“No! Take it out, please?”

He plucked a ladybug out of her hair. His hand brushed the shell of her ear and she backed away quickly, tucking her hair behind it and pretending to be very interested in the ladybug he’d rescued.

Jamie’s voice was brusque as he said, “They’re waiting for us,” and walked out of the greenhouse.

Mika blew out a slow breath and followed him around to the front of the house, where the Broomstick was waiting. Ian had insisted they take it today because, he said, he and Rosetta were not about to pass up the opportunity to travel in a witch’s enchanted car. They were both in the back seat already, bouncing up and down like a pair of toddlers on their first roller coaster.

Mika got in the driver’s seat, retrieved her keys from Ian, and waited for Jamie to fold himself into the little hatchback beside her. As he buckled his seatbelt, she marvelled at the fact that she’d had a golden retriever, a greenhouse, and an entire koi pond in this car, yet it had never felt as small as it did right now, with Jamie Kelly’s elbow just an inch away from hers.

Oh. Oh, no. He’d pushed the sleeves of his white button-down shirt up past his elbows. She could see his forearms.

Forearms were invariably her ruin.

She sighed, started the car, and peeled away from the house before she did something that would well and truly put the cherry on top of her mortification sundae.

“Wheeeeeee!” Ian squealed behind her, as if he didn’t drive his own car faster than this. (He did. Ken had told her.) “When does the speed spell kick in?”

“When I need it to,” said Mika. “Emphasis on the word need there. I’m not using it today.”

“Spoilsport.”

“I don’t mind,” Rosetta said happily. She’d twisted as much as her seatbelt would allow and had her arms propped on the bottom frame of her open window, her eyes glued to the woods and rolling fields zipping past. “I don’t want to miss anything!”

Mika looked at Rosetta in the rear-view mirror. When they’d told her about this trip, she’d allowed herself only a heartbeat of unabashed delight before she’d cast worried looks at Terracotta and Altamira because she hadn’t wanted them to be left out. They had both immediately informed her that they didn’t want to go to a bookshop, thanks, and were more excited about getting to spend the afternoon swimming in the sea under Ken’s watchful eye. (Privately, Mika thought this sounded like a ghastly way to spend an afternoon. There was no force in the universe that would have persuaded her to dip more than a toe in the North Sea in November, but Terracotta and Altamira seemed to positively delight in the cold.)