Love Potion #2. Margot Early

the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.

      What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?

      Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.

      But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.

      And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.

      And he wasn’t talking now.

      He took off her clothes, and she liked this. It felt strangely…forbidden. Tossing his own T-shirt to the floor beside Mariah, he gazed down at Cameron. “You are fantastically beautiful.”

      “What?” Her jaw actually dropped, and she found herself trying to assume a persona, trying not to be aware that she was naked and he was looking at her, clearly intent on only one thing. Having her.

      She quavered. The air felt so revealing. It swam between them. She reached up to his jeans, and he gently caught her wrists, placing them back against the sheets. “Slower,” he said, and she felt the power of his intense maleness, his oppositeness from her.

      He came down to her, to kiss her lips, to touch her face and her jaw.

      Cameron believed herself to be jaded. During the years before Beatrice’s pregnancy and birth, before she’d acquired her own terror of pregnancy and birth, she’d had some wildness. Encounters on the spur of the moment, a live-in boyfriend who’d been not very nice in the long run. Certain words from the mouths of men made her laugh, generally promises that they were going to send her to a yet unknown Eden of ecstasy. They had often made themselves ridiculous to her, and through her work she often found them unworthy of respect, earning only her contempt.

      But Paul, in this minute, seemed a fairy-man, a god-man, a pagan creature who was pure desire and impervious to ridicule or derision. She realized, acutely, why they had never done this again. It was too much, too perfect, too close to what-should-be. Too utterly terrifyingly near her ultimate desire in a lover.

      His body was beautiful, and she tried again to touch, this time, his shoulders.

      He let her, briefly, then removed her hands from him again as he kissed her throat, her heart, her breasts…

      Myrtle Hollow

      CLARE CUREUX sat in her cabin, drinking the herbal infusion that would relax her, allowing her to sleep after the birth she’d just attended. Few people in Logan County chose homebirths these days. It used to be a choice of poverty, but now the indigent had help from the government to go to the hospital.

      Ladonna Naggy’s homebirth had been an educated choice. Ladonna had attended Yale, studied biology and was thinking of becoming a midwife herself. Bridget had come along to this birth as Clare’s assistant, and Ladonna and her partner, Michel, had given birth to a beautiful son. Everything had gone right. Bridget had talked less than usual—this was something Clare had counseled her daughter about, because chatter could distract and irritate a woman in labor. Yes, Bridget was learning; after all, she had two children of her own.

      Clare knew she herself was unlike other women, though she shared many of their experiences. Sixty-seven years old, divorced, mother of two, grandmother of two. She was a midwife and an herbalist, and some people called her a witch.

      Clare was Irish on her mother’s side, of Caribbean descent on her father’s, her paternal grandmother having been white enough to “pass.” Clare was not sure where “the Sight” came from, whether from Ireland or the Caribbean, but she had it, as did her daughter Bridget, her youngest. Clare had received the love potion recipe from her father’s mother but brewed the recipe without the elaborate rituals her grandmother thought vital.

      Grand-mère’s view had been that if one did not make a sacrifice willingly, a sacrifice would be taken.

      Clare refused to see that anything had been sacrificed in her life. Divorce from David? What had happened before the divorce? Just the price of her vocation—or so it had all seemed at the time.

      The children believed that she and David had simply ceased getting along. Clare was content with this interpretation of the story, which had the advantage of being true, as far as it went.

      But Paul, she knew, considered the explanation inadequate. And he used its so-called inadequacy to justify his own absurd belief that it was impossible for two people to remain married. Well, he claimed that he could never have such a partnership.

      She sometimes wondered if knowing the whole truth would change Paul’s mind. It was academic. He never would know, of course, because David would never tell him and neither would she. It hadn’t been her finest hour; and if her son ever learned the truth, Paul would see it just as David had.

      When given the choice, she’d chosen her vocation over her marriage. It had been selfish. But as she shut off the light in the kitchen and made her way through the dark cabin, reflecting on the birth she’d just been honored to witness, she was content.

      CHAPTER TWO

      CAMERON SOMETIMES thought she was actually insane. She considered her insanity as she crawled beneath her bed to retrieve the third used condom.

      Paul had left all three wrappers on her bedside table, from where Mariah had stolen them and taken them to her bed.

      Glad that Paul had been forced to go to the zoo, glad that nothing on Earth would come between him and his job, Cameron took her find into the bathroom to join the other two, turned on the water and prepared to make sure that every condom had kept its integrity. It was the kind of fanatical thing that an insane person might do, and Cameron had been told by various people that her fear of pregnancy was insane.

      She didn’t care. She had been in the middle of her monthly cycle last night—only peak fertility could have made her behave so stupidly—and she would be happier by day and night if she knew that not one of these three condoms had a hole in it.

      Strange, she had not been terrified by pregnancy last night. And maybe she was distracting herself now from something a bit more frightening than bringing forth children in pain. Paul. She remembered every detail of the night before. She absolutely did not want to be cured from her infatuation with Graham Corbett by falling in love with someone so avowedly against commitment as Paul Cureux.

      She was trying to talk herself out of actually making sure the condoms had no holes when she heard someone call her name. “Cameron! Cameron!”

      Not Mary Anne. Cameron was glad of that. If her cousin had slept with Graham Corbett—and why wouldn’t she have done so—she wouldn’t come around and tell Cameron about it. No, this was the voice of Cameron’s younger sister, Denise. Denise, unlike Beatrice and Cameron, had inherited a normal physiognomy that would allow normal childbearing. She was a student at West Virginia University but home for the weekend.

      Her little sister, with no respect for privacy, appeared in the bathroom door. “What are you doing?” said Denise. “My God, who hit you?”

      “I walked into a cabinet door.” Cameron tossed the condoms in the trash.

      Denise’s face filled with alarm. “No, you didn’t. You tell me people always say that when someone hit them.”

      Cameron had told her that, basing the statement on her experience working with battered women. “I turned around in the kitchen and whacked the cabinet door. I’d never let anyone hit me.”

      Unfortunately, Denise’s acceptance of the truth allowed