men.

      “You want him,” Ginny-Genie pointed out.

      Not really.

      Cameron looked at Paul, his dark hark hair waving appealingly, just messy enough, just long enough and no longer. Cameron cut his hair; she did this because he asked her to, claiming that he worried about his mother and sister using pieces of his hair for witchcraft. Because he didn’t simply go to the barber, Cameron suspected he liked her to cut his hair. He was classically handsome, his eyes perpetually alight with mischief. He was tall, lean and broad-shouldered, nothing bulky about him. He looked like a construction worker in a television ad. Or the Marlboro Man. Or an Olympian god.

      In actual fact, he was a zookeeper and moonlighting folk singer who lived a self-serving existence and believed lasting marriage did not exist. Cameron had no desire to marry him, so this didn’t matter.

      “Look,” she said to Ginny, shouting too loudly over the song Paul was pretending to sing to her, “you’re very pretty, and you seem intelligent.” This might be stretching it, but undoubtedly Ginny-Genie’s low self-esteem was part of the reason the girl considered Paul satisfactory. No harm in a little confidence-building. “There are good men out there who would give their eyeteeth to have a girl like you, to marry her. Men who are okay with commitment.”

      Ginny-Genie sipped her own margarita, and there actually did seem to be a look of intelligence—or at least calculation—in her aquamarine eyes.

      Knowing she’d said too much, Cameron became intent on watching Paul tune his guitar. His hands were big, long-fingered, work-roughened. He had a bandage wrapped awkwardly around one thumb where he’d sliced it open erecting the new monkey enclosure at the zoo. He’d really needed stitches but had insisted he didn’t and was now, Cameron saw with much satisfaction and little pity, paying the price.

      As her eyes again skimmed the lounge, she saw a big, tall man enter the bar with Jonathan Hale, the manager of the local radio station. Cameron squinted through the darkness, and the big man seemed to gaze curiously at her. Hazel eyes, she saw, and those cheekbones. That full mouth.

      She smiled, and he broke free from Jonathan, crossed the lounge to her table. Cameron stood up to greet her first lover, who had only grown more fantastic-looking with age. Sean Devlin.

      “Cameron?” he said.

      “Hi, Sean. What brings you to Logan?”

      “Actually, I’m living here. I’m the new drama teacher at the high school.”

      Yes, the old one had died suddenly three weeks earlier.

      He looked down at Ginny-Genie, and Cameron introduced her, as well, not feeling possessive.

      But he seemed interested in her and asked for her phone number, which she gave him before remembering that she was supposed to be acting like Paul’s girlfriend.

      At the end of the song, Paul asked for requests, said he hadn’t made up a song yet that night. Now standing beside Sean, the groupie raised her hand.

      She was the only one.

      Paul lifted his eyebrows.

      “Commitment,” she said.