Portals and Puppy Dogs - Amy Lane Page 0,3

Is this closer or farther away from your house?”

Oh. So that’s what the offer to lunch had been about. Alex would have thought Christopher Lockhart or Gabriele Baldwin, the other two partners in the firm, would have been the ones to talk to him about this.

In their offices. Professionally.

Not on a crisp fall day on the way to a food truck with their gaits fitting together like they were at least friends.

“Farther,” he said on a rasp.

“Are you still planning to ride your bike, then?” Simon asked, and he sounded a little concerned. “Because Auburn Folsom Road’s dangerous, Alex—I mean, every day, two ways, even at night?”

Alex had thought of that, and the more intense his inconvenient crush on the man next to him had become, the more he’d thought the risk would be worth it.

“Calves of steel,” he said weakly, knowing that he’d added another half hour or so to his commute. But anything, anything, rather than feel this panicky, half-embarrassed wash of humiliation every time he saw his handsome, kind, organized boss and knew there wasn’t a thing he could do to control the flutter in his stomach when Simon so much as glanced at him.

“Alex,” Simon said warmly, “come on, ’fess up. Do you really want this transfer? Who pissed you off?”

Alex looked at him helplessly and, unbidden, came that moment of absolute clarity two weeks ago, right before his entire coven had been knocked on their asses and sharply reprimanded by the forces that be.

They’d been trying to cast a spell for their heart’s desire, and every member of the coven—every member—had lied. They’d formulated the spell carefully. Alex had been in charge of thread colors and candle colors because that was his thing, and Jordan had been about the essential oils. Cully had been aesthetics, Dante had helped with the wording of the spells, Bartholomew had been in charge of the ingredients in the cauldron, and Kate and Josh had been all about implementation, putting the ingredients together.

And they’d stood, everybody gathered around the black, white, and red column candles at the points of a seven-pointed star made in black, white, and red thread, reciting the spell together. And then when each one of them was supposed to formally read the spell asking for their heart’s desire, the forces of witchcraft had gotten pissed off.

A cone of power had grown above them—something so awesome and otherworldly not even Alex could deny its presence—and the magic had coalesced at the peak of the cone and then whooshed out, throwing everyone backward and pulling from them one word—one damned word—that had embodied their true heart’s desire and not the pretension they’d written on the page.

At present, the only word that had been made public was Bartholomew’s. It had been “Lachlan,” and he’d had to confess to the object of his heart’s desire that he’d been in love with him for nearly two years before the spell had even partly begun to right itself, and it was still wreaking havoc in their neighborhood.

Alex’s word wasn’t quite that specific, but it still had the same gist. Passion. God, wasn’t that a laugh? Alex. Quiet, dry, competent Alex Kennedy, who used his highly methodical brain to help people assemble shoeboxes full of receipts into legal documents, and his rather scattered, creative friends assemble spells using the logic of the harmony of the universe while also doing their taxes—wanted passion.

He wanted love and sex and humor and hunger, and by Goddess, he wanted it with Simon Reddick, so bad that just smelling the man’s aftershave or seeing his customary black turtleneck as he strolled through the rather sterile white-walled office space hurt his heart.

He couldn’t have Simon. He was an employee—a nobody. Simon was the boss. The power imbalance alone made his liberal brain hurt.

He gave Simon a helpless sideways glance and physically squashed every impulse he had to pause and smooth Simon’s hair back from his eyes or rub his thumb over those lean lips.

“Nobody,” he said gruffly. “Nobody pissed me off.” He swallowed and put his hands in the pockets of his Dockers, hunching his shoulders against the wind.

Sounds from the Darkness

SIMON stared at Alex Kennedy in dismay. God, what had Simon done to make him close down like that?

One minute they’d been talking, and Alex’s face—narrow with pointed features—had lost its usual guarded expression and opened. That moment, his closed eyes to the sun, his mouth slightly parted to catch the wind—that had been such a beautiful, pure