A Kind of Magic (31 page)

“You told me what decision I should make.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s your choice—as laird of the Murrays—to decide whether the clan goes to war or not. I told you the logical thing to do. The logical thing is to stay home and take care of your people.”

“Stay home with you, you mean?”

Maddie had no idea why he looked and sounded so dangerous, why his closeness was suddenly threatening. She wouldn’t be bullied. “Yes. Please don’t get involved with the lord of the Isles’ mad scheming.”

Behind them, she heard the door close as Allen left them to deal with their problems in privacy. It didn’t help when a brief look of exasperation crossed Rowan’s face when Allen exited. Then he looked accusingly at her.

“He left because of you.”

“Maybe he left because he saw that we have things to settle.”

“He’s attracted to you,” Rowan replied. “That makes him vulnerable.”

Maddie laughed. It held hysteria and was hard to stop. “Attracted to me? No way.”

Rowan nodded at her shocked protest. “Allen wants you. I can see it.”

“Well I certainly can’t.”

“It’s true and he has na the strength not to give in to a woman’s whims.”

“Whims? I don’t do whims. I am the least whimsical person you are ever going to meet. In fact,” she went on, “you are the person who’s having the problem with an excess of whimsy, not me.”

“I?”

“You.”

He glowered. She was used to it. She’d come to find it endearing. She certainly didn’t find it intimidating. She reached out, shoved hard against his chest. She pushed hard enough for him to stumble backward to sit on the bed. Maddie took the opportunity to loom over him.

“I’m not sure what a fairy princess looks like.” She spread her arms and slowly turned all the way around. “This isn’t it. I’m a flesh and blood woman, Rowan Murray.”

He looked her up and down. “Aye. So you are.”

“I’m not beautiful.”

“I’d argue with that.”

“Thank you, but I know I’m not. I’m not ugly either. When we make love, I know I’m not ugly or unlovable. You’ve taught me that what I’ve got is a perfectly serviceable, acceptable variation of the female form. It’s not hardware that’s important.”

She touched a finger to her temple. “You’ve taught me that once a woman—this 175

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woman—figures out how to work the pre-loaded software for sex, the actual operation is the most wonderful thing in the world. You’re the perfect partner for me, Rowan Murray, and I love you.”
Even if you don’t love me
, she added to herself.

Rowan’s eyes lit then he smiled, but the hard mask shut down over his features once more. “Making love to you is a joy,” he admitted.

“Making a life with me would be better.”

There was a significant silence after she spoke. She waited, tense as a bowstring for his answer. She almost felt the slow seconds passing, like sand flowing over her tender flesh.

After a long time, he said quietly, “What more life can I give you?”

“You could love me.” There, she’d said it. She almost wished she hadn’t. The subject was so touchy she very nearly ran from the room after bringing it up, even though love was at the center of this confrontation she had forced.

Rowan didn’t look as though he’d heard her or at least not the desperation she was feeling. He was as still as a man-shaped granite boulder on the bed, his face half in shadows, his eyes giving nothing away. “You’re my wife, you are the lady of Cape Wrath,” he told her.

“For a year and a day,” she snarled. “Then what? You’ll trade me in for some other woman the White Lady tells you to look for on the side of the road?”

“I will continue to protect you,” he answered.

“For the sake of my helping your clan.”

“You are a part of the clan. And handfasted or wed by a priest, I honor you above all other women, I protect you with my body and sword, I hope to have a child with you. That is our life.”

She was snarling at him and she hated the calm way he answered. His words were gallant but they didn’t match anything she’d experienced lately. “I’m not your partner anywhere but in that bed. I don’t think even your stupid White Lady meant for us to just screw around together.”

“A wife’s duty is to serve her husband.”

“And a husband’s duty is to serve his wife. All you care about is serving your damned clan!”

“That’s not all I care about.”

“If that’s true, why don’t you show it?”

“I canna.”

“What are you afraid of?”

His hands rested on his thighs, clenched into white-knuckled fists. “It is not you I fear.” Then he went pale and added hastily as if he’d just made a major slip, “I fear nothing and no one.”

“You fear for your people,” she countered.

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He gave a grudging nod. “Aye. It is right that I have concern for my clan.”

“They’re my family now too.” Suddenly she found tears blurring her vision. Her voice nearly choked with pain as she went on. “I’ve lost my world, Rowan—a world you haven’t asked me about since we came back to Cape Wrath. For a while I thought you cared enough to get to know me, to find out the things that are important to me. I see now that I was wrong.”

“I fight battles everyday with my people to help you put a bit of your world into ours,” he protested. “You’re building the things that are important to you.”

She shook her head and fought back sobs so she could get out words. Her voice still shook when she spoke. “I’m building things because I’ve bought into this prophecy about saving your clan—and I don’t even believe in prophecies. I don’t even know what the prophecy I don’t believe in meant. And I don’t have anything better to do,” she added as she dashed tears away. “I’m lonely, Rowan. I’m sick for a home and I have to do something to occupy my thoughts or go crazy.”

“You love what you do. I’ve seen the pleasure it gives you to work like a man.”

“Hold it!” The words came out close to a scream. She pointed furiously at him.

“How is it that in front of your jock friends what I do is ‘woman’s work’ but in here it’s

‘man’s work’? Never mind,” she said before he could answer. “I came here to point out to you that I am not your stepmother. You are not your father.”

Rowan’s eyes glittered with cold anger. It was as though all the light in the room was suddenly concentrated in his gaze. Maddie couldn’t have looked away if she’d wanted to. “I know I am not my father.”

“Do you?”

“I will not let myself become like him.”

“Rosemary says he was a good man.”

Rowan’s gaze slid away from hers. His tense shoulders slumped a bit. “He was a good man. He was a fool as well.”

“From the way Rosemary tells it, he got in over his head with the wrong woman.”

Rosemary had told of fairy enchantment and spells, and all the other stage dressing the natives used to embellish the world around them. Maddie had still managed to weed out the relevant points in the narrative.

“He fell into the trap of being in love,” Rowan said, “and nothing could save him.”

Rowan looked grim and unforgiving and his voice held an undertone of long suppressed fury.

His pain ripped at her heart but she couldn’t give in to the fierce stab of sympathy.

“You think love is a trap?”

He looked at her and she saw the sorrow that shone deep in his eyes beneath the stalwart determination. “I’m sorry to say it to you, lass, for you deserve a man stronger than me. For men of my line, love is indeed a trap. I dare not fall into it, even for your sake.”

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“Then that night we spent together at the White Lady’s was a dream.”

“It was no dream.”

“It must have been. Because I dreamed you told me that love was about trust. I had to have dreamed it all—because you don’t trust me or yourself or even the idea that love can exist.”

Rowan slowly got to his feet. When he would have come to her, Maddie backed toward the door. She didn’t want him touching her just now. Even as angry and hurt as she was, she feared that Rowan’s touch would make her forget everything but how much she cared for him. She wasn’t unaware of the irony that Rowan felt that way all the time but he took the concept so overboard she feared she could ever reach him.

She couldn’t give up trying though. “I’m a mortal woman, you’re a mortal man.

Right?”

He nodded. “That we are.”

“I’m not some ethereal little thing who’d rather drag you off on picnics and dancing in the moonlight. I’m more likely to force you help me build that methane converter than I am to do whatever it is fairies do when they’re in love with mortal men. I’m not your stepmother,” she repeated adamantly.

“But I am too much like my father.”

“Oh for God’s sake!” She wanted to beat down the walls he’d put around his heart with her bare hands. She did snatch up a candlestick and throw it at him.

“Aye,” he responded as he ducked. “I pray to God every day for the strength my father lacked. I’ll not abandon my people.”

“Who’s asking you to?” Maddie brightened at a sudden idea. “Maybe the White Lady thought you were the savior of your people and all you needed was the right woman to loosen you up?”

He almost smiled. “If I loosen up, Maddie, I’ll fall apart.”

She was ready to pound her fists against something in frustration. Preferably Rowan. She thought it was a monument to
her
restraint that she didn’t. Actually, there was nothing immediately handy to throw.

“I’m a lot like my father too,” she told him. “He was an army sergeant before he came back to take over the family ranch. There’s a military joke, a non-com’s joke.

Whenever somebody’d call my father ‘sir’, he’d say, ‘Don’t call me that, I work for a living’. That’s how I am. Whatever else you think I might be, I work for a living. I like working for a living. I’m used to working around some of the toughest men in the world in howling storms and other conditions that makes the life at Cape Wrath seem almost comfortable by comparison.”

She didn’t know why she was telling him this, except that he looked interested, interested in her for the first time since that night at the White Lady’s. She wanted desperately for him to be interested in her the way she was interested in everything about him.

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“And what is it you’re trying to tell me with this tale, lass?”

“That I’m not the sort of woman you’re afraid of. That I wouldn’t let you become the sort of man you’re afraid of being.”

“You can not stop me from following his path.”

“You’re the only one who can do that,” she agreed. “
We
can love each other without spending our entire lives locked in some kind of self-involved, selfish, passionate sex-induced haze. Rowan, I love you, but I don’t spend twenty-four hours a day thinking about you—at least not consciously. You’re always on my mind, I’m always aware of you. You’ve seeped into my bones and blood and thoughts, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to run off and have my way with you when I’m in the middle of an important project.” She put a hand to her throat. “I can restrain my excess of passion for your manly touch for a few hours out of every day, you know.”

“Can you, indeed?”

She shrugged. “Mostly.”

He smirked. She wasn’t used to Rowan Murray smirking. She liked it. It disappeared all too quickly. Maddie wanted desperately to bring it back even as Rowan’s features settled once more into hard-held control. She wanted to run to him, to throw her arms around him, press her body to his and kiss him until they were both consumed with need. He never looked so stern when they were making love but this wasn’t about making love, it was about making a life. She stayed where she was despite strong temptation to do otherwise.

He had to come to her. He had to prove he wanted a wife not just a lover. It didn’t look as if he were planning on moving any time in the near future. He was probably just waiting for her to get out so Allen could come back and they could get on with their little talk.

He probably hadn’t listened to a word she said. His mind was on going off to make war with the lord of the Isles. His mind was always anywhere but on them. She wasn’t so selfish that she wanted him to think of nothing but her or them, but right now she needed some proof that
they
even existed.

It was time to play hardball for the sake of what they could have. She’d tried waiting for him to show her the man she’d come to love when they were away from Cape Wrath. She couldn’t wait any longer. She took a long, deep breath in a vain attempt to steady her nerves while all too aware of his watching her out of those cool, calm, ice pale eyes.

“This is the deal,” she said looking straight into his icy gaze. “Discussion, such as it’s been, is over. I’m going to turn around and walk out of here. Whether or not I ever come back into this room is entirely up to you.”

She was hurt, disappointed—heartbroken—when he didn’t leap to stop her or even say a word to call her back. She wasn’t surprised.

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There was no doubt in Rowan’s mind that he was a fool. The question wasn’t so much whether he was one but whether if he was right or wrong to be one. He knew that Maddie was the most wonderful woman in the world and that he was a dolt and a villain for hurting her.

He was barely able to stay still long enough for the door to close behind his sad, disappointed wife. He was up and after her in an instant but he stopped at the door.

Duty—no, fear of his own nature—kept him from following the impulse to chase after her. Every fiber of his being told him he was making a horrible mistake but the discipline of control held. It was shaky, he was literally shaking with the pent-up emotions but he forced his body and heart to obey his will.

“This is driving me mad. Damn you, Father! Damn me for being your son!”

Rowan wanted to howl, to rage, to break every piece of furniture and crockery and anything else he could get his hands on in the room. Instead he let out some of his rage as he banged both fists against the unyielding wood hard enough to raise bruises on his already roughened hands.