by Alexa Egan
He recalled similar farming duties completed side by side with his father, the air holding a crisp chill, a skein of geese flying low over an autumn sky to glide into the lake, the encircling mountains rising blue and misty from the holding’s green valley floor.
As if on cue, a woman’s voice lifted in song in a traditional ballad, one he’d heard his mother sing often. But today the voice belonged to Bianca: he knew even before she emerged from the kitchen doorway, hair bundled in a kerchief, her satins and silks replaced with a simple dimity gown covered by a snowy white apron. Their eyes met and she smiled, her cheeks stained with a sunrise blush.
His chest knotted, his hand tightened around the handle of the hammer, and for one poignant, perfect moment, peace and happiness were his.
* * *
Mac had long since disappeared with Jory, and Marianne had departed for the village with the girls. Grateful for time alone to muse on all that had passed this morning, Bianca sat on an upturned milk pail beside the byre, a bull calf watching her from behind his mother’s flanks, the cow’s breath steaming the chilly air. Frost nipped at Bianca’s snuffly nose and her toes had gone numb, but she merely pulled her shawl closer around her shoulders, plucking a stem of grass to flick between the fence boards to tempt the bullock.
“His name’s Jasper.”
She looked over to find the youngest Wallace son watching her with the calf’s same pose of reluctant bravery. She took his age for six or seven. Slight in stature, he bore the same red hair and high cheekbones as his father, but his muddy-brown eyes and wide mouth were all Marianne.
“Jasper’s a fine name,” Bianca said. “Did you give it to him?”
He sidled toward her, one toe dragging in the dirt, then the next, his fingers fiddling with a piece of twine. “Mum did. She names all the animals. But she says next spring I can have a spaniel pup and name him myself. I can’t decide between Idrin and Anoraeth.”
“They’re both very good names.”
“Idrin’s important and Da says he’s the father of us all, but I like Anoraeth better.” One more step. One more twirl of his twine. “His stories are more exciting. There’s one where he steals a magic ring from the Fey that lets him travel through time, and there’s another that has him visiting the land of the dead.”
“He sounds very brave.”
“Father said Anoraeth was second in courage only to Lucan, Arthur’s war leader, who died with the king at the final battle.”
At the mention of the familiar name, Bianca’s stomach clenched, her hand curling around the edge of her shawl. “Your father knows a lot of grand stories.”
“He says telling the old tales makes them come alive. But he won’t always tell them, even when we ask. Some nights he stops in the middle and goes out to the barn. Mum says we’re not to disturb him then. Aldith does anyway, but I never do.” He puffed out his chest with pride.
“Perhaps your father grows tired after telling so many stories.”
“No, miss. He gets sad.”
By now the boy stood beside her at the fence, his earlier shyness forgotten.
She gave an encouraging smile. “I don’t think we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Mrs. Parrino.”
“I know. I was hiding from Henry ’neath the cupboard in the kitchen when Mum and Dad were telling Jamie about you.”
“Scamp.”
“I didn’t mean to listen, but I was afraid to come out. Henry said he wanted to toss me in the sheep’s trough for going through his things. I needed a bit of chalk and Henry has so much and mine’s all gone.”
“So what did you overhear?”
“Not much, ma’am. Honest. Only that you and the captain are here from London and the captain and my da knew one another from the before times.”
“Before times?”
“Aye, before Da was driven out by his family for marrying Mum. They made him leave and never come back. That’s why we aren’t given a clan mark and why Da and Jamie fight all the time.”
“A mark?”
“Sammy! Where are you?”
Speak of the devil. Jamie Wallace came striding toward them, his gaze sharpening when he spotted his brother in the company of Bianca. As he approached, he straightened from his adolescent slouch and combed a hand through his wind-mussed hair. “Good day, Mrs. Parrino,” he said with a dignified nod. “I hope Sammy’s not being a pest.”
“What’s wrong with your voice, Jamie? It sounds all deep and funny-like.”
Jamie shot Sammy a killer glare.
“Your brother was amusing me with tales about Anoraeth and Lucan and your parent’s Romeo-and-Juliet courtship.”
His face turned red, his eyes cold as ice. “Just silly children’s stories, ma’am.”
“No they’re not, Jamie. You take that back. Da says—”
Jamie wheeled on his brother with a look that made Sam close his mouth with an audible click. “Get yourself back to the house, Sam. There’s work to be done.”
Sam gave Bianca one last impish grin before turning on his heel and running across the yard.
“Don’t let Sammy bother you. He’s just a baby,” Jamie advised.
“I suppose you’re too old to believe in stories.”
“Hmph,” he grumbled, once more all adolescent anger. “Tell my father that. He never thinks I’m old enough—for anything. But one day I’ll make them listen . . .” He suddenly seemed to realize who he had spoken to, for he smacked the fence post, startling the bullock back behind his mother. “Like I said, ma’am. Those are just baby stories. Nothing for you to worry over.” He glanced at the thickening clouds. “It’ll rain soon. Best get inside.”
He walked away, his back stiff, his head up, and Bianca smiled, seeing in this stone-faced, upright first son no hint of comfortable, contented Jory. Instead, the defiant pose and hard-edged gaze put her in mind of Mac.
She placed a hand over her stomach, her smile erased as quickly as it had bloomed.
A boy with Mac’s dark features and solemn gaze. A girl with his green and gold eyes and flashing smile. The thought burst and died like the spark from a flint and steel.
Never during her marriage had she quickened with child. A fortunate lack, as it turned out. One she thought long since laid to rest. But this morning had taught her just how much of what she’d always thought had been wrong while she was hostage to painful memories of Lawrence.
As Jamie predicted, a chill rain spattered the ground and pattered against her shoulders. She lifted her shawl over her head, banishing her wild thoughts with the ease of long practice. Mac was a dream with no substance, a chimera built on imagination and fantasy.
And she’d learned long ago the folly of dreaming.
* * *
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”
Thinking herself alone, Bianca swung around, catching back a gasp. Mac stood in the stillroom doorway, brushing rain from his hair, shaking the weather from his oilskin coat.
“When did you return?”
“Just now. Jory had some calls to make in the village, so I decided to collect and organize what we need from Adam’s stores.”
“This is why you came to Surrey. To do what Adam did. To break the curse.”
“It is.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to?”
“I have to. I have no future otherwise.”
Inhaling the confusion of sweet, musty scents, Bianca regarded the hundreds upon hundreds of specimens dangling from the rafters. It kept her from having to meet Mac’s eyes and see the determination in his face. It also kept him from seeing the foolish tears burning on her eyelashes.
“It must have taken Adam months to gather all this,” she said with a forced cheerfulness, reaching up to pull down a bunch of simple lavender, the dry sprigs crackling in her hands. Their perfume lingered, soft and grandmotherly. “But if anyone had the patience to find these plants, Adam did. I can still picture the last afternoon we spent together. He stopped by to borrow a book and s
tayed to help in my garden. Afterward we sat in the parlor and chatted about Dr. Smith’s view on Linnaeus’s order Decandria Monogynia.”
“Now, that’s friendship,” Mac answered. “Or torture, depending on your perspective. Adam once asked my opinion on Basil Somebody’s account of some bishop’s garden. We were under fire at the time, so my answer was short, to the point, and not repeatable.”
She laughed. “Poor Adam. He was quite keen. His interest in botany was far more clinical than mine. I loved the beauty. He loved the science. My father was of the same mind. He could prose on about Dillenius and Sherard for hours. Guests to dinner came prepared with paper and pencil.”
Arms folded over his broad chest, Mac leaned against a shelf, regarding her with an intimacy she found both alarming and compelling.
A proper lady would have been embarrassed. A decent woman would have felt ashamed or awkward. After all, she’d welcomed him into her bed. She’d risked scandal and the loss of her reputation. She’d stripped body and soul, gone against every vow she’d made, and thrown every bit of practical good sense out the window for a rippling abdomen and a pair of muscular shoulders.
But instead of seemly discomfort, anticipation cruised her skin and heat gathered in the pit of her stomach as she imagined his body beneath the heavy coat, the long, lean length of him, his sun-bronzed skin. A strange ache knotted her chest when she remembered the way he’d gentled her through the worst of her fears, his soft laughter, their whispered conversation.
“Your father and Adam sound like two of a kind,” Mac said.
“They were. Perhaps it’s why Adam and I grew so close. He reminded me a lot of my father and of my life before England.” She bit her lip as she began to smile. “My aunt Eustacia once said my father would rather make love to a shrubbery than a real woman. My father responded by saying if his choice were between the boxwood and my aunt Eustacia, she was absolutely right.”
“A botanist and a comic. You’re fortunate. After my mother’s death, my father became a different man. Emotionless. Distant. So wrapped in his own grief, he couldn’t see his children were as miserable as he was. It was like Siobhan and I had lost both parents.”
“Is that your sister?”
“Aye. She was a wee sprout when I left. No more than eleven. I shouldn’t have abandoned her. If I’d been a good brother, I’d have stayed. Taken care of her.”
“You did what you had to.”
“Did I? Or was I selfish and thoughtless?”
“Is that why you want to return? For your sister?”
“I return because to be without clan or kin is to be completely alone. To have an enormous part of me missing. A gaping emptiness that nothing can fill. I’d do anything to be whole again.”
“My father died a few months after my marriage. I know that feeling of isolation and the desire to belong.”
He straightened and strode across the room, coming to a halt before her, head tilted to the side as if she were a specimen he wanted to study. Mac’s gaze seemed to pierce her very thoughts. How had this man grown so familiar to her—and so dear? How had she lost her head so completely?
“The past is unchanging and the future is uncertain, Bianca,” he murmured, tipping her chin upward when she sought to evade his stare, “so we need to hold tight to the few precious moments we have and hope for the best.”
“Poor Richard’s Almanack?” she teased.
He gave a short bark of laughter. “One of Mac Flannery’s trite maxims. Hardly philosophical, but it’s the best I can do.”
Warmth rushed to her cheeks, a new strength rising from the wreckage of her old defenses. Is this what Sarah and Deane held between them? This easy camaraderie? This sharing with someone who cared? Had she ever had this with Lawrence—even in the beginning, when she’d been full of hope and innocence? She couldn’t remember. Too many years and too much misery lay in between.
Fear and excitement and desire and dread boiled up in her until she felt as if she might explode. She had spent so many years building walls to keep everyone out that to step through the breach and risk everything on a crazy whim threw her into a panic, her heart drumming under her ribs, her palms damp, her mouth dry.
“What are we doing, Mac?” she asked, suddenly afraid. Of what she was feeling. Of this closeness that threatened every barricade she had used to protect herself from hurt. “This can’t be. Can it?”
He cupped her chin, caressed the line of her cheek. “You should be used to impossible by now.”
* * *
“Most should be among Adam’s collection. Those missing, we’ll have to search for in London,” Jory explained.
Mac sat opposite, their heads bent over the book, Mac with pen and paper to hand as Jory studied Adam’s notes. Since Jory’s return home, they’d spent the past two hours poring over pages of complicated instructions mixed with endless lists and haphazard directives. Perfect work to take his mind off Bianca and the growing tangle he’d made of their relationship.
Hold tight and hope for the best? You should be used to impossible? He sounded like a bloody book of bad proverbs. Eighteen months of enforced solitude had made him rusty; he just hadn’t realized he’d become a tavern bounder with the most wretched poetic banter in history.
“Are you certain about this plant? Haymaids?” Mac asked, dragging himself back to his current problem to face the scrawl of Adam’s handwriting. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“It’s alehoof, sometimes called ground ivy. See there? In the margin he’s noted it alongside its Latin name.” Jory withdrew a flask from his pocket, topping up the coffee Marianne had placed at his elbow. He offered it to Mac, who—understanding now how Jory downed the stuff without gagging—accepted with a nod of thanks.
“Cooks as if she’d been raised in heaven’s kitchen, but her coffee is worse than the devil’s spit. Like drinking burnt glue,” Jory said with a sigh.
Mac took an experimental sip of his own. Burnt glue laced with whiskey wasn’t much better, but he tactfully remained silent.
Fog swirled close around the house, but it carried none of the dank London stench nor did it lay thick with sulfur and smoke at the back of Mac’s throat. Instead it held the damp, loamy mustiness of forests thick with oak and ash and rowan. He felt his senses stir, his instincts heighten. Tonight he would be free to venture beyond the refuge of a locked door. He would use the cover of the fog to stretch his limbs and shed the confines of his human shape for a few precious hours. Who knew when such an opportunity might come again?
Mac pulled free Adam’s krythos from its pocket. Ran his fingers over the familiar notched edges and the smooth, glassy surface. Adam must have felt the same inexplicable need to hold on to the far-seeing disk despite its deafening silence. That discovery underscored his friend’s death as standing beside his grave never had. Adam was gone. The break in their friendship would never be healed. There would be no more trading of brotherly insults or good-natured ribbing. No more whiskey-laden conversations.
“Is that a ph or a qu?” Jory turned the book one way then another. “Adam’s bloody handwriting. Could the man crowd more letters to a page?”
“We’re lucky he didn’t cross his writing to save on paper.” Mac stretched, listening to the scratching of Jory’s quill and the snap of the afternoon fire. Damn, but he grew maudlin. He should be dancing for joy. He had Adam’s journal. He had a potential remedy for the Fey-blood’s curse. He had a beautiful woman in his bed.
He also had Fey-bloods on his trail, a body that resembled a side of pounded beef, and—oh, yes—a beautiful woman in his bed.
Bianca deserved better. She deserved someone who could love her as she ought to be loved. Someone free to offer her a life and a heart not divided into daylight and darkness, man and beast.
He rolled his neck, his shoulders, his arms. Shifted in his seat. He needed to concentrate. Focus. Pull his mind out of his breeches.
Jory shoved the book across to Mac. “What do you thin
k: ph or qu?”
Mac scanned the page. “Maybe bl?”
Jory snatched the book back with a grumbling, “Damn it to hell. I’ve had enough of this tedium. My head’s about to split in half.”
“Here, now. Both of you take a break before your eyes cross.” Marianne knocked the door wide with a shove of her hip, her hands filled with an enormous tray. Behind her came Bianca carrying another platter, napkins draped over her forearm.
Perfect.
He’d not thought about the blasted woman for ten complete seconds and here she was in the flesh. Flesh he now knew intimately. Flesh sweet as summer fruit and warm with life. Flesh he wanted to free of those confining clothes and devour one delicious inch at a time.
Jory leaned back with a sigh. “How do you do it, Flannery?”
“Pardon?” Mac started up in his seat. “Do what?”
“This.” Jory waved a hand over the spread of paperwork. “How do you keep from going barmy sitting at a desk all day, staring at a mess of numbers?”
Mac rubbed his forehead in hopes of alleviating a growing headache. “Not much choice. The farms at Concullum are lost to me.”
Instead of leaving the tea and food, Marianne joined them at the table, her sharp eyes falling upon Adam’s journal with a frown. “Any luck on finding what you seek?”
“It could be months before we’ve riddled it out. And that’s being optimistic.” Mac rose to work off his frustration, offering Bianca his seat, restraining himself from touching her as she smiled at him in response. He made himself look away before he kissed her stupid. “It would take a damned brigade of scholars to make sense of Adam’s notes.”
As Marianne fixed plates, she and Jory exchanged a look that was all too easy to interpret; their desire to help warred with their concern over the danger Mac represented. He couldn’t blame them. He’d react the same way if he had children of his own to protect. But without Jory’s help, he didn’t have a glacier’s chance in hell to unravel Adam’s journal. Even with his assistance, it was a mind-bending puzzle.