WILLEM (The Witches of Wimberley Book 1) Read Online Free

from the half-price store. It’s amazing what treasures people are willing to give away or sell for pennies on the dollar.
    Anyway, I thought about fishing out one of the tomes that really is a lullaby in printed word form, but I knew if I turned on the light I wouldn’t go back to sleep.
    In a huff, I threw myself onto my right side and forced my mind to think about a jumping sheep. Not just any sheep. I’d seen a video featuring a sheep who’d been orphaned young and taken in by an Aussie family with Border Collies. The poor sheep thought she was a Border Collie and tried to play with the dogs, who were not the least species-confused. They just stared with a dog version of a WTF expression. I felt sorry for the shunned sheep who so desperately wanted to be accepted.
    That’s what was on my mind when I drifted off the last time.
    The next time I woke there were cracks of light around my thick-lined dark curtains. That didn’t mean I got a full night’s sleep. There were usually only two to three hours of darkness left when I turned in at night.
    Life and times of a barkeep.
    Turning toward the alarm, I opened one eye so I could read the time. Nine-oh-seven. The first thought that jumped to mind after that was that it probably wasn’t too early to call the number on the card .
    Half falling out of bed, half pulling myself up, I headed to the shared bath outside my door. Jabba’s door was closed and I didn’t hear any signs of life. It was a tiny slice of heavenly experience, the times when I could pretend that I was actually alone.
    Having relieved myself of the burden of Scotch, diet drinks, and vitamin waters, I stepped back into my room and looked at the Hummer. I had the oddest compulsion to take a shower and shave before making that call. I’d figured out by the time I was ten that feelings like that usually mean something and had started paying attention to them.
    You might call it intuition. You might call it weirdness, but calling something weird doesn’t make it go away. It also doesn’t make it untrue.
    I guess that’s what drew me to study MMPP. I find that, if you keep your eyes open and don’t shut down possibilities before they have a chance to show themselves, you’ll find that life is far stranger than most people are ready to admit. By the time I was twelve I was calling this vague and invisible sense of guidance the Voice. Not that it had an actual voice. And not that I called it that anywhere except inside my own head. Even as a child I was savvy enough to figure out that telling other people about voices could land you in the Counselor’s office when everybody else was outside for recess.
    That was the long meandering way of explaining why I went back to the bathroom, used the good soap, gave myself a twenty-dollar shave and used just enough product on my hair to give myself the almost-impossible-to-pull-off-bedhead-by-design look. Over torn jeans I buttoned up a clean, pressed button down, left the shirt tail out and put a good-looking Armani sweater on over. The fashionable juxtaposition of rags and riches was hip and looked good if I did say so myself.
    Too much trouble for a guy who’s straight, you say? I’d agree with you completely, but the gay boys taught me that women like clothes and don’t appreciate the practice of looking like you reached into the closet wearing a blindfold and put on whatever your hand came back with. If you want to be noticed by powerful women who can do something for you, you need to dress in a way that comes off as understated sexy. I’ve worked at that look and pretty much mastered it, even if I do say so myself.
    After transforming into cover model perfection, I took a look at the room and decided that the bed should be made before the phone call. Don’t ask me why. I know it doesn’t make sense. I know it sounds squirrelly. After all, I wasn’t planning a video call, but the Voice was insistent. So I took three minutes to make the bed. I even