by Nora Roberts
uncle and grandfather gradually let me take over the business because I had a knack for it, and they were proud of that. My mother let me handle things at home because, well, she's just too good-natured not to."
She sighed again, snuggled into him. "She's going to get married again next month, and she's thrilled. One of the reasons I took this trip now is because I wanted to get away from it, from those endless plans for yet another of her happy endings. I suppose I hurt her feelings, leaving the way I did. But I'd have hurt them more if I'd stayed and spoke my mind."
"You don't like the man she'll marry?"
"No, he's perfectly nice. My mother's fiancés are always perfectly nice. Funny, since I've been here I haven't worried about her at all. And I imagine, somehow, she's managing just fine without me picking at her. The shop's undoubtedly running like clockwork, and the world continues to spin. Odd to realize I wasn't indispensable after all."
"To me you are." He wrapped his arms around her, rolled over so he could look down at her. "You're vital to me."
"That's the most wonderful thing anyone's ever said to me." It was better, wasn't it? she asked herself. Even better than "I love you."
"I don't know what time it is, or even what day. I don't need to know. I've never eaten supper in bed unless I was ill. Never danced in a forest in the moonlight, never made love in a bed of flowers. I've never known what it was like to be so free."
"Happy, Kayleen." He took her mouth, a little desperately. "You're happy."
"I love you, Flynn. How could I be happier?"
He wanted to keep her loving him. Keep her happy. He wanted to keep her beautifully naked and steeped in pleasures.
More than anything, he wanted to keep her.
The hours were whizzing by so quickly, tumbling into days so that he was losing track of time himself. What did time matter now, to either of them?
He could give her anything she wanted here. Anything and everything. What would she miss of the life she had outside? It was ordinary and tedious. Hadn't she said so herself? He would see that she never missed what had been. Before long she wouldn't even think of it. The life before would be the dream.
He taught her to ride, and she was fearless. When he thought of how she'd clung to him in terror when he'd pulled her up onto Dilis the first time, he rationalized the change by saying she was simply quick to learn. He hadn't changed her basic nature, or forced her will.
That was beyond his powers and the most essential rule of magic.
When she galloped off into the forest, her laughter streaming behind her, he told himself he let his mind follow her only to keep her from harm.
Yet he knew, deep inside himself, that if she traveled near the edge of his world, he would pull her back.
He had that right, Flynn thought, as his hands fisted at his sides. He had claimed her. What he claimed during his imprisonment was his to keep.
"That is the law." He threw his head back, scowling up at the heavens. "It is your law. She came to me. By rights of magic, by the law of this place, she is mine. No power can take her from me."
When the sky darkened, when lightning darted at the black edges of clouds, Flynn stood in the whistling wind, feet planted in challenge. His hair blew wild around his face, his eyes went emerald-bright. And the power that was his, that could not be taken from him, shimmered around him like silver.
In his mind he saw Kayleen astride the white horse. She glanced uneasily at the gathering storm, shivered in the fresh chill of the wind. And turned her mount to ride back to him.
She was laughing again as she raced out of the trees. "That was wonderful!" She threw her arms recklessly in the air so that Flynn gripped the halter to keep Dilis steady. "I want to ride every day. I can't believe the feeling"
Feeling, he thought with a vicious tug of guilt, was the one thing he wouldn't be able to offer her much longer.
"Come, darling." He lifted his arms up to her. "We'll put Dilis down for the night. A storm's coming."
She welcomed it too. The wind, the rain, the thunder. It stirred something in her, some whippy thrill that made her feel reckless and bold. When Flynn set the fire to blaze with a twist of his hand, her eyes danced.
"I don't suppose you could teach me to do that?"
He glanced back at her, the faintest of smiles, the slightest lift of brow. "I can't, no. But you've your own magic, Kayleen."
"Have I?"
"It binds me to you, as I've been bound to no other. I will give you a boon. Any that you ask that is in my power to give."
"Any?" A smile played around her mouth now as she looked up at him from under her lashes. The blatantly flirtatious move came to her much more naturally than she'd anticipated. "Well, that's quite an offer. I'll have to consider very carefully before making any decision."
She wandered the room, trailing a fingertip over the back of the sofa, over the polished gleam of a table. "Would that offer include, say, the sun and the moon?"
Look at her, he thought. She grows more beautiful by the hour. "Such as these?" He held out his hands. From them dripped a string of luminous white pearls with a clasp of diamonds.
She laughed, even as her breath caught. "Those aren't bad, as an example. They're magnificent, Flynn. But I didn't ask for diamonds or pearls."
"Then I give them freely." He crossed to her, laid the necklace over her head. "For the pleasure of seeing you wear them."
"I've never worn pearls." Surprised by the delight they brought her, she lifted them, let them run like moonbeams through her fingers. "They make me feel regal."
Holding them out, she turned a circle while the diamond clasp exploded with light. "Where do they come from? Do you just picture them in your mind and… poof?"
"Poof?" He decided she hadn't meant that as an insult. "More or less, I suppose. They exist, and I move them from one place to another. From there, to here. Whatever is, that has no will, I can bring here, and keep. Nothing with heart or soul can be taken. But the rest… It's sapphires, I'm thinking, that suit you best."
As Kayleen blinked, a string of rich black pearls clasped with brilliant sapphires appeared around her neck. "Oh! I'll never get used to… Move them?" She looked back at him. "You mean take them?"
"Mmm." He turned to pour glasses of wine.
"But…" Catching her bottom lip between her teeth, she looked around the room. The gorgeous antiques, the modern electronics—which she'd noticed ran without electricity, the glamour of Ming vases, the foolishness of pop art.
Almost nothing in the room would have existed when he'd been banished here.
"Flynn, where do all these things come from? Your television set, your piano, the furniture and rugs and art. The food and wine?"
"All manner of places."
"How does it work?" She took the wine from him. "I mean, is it like replicating? Do you copy a thing?"
"Perhaps, if I've a mind to. It takes a bit more time and trouble for that process. You have to know the innards, so to speak, and the composition and all matter of scientific business to make it come right. Easier by far just to transport it."
"But if you just transport it, if you just take it from one place and bring it here, that's stealing."
"I'm not a thief." The idea! "I'm a magician. The laws aren't the same for us."
Patience was one of her most fundamental virtues. "Weren't you punished initially because you took something from someone?"
"That was entirely different. I changed a life for another's gain. And I was perhaps a bit… rash. Not that it deserved such a harsh sentence."
"How do you know what lives you've changed by bringing these here?" She held up the pearls. "Or any of the other things? If you take someone's property, it causes change, doesn't it? And at the core of it, it's just stealing." Not without regret, she lifted the jewels over her head. "Now, you have to put these back where you got them."
"I won't." Fully insulted now, he slammed his glass down. "You would reject a gift from me?"
"Yes. If it belongs to someone else. Flynn, I'm a merchant myself. How would I feel to open my shop one morning and find my property gone? It would be devastating. A violation. And beyond that, which is difficult enough, the inconvenience. I'd have to file a police report, an insurance claim. There'd be an investigation, and—"
"Those are problems that don't exist here," he interrupted. "You can't apply your ordinary logic to magic. Magic is."
"Right is, Flynn, and even magic can't negate what's right. These may be heirlooms. They may mean a great deal to someone even beyond their monetary value. I can't accept them."
She laid the pearls, the glow and the sparkle, on the table.
"You have no knowledge of what governs me." The air began to tremble with his anger. "No right to question what's inside me. Your world hides from mine, century by century, building its pale layers of reason and denial. You come here, and in days you stand in judgment of what you can't begin to comprehend?"
"I don't judge you, Flynn, but your actions." The wind had come into the room. It blew over her face, through her hair. And it was cold. Though her belly quaked, she lifted her chin. "Power shouldn't take away human responsibility. It should add to it. I'm surprised you haven't learned that in all the time you've had to think."
His eyes blazed. He threw out his arms, and the room exploded with sound and light. She stumbled back, but managed to regain her balance, managed to swallow a cry. When the air cleared again, the room was empty but for the two of them.
"This is what I might have if I lived by your rules.
Nothing. No comfort, no humanity. Only empty rooms, where even the echoes are lifeless. Five hundred years of alone, and I should worry that another whose life comes and goes in a blink might do without a lamp or a painting?"
"Yes." Temper snapped off him, little flames of gold. Then he vanished before her eyes.
What had she done? Panicked, she nearly called out for him, then realized he would hear only what he chose to hear.
She'd driven him away, she thought, sinking down in misery to sit on the bare floor. Driven him away with her rigid stance on right and wrong, her own unbending rules of conduct, just as she had kept so many others at a distance most of her life.
She'd preached at him, she admitted with a sigh. This incredible man with such a magnificent gift. She had wagged her finger at him, just the way she wagged it at her mother. Taken on, as she habitually did, the role of adult to the child.
It seemed that not even magic could burn that irritating trait out of her. Not even love could overcome it.
Now she was alone in an empty room. Alone, as she had been for so long. Flynn thought he had a lock on loneliness, she thought with a half laugh. She'd made a career out of alone.
She drew up her knees, rested her forehead on them. The worst of it, she realized, was that even now—sad, angry, aching—she believed she was right.
It wasn't a hell of a lot of comfort.
Chapter 7