Smitten by Magic Read online

  Smitten by Magic

  Magic & Mayhem #3

  Erica Ridley

  Contents

  Smitten by Magic

  Also by Erica Ridley

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Thank You For Reading

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2013, 2019 Erica Ridley

  A previous edition was published as Midwinter Magic.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Smitten by Magic

  He’s no angel. She was born one.

  * * *

  Former corporate shark Javier Rodriguez plans to redirect his money and attention toward family and good works. Unfortunately, his attempts to make things better meet with one disaster after another. His plans disintegrate further when he runs into a sexy tourist with... wings?

  * * *

  As Javi’s guardian angel, Sarah Phimm has her work cut out for her. When his latest charitable scheme risks his life, she's forced to reveal her existence—against protocol. He's everything her immortal heart desires, but can never have. She soon discovers that keeping him safe may be even harder than guarding her heart…

  “Erica Ridley’s romps are swoon-worthy romance with heartwarming laugh-out loud moments. I devour every one. When I want to feel good, I read Erica Ridley.”

  —Darcy Burke, USA Today bestselling author

  Love romance? Have a free book, on me!

  Sign up at http://ridley.vip for members-only exclusives, including advance notice of pre-orders, as well as contests, giveaways, freebies, and 99¢ deals!

  Also by Erica Ridley

  Magic & Mayhem:

  Kissed by Magic

  Must Love Magic

  Smitten by Magic

  * * *

  Gothic Love Stories:

  Too Wicked to Kiss

  Too Sinful to Deny

  Too Tempting to Resist

  Too Wanton to Wed

  * * *

  Rogues to Riches:

  Lord of Chance

  Lord of Pleasure

  Lord of Night

  Lord of Temptation

  Lord of Secrets

  Lord of Vice

  * * *

  Dukes of War:

  The Viscount's Tempting Minx

  The Earl’s Defiant Wallflower

  The Captain’s Bluestocking Mistress

  The Major’s Faux Fiancée

  The Brigadier’s Runaway Bride

  The Pirate's Tempting Stowaway

  The Duke's Accidental Wife

  * * *

  The 12 Dukes of Christmas:

  Once Upon a Duke

  Kiss of a Duke

  Wish Upon a Duke

  Never Say Duke

  Dukes, Actually

  The Duke’s Bride

  The Duke’s Embrace

  The Duke’s Desire

  Dawn With a Duke

  One Night With a Duke

  Ten Days With a Duke

  Forever Your Duke

  Chapter 1

  Javier Rodriguez swung his heavy burlap sacks off the back of the stranger’s pickup truck. He leapt over the tailgate and grunted when his Gore-Tex hiking boots landed hard on the cracked asphalt. He tried to offer cash to the sun-worn family stuffed into the truck’s cab, but they waved off the money, waved him off, too, and continued toward the mountains, a stream of exhaust smoke trailing in their wake. Javier hiked his sacks back onto his aching shoulders and hauled himself up the two-kilometer stretch into town.

  Santita, Bolivia. Population: Six hundred. Amenities: Scarce. Not most CEOs’ idea of a luxury Christmas vacation, but then again, Javier had given up on both “luxury” and “vacation” when he’d walked out of last month’s congressional hearing a free man. The government would pen new statutes to better guide industry practices in the future, but nothing could be done about the past. After all, no laws had been broken. Any exploited resources had been depleted legally. He and his Fortune 500 counterparts were free to retire with billions of dollars and a clean slate.

  Javier’s conscience disagreed.

  He’d thought purchasing “carbon offset” land in rural Bolivia where his great-grandparents had been born would be enough. Protecting his ancestral land and sharing a portion of his money in one set-it-and-forget-it dash of his signature across the bottom of a page. He’d let himself believe that one good deed canceled out all the rest. After all, his mission wasn’t philanthropy.

  It was profit. And he was a media darling.

  No businessman made the cover of Time magazine without ruthless ambition and relentless momentum. But his face on the cover had impacted him far less than the gut-punch of images shown during the hearing. The true cost of being a so-called “unicorn” startup wasn’t eighty-hour work weeks and a drawer full of antacids. Every penny of their success had ruined someone else’s quality of life.

  While his ex-partners congratulated themselves on becoming filthy rich before the government could stop them, Javier had simply felt filthy. His eyes had been opened, and he would never again value a conglomerate over an individual. No more impersonal signatures on contracts.

  It was time to walk the walk.

  And so here he was, at the crossroads of the Andes Mountains and the Bolivian lowlands, making his own penance for the damage his industry had wrought.

  Or trying to, anyway. Getting out of California had taken nearly three weeks.

  Heading toward his Malibu beach house was never a big deal. Limos and private jets were as easy to score as pumpkin spice lattes. But leaving the States for a remote dot in the rainforest—or going anywhere without artisanal tater tots and 5G networks—was all but impossible. Even for him. It was as if a forcefield of Murphy’s Law intended to trap him inside the 90625 zip code.

  As quickly as he made airline reservations, his flights got canceled without notification. Uber Black chauffeurs suffered flat tires just pulling out of his driveway. LAX customs officials grilled him about his crates full of toys and medicine and children’s clothing until he missed every possible flight and had to start all over the next morning.

  Once he managed to get on a plane, mechanical failure or missing flight crew kept it grounded. When the plane finally took off and reached cruising altitude, inclement weather diverted him first to Vegas and then to Aspen. When he landed at his actual destination, immigration officials warned him of malaria and dengue and avian flu and offered to send him right back home, free of charge.

  The moment he refused this largesse, the wheels and zippers of his sturdy, custom-made luggage spontaneously fell apart, strewing crayons and penicillin along the baggage belts. When he rejected the reiterated offer of a free return to Malibu in favor of stuffing whatever he could salvage into discarded burlap sacks that still carried the faint scent of coffee beans, the car rental company he’d hired as well as the backup car rental company he’d also hired
and every other car rental company in Bolivia were inexplicably fresh out of drivers and vehicles.

  Which was how Javier Rodriguez, ex-Fortune 500 leading man, found himself sharing a truck bed with four skinny goats for the 185 mostly-paved kilometers between the Sucre airport and the rural chili town of Padilla, his luggage reduced to dirt-stained burlap sacks… and if he wasn’t careful, even less than that. Who knew goats ate burlap? And crayons?

  It would’ve been much easier to give up and go home. But Javier hadn’t taken his company from fledgling startup to international powerhouse in ten short years by being the sort who gave up and went home.

  Plus, it was already December. Only a few weeks until Christmas. And he’d promised the children of Santita that, this year, Noche Buena would truly be a good one.

  He stumbled downhill, a couple hundred yards from the spare room he’d coaxed from the town dentist—all traditional lodging had naturally been unable to accommodate his request.

  Suddenly, he smacked into an invisible wall.

  Everything went flying, including him. Giant snow-white wings and a blinding light filled his vision and vanished just as quickly.

  Javier landed on his ass and blinked in befuddlement at the empty space in front of him. Maybe it wasn’t a brick wall after all… but it was equally as mystifying.

  He could’ve sworn he’d run into another person—someone swathed in a gangster-huge fur coat. Something soft and wide and hairy and completely unnecessary in sixty-five-degree weather. The breeze had a nip to it, sure, but head-to-toe fur was a bit much. Only a crazy person tromped around Bolivia dressed like a Sasquatch.

  But no one was there. Just an empty gravel road, littered with coloring books and chewable vitamins and a dazed and confused ex-CEO.

  Maybe he was the crazy person.

  With a muttered curse, he started stuffing his donation supplies back into the burlap sacks for what felt like the millionth time that day. Every single muscle ached. He was hungry and exhausted and no doubt hallucinating from stress and sleep deprivation. There’d been no enormous white wings, no ’20s gangster wrapped in snow-bleached fur, no—

  Clipboard.

  There was a clipboard on the road, half-hidden beneath one of the comic books that had fallen from his stack. He jerked his head up and scanned all sides of the empty road. A few goats, several chickens, plenty of gravel, but no sign of anyone who might’ve dropped a clipboard in his path.

  Except whomever he’d run into.

  The clipboard couldn’t have been there long. For one thing, the clipboard wasn’t dirty—and anything lying on a dirt road for more than a few seconds got very, very dirty. Javier could well imagine the current state of his backside.

  Also present beneath the fallen clipboard were a handful of mismatched Barbie shoes and a Hot Wheels car, further confirming the clipboard had fallen at the same time he had. But from where? From whom?

  He looked around slowly, carefully, every sense on high alert. But this was rural Latin America on a Sunday evening. The only thing open was the church. Every townsperson was either inside their homes eating dinner or attending Sunday mass. More importantly, he was in the middle of a large open area. There wasn’t even anywhere to hide, not as quickly as the accident had happened.

  Except here he was, dusting off jump ropes and children’s tennis shoes, right next to a clipboard that Should Not Be.

  Once he got his precious donations re-secured in the burlap sacks, he picked up the clipboard for a closer look.

  * * *

  Malibu

  Los Angeles

  Houston

  La Paz

  Sucre

  Santita

  * * *

  His itinerary. Javier’s stomach dropped. He was dehydrated and bone-weary and wound so tight he could snap, but he wasn’t hallucinating. Someone had a copy of his travel itinerary, stop for stop. Someone was following him. Or had arrived first in anticipation.

  But who? And how? And why?

  He looked around again, slowly, carefully, his farcical bad luck now taking on a sinister edge. He sat on his haunches in the middle of the empty road, ready to spring up at a moment’s notice.

  When he’d dissolved his corporation, he’d given every employee an extraordinarily handsome severance package, from the legal team through the janitorial crew, so there was no cause for concern on that front. That documentary on the far-reaching impacts of corporate greed still ran on late-night TV, but it vilified soulless conglomerates in general, not him specifically.

  And yet… Javier’s fingers gripped the clipboard, smudging the pristine page with his dusty fingerprints. And yet.

  He leapt to his feet.

  “I know you’re out there!” he shouted into the evening wind, raising the clipboard over his head like Lloyd Dobler’s boombox in Say Anything.

  Javier’s abuelos had ensured he’d grown up speaking Spanish, but for now he stuck with English. Whoever wrote this list had started in Malibu. He was probably a gringo—and possibly as ruthless as Javier himself.

  “Come out, come out, whoever you are,” he called, his voice singsong and infused with anger. He didn’t like mysteries, and he especially despised any situation that made him look foolish. Such as yelling his head off in front of a goat and a few chickens. “Show yourself right this second, or so help me—”

  A woman stepped out of the shadows.

  Presumably the shadows, anyway. Purple sky shot with pink from the setting sun did tend to lower visibility, but he could swear the spindly trees dotting along the road weren’t nearly thick enough to hide a person.

  And yet here she was. His mystery stalker. Looking less terrifying than he’d imagined, and more... terrified. Good. She ought to be scared.

  He, for one, was speechless.

  She had bright hazel eyes, a pert little nose, bronze skin, and golden-blonde Shirley Temple ringlets... which might not have seemed out of place on, say, an eight-year-old girl instead of what appeared to be a twenty-eight-year-old woman. She stood about average height—maybe a head shorter than Javier himself—but there was nothing else average about her. She wore a gold-and-purple Lakers jersey over the neon green straps of a string bikini top, calf-length rainbow-striped yoga pants, mind-blowingly impractical stiletto-heeled sandals with white powder puffs, and a plastic headband with a hot pink cupcake sticking out of it.

  His niece had a headband just like it.

  His niece was seven.

  This woman... Javier shook his head to clear it. It didn’t help. He tried to think logically, which would’ve been much easier had there been anything logical at all about the woman before him. She looked like she’d gotten her getup from some Halloween costume labeled “California Girl.” The kind sold on Mars. For the extraterrestrial tourist who wants to blend with the earthlings.

  If this was a stalker, he’d eat the clipboard.

  “Who are you?” he managed to get out, once his throat started working.

  “Sarah,” she answered automatically, her voice low and strangely melodious. “Sarah Phimm.”

  He choked in disbelief. “Sarah Phimm? Seriously? Well, I’m ‘No Way José.’”

  She stared at him in cherubic innocence, as if she hadn’t gotten the joke.

  Forget it. He held up the clipboard. “What are you doing with my itinerary, Sarah Phimm?”

  “It’s my itinerary.”

  He didn’t bother to hide his skepticism. The woman was wearing a cupcake. On her head. “You’re from Malibu?”

  “I came from there this morning,” she said, which didn’t precisely answer the question. “Anybody arriving from Malibu has that itinerary. It’s either that, or layover in Miami. And Miami is, you know... Miami.”

  Javier happened to like Miami. Most of his family lived there. Then again, who knew where this lady had been hatched?

  He narrowed his eyes, trying to picture a world in which it was okay to take someone in a cupcake headband seriously. He wasn’t even
sure he could take himself seriously at this point. Think. He rubbed his temples. Okay. So she flew in from LAX. That still didn’t explain her My First Earthling getup—or why some loca with time and money on her hands would choose a remote Bolivian village, of all destinations.

  “Why here?” he demanded. “Why come to Santita?”

  “Why not?” she countered with a little shrug. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

  He frowned. Not at her logic, which was incredibly flawed, but because when she’d lifted her shoulder, a soft rustling accompanied the movement, like spring leaves fluttering in an afternoon breeze.

  There were plenty of leafy trees and brisk winds here in Santita, but neither should be coming from the direction of Sarah Phimm’s shoulders.

  He had to be more sleep-deprived than he’d thought.

  She held out her hand. “Can I help with the bags?”

  “No.” Javier handed back her clipboard, then hiked the burlap sacks back up over his bruised shoulders.

  Every muscle screamed in protest. He ignored the pain. He might be dead tired, but the contents of those bags were his responsibility. The well-stocked replacement shipping containers he’d ordered wouldn’t arrive until January. After the frustrating three-week adventure getting back to Bolivia from California, there was no way he’d risk jaunting home again before Christmas for another shopping spree.

  Ignoring the strange woman, he resumed his laborious trek toward the dentist’s house.