The Trouble with Magic (Loveswept) Read Online Free PDF Page B

to reconsider, she’d accepted her failure and given up gracefully, as she’d promised. Dealing a legend into the arrangement was above and beyond what was expected of her.
    “Wonderful,” he said, chuckling as he took the seat across from her, where she’d placed his cup of coffee. “Magic beats a ghost hands down every time.”
    “It gets better,” she said, guarding her features closely. “The magic involves love and living happily ever after.” She paused. “I suppose that’s why there are no ghosts,” she added.
    “This is great. A honeymooners’ island!” He became solemn. “Look,” he said, trying his best to be gentle—an uncommon endeavor. “I ... I can imagine how tough this is on you and I ... it’s business. It’s nothing personal. I ... thought I was going to enjoy this part—taking your island—after all the trouble you’ve caused me. But ... well, I’m not, Harriet.”
    He could have fooled her.
    “Maybe not just honeymooners, Mr. Dunsmore,” she said, ignoring his feeble excuses or apology or whatever it had been. He was extremely handsome and something very male called to the woman in her. But plainly, there wasn’t a drop of human kindness or compassion in him. “You could turn it into a ... a lonely hearts island. You know, where strangers come and meet and fall in love, and then live happily ever after.”
    He gave her a small smile and nodded, watching her expectantly, waiting to hear the legend. He couldn’t ask her to tell him. He could hardly think, let alone speak. Something was terribly wrong. He felt no triumph, no satisfaction, no pleasure. If anything, he was feeling something that he suspected came very close to guilt. Guilt! And he’d done nothing wrong.
    The facts were simple. It took money to maintain an island. She had no money. Someone was going to take the island from her eventually. It might as well be him. It made perfect sense, so what was the problem?
    Was he supposed to give this strange woman the money she needed? Loan it to her, knowing she’d never be able to repay him? Walk away from an excellent investment only to have someone else snap it up behind him? Where was all this stuff coming from? he questioned, shaking his head.
    “You don’t believe in happily ever after?” she asked, watching his head move back and forth. He gave her a blank stare. “I sometimes wonder about it myself, but it’s in the legend and I’ve seen proof of it.”
    “Of happily ever after?”
    She nodded. “You remember I told you about Lazare Jovette, the French trapper who came to the island first? Well, one winter—a particularly fierce winter—he came across a young Indian girl, ill and half-frozen, right here on this very island.” She paused briefly to speculate on the extent of Payton’s knowledge of history. “You see, when the Europeans came to this country and Canada, they brought with them diseases that were unknown to the Indians. Whole communities were wiped out by smallpox, and even illnesses as simple as the flu took many of them because they had no tolerance built up against the white man’s diseases.”
    “The Indian girl had smallpox,” he deduced.
    “No. I never heard exactly what she had, but when she became ill her people cast her out, thinking it was something terrible and wanting to save the rest of the tribe. Lazare found her, took her in, and spent the winter nursing her back to health.” She took a sip of her coffee. “In the spring, her people returned. They were shocked to see that she’d survived the illness as well as the winter, and they welcomed her back. But Lazare had fallen in love with her and didn’t want her to leave.”
    “So, he went to the chief and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Payton injected.
    “Yes. How did you know?”
    “TV.”
    There was a twinge of resentment at his lowering Lazare’s story to a TV western.
    “Actually, the chief was no problem,” she said. “But the girl’s father loved