Something Magical (Witches of Hawthorne Grove Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

very little experience to back up his business plan, but the numbers were right, and as it turned out, so was he.
    Investor number seven had helped him prove it to the world.
    Within five years, his company ranked in the top one hundred IT companies in the world. When he'd sold it off last year after he'd decided to retire, it was ranked number seven in the Fortune 500. But being turned down for coffee by the peppy Miss Dean was a rejection that felt personal .
    Not that it should have. If he counted every minute since their first meeting until she walked away from him at the end of their last, they'd spent a total of eighteen minutes together—hardly enough time for him to turn her refusal to share his caffeine addiction into a personal jab—and yet, it had wounded him somehow. Not unlike the antique letter box he'd picked up last weekend at the antique shop, he thought, rubbing at his injured arm, but even that hadn't bothered him as much as this woman's whole I-don't-want-to-get-coffee-with-you thing, and he didn't know why.
    It's probably just that over-inflated ego of yours , his conscience pricked as he followed her with his gaze. She put a pin in it and the pain you feel is the effect of it slowly shrinking down to size .
    She hadn't waited around for him to finish the paperwork, either. After depositing him at one of the tables with a hasty mumble about someone being there to help him soon, she'd hurried off to see to another customer while he busied himself with watching her from afar as he made sure to dot all his “I's” and cross every “T”.
    Shifting in the chair, he reached into his pocket to collect the dog license he'd unearthed from the letter box and held it up to the light, trying to make out something other than the name. He could clearly read the series of numbers, but rest of it was far too corroded to read. Still, it was responsible for his being here today. He'd come to the shelter to adopt a dog—not pick up a woman, he reminded himself.
    Slipping the warm metal tag back into his pocket, Jordan signed his name on the last sheet of paper and walked to the front desk where he laid both the pen and clip board aside. “I've filled in the important bits, my cell number and my signature. If you need anything else, give me a call.”
    Half an hour later, he was standing in his garage staring down in aggravated confusion at the antique letter box he'd moved to the worktable for dis-assembly. As he scowled down at it like it was some strangely intricate, impossibly difficult puzzle to be solved, he contemplated the ill-considered invitation he'd issued to Miss Dean to join him for coffee and then complained to the box that it was “just like a woman.”
    And by that, he meant confusing. Not knowing the reason for disappointment at being turned down by the woman from the antique shop was as irritating as not knowing where his illogical passion for buying antique letter boxes came from. At the moment, both currently posed a mystery for him that was gnawing at his insides and adding equally to his growing surly mood until, glaring down at the box, he reached over and slammed the lid firmly shut.
    Why did he keep buying the darn things, anyway?

    * * *
    H untingdon's One Shot Coffee Cafe was a cozy little coffee shop located on the outskirts of town to which quite a lot of Hawthorne Grove's residents gravitated, both in the mornings, for that first steaming cup of brew that the owner guaranteed would knock the sleep out of their eyes, and in the evenings when the lighting was dim, the mugs were thinner, and the exquisite brew topping every cup became a lot more artistic than the caffeinated jolt Sam Huntingdon faithfully served his sleepy-eyed customers in the A.M..
    Jo Dean Leavy was a regular. In the four years during which the cafe had been in operation, she hadn't once missed a morning of stopping in for what she called her “emergency wake up call.” But tonight, she was sitting at a ruby