Tonight and Always

by Linda Lael Miller

  "This is great!" she shouted across the Formica tabletop, opening the menu.

  "I'm glad you like it!" Max yelled back, smiling, but he was thinking about the music, which was so loud that he felt his liver quivering. Why hadn't he noticed that before, when he came here with the kids, or Gweneth, or his buddies from school and the gym? He reached for his own menu and pretended to examine it carefully, even though he always had the Seafood Etouffe.

  Kristina ordered first and chose the special, Craw-Dad pie. It was impossible to talk with all the noise, and Max wondered if he hadn't subconsciously chosen the place for just that reason. He hadn't been this fascinated by a woman since he and Sandy had met and fallen in love when they were in college, and he was scared because the depths of what he felt were uncharted ones. Because he didn't want to say something stupid that would make her dislike him.

  They ate, and Kristina smiled and moved her head in time with the music, and Max thought, Even if this is all there is, it's enough. Just let it last forever.

  It didn't, of course. They finished their meal, Max paid the bill, and they left the restaurant, making their way through a crowd of new customers swelling in from the sidewalk.

  "Nice night," Max said.

  Kristina pulled her camel-hair coat closer and laughed. "I was about to say it was unseasonably cold, even for the first of November."

  Max debated with himself. Should he slip an arm around her, or was it too soon to touch her at all? "Well," he said from the horns of his dilemma, determined to strike a positive note, "at least the stars are out."

  "You're an optimist, Max Kilcarragh," Kristina told him as he took her hand and pulled her across the street, between honking cabs, smoking clunkers with dragging mufflers, and BMWs polished to a blinding shine.

  They reached the opposite sidewalk safely, but Max didn't let go of Kristina's hand. There were a lot of pan-handlers on the street, he reasoned, and even though most of the poor devils were harmless, you couldn't be too careful. Not these days.

  It was ironic, his thinking thoughts like that when Kristina had just accused him of being an optimist. "What's wrong with looking on the bright side?'' he asked as they approached the parking lot where he'd parked the Blazer earlier.

  Her expression was serious in the neon glow of Pioneer Square and the streetlights. "It can be so dazzling that it blinds you, that's what," she said.

  Frowning, Max opened the passenger door, helped Kristina in, and walked around to the other side. He was behind the wheel, with the engine started, when he spoke again. "Where did that come from?" he asked.

  She settled back against the seat with a sigh so deep and so weary that Max wanted to put his arms around her. Even more than he had before, that is. "I found some old letters in the attic the other day," she said. "I guess they've brought back a few feelings I thought I'd already dealt with."

  "The past can sneak up on a person, all right," Max agreed, switching on the lights and pulling out into the brisk Friday-night traffic. "Sometimes it's tough to stay in the present."

  "Yes," Kristina said, turning her head and looking at him with those spectacular gray eyes of hers. They reminded Max of the sparklers he always bought for the kids on the Fourth of July. "You're a nice guy, Max Kilcarragh."

  "Thanks," he answered with a touch of regret in his voice. "Just once, though, I'd like some woman to say I was—''

  "What?" she prompted, grinning, as they drove up one of Seattle's many one-way streets.

  "Dangerous," Max admitted with a grin of his own. "I'd like for mothers to say to their daughters, 'Watch out for that one. He's trouble.' "

  Kristina's laughter pealed through the car like the chiming of a celebratory bell. "No, you wouldn't," she said when she'd calmed herself a little. "You're sweet and you're strong and you're good, and trouble, my friend, is definitely not your middle name."

  Max was mildly insulted. "You make me sound like a real wimp, to use today's vernacular."

  She touched his arm, and Max felt the proverbial electric shock snake through his veins and explode in his biceps. "Never," she said quietly. "Don't you understand, Max? You're the complete opposite of a wimp. You're a genuine, grown-up, secure-in-his-masculinity man.''

  He was grateful that it was dark inside the Blazer, because he blushed. He hadn't reacted quite like that since the beginning of adolescence, when his hormones, dormant one moment, had been running amok the next.

  "Max?" She wasn't going to give him time to think of something clever to say, which was just as well, because it might have taken the rest of his life.

  He cleared his throat. "Yeah?"

  Kristina's fingers brushed the side of his face, so lightly, so briefly, that he was afraid he'd only dreamed it. "I'm not what you think I am."

  Max turned his head, smiling with his eyes as well as his mouth. "You used to be a man," he teased. "You were born on another planet." He snapped his fingers, as if struck by a sudden revelation. "I've got it. Bree was right—you're a witch."

  Kristina's silver eyes shimmered, and when she answered, her voice was hardly more than a whisper. "Close," she said. "You almost guessed it, Max."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 4

  « ^ »

  Kristina turned in the passenger seat of Max's car and regarded him solemnly, so he'd know she hadn't been joking when she'd said his guess that she was a witch was close to the truth. Their brief evening together was about to end, she thought with dismal resignation, and once he'd heard what she had to say, there wouldn't be another date.

  The thought stirred an unbearable sadness in Kristina. How had she come to want so much from this man, so soon?

  Max glanced at her, navigating the traffic with a skill born of long practice. He was a good driver, yet another trait Kristina admired in him, for she herself had never really gotten the knack of motoring. Probably because of her nineteenth-century beginnings, she still yearned for horse-drawn carriages and spirited riding ponies.

  "What is it?'' he prompted in a gentle voice.

  Kristina sighed. "I'm different," she said.

  Max kept driving, but he was plainly listening, waiting for her to go on. There was something very nurturing in his attentiveness, something Kristina had craved all her adult life, without being aware of it until that moment.

  She folded her arms, gnawed briefly on her lower lip.

  "A moving vehicle is hardly the place to discuss something like this," she observed, thinking aloud more than addressing Max in any specific way. "Could we go to my place for coffee?"

  "I'd like that," Max answered simply, apparently ascribing no other meaning to the invitation, as many men might have done. Another point in his favor: He didn't think buying dinner entitled him to spend the rest of the night in Kristina's bed.

  She murmured directions, and they soon pulled into the driveway of her house. Without thinking, she turned on both the interior and exterior lights with the flip of a mental switch. Despite her unique heritage, or perhaps because of it, Kristina did not care for dark places.

  A bright glow spilled around them, pouring through virtually every window. Max, in the midst of helping Kristina out of the Blazer, merely grinned. "These electronic motion-detectors are great, aren't they?"

  Kristina nodded in reply. Her resolve to tell all was already waning. The deep, unutterable loneliness that had plagued her since her disastrous marriage to Michael would surely return, once Max had taken his inevitable leave, and she dreaded that empty ache the way mortals dreaded death.

  She did not normally lock her front door; vampires and other immortals could not be kept out by such simple means, and she was more than a match for human criminals. Kristina gave a moment of thought to a certain doorstop on display at the shop, an ugly brass monkey that had once been a living, breathing man—a thief and a would-be rapist. He'd broken into her store one night when she was working late, going over the books, and threatened her with a knife. She'd dealt with him accordingly.

>   One of these days, of course, she would have to change him back and hand him over to the authorities. For the time being, though, he could remain a brass monkey, quietly contemplating the error of his ways.

  Kristina pretended to use a key, for Max's benefit, and stepped into the house. "This way," she said, and set out for the kitchen.

  Max followed. "This is a beautiful place," he remarked as they passed through the large living room, with its elegantly faded Persian rugs and French antique furniture.

  "Thank you," Kristina replied, proud of her possessions, which she had gathered from all over the world, in nearly a century of travel. "That writing desk in the corner next to the fireplace belonged to Marie Antoinette." Naturally she did not add that Valerian, whom Max knew only as a neighbor and a magician, had been personally acquainted with the queen and indeed been a member of her court until, inevitably, he'd managed to offend her.

  Max gave a low whistle of appreciation, pausing to examine the workmanship of the piece, and then they proceeded into the kitchen, where lights blazed and the large refrigerator, with its stainless-steel door, hummed.

  "Have a seat," Kristina said, gesturing toward the tall stools lining the breakfast bar, which overlooked the family room. It was there that she exercised, read, and occasionally watched television. "What will you have—coffee or tea?"

  He perched on one of the stools, looking a little awkward there because of his size, though he was not an ungainly man.

  "Coffee sounds good," he said quietly, watching her. He was surely waiting for her to confide in him, as she had promised to do earlier, but he didn't press. There was something so restful about him, so easy. With Max, Kristina thought, there would be no games, no subterfuge, no guessing. He was exactly who he appeared to be.

  She sighed inwardly, envying him a little. If she were ever so open about herself, her life would become a circus in short order. "Regular or decaf?" she asked in order to fill the silence, comfortable though it was, opening cupboard doors and taking down cups with brisk clatters and clinks.

  "Regular," he answered with a smile in his voice. "Nothing keeps me awake."

  A vivid image came to Kristina's mind, unbidden and fierce; she saw herself and Max making love, and sudden heat suffused her, beginning in the very core of her being, in regions at once physical and spiritual, and surging to the surface to throb beneath her skin. She was very glad that her back was turned to Max, that he couldn't see her high color or trembling hands. "You're lucky," she said, hoping she sounded even remotely normal.

  "Kristina." Max spoke calmly but firmly, causing her to turn toward him before she'd thought about it. "What is your terrible secret?"

  She hesitated, imagining herself saying, "Well, both my parents are vampires, you see. I'm a hundred and thirty years old, and I have magical powers. Except for those things, I'm perfectly normal."

  Her considerable courage failed her in that instant, and she said the first thing that came to mind. "I was married once."

  Hardly a shocking confession in this day and age, she reflected, wishing she'd thought of something more dramatic.

  Max shrugged, his hands still resting comfortably on the countertop, fingers loosely intertwined. "So was I," he said.

  The four-cup coffeemaker began to chortle and hiss. "I know," Kristina answered, thinking of his beautiful children, the little girls she'd seen at Daisy and Valerian's Halloween party. "Please—tell me about her."

  "I thought we were going to talk about you." It was an unvarnished statement, with no underlying meaning and no hint of secrecy or irritation.

  "We will," Kristina said. She felt shame, because she wasn't sure she could manage complete honesty with this man. Not if it meant driving him away.

  "Her name was Sandy,'' Max said, and a certain sorrow came into his brown eyes, as though he were looking inward, seeing some tragic scene. And no doubt he was. "She was killed two years ago, just before Christmas, in a car accident."

  Kristina felt his pain in a shattering rush, making it her own, and steadied herself by moving close to the breakfast bar and grasping the counter's edge in both hands. "You loved her," she said. It wasn't a question, or an accusation, or a protest. Just a plain fact.

  "Yes," Max answered. "We were very happy together. I met Sandy in college, and we were together from then on."

  The coffee had finished brewing, but Kristina did not move to fill the cups. "I'm sorry," she said and then blushed again. "Not that you were happy, of course—I only meant—"

  Max smiled and reached over to brush calloused fingertips across the backs of her knuckles. "Relax, Kristina," he said. "I know what you meant."

  She looked down at his hand, now resting lightly upon hers, and marveled that such an innocent contact could rouse so many violent sensations. Nerve endings crackled in every part of Kristina's body, as if she'd grasped a lightning bolt, and her heart felt like a smooth stone, skittering over ice.

  "It's just that—well—I don't want to say the wrong thing," she admitted. That much, at least, was true. Kristina could not remember a time when making a good impression had been so important to her.

  "I don't think you could," he replied. "You have to be the most elegant, well-spoken woman I have ever met." With that, Max got off the stool, came around the end of the breakfast bar, and took Kristina's arm. Once he'd seated her at the table in the family room, he went back to the kitchen, poured coffee into the two cups Kristina had gotten out earlier, and then rejoined her.

  These small ordinary courtesies pleased her to a ridiculous degree, and so did the compliment. In all her long life Kristina had never known a man quite like Max Kilcarragh. She thanked him for bringing the coffee, lowering her eyes, feeling shy and awkward and anything but well spoken.

  "I'd like to see you again, Kristina," Max said when a long but untroubled silence had unfurled between them.

  Kristina met his eyes, swallowed hard. Tell him, commanded some sensible inner voice, but she couldn't bring herself to comply. "I'm a pretty good cook," she said. "Would you like to come to dinner tomorrow night with the girls?"

  He grinned. "Just tell me what time to be here," he said.

  "Seven-thirty?" Kristina replied, even as she called herself a reckless fool. It was bad enough to risk her own heart, but there was much more at stake than that. Through her, Max and his children would be exposed to creatures they couldn't begin to imagine—vampires and warlocks for certain, and possibly other monsters, too. She did not have the right to unleash such forces, she knew that, and yet she seemed unable to stop herself.

  "Seven-thirty," Max confirmed. Then, glancing at his watch, he sighed and rose from his chair. "I'd better go. It's a school night, and I don't want to keep the babysitter out late."

  Kristina stood up, too, and walked with him to the front door. There he kissed her gently on the forehead, said good night, and went out. She watched until he'd gotten into the Blazer and backed out of the driveway, her heart brimming with contradictions—guilt, longing, sorrow, and hope.

  Once Max was gone, Kristina climbed the stairs to her bedroom and took the packet containing her old letters to Phillie, her governess, from the top drawer of her writing desk. Then, after mentally shutting off all the lights in the house, except for the lamp beside her chintz-covered chaise lounge, she sat down and began to read…

  My dearest Phillie,

  I am certain that my last letter must have caused you considerable worry, and I do regret any anxiety you may have felt while waiting for me to continue my tale.

  Michael and I were married in the family chapel at Cheltingham, under a shower of colors from the splendid medieval windows of stained glass that grace the wall behind the altar. My fraudulent "parents,'' engaged by Valerian (because I pleaded and wept until he gave in), sat on the bride's side of the church, along with the servants from Refuge and a few mortal friends I'd managed to make along the way. They were well behaved and fashionably dressed, this hired mother and father, but give
n the circles Valerian travels in, I shudder even now to think who, or what, they might have been.

  But that is beside the point. Our vows were exchanged, and there was music and great merriment on the south lawn of Cheltingham, my new home, where pavilions of silk had been erected for the occasion. Never, since the days of the dissolute Romans, has there ever been so much food and wine arrayed in one place. There was dancing and laughter, and I felt welcome and wanted, despite the fact that most of the wedding guests had been invited by Michael's family. I actually believed that I belonged, at long last.

  After the sun went down, I began to look for Mama and Papa and Valerian, though I knew none of them would appear. They did not approve of the marriage, and besides, they were notably different from everyone else and would have attracted unwanted attention.

  Still, I was wretchedly disappointed.

  Michael's brother, Gilbert, Lord Cheltingham, had arranged for fireworks. When the last of the day's light had truly gone, and only the stars and the red and blue and yellow Chinese lanterns suspended from wires crisscrossing the lawn offered any illumination at all, Gilbert gave the order for the fuses to be lit.

  Oh, Phillie, it was splendid! The sky was black and cloudless, and suddenly there were great bursts of brilliantly colored light blooming overhead, like massive celestial flowers. I was awestruck, my arm linked with Michael's as we, like everyone else, gazed up at that incredible spectacle.

  Michael was a bit drunk by then, for he and his friends had been offering toasts to marital bliss ever since the ceremony ended, but I didn't think much of it until later. I had only one concern, as I have told you, and that was the marked absence of my own, true family.

  The fireworks ended, and Michael staggered off somewhere, leaving me quite alone. Before I knew what to make of that—it was our wedding night, after all, and I had been looking forward to being deflowered, though I admit I was fearful, too—an argument erupted between my bridegroom and one of his guests.