A Kind of Magic (21 page)

She didn’t realize she was trembling until Rowan’s hands began to move on her shoulders. His presence had been so welcome, so comforting, she’d almost forgotten he was there. An hour ago she might have stepped away, now she leaned back against him and let her body accept the sheer animal solace in another body’s warm touch. He stood solid as a wall at her back, serious, certain of who and what he was. Rowan Murray knew where he belonged. He knew what he believed. What was right. What was wrong. Who his friends were—who were his enemies. For him it was all so simple, easy, a world tied up in a plaid ribbon in a time when the sun revolved around the Earth and people really cared how many angels danced on the heads of pins.

And believed in fairies.

“Let us not forget the fairies,” she murmured.

“I wish we could,” he answered. “The world would be better off without them.”

He really, really believed. And if the White Lady was right, she had better believe too, if she wanted to get the necklace off and live through it. And why was it she didn’t have as much trouble dealing with the White Lady’s mumbo jumbo as she did when Rowan went on about it?

“You have to trust that magic is real,” Rowan said before she could think any more about the wisewoman.

“And how am I supposed to do that?”

“And why are you such a skeptic? Can you not
feel
the truth of it in your very bones and blood?”

What she was feeling in her bones and blood was the presence of Rowan Murray as his thumbs made slow circles over her shoulder blades. It was melting one and firing the other, though she tried very hard to ignore the physical sensations that tempted her away from clear thought—or any thought at all for that matter.

It wasn’t time for letting physical reaction rule, not just yet. “Belief. Trust.” She said two of the three things that needed to get settled out loud.

“Love,” Rowan said, contributing the third.

“Let’s start with the other two, shall we?”

“Aye.”

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A Kind of Magic

She felt the tightly controlled pain in that one small word. Though she didn’t know if he was afraid of rejection or simply as reluctant to explore that mare’s nest of conflicting emotions as she was.

“You’re a stubborn one, wife,” he went on after a long silence.

A smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “You sound almost proud of my stubbornness.”

He laughed, a soft, breathy chortle. They were standing so close that she felt as much as heard the sound as his chest vibrated against her back. “At least you’re consistent about it. You’ve a steadiness about you that I like fine, wife, even if what you believe is dead wrong.”

“Thank you very much for that backhanded compliment—husband.”

He put an arm around her waist. “It’s good to hear you acknowledge the fact.”

She didn’t recall ever denying it, though she supposed she didn’t even begin to live up to his standards for wifely behavior. All she could manage in the way of a reply was a soft, sad, sigh.

“I like you fine, Maddie,” he whispered in her ear, as though he wanted no one else in the world to know. “Though too stubborn and hardheaded for your own good you be.”

She wasn’t certain of his grammar but the hint of affection in his voice was inordinately pleasing. He pulled her closer, making her all too aware of the solid muscles of his thighs and how neatly her softer curves fit against that rock-solid masculine hardness.

“You’re making it very difficult to think, Rowan Murray.”
And to breathe
, she added to herself.

His answering chuckle was deep and dirty. It made her laugh and blush and want to turn around and fit her body against his in an even more intimate way than they were already joined.

This was all very interesting but it wasn’t getting anything accomplished.

Maddie took a deep breath and made herself move away from Rowan. She turned to face him. She touched the entwined gold and copper chains on her throat. “I’m willing to admit that this thing is eventually going to kill me. I want it off. Now,
I
think that there is some property in the metals that sets up an electrical charge. For some as yet unexplained reason, the longer the metals are in contact with each other and some other element, possibly body heat, the more powerful the charge becomes.”

“And I say it’s magic.”

She held her hands up and said matter-of-factly, “Then we’re in agreement.”

His brows came down over his ice blue eyes. “I thought all those words were your way of denying the truth of it.”

123

Susan Sizemore

Maddie sucked in a long breath between her teeth. “No,” she told him. “All those words are a just a different way of explaining reality. I look at it as science, you see magic. Maybe we’re both right.”

“And how can that be, lass?”

She grinned at him. “Because I just remembered something I read once. I think it’s attributed to Arthur C. Clarke, who is Scottish, I believe. Anyway, it goes something like,
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
.” She touched the necklace again. “This thing might as well be magic for all the sense I can make out of how it works. So,” she went on firmly as Rowan frowned in confusion, “I declare that I believe in magic.” Once she’d said the words she felt as if a weight had been lifted from her. She smiled. “That wasn’t so bad.” When none of her former college professors appeared out of thin air to swat her on the back of the head for spouting such heresy, she even managed to laugh. She grabbed Rowan’s hands. “Magic. Why not?”

“Why not indeed?” he answered. He matched her smile with one of his own and drew her to him.

“Now, I’m not going to go overboard on this or anything,” she hastily told him, babbling to try to ignore the sudden rush of her heartbeat. “Not going to admit to alien abductions or the Bermuda Triangle or anything like that. I’m just going to acknowledge a few specific instances where it’s possible—okay, definite—that some sort of magical field energy is in operation in my life. Time traveling and lethal jewelry are as much as I am willing to declare magical at this time.”

Rowan’s eyes were full of merriment as he drew her even closer. His arms came around her. “You talk too much, lass.”

Maddie found that she couldn’t look away from his gaze, even as the expression in his eyes turned from amusement to something far more intense. A shiver ran through her, leaving a hot ache in its wake. She licked her lips. “I know.”

He ran one hand up her back until his fingers tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck. Warm sensation spread out from the line his fingers traced. He used his hold to gently draw her head back. “Hush,” he said, and kissed her.

It not only effectively silenced her, it took her breath away. The pressure of his lips against hers was insistent and she answered it with an eagerness that surprised her. Her lips parted and it was her tongue that sought the warm intimacy of his mouth.

Her reaction surprised him. Rowan drew back his head, eyes bright with both teasing and desire. “Can it be that you want me, lass?”

“Could be,” she answered, though it took her a moment to get breath enough to speak. She wanted to recapture the pure, glorious, delightfully uninhibited sensations they’d shared by the lakeshore before the pain came between them. She looked deep into his eyes while the words came up unbidden by her soul. “I want you, Rowan.”

I’ve wanted you all my life
, she thought. She didn’t know why or how but it was true.

The reason she’d been so alone in her own time was because Rowan had not been there.

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A Kind of Magic

He searched her face. “Do you trust me then? For I think you have little trust in the kindness of men.”

Sudden tears filled her eyes while her throat constricted with pain. “Not men. It’s me.” She wanted to draw the words back as she said them but instead more spilled out.

“I’ve always wondered why would any man want me.”
Until now,
she thought.
Until
you.
She found that her hands were resting on his chest, tightly balled into fists. She was shaking, her vision awash in tears. “What is the matter with me?” She was as confused as she was in pain. “Even you don’t want me for me but for the help I can give your people.”

A moment ago she’d been tingling with desire, now she felt as if she were a heartbeat away from falling into a thousand fractured pieces. This Humpty Dumpty feeling frightened her out of her wits. So much so that she found herself clinging to Rowan as though he were a rock on the very edge of the world and without him she’d be lost. Hadn’t she been the most self-sufficient person in the world not that long ago?

And hadn’t the world ignored her as she went her own way? Or was it that she went her own way because the world ignored her? And what did it matter since she wasn’t in her own world anymore anyway? She was in Rowan’s world. All she wanted was to be with him, even if—

“I want you for you, lass.” His voice was a soft, gentle whisper. “I always have.”

He sounded surprised by what he’d said himself.

It certainly surprised her. She was afraid to believe him. It meant too much to her. It frightened her to have gone almost instantly from self-sufficiently comfortable with her lonely existence to being so in need of love. Of companionship. Of intimacy. Not with just anyone but this one specific, stubborn, difficult, dour Highlander.

“Trust,” he told her. “That what I tell you is true.”

“I don’t know what trust has to do with anything,” she said with her head tucked in the crook of his arm.

He barely heard her for the way her words were muffled by his saffron shirt. He pushed her head up and made her look at him. “Ye’ve got to trust in yourself, lass.

Trust that you’re woman enough for a man to want you, for you are.”

She blinked and tears spilled. Maddie crying was a thing it broke his heart to see. “I am?”

He ran his thumb gently across her lower lip. He kept himself from brushing the tears away for it was not right to acknowledge such momentary weakness in a woman who needed to learn her own strength. “Are you not?” he questioned in reply. “Do I not hunger for you every moment of the day?”

“Me?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

He pulled her closer so that their bodies fitted together, man to woman. “Can you not feel the heat of me? The swelling hardness that wants to rest no place but within you?”

125

Susan Sizemore

A deep red blush darkened the fair skin of her face and throat. Her breath quickened and a dazed expression widened her eyes. “Uh…yeah. I…feel…you.”

He rocked his hips against her, subtly, suggestively. It nearly drove him mad to have so many layers of clothing between what his words conjured and his body craved.

He wanted to do, not talk, but words were what his Maddie needed now. Words were what she would have.

His Maddie.

The realization struck him hard. It had been rocking him with both fear and wonder since nearly losing her to the fair folk hours before. Awareness of her rushed through his blood and being. His. His. His. This woman like no one he’d ever wanted had insinuated herself into his heart and his life through no fault of her own and there he wanted her to stay. It made his grip on her shift to sudden harshness. It made his mouth come down on hers with a fiercer hunger than he’d ever known.

They were both panting by the time he lifted his lips from hers. She was wild-eyed, but not all of it was fear. “I want you.” The words rasped out of him as he fought hard for control. “Waking and sleeping. In my dreams I touch you, though in the daylight I keep my hands away.”

His hands were on her now and he intended for them to stay on her until he’d touched his fill, until he’d taken his fill. He would learn every secret place on her soft, sweet body and mark it as his own. He ran his hands up and down her back and cupped her buttocks. She was taut muscle under lush softness, solidly made and a fine size for bearing bairns. And bairns he wanted from her and the joy that came from making them. He wanted that joy first and many, many times before he heard the first strong wail of his son.

“Trust me to make love to you,” he pleaded with her. “Trust that you’re woman enough to make a man mad with wanting you, for you are. Trust that there—”

She kissed him before he could say another word—kissed him so hard that she very nearly broke his nose when she pulled his face next to hers and planted her mouth over his. Rowan didn’t mind the pain one little bit for he was instantly caught up in the intensity of the moment.

Okay,
Maddie thought as their lips touched and tongues met and surged together.
If
I’m going to do this sex thing, I’m going to do it. Right now. Before I lose my nerve. Before I—

He cupped her buttocks with one hand, ground his hips against hers and Maddie completely lost her train of thought. She had never been sure how this making love thing was supposed to work but she suddenly felt absolutely no need for an instruction manual. It all just sort of came naturally. As it had back at the lake. At least some basic urges seemed to take over as Rowan
did
things and she responded and everything between them was hot and tingling and urgent. Things spun out of control so fast Maddie didn’t have time to be awkward or shy or scared. She just went with the moment and forgot all about being analytical or even being coherent for that matter.

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A Kind of Magic

She barely noticed when his hands tangled in the hair at the nape of her neck. His fingers stroked her neck, moved whisper softly against her skin. It sent a shiver through her, sent a sigh from her mouth to his as they kissed. She was too caught up in the ascending spiral of pleasure to pay much attention when the necklace slipped off and fell to the floor.

She had no objections when Rowan picked her up and took her the few steps to the nearby bed. She wasn’t going to object to anything but the absence of his touch and that didn’t seem likely to happen. Her arms twined around his neck as he lay her on the bed.