Captivated: Spellbound (Book Two) Read Online Free

and I could do the work. But I was bothered that he wanted me to do it. What was the deal anyway? I looked out at the tall weeds in disgust. Well, he was letting me stay for free. I thought this little arrangement was a sex thing, maybe a romance thing, but apparently he wanted me to work to earn my keep. Hell if I knew. He seemed to have some kind of peasant girl fetish. So weird. But, I wasn’t interested in going back home yet, and there were worse ways to spend the summer.
    I picked up the scythe and walked out into the field. It was about a quarter of an acre. Not a lot of land for power tools, but quite a bit for the sweat of a person’s back. I swung the scythe. I’d never used one before, but after a while I got the hang of it. I thrashed the weeds down to about six inches tall in a great sweeping row as I walked forward.
    That weird sense of going back in time hit me as the sun beamed down on my back. Half-way down the second row, I was sweating. From my estimation, it would take about ten sweeps to get the whole area mowed. I guessed the idea was to mow it, and then turn over the soil. I knew that much about gardening. I eyed a spot near the gate to begin my planting when the whole thing was turned over to exposed soil.
    Under the hot sun, shearing down the weeds, I began to feel competitive with myself— like I wanted to prove something. I hacked at the weeds with all I had, driven an inner force that was all my own. It was the same drive that came over me when I was working out or writing a paper to get the top grade in my class. It was the same drive that made me want to stay in Europe all summer instead of just a few weeks. I wanted to win; I wanted to succeed.
    It took me until the sun started to dip toward afternoon to mow the entire garden. I was so hot and thirsty and sweaty, I wondered if I could keep working. My hands stung with blisters, so I pulled them off and washed them with cold water in the kitchen sink. I sat at the table and ate bread and cheese and drank cold tea from the fridge.
    I wanted to impress Alexi even thought I'd become irritated with his expectations of me. He said he wasn’t going to be back for a few days, and I wanted to have the whole garden turned over, and the whole front yard pruned and weeded before he got back. Then he would see what this little Capitalist was made of.
    After I ate, I went into my bedroom and looked at my cell phone. My mom kept calling and leaving voice mails, and emails, and Facebook messages. I turned my phone off just so I didn’t have to look at them. Gardening for my lover was better than a summer of working at my dad’s office filing memos and enduring subtle sexual harassment from old sickos.
    Back out in the garden, the sun was cooling toward the west. I slipped my gloves back on my sore hands, and drove my sharp shovel into the soil. It slid down easily, and I turned it over. Again, I drove the shovel down into the soil and turned it over. I repeated that same movement countless times. My mind went blank in the monotonous motion, sweat dripping down my brow, until my shovel hit something hard. I thought it was a large stone, and tried to dig it out.
    When I shoved down again, and tried to leverage under the side of the stone, a metal box rose to the surface of the soil. What the heck is that? I leveraged the other side of the box and brought the whole thing into the open air. I bent down to my knees and brushed the box off. It looked like a cash box, but it was locked. I picked it up and brought it to the front porch were I fiddled with the lock with a knife. These things were usually easy to open. With a small crack, the lock relented. I lifted the lid and was completely unprepared for what I found.
    Inside, was a Russian passport and a bunch of strange objects. They looked like voodoo dolls rapped with pink, silk ribbons. There was also an amulet in the shape of a pentagram. I shivered as I touched the items. What is going on here? I opened