by Betina Krahn
She looked at the luminous entreaty in his gray eyes, felt the seductive pull of his need for her, and was at a loss for how to respond.
"One minute I'm Miss Edgethorn, the next I'm Mimi. One minute you kiss me, the next you glower at me. I don't know what to expect of you… or what you expect of me."
The muscles in his jaw worked visibly as he struggled to master the riot of sensation in his body. "God—I don't know what to expect of me either, Mimi. Please," he said with a groan, "just come and touch me."
No one had ever said such a thing to Mimi in her life. Touch me. And she knew that once Graham Hamilton left Asher House, she would probably never hear it again. She stared at the dark, half-pained desire in his eyes, and her whole body was swept with the same longing she had felt earlier… to touch him, to comfort him, to experience him as a man and herself as a woman. She walked straight into him, with her arms, her senses, and her heart wide open. He pulled her against his body and banded her with his arms, holding her tightly against him for a long, breathless moment. Then she felt him relax, and his deep sigh sent a quiver of pleasure through her heart.
"Is that better?" she asked quietly.
"Much." His voice rumbled above her head. "Though I think it could probably be even better."
He lifted her chin and gazed at her with a look of wonder that caused her throat to tighten. Then his head dipped, and their lips met with the intensity of a striking spark. She gasped silently as a glowing streak of sensation traced a path through her cheeks and down her throat, to tumble about in the tips of her breasts. His tongue darted between her parted lips and raised a tantalizing, liquid charge along the sleek inner surfaces of her mouth with its silky strokes.
Her entire body was electrically alive against his. The tingle in her breasts grew to a delicious burn that could only be soothed by rubbing them against his ribs, and that erotic friction built a wild static in her blood… hot, crackling, irresistible. Prickles danced over her shoulders, and her fingers burned as if sparks clung to their very tips.
Freed somehow by her responsiveness, he clasped her feverishly to him, claiming her with deep, penetrating kisses. He slid his hands down her narrow waist and the sides of her bottom, savoring her soft, elegant curves, then pressing her tightly against his swollen, aching loins. He undulated gently against her, imagining, anticipating…
"Lord, Mimi, you make me feel so… You're so sweet, so warm, so…" He couldn't find a word to describe the effect she was having on him. She supplied one.
"Magnetic?" Her kiss-swollen lips curled into an innocently seductive bow. Her prompting helped him find the perfect word.-
"Electrifying." His eyes flickered with newly freed feelings. "I'm positively on fire."
"Burning?" she asked, pushing back in his embrace with alarm.
"Aching," he declared. "And throbbing… and gnawing…" He groaned and closed his eyes as if in extreme discomfort.
"Oh, no!" she exclaimed, grabbing his hands and pulling him along. "I have just the cure."
They soon stood beside a long, upholstered table, which was ringed with hinged wooden arms bearing pieces of metal wrapped with loops of copper wire. She looked up at him with a bit of mischief in her smile. "Aunt Caroline's mag-netizing table. She conducts research to show that magnetizing the body can alleviate any number of discomforts." She sent him an earnest, through-the-lashes look. "Lie down. And we'll soon have you feeling better."
He sat and slid back on the edge of the table, then swung his legs around, avoiding the wooden arms. The tingling that had plagued him earlier returned, but in such a mild form that it was rather pleasant among the other excitations he was experiencing. Mimi swung the arms over the table, positioning the electrical coils around his body, then moved away to pull a few levers. He braced and waited. At first, nothing seemed to be happening.
"The coils become magnets when the electricity is turned on," she informed him. "By moving the coils over your body, I can align your magnetic poles. And when your poles are properly aligned, your body will be at perfect rest."
"Exactly what I need," he said in a strained voice. "Having you align my poles." He raised his head to watch her as she directed a large coil along the arch of his foot and up his ankle, without quite touching him. "Am I supposed to feel something?"
"Not necessarily. Magnetism can't be seen or felt. Only its effects."
He watched her slender hands manipulating that coil, pushing it higher on his body, skimming just above the fabric of his clothing. His blood began to rise, following the coil, then anticipating its movement and racing ahead to collect in his tightening loins. Higher and higher she moved with that peculiar nontouching touch; to his knees, up the sensitive insides of his thighs, to his throbbing male parts.
"Do you feel anything now?" she asked, sensing the growing tension in his body and puzzled by it. Magnetizing was generally known for its sedative effect.
He was feeling quite a bit—none of which he wanted to admit to her just then. So he bit the inside of his lip and shook his head.
"Perhaps I need to increase the magnetic strength." She stepped away and turned up the voltage. When she returned, she moved back down to his feet. "We'll start over. Sometimes in difficult cases—people with stubborn poles—Aunt Caroline actually touches the body with the magnet."
She touched his foot, and he twitched. She looked up to find him red-faced and grinning, and she continued to direct the coil around his foot, then up the inside of his ankle and calf. By the time she reached his knee, he was squirming and his body was jerking oddly. "I'm not hurting you, am I?" She halted on the inside of his knee. And he burst into full laughter.
"Oh, God, Mimi—it tickles!"
"It does?" She scowled at the apparatus. "But it's not supposed to tickle."
"Well, it tickles," he said, twitching as he fought for control. "Ohhh, Mimi—it really—" Then he suddenly lost the fight and broke out in abandoned gasps and gulps of laughter.
It felt as if his feet were being attacked by feathers, relentlessly poking, twiddling, and stroking. And no matter how he jerked his feet to avoid it, the tickling continued— right inside his boots! The tickling sensation worked its way up his legs just as she had, and soon the sensitive backs of his knees and inner surface of his thighs were involved! He squirmed and raked one foot against the other, trying to scratch, and he almost succeeded. But another surge of agonized laughter rolled over him, and while he was trying to conquer that wave, invisible fingers attacked his waist and began wriggling and brushing up his ticklish sides to his armpits. He jerked and twisted and laughed that much harder.
"Oh, Mimi—" he gasped. "Ple-e-ease—"
"Where does it tickle?" she demanded, wringing her hands.
"Everywhere!" he roared, then was off in another peal of laughter.
She ran to shut off the magnetizer and hurried back to help him up. He was lying limp against the table, letting the eruptions of laughter wash through him and die away.
When he finally drew a breath and turned his head to look at her, his eyes were moist.
"Lord, I haven't laughed like this in years," he said, swallowing back a chuckle. "Your dotty old aunt paid a thousand pounds for a customized tickling machine!" And he erupted into spasms of laughter again.
There was something so contagious and liberating about his laughter that she began to laugh, too. It was as if years of bottled glee were rolling from him, and they caught her up in their long suppressed tide.
"It's not supposed to tickle," she protested, red-faced and gasping. "I don't know what could have gone wrong."
"It's all right," he assured her, straggling up to a sitting position. He wiped his eyes and managed a deep, shuddering breath. "I won't hold it against your Aunt Caroline. This seems to be my week for odd things to happ—" He stopped dead, staring at his boots. They were smoking.
"Agghhh!" He began kicking his feet. "My boots are on fire!" He finally managed to pull one off, and Mimi somehow wr
enched the other from his thrashing foot and tossed it onto the floor. They stared in mutual horror at the tiny wisps of smoke curling up from the toes of his immaculate boots.
Graham began to laugh again, this time in huge, bone-jarring convulsions of laughter that he couldn't seem to stop. Mimi tried calling his name, then shaking him. He just stared at her and went off on another, breathless round of mirth, holding his sides. She ran for help.
Halfway down the hall, she met Shaddar, hurrying toward the laboratory; close behind him were her aunts, bustling along with frowns of concern on their faces. They had apparently heard the ruckus in the laboratory and were coming to investigate.
The old ladies found poor Mister Hamilton in desperate straits, doubled over, breathless, weak with convulsive laughter. He slid off the table to greet them, and his legs were so weak they would scarcely support him. Before their anxious eyes, he made a last valiant effort to achieve sobriety by holding his breath. His cheeks puffed, his eyes bulged… and he slowly turned purple and passed straight out of consciousness.
Mimi and Shaddar caught him before his head hit the floor again. And for the second time in as many days, the manservant hauled Graham's unconscious form up onto his shoulders and carried him back to the guest room.
"Miranda," Aunt Caroline said, her hands folded and her mouth pursed with displeasure, "you have a bit of explaining to do."
"I just brought him here to tell him about the cost of the custom metallurgy for your experiments, Aunt Caroline. I was demonstrating your magnetizing table, and he said he couldn't feel anything, so I turned up the power. Then he claimed it tickled, and before I knew it he couldn't stop laughing. Then he saw his boots smoking…" She pointed to Graham's discarded footgear, and Aunt Caroline's eyes widened in horror.
"His boots caught fire?" Caroline croaked.
Mimi winced and nodded. "I'm sorry, Aunt Caroline, but something must have gone wrong with the apparatus."
"I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, Mimi dear." Phoebe patted Mimi's tightly clasped hands. "Now go… see to poor Mister Hamilton."
When Mimi was gone, Phoebe picked up one of Graham's scorched boots and waggled it in Caroline's crimson face with a taunting chortle. "Well, Caroline, I don't know about his passions, but you and your electrical enhancers managed to set the fellow's boots on fire!"
The next day dawned unseasonably balmy for the end of October. Even it had been a howling blizzard outside, Graham Hamilton would still have risen, dressed, and set off on foot for the local village, before breakfast. He had to get out of that house for a while, away from the scene of his humiliations, away from his own incomprehensible behavior, and most of all, away from the distracting and desirable Mimi Edgethorn.
He shoved his hands into his coat pockets and stalked along the road toward the village, letting the crisp autumn air curl through his lungs and savoring the steady warmth of the sun on his face. The ordinariness of it was a balm for his harried soul. His entire life had been turned upside down and inside out in the last three days.
Three days? he thought. It seemed like a bloody lifetime since he'd come roaring off to Devon, a self-styled knight errant, determined to do battle with the old dragons who watched over Miranda Edgethorn.
He paused on the dusty road to stare out over the cliffs, across the sparkling white-capped bay. He had taken an unthinkably personal interest in Miranda Edgethorn's situation, right from the start. And he had convinced himself it was his pride in the reputation of his law firm that made him so determined to set things straight. But, he admitted now, he had felt an oddly personal link with the little orphan girl who had been sent to live with a trio of crusty old maiden aunts. Too well, he remembered being carted off to an elderly uncle's house as a child.
He had arrived at Asher House to find not a child, but a very determined young woman, who wanted neither his help nor his interference. And then he'd stumbled across her old aunts engaged in God knows what that first night, and had the misfortune to run smack into her immediately afterward. He closed his eyes and clenched his teeth, shuddering through another potent dose of humiliation at the memory of their encounter on the stairs: him in his nightshirt, grappling and tussling bodily with her while babbling that her old aunts were witches. She had politely told him to go sleep it off.
Perhaps he had been a bit cup-shot, but that didn't explain what he'd seen or why the memory of it still had a strangely powerful effect on him. At the slightest nudge of recall, it took substance once more in his mind and senses, full-blown and hauntingly real—the bloodred firelight; the withered faces and gnarled hands; the pulsing, colored vapors; the spinning wheels and sparks…
His heart was racing and his hands were clenched into fists even now, as he stood at the side of a public road in broad daylight. He shook off that disturbing memory and began to walk again, with longer, more determined strides.
Perfume, Mimi said. He had seen her old Aunt Flora distilling and blending fragrances to produce some exotic perfume. And she'd shown him the proof of Aunt Flora's expensive and eccentric, but otherwise innocuous, avocation. But her demonstration of Flora's creations, meant to allay his suspicions, had raised more questions than it answered. What the hell kind of perfume sent a man into giddy, spiraling raptures and caused him to see and feel and taste, as well as smell things? It had partly explained his bizarre compulsion to sniff and rub against Mimi—it was undoubtedly her perfume. But a few boiled flowers and a dollop of ambergris did not render a man bloody well unconscious! There had to be something besides a bit of toilet water involved.
And there was Mimi's explanation of the wheels and lightning and sparks: he'd seen some of Aunt Caroline's electrical apparatus in operation, she said. Perfectly reasonable—except for the things it didn't explain, like the strange sensations that had plagued him in Mimi's presence and why he'd been damn near tickled to death by a table and a few coils of wire! He slid his hand beneath his coat to massage his ribs, which were still sore from his laughing binge. There had to be something besides a bit of electricity and magnetism involved.
But what?
He stopped dead on a rise overlooking the village. What else?
Magic. The old ladies had been working a bit of magic on him—trying to get rid of him so they could have Mimi all to themselves again!
But no sooner had he completed the thought than the logical rational side of him rebelled at being forced to defend such a wild and fanciful conclusion. There wasn't supposed to be any such thing as magic or witches; he didn't believe in such stuff! But if it wasn't magic, the debate raged in his head, just what in the hell was it that had taken over his senses and reactions and made him act against his very nature?
Shoving aside his troubling questions about Asher House, he strode into the sleepy village and made his way to the local smithy to inquire whether they might know something about his missing horse. They did. The beast had been found wandering around by a local farmer and brought to the local livery stable, to await claiming by its owner. Greatly relieved, he retrieved his bags and paid the smith for his trouble. Then, with his mud-stained document pouches slung over his shoulder, he inquired of the local postmaster, who ran both the local dry goods shop and the tavern, if there had been word from his firm or his clerk. There was none. Graham sighed and sat down in the pump room for a bit of breakfast and a hot, bracing mug of tea. As he sipped, he chatted with the postmaster-cum-tavernkeeper, who seemed impressed to hear he was all the way out from London and staying at Asher House.
"Odd old things, them Asher sisters," the fellow mused. "But always hospitable and willin' to help. And their niece…" He signed. "Pretty as a picture."
Graham's interest piqued, and he would have asked the fellow a few questions, but a matron trailed by a string of freshly scrubbed children bustled in, demanding to know if the crackers and party favors she ordered had come in. The tavernkeeper introduced her as the local rector's wife. When she learned Graham was a guest at Asher House, her manner
warmed considerably.
"Why, Miss Phoebe Asher was at our house just a day or so ago," she said. "She does readings of the head, you know." She pulled her plump chin back to counter her glow of pride as she pulled her eldest boy in front of her and patted his head. "She says Bertrand here has a great deal of development in his regions of 'dignity,' 'veneration,' 'firmness,' and 'faith.' True bishop material if ever she's seen it." She turned to the tavernkeeper. "Now about my crackers and favors…"
When the rector's wife moved away, the tavern man explained: "Her and the rector, they're havin' a bit of a social on All Hallows' Eve. Determined to keep the "young'uns out of mischief"—he glanced around warily— "and outta the woods." He delivered a verdict on their efforts: "Fuss an' bother, if you ask me. Nobody goes into the woods on Halloween around here, anyway."
Prickles ran up the back of Graham's neck. "And why is that?" he asked, as casually as he could. The tavernkeeper scowled and leaned closer with a confidential air.
"The dance, of course." At Graham's frown, he elaborated. "The witches' dance. Everybody in the county knows that on Halloween, witches gather to dance in the woods, out north of the village." His voice dropped to a whisper. "There's a meadow where nothin' but starflowers grows. I seen it myself. And they say"—his eyes widened— "that if a body gets caught out in the woods that night, he's forced to join in their unholy dance…or die." He drew back, his manner secretive and certain.
"They truly believe such stuff?" Graham asked thickly, his toes curling inside his fire-damaged boots.
"We lost two fellers out in th' woods a few years back. They didn't believe it and sat out in the woods to see for 'emselves. Nobody's seen or heard from 'em since." He nodded smartly to punctuate the truth of his tale. Just then another customer came into the tavern, and he was pulled away to wait on him.
But Graham had heard quite enough. Witches. The whole village believed the woods were haunted by witches. In his mind, an inescapable linkage was made: the witches who danced—and his vision of the old Asher sisters, chanting and dancing. It was too much of a coincidence to ignore. He had just made up his mind to ask the tavern man what he knew about the supposed witches when the rector's wife reappeared with her hands full of parcels and a broad, ingratiating smile.