Finding the Magic Read Free Page A

eyes, he walked away from them and out of the ballroom, feeling all the while that he was leaving a part of himself behind.

Chapter Two
     
    The feeling was still with him two days later as Cam paced restlessly in front of his second-floor office window. Ordinarily, the view helped bring him peace and today it was particularly spectacular. The sun was just rising over the hill and it lit the scene with a fresh, golden light, turning darkness into lengthening shadows. There had been a light fall of snow overnight and the thin layer on his wide lawn was pristine and undisturbed. It dusted the pine forest that surrounded his family home like a layer of confectioner’s sugar. Just beyond the trees at the base of the hill, he could see part of his small loch, as still and smooth as a mirror. There wasn’t another house in sight, though he knew that there was a small village just a couple of miles away, nestled in a sheltered valley. The undisturbed land around him usually gave him a sense of freedom and safety. Today it just felt isolated.
    Since he had left the wedding reception and Jayne Davis behind, nothing had given him respite. The little sleep he had managed to grab had been filled with the kind of erotic dreams that would put a porn star to shame. When he woke, his cock was as hard as steel and not even an ice-cold shower or taking matters into his own hand had relieved it for long. He just needed to get her out of his mind. Unfortunately, with the information he had discovered this morning, it didn’t look as if that was going happen.
    The computer hummed softly behind him, the database he had been studying covered by a screensaver. Its animated image of a man transforming into a house cat caught his eye. He watched it cycle through a couple of times, remembering the first day it had flickered on. Nick Douglass had hacked into the machine. Hiding the program in the hard drive just to prove he could. Nick had thought it was hilarious that he had been able to outsmart him, the “computer security expert”. Cam had tried for over a week to get rid of it with no success. He had fully intended to threaten Nick with bodily harm if he didn’t fix it when he came to Scotland. Only his friend hadn’t arrived.
    He had finally figured out how Nick had done it but he didn’t want to delete it anymore. That stupid animation had become a memorial to Nick. A reminder that it was up to Cameron to find out what had happened to him. After all, if he hadn’t refused to go and pick him up at the airport eighteen months ago… He closed his eyes in regret. He knew Nick had arrived at the airport since he had collected his rental car. He even had the surveillance tapes of the garage to prove it. The car had been found abandoned and empty on a country lane about twenty miles away from Murray House. No one had heard from him since and, until recently, there had been no new leads.
    When Jack and Megan had come to him for help, he had set out to find the identity of the person trying to kill them. Unable to find any motive for getting rid of either of them, he had looked for similar crimes. He found that a number of shapeshifters had disappeared over the last couple of years, Nick Douglass was one of them. At the time, they had been looking for mated couples who had vanished and, in the end, he had dismissed them as unrelated. The disappearance of the others had continued to bother him though.
    When they had finally caught up with James York, the man who had been trying to kill his friends, Cameron had found that the man had extensive notes on shapeshifters . He must have gotten that information from somewhere and Cam couldn’t help but wonder if it had anything to do with the missing shifters. He might just be grasping at straws but anything that might help him find out what had happened to Nick was worth checking. With this in mind, he had continued to investigate.
    This morning, he had made one of his periodic checks of the missing