“Just two. There’s a writer who has been assigned the castle and surrounding area, a cameraman to film her, and a sound engineer. The last two are a couple, so I thought we could put them in the carriage house, and let the writer have the Tudor Room for the atmosphere. Sim? Ah. Obrigato.”
“And just how are we going to explain about the druids?” I asked, exiting the schedule program with a sour expression. I disliked having my well-laid plans put awry, and now I was facing endless upheaval. “The celebration is coming up, and you know how they get—everything’s a sacrifice or a ceremony, most of them conducted with no clothing on, and many involving sexual congress. Debauchery and pagan ceremonies is hardly how I want Bannon Castle depicted to the world.”
“I’ll talk to Elfwine and tell her to keep a low profile—good morning, Lady Fidencia. I have his lordship waiting to speak to you.” Stewart paused for a moment, a faint blush brightening his cheeks.
Silently, I picked up the phone on my desk and leaned back in the chair, unable to keep the smile from forming as Stewart was forced to listen to Fidencia’s recital of intimate woes stemming from her pregnancy. I let her go on for a bit, but took pity on him when she got to the part about bathroom difficulties. “What sort of game are you playing now?” I asked, interrupting her. “You picked a hell of a bad time to do it—I need you back here immediately. Beltane is just a week away. We have to be married by then, as you well know.”
“Noony, darling!” Fidencia positively cooed into the phone. “What a delight it is to hear your forceful, one might almost say grating, voice again. How was the Underworld? Still filled with usurers and adulterers?”
I scowled at the photo on my desk, that of a long-limbed, dark-haired, sultry goddess poised seductively on a white fur rug. Noony. I hated that absurd nickname, which was no doubt why she used it. “There haven’t been usurers since the investment advisers fed them to the sharks. And as for adulterers—those who live in glass houses, my dear.”
Her laughter tinkled in a way that, for the three years I had been unaccountably smitten with her, delighted me, but now just made my teeth itch. My jaw tightened in response, causing my teeth to grind.
“Darling Noony! One can’t adulterate someone who isn’t one’s legal spouse. You died. Therefore, I was a widow and free to remarry as I liked.”
“It’s a symbolic death, as you very well know. Or you would know if you’d ever gone into the Underworld with me, as you were meant to do.”
“Once was enough,” she answered quickly, the shudder evident in her voice. “I’ve moved on since then. While you were moldering away in the Underworld, I was falling madly, wonderfully, totally, and completely in love with Dion. He asked me to marry him the very first night we met—at a samba contest, which naturally we won—and I just knew that he could offer me everything you couldn’t. It was kismet, darling, kismet.”
I ground my teeth some more, just for the hell of it. “You have no right to marry someone else. You agreed to the rules of the job, even if you’ve disregarded most of them. But you can’t just brush aside the fact that in a week’s time, we are to be married. I’m willing to overlook this indiscretion, just as I’ve overlooked all the other ones, but I won’t have you jeopardizing my job simply because you’ve had it off with some Latin boy toy.”
“He’s actually Greek, dear heart, but I wouldn’t expect you to know that. Dion gave up his licentious past, and has devoted himself heart and soul to salsa. And me, naturally. I can assure you that Dion is anything but a boy,” she purred. “And as for your job—I am sorry, darling, but I’ve decided to quit. I’ve found my true métier in life—to be a wife and mother—and nothing you can say or do will change my mind.”
“You can’t do this to me!” I yelled, ignoring the pressure in my forehead. “You know that Taranis has been breathing down my back for the last two hundred years! The instant he knows you’ve married someone else, he’ll take everything away from me and hand it to one of his minions!”
“I’m truly sorry, darling, but my mind is quite made up. There is nothing in the laws that say I have to be your wife—you’ll simply have to find someone else to marry you at Beltane.”
A few more layers of tooth enamel were ground off. “You can’t seriously expect me to find, court, and marry a woman in a week?”
“There once was a time, many centuries in the past, when you had something approaching charm,” she said thoughtfully. “I suggest you dust that off and use it. Otherwise…it’s been nice knowing you.”
The call continued in that vein for another agonizing fifteen minutes. I tried every argument I could to make her see reason, but she always was an unreasonable woman.
“Hellfire!” I swore, slamming down the phone. I then took great pleasure in jamming her photo into the trash, followed by a great many invectives.
“I take it the call did not proceed in a satisfactory manner?”
“No.” I stormed around the room for a moment, cursing Fidencia, cursing women in general, cursing the situation I found myself in. “After eleven hundred years, she suddenly decides I don’t offer her enough scope. Scope! What the hell does that mean, anyway?”
“I believe, sir, it means she feels her life is going nowhere, that marriage with you is stifling—”
One glare was enough to leave him mumbling an apology.
“As if anyone could stifle her! She’s the most unreasonable woman in existence, and I rue the day I ever saved her wretched neck by pulling her out of the sea before she drowned. The little witch has me by the balls good and proper. Well, I’ll just show her who is lacking in scope! There is no way in this world or the next I will give up my job to one of Taranis’s lackeys. Stewart! Round up every marriageable female you know. I’m going wife shopping!”
Two
A nd this is Aoife, Lord Cernunnos,” Elfwine said the following day as a shy-looking girl with a broad, freckled face stepped forward and peeked at me over the top of her thick-rimmed glasses.
I frowned.
“Just barely eighteen,” Stewart whispered. “If that.”
I frowned more.
“Aoife is one of our newer ovate initiates. She comes from County Clare and will be going to university next month. Her interests are herbalism, art, and nature in its purest form. She is, naturally, a virgin. Aoife, dear, take off your robe so his lordship may see your physical being better.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said quickly, holding up a hand to stop the virgin from stripping. “Quite charming, but as I mentioned, I’m looking for a woman with a bit more…experience than this young lady offers.”
“Experience?” Elfwine’s formidable brows pulled together in a puzzled frown.
She was an elder in the order of druids that had shown up at my doorstep six centuries ago, claiming they existed solely to worship the lord of the forest: namely, me. Elfwine was a leader in the group that set up home in what had once been the castle’s inner ward. Although silver now streaked her black hair, she retained the forceful personality for which she was known. A few minutes with Elfwine always left me feeling like a bit of moss directly in the way of a rolling boulder—she had a way of sweeping everyone up before her, putting them inexorably on the path she desired. It was an uncomfortable feeling, one I avoided as much as possible by leaving Stewart to deal with her.
“How can a virgin be experienced?” she asked, fixing me with a gimlet eye. I had to steel myself not to take a step back.
“I never said my wife had to be a virgin, did I, Stewart?” I asked, desperately trying to foist her attention onto him.
Her steel-gray eyes gave Stewart a look that would have made the hair on a lesser man’s head stand on end, and I congratulated myself on my cunning ability to distract her. True, it wasn’t very sporting to offer Stewart up as a sacrifice, but I had much on my plate and little time to spend dodging Elfwine’s all-knowing gaze.
“No, you didn’t, sir, although you didn’t say she couldn’t be
one, either,” Stewart answered, and damn him, her attention returned to me.
“You are Cernunnos, lord of the hunt, lord of the dead, lord of the forest,” Elfwine said slowly, each word striking me with the blow of a sledgehammer. “Nothing but a pure woman will do for your consort. You must have a virgin. As your devoted worshippers, as keepers of the wood of Cernunnos, it falls to us to provide for you, and provide we will. We currently have three virgins for you to look over. There were five—but an unfortunate brewing incident that led to unusually strong mead caused two girls to be stricken from the rolls.”
I took a step to the side, hoping to distract her long enough to make my escape.
“The three who are left are very nice girls, brought up to properly worship you. They know their place, are well seeped in druid lore, and all of them are willing to cast aside their worldly concerns to devote themselves wholly to you as your wife.”
Escape wasn’t going to happen. I straightened my shoulders and looked down my nose at her, arranging my expression into an intolerably lofty sneer. Elfwine had refused in the past to be intimidated by such pitiful tactics, but I had few weapons against her, and was forced to rely on what was at hand. “I haven’t had a virgin in the past, so I don’t see why I need one now.”
“You haven’t had one…” Her eyes showed astonishment for a moment as she chewed that bit of information over.
Stewart blew out a breath that sounded suspiciously as if he’d said, “Fidencia will have your balls for that.”
“Furthermore,” I said, raising my hand to stop her from speaking, “I find it nerve-racking to be around virgins. They’re either skittish and giggly, or lust-filled vixens who have an itch they want me to scratch simply because I’m Irish, lord of the woods, or just male, depending on their particular itch. I’m looking for a woman who will spend the rest of eternity with me, a woman of intellect as well as beauty. I do not need an untried teenager who has more knowledge of the latest boy band than what it means to be my goddess.”
I swear Elfwine seemed to grow. The air around her fairly vibrated as she took a deep breath. Stewart took three steps backward. I seriously considered running for the tower, but remembered in time who I was.
“You are Cernunnos!”
“Yes, but—”
“You are a god!”
“Just a minor one, really—”
“You are lord of the forest! Of the dead! Of fertility!”
“The last is purely an honorary title, to be perfectly frank—”
Her words chipped away at me like tiny sledgehammers. “You must have a virgin!”
Desperate times called for desperate measures.
“Was that the phone?” I tipped my head toward the castle, pursing my lips. “I believe it is. We’ll have to continue this conversation another time, Elfwine. Or better yet, you talk it over with Stewart. That’s no doubt a very important call that I must take. Good morrow and all that.”
The look on Stewart’s face as I raced off to the tower would have wrung the heart of the sternest misanthrope, but I simply didn’t have the time to waste on the awkward, inept virgins Elfwine wished to thrust on me.
“You can run, my lord, but you cannot escape your fate.” Elfwine’s bellow followed me even as I ran around the stone tower, intent on gaining sanctuary. “You must have a virgin!”
“Over my dead body,” I muttered. Distracted by the thought of being stampeded by a herd of thundering virgins, as I rounded the corner to the front of the tower, I collided with something warm, soft, and extremely sweet smelling. An obstacle at my feet sent me falling forward onto the something, which gave a surprised squawk as we hit the ground.
Blue eyes gazed up at me in dazed astonishment, a blue like nothing I’d ever seen before—pure, glittering blue, almost cerulean, shining with a brightness that reminded me of a sapphire I’d once given Fidencia. I stared into the eyes, my brain grinding to a halt as I watched with fascination as the astonishment faded into quick-lived amusement, followed almost immediately by vague annoyance.
“You’re crushing me,” the owner of the eyes said in a charming American accent.
My lips stretched into a grin. An inane one, but for some reason I couldn’t stop staring into those lovely eyes. The body beneath me was soft and curved in enticing places…enough so that a primitive part of my brain sat up and took notice.
“Um…can you get off me now? Seriously, you’re crushing me. There’s a rock the size of Montana beneath my left shoulder, and it’s really starting to hurt.”
The face that went along with the eyes was equally entrancing. Eyebrows the color of dark amber honey arched upward, framed by a widow’s peak of dark blondish-brown hair that was the exact color of a satinwood bureau in my sitting room. Lightly freckled cheeks that were as silky as a mare’s bottom swept downward to a gently pointed chin, above which resided two rosy lips.
“Hello? Don’t they speak English here? HELLO? Get off me, you great lummox!”
The lips pursed for a moment; then the world shifted suddenly and I was on my back, staring up into a sky that was pale in comparison to the woman’s eyes.
“Christ on a handcar, I think one of my ribs is broken! What is wrong with you? I’m going to have bruises all over my back now. You know, a more litigious person than myself would consider a lawsuit for pain and suffering.”
Stewart’s face hove into view. “My lord, are you all right?”
“My lord?” the voice asked hesitantly. “You’re a lord? An Irish peer?”
The woman’s voice finally sank through to my brain. I sat up abruptly, smacking my head against Stewart’s. He staggered backward rubbing his head, but I leaped adroitly to my feet and endeavored to make up for the temporary lapse in my thought processes. “My apologies, dear lady. Are you injured? Should we call for a doctor? I didn’t see you standing there when I came around the corner, and unfortunately something tripped me before I could stop.”
“I think you gave me a concussion,” Stewart moaned from where he had collapsed against the tower wall.
“I’m fine now, thank you. Did you hit your head when we fell? You looked a bit stunned for a minute or two.” The woman’s brow wrinkled in concern as she examined my head for signs of injury.
“It was nothing, just a little bump on the head.” I mustered up another smile for her, one that I hoped displayed an urbane nonchalance tinged with a healthy appreciation for her beauty, grace, and overall wonderfulness.
Stewart’s voice drifted over to us. “I’m seeing double.”
“I’m Megan St. Clair,” she said, offering me her hand.
I took it in both of mine, feeling an inordinate rush of pleasure in its possession before a slight tug reminded me she would probably want it back. “I’m Dane Hearne.”
“I’m sick to my stomach,” came a faint voice.
She sent a startled glance over to where Stewart was sliding down the wall to the ground. “Is that man all right?”
“Stewart? Absolutely. He’s just winded—he’ll be fine in a moment or two.”
She tugged slightly on her hand. I tightened my fingers around it, not willing to give it up yet.
“You’re American?” She’d pronounced her name in the American fashion, Saint Clair. A memory clicked into place. “Ah…you must be the Yank travel writer who’s come to stay at the castle for a bit. Welcome to Castle Bannon.”
Another tug, this time a bit stronger, almost had me losing my grip. “Thank you. Yes, that’s me. You’re the owner of the castle? Is it Lord Dane Hearne?”
“No, no, that’s just one of Stewart’s little ways. It’s Dane, just Dane.”
“I see. Can I have my hand back, please, Dane?”
A slight tense note in her voice warned me that insisting on retaining it might lead to trouble. With reluctance, I relaxed my grip on her until her fingers slid from mine.
“I’m very excited to be here,” Megan continued, turning in a little circle to take in the grou
nds. “It’s my first time abroad, my first time in Ireland, and my first Irish castle. I’m a bit of a virgin, you might say,” she ended with a light laugh that was as golden as a late summer afternoon. It warmed me to my toes, spilling around and in me, lighting up all sorts of dark little corners of my soul. I felt almost drunk by her laughter, so heady was it.
“Indeed. I hope the deflowering wasn’t painful,” I said, reeling a bit from the smile she turned on me.
“Not at all, although the flight from the West Coast—I live in northern California—was a bit long. Could we…are our rooms ready?”
“We?” I asked, confused.
“Oh, I’m sorry, you haven’t met Pam and Derek. They will be filming my segments for GoWorld.”
Two people whom I hadn’t noticed standing behind her stepped forward. A young woman with short-cropped black hair, glasses, and a serious mien held out her hand with a murmured “Pam Russell. I’m the photographer.”
I shook her hand, as well as that of the slight, bearded man who was loaded down with bulky bags. He nodded, and said, “Derek Thompson. Sound.”
“Of course you all must be tired out by the journey. I think you two will find your room in the carriage house comfortable,” I said, waving to the building behind them. “Stewart will show you the room. Stewart!”
“Coming, sir.” Stewart stumbled over, still rubbing his head. He gave me a glare that was astonishing in its ferocity, but murmured all the correct things as he escorted the two travel people to their room.
“Your room,” I said, smiling at Megan as I gestured toward the tower, “is in the oldest standing structure of the castle.”
Her eyes widened as she gazed at me, some intangible spark igniting in the air around us. She blinked a couple of times, blushed, and looked away. “I’m sure it will be wonderful.”
“I have every intention of ensuring it will be,” I promised her, hoisting up her luggage and carrying it toward the door.
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