Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Other Titles
Kendawyn
For Pamela and Auburn
Alice Mary Barrett was a terrible mage.
If she weren’t, she wouldn’t have to face the rudeness of the rector’s wife, the unwanted attention of the rector, or for that matter, the insinuating comments of all of Jenner’s Hollow and Miller’s Crossing for being the poor relation.
She was not poor.
She owned half of the house she and her cousin lived in. They’d inherited it together. Everyone forgot that in light of Mariah running the house and Algernon running the properties. It wasn’t for taking advantage of them that had Alice living with her cousins. It was her house, too.
Plus she loved them.
If she weren’t also so terrible at social niceties, modern languages, and needlework, perhaps people wouldn’t assume that she was un-marriageable.
She could marry.
Probably.
She just didn’t want to. She wanted to take the millennia that fate had given her and enjoy it. Not combine her lifespan with some random, well-bred werewolf, vampire, or mage and breed further gently-reared little babies.
Mages could do almost anything working together. They could open portals, heal any illness or injury up to death, they could change the weather, they could weave magic into the very buildings, they could…but it did not signify.
Alice could no more do those things than change into a wolf or have the super strength and speed of a either a werewolf or a vampire. She might as well be living in the mortal realm with mortal abilities as far as her magic went.
She muttered as she walked, almost racing down the lane that linked the small villages of Jenner’s Hollow and Miller’s Crossing. The link between them was only two miles, but they were separate little villages.
Except the church was in Jenner’s Hollow.
With the rector.
And his wife.
His horrible, terrible wife, and his prying eyes.
It was worse for Mrs. Smythe-Anderson, who had been married for her money. She knew it. And she’d been fine with it. She was all elbows and sharp edges, and even with magic, she had not been softened. She’d been fine with being wed for her money—until she’d seen how the rector’s eyes followed Miss Barrett.
Alice didn’t know what to do—it wasn’t like she tried to gain his attention. There was nothing about her that made her extraordinary. She had fine bones, creamy skin, dark brown hair, and soft blue eyes. She looked like a typical Kendawyner. She was not noteworthy in any way. Perhaps her bosom was a little large, but only in comparison to her frame. She did not have freckles, but the truth was there were spells for that, so few did. She had soft, pink lips that matched her skin tone, but they were not full or pert. She was, she supposed, pretty enough. But certainly not remarkable. There was, therefore, no reason for the rector to make her feel haunted. She tried very hard to avoid him. But you couldn’t avoid church in Kendawyn.
She lived in the country.
Everyone went to church.
All of the ladies helped with the flowers for services. Everyone supported the choir and the Sunday school. If you didn’t attend church, you were a social pariah on every front.
It wasn’t like the city where she could be going to any number of churches. Where more than one person didn’t attend.
Mrs. Smythe-Anderson had not been pleased when Alice appeared to help with the flowers today instead of her cousin. But her cousin, Mariah, had been forced to stay home with a sick child. She’d asked Alice to take care of the task. It was so very reasonable.
Except that it was not.
The rector had been ready to help Mariah fill the giant vases. When it was Alice who appeared, he’d helped, of course. He’d carried them for her—like the gentleman he was. The gentleman whose eyes lingered too long and too heavy as Alice hurriedly arranged the flowers and tried to escape.
“Oh,” Mrs. Smythe-Anderson had said as Alice sidled out of the chapel. “I understood that Mrs. Abelmarle was going to be doing the flowers today.”
And then Alice had jumped and mumbled a reply like she was making excuses. She should have said that Mariah’s son was ill and Mariah asked that Alice fulfill the duty. Instead, she’d frantically filled in the silence. She’d made the rector’s wife’s eyes narrow. Alice had been the recipient of that cold, hard look yet again. The one that said she was guilty of trying to steal someone else’s husband. What was the woman even thinking?
Divorces didn’t happen in Kendawyn. Not without losing your place in society. The upperclass of Jenner’s Hollow and Miller’s Crossing might be on the bare edge of the ton but no one in the high society divorced.
Ever.
The ton, those spoiled, rich nobles, the gentry with their country estates and generations of excluding those with jobs. They excluded rich merchants. They excluded anyone who was not well-connected or powerful. The ton was the idle rich, and they expected you to behave to their standards or they would expel you without mercy.
“Well, should you not be going then? Dark is coming swiftly” Mrs. Smythe-Anderson had taken a long, obvious look at her watch and made it clear that she knew the rector and Alice had been lingering together in the chapel since the flowers were normally long since done.
The woman didn’t understand that Alice had been late because she’d been trying to get anyone—anyone at all—to take over the task for her.
Just the thought of it made Alice furious. How dare the woman assume that Alice would behave in that manner. Perhaps Mrs. Smythe-Anderson had reason to believe that her husband was a philanderer, but that did not mean that Alice was the other woman.
Just because she was a little late on even attempting to find a husband. Just because her parents had already faded from this world did not mean that Alice was crazy old. It only meant that her parents had waited rather longer than usual to have a child.
She should give or sell her cousin Algernon her share of the house and buy a cottage. A cottage, she thought, by the sea. Where the rector was very old, and she’d read novels without apology and never, ever do needlework or pretend to speak the modern languages and refuse to perform music on demand.
She actually was, she knew, good at playing both the piano and the violin-cello, but she didn’t like performing. She played for herself and herself alone. She walked faster and faster, long skirts napping against her ankles, the mud of the wet lane splashing as she stamped through it. There was very little beyond this lane and Miller’s Crossing but a hunting cottage in the forests of the Wolfemuir clan—nearly always empty except for the wood’s keeper. Miller’s Crossing was little more than a tiny little hamlet of houses where she lived with her cousins.
The shadows were growing long because she’d spent too long avoiding the task and then longer still getting away from the rector. The birds were settling down, the wind was picking up, and the quiet of the lane seemed starker. Perhaps the birds had settled down too early. It seemed like there should be more wildlife out, like little rabbits munching flowers in the gree
n spaces, but everything was lonely.
The lane felt as forsaken as she—as if the universe were creating a scene for her to walk through that reflect what was in her heart. Lengthening shadows, twilight with no sun and no moon. Intense, stark loneliness.
And no one but her.
It was just that the more children Mariah and Algernon had, the more they built their life together, the more Alice felt…superfluous.
A loud crack snapped through the quiet of the evening.
“What?” Alice gasped the word on reflex, for there was no one to talk to. She looked around, searching for the source of the noise, while her mind processed what had happened.
She…
That couldn’t have been….
It was far too close to the lane to be hunting.
It was utterly off-season….
She looked towards the trees, and as she did, a huge shadow came raging out of the woods towards her. She screamed and leapt to the side, only realizing after it passed that it had been a horse rather than some demon from the nether regions.
A saddled, riderless horse.
Alice stared towards the trees, horror crawling up her spine. The darkness loomed towards her with clawing shadow fingers. Every bit of self-preservation demanded that she run all the way home. She looked towards the hamlet, but the little gathering of houses were at least a mile farther on. She looked behind her, realized she was precisely between the two little villages, and she was utterly alone.
“It isn’t what you think, Alice,” she muttered as she shifted closer to the trees, terrified to continue. “Just because there was a loud sound—probably a gunshot—and then a horse without a rider doesn’t mean that there are brigands in the woods.”
She had to gather up all of her courage and the realization that—just in case—she could not leave someone injured in the woods. She simply could not. What if she left him or her, went for help, and they died?
What if they could have lived?
What if she talked herself out of what she was sure was happening, and in doing so, she heard of a body found tomorrow or the day after? What if she then realized that she might have done something but did not.
It was untenable.
She darted from tree to tree, trying to follow the signs of the passage of the horse. It wasn’t actually that difficult. The horse had moved quickly and fiercely through the undergrowth, leaving a path even Alice could follow. She moved carefully, reminding herself that this was Kendawyn, where they chose to live by social structure. Where they chose to be genteel. Where people just didn’t get shot.
“Even if someone was shot,” Alice whispered, trying to comfort herself. “It doesn’t mean that it was ill-intent.”
She did not believe her lies.
The trees were thick and tall here. The brown earth was covered in ferns and moss during the height of spring. She felt the pressure of an awareness that she needed to be careful. That she needed to gather her skirts close and be ready to run. Alice did not care for the feeling.
Whatsoever.
She stepped as lightly as she had ever walked as she wove through the trees. She whispered, in her mind, to be a wraith. Be a ghost. Act as if you had faded and were a wisp of yourself. And after several heart-stopping minutes as she snuck through the woods, hoping she wouldn’t find anyone, she felt fingers wrap around her calf. She stifled her gasp, only barely, and looked down to see a man so blended into the darkness that he was invisible without those steely fingers and glowing eyes.
She met his gaze.
He seemed to be trying to tell her something, to impress something on her. But without words.
It was the lack of words that made it so very clear.
She looked up and around as if she had not seen him.
“Hello,” she called. “Is anyone hurt? Is anyone there?”
There was no reply, but his fingers did not relax on her calf until she pulled away and led the watcher away.
“Hello?” she asked again, and then shook her head theatrically as if she’d tried. And then she moved past him. Leaving him alone in the dark, certainly hurt, as she pretended to be looking for an injured person.
She wanted to say she was being dramatic, but she knew she wasn’t. She felt the presence of something. She didn’t know what it was, but she tromped along as if entirely unaware that something sinister must have happened, calling for someone, anyone, before she shrugged and turned back to the lane as if she’d done as much as could be expected.
She left the man in the woods and walked on until she stopped feeling that horrible awareness. The moment it faded, she darted into the trees, hidden, and made her way back to the injured man. She’d seen only his powerful gaze. She realized that he must be a werewolf. A mage’s eyes would have glowed green. A vampire’s would have glowed red.
His had glowed yellow.
Given their location, he must be a member of the Wolfemuir pack, but she could hardly believe it. If the Wolfemuir Pack weren’t the most powerful pack in Kendawyn, they might as well be.
It took more courage than Alice thought she possessed to make her way back to the man in the woods. On the way, she kept reminding herself that this wasn’t her. She read novels and played with children and walked in the rose gardens. She refused to do needlework and occasionally played the piano. She didn’t do dangerous things.
Not ever.
She had to force herself to go back. And that became even more difficult as she heard hoof steps. She didn’t see the rider—she was, after all, hiding in the trees—but she heard him. And she remembered the feel of a sinister gaze that had followed her for too long. She thought she’d found its owner.
Whoever rode that second horse had seen her find the injured man in the woods. They had seen her pretend not to find him. Had they realized it was an act? Was she going to return to the woods and find a dead werewolf with a slit throat? Her legs were weak as she pressed forward. If her ruse had been successful, then the werewolf needed her. The werewolf had not spoken. The second watcher had seen help arrive and the injured be unable to call out. That second rider was hoping that the man who grabbed her leg was dead instead of cagey.
Someone had intended murder.
“Bloody hell,” she muttered as she walked carefully and quietly through the woods. She found her way back to his unmoved body, thinking he must have passed out or died, but those eyes opened and the yellow gaze met her own.
Was that relief she saw?
“You came back,” he said, low and deep. There was a growl in his voice. The spirit of the wolf he carried in him was very near the surface.
She nodded.
“Foolish,” he snapped before holding out an imperious hand. She had to lean all her weight back against his grip to haul him to his feet. Even then, he had to hold onto a tree to keep from collapsing.
She said nothing as his face paled to utter, horrible whiteness. She simply placed her hand against his side to somehow anchor him. He breathed great, gasping, wolfy breaths until the merest bit of color returned to his cheeks.
“I think we should wrap your wound,” she said.
He nodded once. More command than an agreement. She looked at him and then herself and turned to pull off her petticoats. They were lovely and sheer and one of the nicest things she owned. She signed at the delicate embroidery that Mariah had been kind enough to provide before pressing the garment against his side where the blood pulsed.
“I push down, yes?” Her voice was startling in the utter silence of the wood.
“Hard.” The pain he felt was evident in the grittiness of his voice.
“Perhaps you should sit again?”
He shook his head and took firm hold of the tree while she pressed against his side. She pressed and pressed until she felt that there might be a lessening of the blood loss. But when she looked again, there seemed to be no change.
“I’m a mage,” she said.
He waited.
“I’m terribl
e at magic.” She was offering the cruelest of closures of his wound. Even the weakest of mages could generally create fire.
“Do it,” he said.
She closed her eyes and felt for the energy of the magic as she pulled his shirt back to reveal the wound. As usual, she found it nearly impossible to let the magic flow into her. She tried and lost it, tried and lost it, and tried again until she finally felt the magic in her tenuous grip. She focused the magic into a searing flame and pressed it against his side before she lost the power again.
His breath stopped, he slumped against the tree trunk, wrapped around it, face pressed into the bark. For long, long moments he breathed shakily through his nose, fighting the need to vomit, the need to scream, the need to backhand her. All of those feelings she guessed.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, hand on his spine, balancing him and, she hoped, providing him something to focus on.
He did not answer for a long time, but she kept that soft hand on his waist as if touching him would remind him that he was not alone and that this would pass. She wanted to run, terrified the shooter would return, but she would not leave him after what she’d done.
When his breathing finally slowed, she dared to asked, “Can you walk?”
The need to move and move quickly had begun pressing against her mind. She thought it must be pressing against his own.
His look was yellow steel as he focused on her. He seemed more wolf than man at that moment. But she didn’t feel anger towards her. The relief of it was terrible. She hadn’t realized how scared she was that the wolf in him would lash out.
He must be quite the powerful werewolf, she thought, for any other wolf would have been unable to keep from maiming one who injured him.
But then she looked again to his eyes and thought he was more than a powerful wolf. He was a hard man. He took several deep breaths to fortify himself for the journey. Their gazes met again and an unspoken conversation occurred yet again.
She simply took his arm and wrapped it around her shoulders, inviting him to lean on her. The weight of him, even in these circumstances, was so foreign it stole her breath. Then she told herself to quit being a ninny, and together they took that first step.
Compelled by Love (Kendawyn Paranormal Regency) Page 1