“If you would like me to try, I might be able to reduce it.”
“I would be grateful for anything you can do.” The countess’s mouth twisted. “Even if the lump isn’t dangerous, its presence is…disturbing.”
This time Abby lightly touched the outside of the countess’s rose-colored gown. Scanning deeply, she found a weak spot in the wall of the cyst. With a short, focused burst of energy, she thinned the wall to nothing there. Fluid began to seep out. Soon it would be absorbed back into the body. “In a day or two, it should be gone.”
Lady Roreton gingerly probed the area, then gave a gasp of delight. “Already it’s smaller. You are a miracle worker. I have been living in fear for months. The family physician recommended bleeding, but that didn’t save my friend when she had a similar problem. Now I can start to live again.” She smiled radiantly. “God bless you for your kindness, Lady Frayne. What can I do to repay you?”
“By speaking kindly of wizards,” Abby said. “I don’t want my host and hostess to suffer for the crime of having me as a guest.”
“I will do that.” Lady Roreton’s expression changed, the fear replaced by determination. “I am not without influence in society.”
“I will be grateful if you exercise that influence on behalf of me and my new family.” Abby wrapped her arms around herself, shivering. Jack had said that she would be embarking on a campaign for acceptance, and she knew from experience that tolerance must be earned one mind at a time. “Now let’s go inside before we freeze!”
Laughing, they headed back into the house. Abby didn’t know whether or not Lady Roreton would become a friend—but she was certainly an ally, and at the moment, that was even better.
Jack was relieved when Abby rejoined him and Celeste at their table, looking composed. “Are you all right?”
“Fine.” Abby’s gaze fell on the food. “One of those is mine, I hope?”
He set a plate in front of her. “I got a bit of everything since we haven’t been married long enough for me to be sure of your tastes. But the lobster tarts are heavenly.”
“It’s generous of you to share.” Abby took a bite of one, then closed her eyes in bliss. “Celeste, I must confess that I periodically have thoughts of casting an enchantment on your chef and stealing him away.”
The duchess looked stern. “It’s better not to joke about magic in this place.”
“I wasn’t joking!”
“That’s even worse.” Celeste smiled a little. “You helped Alice Roreton?”
Abby nodded while swallowing the rest of the lobster tart. “Yes, she was troubled, and I was able to relieve her mind. She has offered her aid in countering the social disaster of my presence.”
“Excellent,” Celeste said, relieved. “She is considered a model of chaste, respectable conduct, so she can do a great deal to smooth this matter over.”
Jack was picking up a cheese puff when the Duke of Alderton came to the table.
“Frayne. Madame.” His gaze went from Jack to his wife, ignoring Abby. “I would speak with you in private. Now.” His voice could not have been heard more than a yard away, but it vibrated with barely controlled anger.
His granite-like expression and formal language did not bode well. Jack rose, thinking that perhaps Abby had been right in wanting to avoid this ball. The night was producing far too many consequences. “Abby?” She took a deep breath and stood also, her expression that of a woman expecting serious trouble.
“I did not invite her,” Alderton snapped.
“She is my wife, and also, I suspect, the cause of this discussion.” Jack’s gaze was challenging. Alderton was entitled to castigate them and demand they leave his house, but he didn’t have the right to act as if Abby was beneath his notice.
“Very well,” Alderton said ungraciously. “But she won’t like what I have to say.”
As Jack and the two women left the table, he glanced at the nearly full plates regretfully, suspecting that they wouldn’t return to them. He’d learned to forage in the army, so he grabbed two lobster tarts, eating one and offering the other to Abby as they followed the duke from the dining room. Her smile was unsteady, but she took the tart and ate it as they climbed the stairs to the next floor.
One of the first rules of war was to eat well when one could. Especially with a bloody battle imminent.
Chapter XXVII
The duke led them to his private study, a quiet room in the back of the house. It was well lit with candles and a fire and looked misleadingly welcoming.
Alderton closed the door behind them, then whirled on Jack and allowed his anger free rein. “How dare you bring a wyrdling into my home when you know how I feel about such creatures! I had thought we were friends, Frayne, yet you have betrayed me.”
Jack clamped down on his own anger. “I didn’t bring a wyrdling, I brought my wife. Abby is a wellborn young woman of impeccable reputation who happens to be blessed with the gift of healing. I didn’t realize that bringing her to your home was a betrayal of our friendship. Or do you think it was treacherous of her to save my life?”
Alderton’s mouth twisted. “If you thought it was all right, why didn’t you tell me at the beginning instead of leaving me to be humiliated in front of half of London?”
The duke had a valid point. Jack had known his brother-in-law might be uncomfortable with Abby’s magic. But he hadn’t expected such fury, or he would never have come to stay with his sister.
Celeste spoke up. “Abby told me as soon as she arrived, Piers. Jack is my brother. Surely he and his wife are welcome in my home.”
The duke’s face shuttered. “So you have betrayed me again. My wife, the harlot, who yearns for other lovers and doesn’t mind allowing a witch under my roof.”
Celeste gasped, then flared with a rage that shimmered incandescent red in her aura. “Damn you, Alderton! You have no right to say such a thing! I have never wanted to take a lover.” She drew a shuddering breath as she struggled for control. “I hated the thought. Hated it! Do you think I have ever done anything in my life more difficult than suggest you find a mistress to give you a child? But the first duty of a duchess is to give her husband an heir, and I have failed to do so. I was willing to break my own heart to give you what you want and need.”
“What I want and need,” the duke snapped, “is a faithful wife who knows better than to allow a damned wyrdling in my home!”
“Then you had better throw me out now!” she hissed. A silver chain slithered up from under the duke’s shirt, powered by a blast of her magic so strong it rocked Jack and Abby. Hanging from the chain was an anti-magic charm of the highest potency.
“Do you have any idea how often this charm has burned my skin when we made love?” she exclaimed, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I am everything you despise, Piers. An untrained wizard who has been too afraid to tell my own husband what I am.” The charm jerked at the chain, snapping the links, then sailed across the room to bounce off the opposite wall.
Aghast, the duke watched the charm rip away, then stared at Celeste as if he had never seen her before. “You’re a wizard?”
“Magic often runs in families, Alderton,” Jack said as he took a protective step toward his sister. He didn’t think her husband would hurt her, but at the moment he wasn’t sure. “Remember that I was sent to Stonebridge Academy because of too much interest in wizardry. They taught me to hate myself, but they couldn’t change my essential nature.”
He hesitated a moment before continuing. He hated claiming his magic, but he couldn’t bear to let Alderton lash out at Abby and Celeste. He raised his hand and created a ball of shimmering light. “If you must rail at wizardry, aim your venom at me. It was I who married Abby and brought her here, thinking you would be at least civil, and our arrival was what persuaded my sister to accept her talents.” He let his anger show. “I had thought our friendship was stronger than this, Piers.”
“He is being eaten alive by his pain,” Abby said quietly. “L
ook at his aura. His anger is based in the fear that Celeste doesn’t love him, and that fear is poisoning him from the heart out. Because he fears, it is easy to hate us.”
Alderton turned white at Abby’s words. “This is why wyrdlings are hated,” he said starkly. “Because they steal the secrets from a man’s soul.”
“Time and again I have said how much I love you. What more can I say?” Celeste asked, her anger fading into anguish as she stepped between her husband and the targets of his fury. “Why will you not believe me?”
“Perhaps you love the Duke of Alderton.” He stared at his wife, so mesmerized by her ethereal beauty that Jack and Abby might not have existed. “But would you have married me when I was Lord Piers, a third son of modest fortune? What I have always wanted and needed is you, Celeste. Far more than I want an heir. I need a wife who loves me, not the Duke of Alderton. I have never been sure that I have such a wife.”
“You want to be loved for yourself, not because you’re a duke,” Celeste retorted. “But would you love me if I wasn’t beautiful? How much of your feeling for me is because of the pretty face and blond hair you prize so much?”
Alderton was taken aback. “That’s not the same!”
“Close enough,” she said tartly. “My beauty has shaped my life and become part of who I am. I would not be the same woman if I was plain. But neither would you be the same man if you had not become the duke.”
Her voice softened. “I love all of you, Piers, and part of that is because of the dignity, fairness, and justice you exercise as the Duke of Alderton. I think I would love you no matter what your station in life, but this is the only way I have known you. Can you say the same? Would you have asked me to dance that first time if I had been plain and shy and badly dressed?”
“I…I don’t know,” Alderton said with painful honesty. “But London is full of beautiful women, and far too many try to catch the attention of a duke. Seldom did I ask one for a second dance.” He reached out and touched her bright hair, his expression taut. “With you—I couldn’t get enough of your company, and it wasn’t only because of your beauty.” As they gazed into each other’s eyes, the air thickened with sexual tension.
“Can you love me even though I have magical power?” she whispered, laying her hand over his. “I can refuse to use it, but it’s still part of me.”
“If that’s true,” he said hoarsely, “then I will learn to love magic, because I truly do love you.”
Tears running down her face, she stepped toward him. His control shattered and he drew her into a crushing embrace, as if his kiss could draw her soul into his. Celeste’s hands bit into his back to hold him so tightly that he could never leave her.
Nerve endings tingling from the energy that scorched through the room, Jack grabbed Abby’s arm and hustled her out into the hall, slamming the door behind them. “The power generated by that fight must have set all the pigeons in London flying!”
“Not only the pigeons.” Abby’s pupils were dark and her cheeks flushed with sensual promise. He couldn’t take his gaze from the magnificent swell of her breasts.
“I shouldn’t have been affected by that,” he said hoarsely as his blood hammered through his veins. “She’s my sister.”
“That room held enough passion to make monks break their vows. The source doesn’t matter.” Eyes blazing, Abby pulled his head down for a fierce kiss. “And I am not your sister.”
Raw lust seared through him. As their mouths locked in an urgent kiss that knew no end, he braced her against the wall and fumbled with the buttons on his trousers to release himself. Mindless with desire, he raised her skirts, and this time he had no thought for saving the fabric from being crushed.
Her body was hot and ready, and she cried out when he entered her, the sound swallowed up in his mouth. She convulsed around him almost instantly. As rainbow colors rioted around them, he thrust again and again, spilling into her, trying to merge physically with an intensity that stripped away all consciousness until frantic desire shattered into a stunning release.
When the madness had passed, his forehead rested against the wall as his arms clung to his wife’s richly provocative form. “No wonder people fear the power of sexual magic,” he panted. “If not for the wall, I think we’d both collapse.”
“Very likely.” She smiled crookedly. “Much of that magic came from you, I think, for I’ve never been so strongly affected.”
“A good thing no one came down this hall. Though I think a herd of galloping elephants could have passed and I wouldn’t have noticed.”
Shakily he released her and straightened, half surprised he could stand. As he buttoned his trousers, he asked, “What just happened? Apart from the obvious,” he added hastily when he saw Abby’s mischievous smile.
“I think that Celeste and her husband have both been suppressing their passions for quite some time.” She accepted the handkerchief he offered and dried herself. “As they fought, all that suppressed desire exploded, augmented by Celeste’s magic. Since we were right there and also involved in the argument, we were caught in a firestorm of desire. I wonder if others in the house felt that, too?”
Jack shuddered. “I hope not, or we’re going to return to the ballroom and find an orgy in progress.”
“Must we return to the ball?” She made a face. “I suppose we should, since we’re the guests of honor.”
“And the host and hostess are unlikely to reappear. Do I appear respectable?”
“Well enough for this stage of the evening. If you’d looked like this earlier, people would have suspected something more than energetic dancing.” She smoothed her hands down her gown. “How is my appearance?”
“You look like you’ve been dancing very energetically,” he said gravely. “But no more than that, I think.” He offered his arm. “Shall we go down?”
She bit her lip. “I did something I shouldn’t have. When Celeste pulled Alderton’s charm off, she left him unprotected from magic. I…I did a deep scan of his body and I think I found the cause of their failure to have a child. It was a simple blockage, and I fixed it. I think.”
He stared, imagining how intimate that scan had been. “That was fast work.”
“Some problems are simple and can be healed quickly.” She sighed. “What I did was wrong, yet I can’t bring myself to be sorry. Even if the events of the evening make Alderton more tolerant toward wizardry, I think he’d be a long way from allowing a healer to examine and treat him.”
She was right. For Celeste and Piers’s sakes, he hoped she’d been successful. “It may have been unethical, but the rewards of success will be enormous. If you failed—well, no one but me will ever know.”
“But it’s not something I should do again.”
“No, and especially not to me!”
“I wouldn’t need to,” she said. “I can talk to you and know you’ll listen.”
As they headed down to the ballroom, he realized that the ability to talk to each other was perhaps an even greater blessing than the amazing passion between them.
His friends were right. He was a very lucky man.
Abby woke and stretched, the length of her body rustling pleasantly against her husband’s solid frame. “Do we have to get out of bed today?”
“I think so. But not just yet.” He settled in closer, his arm around her waist. They’d never made it into their nightclothes the night before, so he was enjoying her delicious nakedness.
“I wonder how many flowers will arrive with notes hoping that the duchess has recovered from the illness that forced her to leave the ball early.” Abby smiled as she thought of the social lies they had spun the night before to explain the disappearance of the host and hostess. “And how many women will envy the fact that she has a husband solicitous enough to sit with her.”
“I doubt much sitting was going on,” Jack said with amusement. “With luck, they’ll have patched up their differences, but matters could be awkward today. It’s not too late
for us to leave rather than wait until tomorrow. Both of us are mostly packed, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” Abby said doubtfully. “When is your mother expecting us?”
“She isn’t.”
When Abby’s brows arched, he said, “It seemed better not to give Scranton a chance to prepare. It’s not as if I need to give notice to return to my own home.”
“I wonder what awaits us there.” Abby tried to get a sense of the events that laid ahead, with little success. “I think it will be…complicated.”
“Perhaps even dangerous.” Jack’s expression was grave. “If we are right, there is something profoundly wrong with Scranton.”
“Between us, we can prevail over one wicked stepfather.”
Jack nodded, but didn’t look reassured. Changing the subject, he asked, “Can you sense the moods of Celeste and Piers?”
“I feel deep contentment, but I don’t want to look any more closely. I’ve interfered enough already.”
His circling hand began caressing her midriff. “More and more, I understand the dangerous temptations of magic. It must seem so easy to look in on people’s emotions. To make little changes for their own good.”
“Exactly,” she said, glad he understood. “It’s fortunate that so many people carry anti-magic charms. While they won’t stop a powerful and determined wizard, running into the shield produced by a charm is a reminder that one is going too far.”
“At which point, ethical wizards like you withdraw.” The circles he made on her stomach transformed into longer strokes over her belly. “How many wizards are ethical?”
“The stronger one’s magic, the more likely one is to be ethical. The most powerful spells require discipline, and the consequences of misbehavior become greater.” She moved into his caressing hand like a cat. “The most dangerous wizards are the charlatans with only a trace of talent and no scruples. They give us all a bad name.”
“I’m losing interest in the subject of wizards,” he murmured. “And thinking how wise we were to feel we’d be too tired to travel the morning after the ball.”
The Marriage Spell Page 25