Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions

by Melanie Rawn

  On August first, Lughnasadh, she participates in a ritual with the London Circle. It is the first magic she has done in a year. The Magistrate is Mr. Scot’s granddaughter, and she figures she owes the woman a favor in the old man’s name.

  Her British publisher never has figured out why she went into a funk but is certain he’s found the perfect man to bring her out of it: a tall, black-eyed Irish playwright whose accent is all emerald hills and bardsong. He is charming, witty, intelligent, fun, everything she enjoys in a companion. After she’s known him longer than the requisite month, she decides to take him to bed. But if not him, then someone else. Anyone else. It’s been a long time.

  Yet she hesitates, and escapes London’s heat with long drives into the country. She visits cathedrals and medieval ruins and great houses, for once making notes on nothing, researching nothing, simply being in these wonderful places for herself and not for any book.

  Jerusalem Lost is spending more time on the best-seller lists than she had any right to expect. She knows it’s a good book. It just isn’t the book she’d meant to write. She is bleakly amused to find it is competing with Denise Josèphe’s newest fangs-and-fanatics novel. In all honesty, there is no such thing as bad publicity. Denise has legal problems, which her lawyers have long delayed with multiple continuances, and her name is often in the news.

  At last, one Saturday night early in October, she invites the Irishman to dinner. He suggests Luigi’s, a favorite of the late Princess Diana, where he points out several semi-scandalous faces and amuses her with gossip. She purposely drinks too much. He comes back to her suite at Durrant’s, undresses her, and begins to make love to her quite proficiently. But she makes the one unforgivable mistake. She calls him by a name not his own.

  He has compassion enough — or ego enough — to stop. He listens to her stammered apology, then smiles, touches her cheek, and tells her that when she’s ready, he’ll be here. And then he dresses and leaves.

  Humiliated and furious, she pours herself a very large cognac. At length she falls asleep. But being in a man’s arms for the first time in more than a year wakens the memories of her flesh, and she dreams.

  He laughed — exultant, triumphant, knowing she is at her limit. She cursed, and he laughed again, and finally allowed her to blaze down to ashes in this fire of his gleeful making. When it was over, and she lay gasping beneath him, he was still hard within her, his satiation secondary to hers, sensitive fingers soothing the frenzy he had created. She roused herself, touching him, greedy for the feel of sleek flesh and hard muscles and sweat-damp skin, muscles contracting along his length, and it was her turn to laugh as his eyes became green-gold dragon’e eyes and his head arched back on his long neck and be spent himself within her, crying out her name.

  As she recovered her breath she opened her eyes to see him propped on one elbow beside her. His hair was tousled, his eyes gleaming, his lips and cheeks flushed, and she felt her heart ache with his beauty. No man had ever loved her like this: with his heart as well as with his body, their souls and minds and spirits all interwoven in this perfect making of love.

  “A chuisle mo chroí,”she whispered, “my love, only mine — ”

  He smiled at the litany. “Just like you’re mine. And in case you need it proved to you again — ”

  “You’re insatiable. Incorrigible.” She ran a hand down his belly to his groin and he hardened once more beneath her caressing fingers. “Indestructible!”

  “It comes with a lifetime guarantee, babe,”he purred. Then be laughed, and pulled her atop him, and kissed the breath out of her.

  He tastes of good Chianti and fine cigars.

  She wakes up with the memory of a stranger’s hands and a stranger’s mouth, and cries herself to sleep.

  She dreams just before dawn, about a gigantic black grand piano, gleaming with polish and perfect in every respect but for the keys, which ripple and flutter like loose shingles in a gale. Suddenly they begin to fly from the board, short black and long white shards that sound their assigned notes even though they are no longer connected to hammers that strike strings. She lunges to catch them, knowing she must put them back in the proper order, and when she wakes to the ringing of the phone she is sitting up in bed, staring at her empty hands.

  She has no tears left when, from an ocean away, Elias Bradshaw tells her that Susannah Wingfield is dead.

  HE HAS NOT BEEN BACK across the river in over ayear. But today he has to go. He’s not sure why. Maybe because he doesn’t want to think of her as that hard, bitter woman in the book—or of himself as that grim, bitter man. There are memories to be found, good memories that will take the taste of those words out of his mouth. If for a time it hurts even more than usual—well, the words hurt worse.

  His few hours of sleep the past two nights have been anything but restful. He thinks with weary longing of when she’d last slept beside him, when the nightmares caused by memories of his mother and the priest vanished as if they’d never been. When the world she’d created for him gave him rest, and peace.

  He doesn’t dream about the priest anymore, about running and running and never stopping. That is an old hurt, and cannot compete with nightmares in which he cannot move, cannot speak, can do nothing but scream soundlessly with the panic that never wears a face. He has tried to teach himself how to trigger wakefulness, how to turn the dreams deliberately so they can’t master him. But he has never quite gotten the knack, and he always wakes with his face buried in a pillow, shivering with sweat, his body clenched with need, with longing, with hatred of his own impotence.

  He fears the nightmares, the pain and the panic of them, and for a time last year thought that sex would be an antidote. He was wrong. The first time had been a failure—the first of his life, humiliating him. The second time he’d managed it, but only by squeezing his eyes shut and pretending. Afterward, nightmares had come, and it was months before simple physical desperation had driven him to the bars, and the bed of some woman whose name he didn’t know and didn’t want to.

  There is liquor, of course. There is some measure of oblivion to be found at the bottom of a bottle, but what it did to his body and his mind was, eventually, not worth the hours of sodden sleep.

  He’s not sure why, but he thinks maybe he’ll find something here this bright Sunday morning that will let him sleep tonight. Something is drawing him here, to a tiny part of the world he shared with her. He walks where they once walked together, remembering long talks and laughter and sudden crazy races back to her place so they could make love.

  Nothing has changed in the Park. But he is different. He created a hell for himself, and managed somehow to survive it, and now that he has finally come out on the other side he sees that other Evan Lachlan who loved a woman with his whole heart, and shakes his head with incredulity that this man could have been so colossally stupid as to let her go.

  He also sees what he did not fully see back then. She offers him everything. Whatever he wants, whatever he needs. He has thought all this time that their private world was of her sole creation. Now he understands that although she was its conjurer, the magic was theirs together. He was always the exact center of that world, and it does not exist without him.

  He thinks about something a psych professor said a long time ago. “The pet theory of a colleague of mine is that there are four kinds of people in the world: Creators, Consumers, Guardians, and Destroyers. Those who choose to work in law enforcement are obviously Guardians. Keep the Consumers safe, let the Creators do their work, and catch the Destroyers before they do any more damage.”

  He knows now that she made that world because she needed to. She could no more choose not to create than she could choose not to be born. He was to have been that world’s Guardian. Instead, he has been its Destroyer.

  He knows that no woman will ever love him like that again. There had been affection from others, tenderness, sometimes real caring, but never this encompassing love that enfolds him even now that
he is parted from her. For despite what he did in shattering their world, her loving stays wrapped around him. Pride told him he must get through his self-made hell alone. What he has not realized until this very moment is that she is with him, she has been with him all along. If he has risen from his knees, and stood, and walked, and found his way through, it is partly because she has been beside him.

  He knows this now. Accepts it, with gratitude. It is not weakness, to admit this need. That would be the same as believing that he is a lesser person because he is right-handed or hazel-eyed. The man in that book, with his own Jerusalem forever lost, with his rigid pride and his terror of loving — wrong, so wrong. Loving her and needing her are as much a part of him as his skin, his blood, his bones.

  He can see that other Evan Lachlan catch her in his arms and whirl her around and around, laughing. When she escapes him, he runs after her. And this, he thinks suddenly, is what has changed most about him: he has stood, and walked, but he no longer runs. Not like that other Lachlan, with his eager uncomplicated joy.

  Suddenly his legs ache to run. He isn’t wearing the clothes for it—the T-shirt is okay, but the jeans are too snug. He runs anyway, pushing himself harder and faster until his lungs are on fire and his thighs are screaming. He slows, eventually stops. Hands on hips, bent over, gulping air.

  A voice says to him, Legs that long aren’t meant for sprints, you know — you’re built for distance.

  He looks up. Barely five-five, thin as a rake and carefully sculpted, no hips to speak of, blonde ponytail. The eyes are greenish, and for a moment he is reminded of Susannah—but the face is all wrong, the lips too full and the cheekbones too sharp. She is dressed for jogging in barely legal shorts and a cropped halter top that expose toned and honed stomach muscles and artfully tanned skin.

  Distance, huh? he says. What’d you have in mind?

  She looks him over once again, and likes what she sees, and replies, How about the five blocks to my place?

  He puts a grin on his face, but inside he is reeling. This easy? Twenty-five words or less, and they’d be in the sack? But it has been a long time.

  The apartment is pricey, self-consciously decorated, and smells of some odd, nose-prickling incense. The bed is huge. He lifts her effortlessly—she weighs nothing—and splays her across the velvet bedspread. He strips her clothes off without preliminaries, using every trick ever learned, every technique, until she finally begs for mercy.

  As she sleeps, sprawled on her stomach with her face hidden in a pillow, he lies on his back, late afternoon sunshine streaming down from a high window. His body is sated, his soul unsatisfied — just like all the other times. Those falling-down-a-well-into-the-mud times when he’s been so starved for touch and warmth or just plain sex that he took whatever was offered.

  But it turns out there is a difference with this one, because there was no softness, not even inside, where a woman is usually warmly yielding. It was like fucking a sweat-sheened marble statue: alive, the blood hot within her, but ultimately hard. Repressing memories of another body, strong but soft and giving (that is what he’s missed, more than anything else: the givingness), he draws the sheet over her and goes into the bathroom.

  There is no light in his eyes. No look of sheer exhilaration, of shared ecstasy. Of being happy. Leaning on the sink, hands gripping the porcelain, he squeezes shut his lightless, lifeless eyes and smells the woman on him and whispers, “Holly …”

  “You’re mine, Evan Lachlan —”

  He remembers the first time she said that. When it had startled him, and for a few moments he had shied away from it, until he understood what she meant.

  They finished dinner, with the choice of brandies to be debated before they went to the bar for cigars. A woman in a tight black dress approached and mentioned something about special reserve Armagacs — but she didn’t get around to naming them because she recognized him. And he recognized her:

  Hi-how-are-you-what’ve-you-been-doing. Holly sat patiently waiting for him to remember his manners and perform introductions. Glancing over at her, he did so. And wished to God he was anywhere but here.

  Sherry smiled with the smug superiority of prior knowledge; Holly smiled with the poisonous sweetness of current possession. He made a hasty escape to the men’s room, telling The women to older whatever they thought he’d like. Christ Almighty — there was nothing worse than all old girlfriend running into the new one. If they didn’t shred you right in front of your face, they hacked you up without saying a single word, just by smiling.

  Five tactful minutes later he returned to the table. Sherry’s voice could have blighted every newly budding tree in Central Park as she told him his friend was waiting in the bar. He nodded thanks, and didn’t say he’d call her real soon.

  Holly, perched on a tall chrome bar stool, had already lit her cigar. She gestured to the cognac and Cohiba waiting for him. Her perfect serenity made him deeply suspicious.

  He smoked, dipped, and waited. At last, able to stand no more, he asked, “What the hell did you say to her, anyway?”

  She shrugged. “All I did was tell her that I’d greatly appreciate it if she’d wipe the drool off her chin.”

  He choked. “McClure!”

  “Well, what else could I do? She had the gall to ask not only how long we’ve known each other—with biblical implications to the verb — but whether it’s still impossible to wake you up in the morning, with the further implication that she could wear you out like no other woman in the world.” Holly took a long draw on her cigar. Fragrant smoke trickled from her lips as she went on, “To which I replied that I don’t bother trying to wake you up before noon. Any more former girlfriends among the staff here?”

  “None that I know of. Why?”

  All at once her eyes were fierce. “You’re mine, Evan Lachlan, in case you hadn’t noticed yet. And if any more of your women show up —” She didn’t have to finish the thought. A smile was back on her face, but this time it was the smile of a predator anticipating the gratifying crunch of bone.

  He’d seen that smile only one other time: when she looked straight at Father Matthew. By then he’d known what it meant. But the first time, he hadn’t known whether to feel smug and delighted or trapped and appalled—until he abruptly understood that the other thing she meant was, “I’m yours, Evan Larchlan, in case you hadn’t noticed yet.”

  He is still hers. And the flesh that has just spent itself within another woman disgusts him. Just his body, he tells himself as he strips off the condom and showers himself clean. Nothing to do with his heart. She is still here, still beside him, and even with the feel of another woman lingering on him despite his efforts to wash her off, he can sense warm fingers slide into his palm and hear soft laughter as her head rests on his shoulder. She is still here. She always will be. And despite what he has just done with his body, the truest part of him is still hers.

  He returns to the bedroom for his clothes. The girl is still sleeping. Nice, he thinks sourly, to know a pushing-forty out-of-shape deputy marshal can wear out a twenty-two-year-old marathon runner.

  He gets into his clothes, hoping she won’t awaken. She does. She stretches, and turns over—and all at once her face is different, altered, older, sickeningly familiar. The last time he saw it was inside Elias Bradshaw’s courtroom.

  Still don’t believe in magic? she asks, grinning. She sits up in bed, shaking out long blonde hair. I have to say it was worth the trouble it took to bring you to Manhattan today.

  Bring me—? he asks, voice thick with disgust.

  Unlike your former playmate, I know how to use what I’ve got. I got a late start Friday—you remember that murder charge? Continuance after continuance, but Friday I had to be at the courthouse for some tedious interview. But once I got back here—She gives a little shrug. Complicated, and I expected you Saturday, but well worth the effort and the wait. I Called, and you came, and — She breaks off, laughing. Did she ever do you as well as I just did?r />
  For a moment he thinks he’s going to throw up.

  Her brown-mottled green eyes strafe him. You’re not quite as impressive as that time we talked at Starbucks. Body by Nautilus, back then. Now it’s more like Body by Budweiser. But you’re still a choice lay, Marshal. And my choicest trophy, even better than beating that bitch on the August best-seller lists.

  Somehow he manages to leave her apartment. This is worse than the other times he’s found a woman to fuck. Infinitely worse. For the first time he understands how Holly must feel when her blood is used for someone else’s magic.

  Back across the river, there is a message waiting on his answering machine. The time-log says it has been here since noon. He plays it, then plays it again, thinking he has heard wrong, that Pete is mistaken. God, no — it must be a mistake—not Susannah —

  Tears blur his eyes. He can’t take this. Not after that book, not after this day. With a blind, mindless need he wants Holly—to be with her, to hold her while she cries, to rock her in his arms and cry with her, to talk of Susannah, to mourn her —

  But he has no right. Especially after what he’s done today, he has no right. In his apartment across the river, a place he has never even begun to think of as home, for the first time since his self-imposed moderation he gets thoroughly, senselessly, retchingly drunk.

  Twenty-one

  HOLLY FLEW INTO HARTFORD for Susannah’s funeral with no very clear idea of how or even when she arrived. Another classmate picked her up at the airport and categorically forbade her to stay in a hotel. So Holly and her luggage rode out into the suburbs, then the countryside, while darkness fell and Jemima Stapleton Rowell filled the silence with details of tomorrow’s memorial.

  Jemima had inevitably been known during childhood as Puddleduck, a nickname unused at college for the simple reason that she threatened frightful vengeance on anyone who even thought about calling her that. The only person who ever got away with it was the man she eventually married—and Joshua dared only “Puddin’” or “Ducks.”