Page 73 of Enchanted to Meet You

“Gross,” Yasmin said, and wrote downZero.

“Dee.” Jessica had left her own stool, and now laid a hand on her friend’s arm to keep her from physically launching herself at Rosalie. People were beginning to glance in their direction,mostly because of the agitation emanating from Dina. “You know friendship spells wear off in a few days.”

“In a few days it will be the Tricentennial Ball.” Dina slid back into her seat, but she didn’t look happy about it. “She’s trying to get everybody on her side so they’ll write extra nice reviews of her event online.”

Derrick had the feeling that Rosalie’s motives for handing out the muffins were a bit darker than a desire for positive online feedback.

“Is this kind of thing okay with whoever you work for?” Dina asked Derrick bitterly. “Slipping people happy muffins without their consent?”

“No,” he said. “It is not.”

“Well, then what are you going to do about it?”

“This,” Derrick said, and he held his right hand out to Mark. “How are you doing, Mark?”

Mark slipped his hand automatically into Derrick’s, giving him a hearty handshake. Not as hearty as the one Mark had given him when they’d met. But Mark hadn’t been strung out on Rosalie’s love muffins then. “Hey, man,” he said. “Thanks, I’m doing good. How are—”

Mark broke off with a perplexed expression. He seemed to be hearing something the rest of them couldn’t. He cocked his head, listening, while Derrick continued to gently clasp the other man’s fingers.

It wasn’t something Derrick ever learned consciously to do. It wasn’t something he’d ever even known hecoulddo until one day, when he’d been a kid, a favorite horse had run afoul of some barbed wire, and Derrick, in a panic, had laid his hands upon the wounds.

Like magic, the horse had calmed, the pain disappearing. The wounds themselves had healed up by the time the vet arrived.

A miracle, anyone else would have called it. But his father had taken one look, shook his head, and sighed.

“Your damned mother,” he’d said to Derrick—not without affection.

Maybe Derrick had inherited the ability from her. Or maybe it had been another one of her gifts. Since she only gave him one a year—which was also the number of times per year she visited him, since other obligations kept her busy traveling all over the world—she tried to make her presents especially impressive.

True, as a boy he’d have preferred a Nintendo, particularly since, after that, it was Derrick who got called anytime an animal—or ranch hand—fell ill or was injured on the farm.

But the gift of healing is what his mother gave him, and so it was what he gave back to others... like now, in the restaurant, holding Mark’s hand as he waited for the foggy glaze in the other man’s eyes to lift.

“What...” Mark blinked a few times. Then Derrick saw the clarity return, seeping back like the tide beneath the dock. Mark hastily snatched his fingers from Derrick’s.

“Hey, bro.” His voice sounded once again like his own, his diction crisp and rapid-fire. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on?” Dina struck her boyfriend in the shoulder. Her gaze was still fiery, but now her eyes were lit with the warmth of affection and worry, not rage. “What’s going on?What’s going on is that Rosalie gave you one of her homemade happy muffins andyou ate it. What the hell is the matter with you?”

Mark shook his head, his long dark hair brushing his shoulders. “What? No, that didn’t happen.”

“Yes, it did. You were going on and on about how good it was and how great she and Billy are.”

“No.” But Mark looked vaguely troubled, as if he did havesome distant memory of . . . something. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I hate that stupid witch and her dopey husband. I always have.”

“That’s not what you were saying two minutes ago.” Dina pointed at Derrick. “If he hadn’t done his little magic trick with his fingers on you, you’d probably still be all,Oh, Rosalie and Billy, they’re so great, why don’t we get together with them for Sunday Gravy?”

Mark laughed—but nervously. “I literally never said that.”

“Youliterallydid.”

Derrick felt a hand slide into his. He looked down and saw Jessica looking up at him, her face very pale under the bright lights of the brew pub.

“Thank you,” she said, in a voice so quiet he wouldn’t have heard her if his very being hadn’t become attuned, over the past few days, to her every word, her every movement, her every breath.

He squeezed her fingers in his. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You did.” Her eyes, in all the wild lights around them, looked larger and darker than ever. Her hand, so warm and alive in his, felt oddly reassuring. “Even Mark knows it, deep down. I don’t know how you did it, but you did. Thank you.”