Charmed by His Love Read Free Page B

one coming.
    “I … um … I don’t date.” Peg swiped the plunger from him and drove it into the toilet bowl. “Mostly because I can’t find anyone to babysit my
four
kids.”
    He took a step back, although Peg didn’t know if it was because she was splashing water all over the place or because
she
had just scared the bejeezus out of
him
. “Four?” he choked out, taking another step back.
    “Yup. All under the age of nine. There, that took care of that little problem,” she said over the sucking sound of the toilet unclogging. She set the plunger beside the tank and washed her hands in the sink, but not seeing any towels, she wipedthem on her pants as she turned to face him. “Now, if you can find out where all the towels are hiding, I’ll give you an in-depth tour of our laundry facility,” she said on her way past him. She stopped in the doorway. “What’s Claude look like, anyway?”
    “Hey, you aren’t going to tattle on me, are you? I mean, jeeze, I was only asking you out to dinner.”
    “And I thank you for that.” She shrugged. “I just want to keep all you guys straight, since you’re going to be here all summer exploring Spellbound Falls’s freaky new tourist attraction. Is Claude the boss of your little operation?”
    He nodded, looking relieved—which told Peg that
Claude
was her target.
    “He’s fortyish,” Mr. Romeo said, “a good three inches taller than me, athletic build, short dark hair.” He shook his head. “You might want to leave your bossy-mama attitude at home when you’re around him, though. Not only is Claude not into kids, but on a good day he barely tolerates women. And on a bad day I’ve actually seen him throw them overboard.”
    “Thanks for the heads-up,” Peg said, picking her way through the cluttered cabin.
    “Wait. About Bottomless,” he said, making her stop at the door. “Have you lived around here long?”
    “All my life.”
    “So you were here when the earthquake hit last week?”
    “Yup.”
    “It must have been pretty scary when those mountains split apart,” he said, pointing toward the window. He shook his head as he looked around the cabin. “The fiord the earthquake created is twelve miles long and over two thousand feet deep, but after talking to the geologists staying in cabin seven, none of us can figure out why nothing was damaged. Hell, we arrived within two days of the event and we didn’t even see a broken window. All the buildings in Spellbound Falls and here at Inglenook seem to be perfectly intact.”
    Peg snorted. “The ground did a lot of shaking, and when Bottomless split open and the ice covering it caved in, it made one heck of a deafening
boom
. It’s a miracle none of the structures were damaged. As for that new fiord, it cut right along my eastern property line and flooded a large part of my oldgravel pit. So tell me, have you guys been able to come up with an explanation for what happened? Because honestly, people in town are really rattled and are calling it
magic
.” She snorted. “And some are afraid to even go in a boat now, claiming Bottomless is cursed or something.”
    “Sorry, we’re as baffled as anyone.” He picked up his laptop and followed her out of the cabin. “The geologists can’t figure it out, either, swearing there wasn’t one warning sign of an impending earthquake. But what has us oceanographers really baffled is that the subterranean river actually became a navigable passageway from the Gulf of Maine to the St. Lawrence Seaway. The underground river surfaced in seven lakes; six here in Maine and one in Canada.” He stopped at the bottom of the stairs to face her. “Each of them appearing almost deliberately spaced so that ocean mammals can come up for air.”
    “Does that mean there really could be whales in Bottomless?”
    He nodded, gesturing toward the lake. “One of our crew swears he spotted the biggest sperm whale he’s ever seen the very first day we were here, and