Darknight (The Witches of Cleopatra Hill Book 2) (18 page)

“Well,” I said, attempting to sound casual, “I guess the best we can hope for is that Damon will hook up with some fourth or fifth cousin who’s willing to be queen for a day.” Again I thought of the young woman I’d seen with Damon at the potluck, and wondered if that was exactly what he had planned. “If he has a son, then you’re safely out of it.”

“Not exactly. I’m still of Jeremiah’s line.”

Crap. Trying to untangle all this was like trying to unwind all the fine chains at the bottom of my jewelry box — no matter what you did, you found another knot to slow you down. “But it would get him off your back a little, wouldn’t it? At least if he had an heir, he wouldn’t care so much whether you did or not.”

“Probably. But it’s sort of awful to wish for someone else to suffer that kind of fate, isn’t it?”

I knew that, of course. Even so, I replied, “I did say ‘willing,’ you know.”

“Yeah, you did. I just don’t want to think about it right now.” He kissed the top of my head, then let go of me and stepped away. “For now I just want to think about getting some food inside me. And coffee. That must be why my brain still feels so fuzzy.”

A good excuse, but I guessed his real reason was that he didn’t want to discuss the subject anymore. I couldn’t blame him; it was almost New Year’s. A fresh start, and not the sort of day that we needed to drag a bunch of baggage into. Whatever the true solution to the situation might turn out to be, I didn’t think we were going to discover it today.

So I followed him downstairs, and hoped I could push everything aside and just enjoy my time with him and my friends. At least we’d already made plans that would fill it up pretty well — a movie after lunch, then come home to change and have Syd and Anthony meet us after that. We’d probably share a bottle of wine here first, have some cheese, that sort of thing, and go out to eat afterward. Things should be busy enough that I wouldn’t have any time to worry about Damon Wilcox or the curse that hung over his family like the proverbial sword of Damocles.

That was the plan, anyway.

S
ydney and Anthony
were late coming over — “it took us more time than we thought to get settled,” she told me breathlessly over the phone, which I thought was probably Syd-speak for
we decided to test out the hotel bed first.
No matter, since Connor had made our dinner reservations for eight-thirty. When my friends did finally appear, she looked more or less calm and composed, but I caught a faint pinkish blotch on her neck that I guessed was her attempt to cover up a fresh hickey. I tried not to smile; I’d resorted to the same subterfuge on numerous occasions over the past week.

“Awesome belt,” she said, nodding as she gave my outfit the once-over.

Flagstaff was just as casual as Jerome, so something sparkly for New Year’s wasn’t really appropriate. I wore a black long-sleeved wrap T-shirt and some new skinny jeans tucked into my riding boots, along with the concho belt Connor had given me and some turquoise pieces I’d owned since high school. The ensemble had met his approval as well — he said my butt looked very “grabbable” — but I wasn’t going to repeat that particular comment to Sydney.

“Thanks,” I replied. “Connor gave it to me for my birthday.”

Her eyes widened. Sydney had a pretty good idea of the market value of things, and I could practically see her adding up the numbers in her head as she gave the belt another once-over while Anthony went with Connor into the kitchen. Another approving nod, and she mouthed
keeper
at me even as the guys came into the living room with the wine and some glasses.

Anthony had brought a bottle from the tasting room where he worked, and so the conversation just sort of naturally drifted to wine and winemaking and all the opportunities opening up in the Verde Valley. Things were booming, according to him, and he was hoping to hit the ground running once he was done with getting his viticulture certification in June.

“Well,” Connor said easily, swirling the wine in his glass in a contemplative way, “if you hear about any good opportunities for investment — land opening up, someone with some vines who wants to sell their property — let me know. Maybe we could work something out. I don’t know much about wine growing, but I always thought it would be an interesting business to be in. And if I had an expert running things….”

Anthony didn’t need any more of an opening than that. “I’ll definitely keep my eyes open. More property changes hands than you might think. People dream about owning a vineyard but don’t realize how much work it actually takes. But if you’re serious — ”

“I am,” Connor said.

I raised an eyebrow at him, and he just gave me a half-smile. This was the first I’d heard of any ambitions in that direction. Then again, Connor did like and appreciate wine, and knew a good deal about it. And Goddess knows that he didn’t seem to be lacking for cash. Maybe he thought that now the Verde Valley wasn’t completely off-limits to him, he could pursue something he hadn’t had a chance to before. I certainly wasn’t going to protest. Owning a winery sounded like a pretty great idea to me.

Besides, any indication of long-range planning for the future meant there was hope, that maybe we’d find a way through our current mess and have an actual life together.

Sydney had been uncharacteristically quiet during most of this conversation, but after we were done with the wine and were bundling up to head out to dinner, she whispered, “What, is Connor
rich
, too?”

I nodded, winding a scarf around my throat.

“Some people have all the luck,” she muttered, and finished buttoning up her coat.

If you only knew,
I thought. Not that I didn’t love being with Connor. I did — I loved both him and being with him, which was not always easy to pull off, no matter what the books and movies might have to say on the subject. But I wouldn’t wish our particular baggage on anyone, let alone my best friend. I’d rather Connor were poor and curse-free than rolling in cash. From what I could tell, their wealth hadn’t made the Wilcoxes particularly happy.

I pushed those thoughts out of my mind, though, as we headed outside and over to the next street where the restaurant was located. The sidewalks were already crowded with people, making the icy night feel warmer than it really should. It had warmed up for a day or two, just enough to melt a lot of the snow down in the city proper, but temperatures still dropped into the single digits overnight.

The restaurant was packed, but since we had reservations, we only had to wait about five minutes for a table to be ready. I looked around as we were seated, but I didn’t see anyone I recognized from the Wilcox holiday potluck. Not that that meant much; about the only two I could probably pick out of a lineup were Lucas and Marie, and while Lucas had seemed like the cheery sort who might brave downtown Flagstaff on New Year’s, I couldn’t say the same thing for Marie. Maybe the Wilcoxes had a New Year’s get-together of their own. If they did, I wasn’t sorry to be missing it.

After that, though, I tried not to think about Connor’s family, or what they might be doing at this particular moment. It was enough to peruse the menu, to discuss the options — the restaurant offered Spanish food, but with some southwestern touches — and talk about places we’d eaten and the sort of things we liked. Sedona was actually common ground for all four of us, since we’d all been there at various times, and we made a pact to meet there in the near future and brave the lines at Elote.

Dinner took a while because the restaurant was so crowded. It was almost ten by the time we headed back out, and it seemed as if even more people were flocking to the downtown area.

“They do realize we have almost two hours to go until midnight, right?” I inquired plaintively after someone almost ran over my foot with a stroller. Who the heck brings a stroller to a New Year’s Eve celebration anyway?

Connor looked as if he was trying hard not to laugh. “Actually, they do two pinecone drops — one at ten to match up with the ball drop in New York, and then another one at midnight our time. A lot of people with kids come to the ten o’clock one.”

“Then let’s get our asses into a bar,” Sydney remarked. “Because I don’t care about New York, but I do care about getting run over by soccer moms.”

He grinned and led us a couple of streets over to a dark little bar that definitely was twenty-one and over, and not a stroller in sight. Neither were any empty seats in evidence, but we squeezed in at one end of the bar and ordered another bottle of wine. It wasn’t exactly a wine sort of place, but they scrounged up some merlot for us.

“Don’t say it,” Anthony warned Sydney as her eyes started to dance.

“Say what?” she said innocently.

“‘I’m not drinking any fucking merlot!’” he and I announced in unison, and Connor burst out laughing.

“They obviously know you too well.”

She looked like she wanted to pout, but as she was already a little tipsy, she couldn’t quite muster the energy to make it look convincing. Instead, she shook her head and said, “Fine. At this point, it probably doesn’t matter all that much.”

Which it didn’t. We drank and talked and laughed, and eventually it was getting close enough to midnight that we decided we’d better close out our tab and head over to the Weatherford. It seemed as if just about everyone else in downtown Flagstaff had the same idea, so we had to sort of push our way through the crowd to get close enough to see what was going on. Luckily, both Connor and Anthony were tall, so they walked ahead of Sydney and me until they reached a good spot. Then we settled in ahead of them, letting them provide a kind of barrier behind us.

The pinecone was lit up, glittering as it hung from a crossbar beneath the hotel’s roof. Although the night was very clear, it almost looked as if a sort of mist had settled over the intersection with all the breath puffing upward from everyone into the frigid air.

“Five minutes to go,” Connor whispered in my ear.

For some reason, I shivered. Not from the cold — I’d bundled up pretty well — but because I couldn’t ignore the importance of this night, this moment. Being together on New Year’s meant we were looking forward to the coming months, that we were making a commitment to some sort of future together, even if right now we didn’t know exactly what that future might be.

Beside me, Sydney looked flushed and happy, and I wondered if she were having thoughts along the same lines. Sure, she’d spent New Year’s with guys she was dating, since she was not the type to sit home alone on the biggest party night of the year, but being here with Anthony had to mean something different. She’d never dated anyone this long before, and certainly wasn’t showing any signs of wanting to end things.

“One minute!” someone called out using a megaphone.

The crowd stilled somewhat, everyone preparing for the big moment.

“Thirty seconds!”

I felt Connor’s gloved hand take mine, fingers entwining. Warmth went through me at his touch, and suddenly I wasn’t cold at all.

“Ten, nine, eight…”

Now everyone was chanting the numbers, counting down.

“Three, two, one,” I said aloud with everyone else.

“Happy New Year!” we all cried, and Connor was turning me around and kissing me, and I caught a glimpse of Syd and Anthony hugging and kissing each other as well. Then people began singing “Auld Lang Syne,” Connor, too, and I was surprised to hear what a nice baritone he had.

Tears stung my eyes, but they weren’t sad tears. No, I was just happy to be here, happy to be with him, no matter what might happen next. My Aunt Rachel used to shake her head over the fuss about New Year’s, saying it was the solstice and Yule that were truly important, that New Year’s was just an arbitrary date, but I had to disagree with her on that. It did mean something. It was a new beginning of its own, a way to mark a transition from one period in your life to another.

I knew I was shifting from the Angela I had been, the one who did everything that was expected of her, to someone more in control of her destiny. Not to say that control was complete, far from it, but I was still making my own decisions instead of allowing them to be made for me.

Goddess willing, I would make the right ones.

A
fter midnight
, we went up to Syd and Anthony’s room at the Weatherford for champagne. Well, it wasn’t precisely a room, more a suite on the top floor of the hotel, complete with sitting area and a tiny kitchen. No wonder they’d wanted to give the place a workout before coming to meet Connor and me. The bed definitely looked as if it had been made up hastily — no hospital corners there — but I decided not to mention it.

The champagne put the final alcoholic haze on the evening, and even Connor’s gait wasn’t completely steady as he led me back to the apartment afterward and more or less pushed me up the stairs.

“I’m fine,” I protested, flailing weakly at him.

“If by ‘fine’ you mean drunk, then yeah,” he replied with a grin. “But it’s okay. I’m pretty wasted myself. This is why it’s great we didn’t have to drive.”

“Definitely,” I said.

By then we were inside. He shut the door and started to pull me toward the stairs.

“No,” I said. “I want to do it down here. On the rug in front of the fireplace. I don’t even care if it’s scratchy.”

“The fireplace?”

“The rug, silly.”

He shook his head but offered no argument, only took me by the hand to the living room, then paused to get the fire going. While he did that, I unbuttoned my overcoat and unwrapped the scarf from around my throat, and flung them on the sofa. My boots I pulled off and pushed out of the way under the coffee table.

I began to undo the buckle of my belt, but he came over and stopped me.

“No,” he murmured. “I want to undress you.”

Something in the quiet intensity of his gaze kept me from making a flippant remark, made me stand silent as he undid the buckle and then the button and zipper of my jeans beneath. He drew them down slowly, being careful to leave my underwear in place. I’d hoped the evening would conclude this way, so I’d put on a new pair I’d just bought, emerald green satin with black lace trim, and a bra to match. As he pushed up my top, he caught sight of the bra, and sucked in a breath.

“When did you get that?”

“The other day, when we went to the mall. You had to use the bathroom, so I sneaked into Victoria’s Secret since it was only two shops down from the restrooms.”

“Resourceful,” he said, eyes gleaming.

“I try to be.”

No chance to talk after that, because he pulled off my top and dropped it on the floor, his mouth going to my neck and trailing hot, tickling kisses from throat to collarbone to the swell of my breast, just before he pushed the bra to one side, his mouth closing on my nipple.

I whimpered, and then we were sinking down to the rug, my hands eager on his belt buckle, wanting his jeans and underwear out of the way, wanting nothing more than bare flesh against bare flesh. The fire flickered and snapped in the background, but we didn’t need its warmth.

We had one another.

He was so ready for me, as ready as I was for him. I touched him, marveling at the rock-hard flesh under the silky skin. There had been times when we’d made love for hours, exploring one another’s bodies, stroking and licking and touching, but this wasn’t one of them. I wanted him in me, needed that joining more than anything else, as if by coming together in such a way we could sanctify the evening, seal the pact we had made to face the future together.

Although I said nothing, he seemed to understand what I wanted. His fingers found my core, stroked gently, and then he was pushing inside me, rocking with me as I wrapped my legs around him, driving him deeper, wanting him in the very center of my soul.

As always, we climaxed within a second of one another. Maybe it was because of the consort bond, or something else, something even more primal. All that mattered was the shivering heat, the explosion, the wordless convulsion as Connor and Angela disappeared for that single endless second, becoming something else.

Becoming one.

Afterward he carried me upstairs, tucked me gently in bed, then slipped in next to me, his warmth dispelling the chill from the icy sheets. I pushed up against him, cradling my head on his chest, and fell asleep that way, secure in his strength, secure in his love.

In that moment, it was enough.

A
s if the
world truly had turned a page after New Year’s, the days seemed to pass more quickly than ever. Soon enough, the university was back in session, and we had no further contact from Damon. After a week went by, and then another, I began to believe that he truly must have abandoned his schemes, had resigned himself to the idea that the McAllister
prima
would never allow him to use her powers for his own ends. And since Connor had gotten confirmation through the family grapevine that Damon was making overtures to Jessica Lowe, the young woman from the potluck, I figured I was safe. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for her, but if she was a Wilcox, then she knew what she was getting into.

My feeling of relief only increased when I got my monthly visitor a few days after New Year’s. Not that getting my period was that much fun, but at least it meant the charm was working, meant that I didn’t have to worry about the curse descending on me. Well, the Wilcox curse anyway.

Connor asked if I would like to get back to making my jewelry, and offered one of the upstairs bedrooms in the apartment next door for me to use as my studio. That sounded like an excellent idea — after thinking it over for a while, I’d decided to withdraw from my online coursework for a while, and I couldn’t just sit around and watch TV all day. Connor ordered some furniture and equipment for me, had the room painted almost the same cheerful turquoise as my old bedroom back at my aunt’s apartment.

The supplies, though, I had Sydney bring up. I didn’t want to face the Jerome contingent quite yet, and since my jewelry-making tools and loose stones and other items all fit easily into a few small boxes, she was all too happy to get everything together for me and drive up with Anthony on a Saturday when we could all go out on the town. She seemed to be getting quite a taste for Flagstaff nightlife. Not that I could really blame her. Maybe in the grand scheme of things Flagstaff wasn’t a big city, but compared to Cottonwood it was practically a metropolis.

All through this placid domesticity, though, I had this niggling sensation in the back of my mind, a feeling that things couldn’t go on like this indefinitely. I wasn’t sure why, because it seemed as if Connor and I were being left alone to live our lives. I tried to tell myself that it was silly, that my unease was probably due to guilt over not returning to Jerome and nothing more, but I couldn’t quite seem to convince myself of that. And as far as I knew, I had absolutely zero precognition, so it couldn’t be some hazy vision of the future trying to work its way into my mind.

Even so, I managed to shove the feeling away as January began to move into February. Imbolc, the ritual start of spring, came and went with little fanfare; the Wilcoxes didn’t follow the old calendar and holidays the same way the McAllisters did, save the major quarterly observances of the solstice and the equinox. But it was on Imbolc when the homesickness came over me the worst, thinking of how we would be calling on Blessed Brigid, celebrating her with fire and feast. In Flagstaff, February 2
^nd
was Groundhog Day, and that was about it.

But I pushed the melancholy aside, reminding myself that I was here with Connor, and that was the most important thing. As time passed, either my family would become reconciled to the relationship, or they wouldn’t. I couldn’t put my life on hold simply because they were too narrow-minded to understand that Connor was the only man I’d ever truly want or need.

A few days after Imbolc, he was just putting the finishing touches on the autumn aspen painting I’d first seen back in December, looking at it with narrowed eyes as he put a dab of color here, a touch of shadow there. I came downstairs from my own studio, fingers tired from wrapping thin copper wire around some new pieces of Kingman turquoise I’d acquired a few weeks earlier.

“So what are you going to do with that one?” I asked.

“Stack it up against a wall somewhere, I suppose,” he replied with a shrug. “Or maybe replace one of the paintings in the apartment. It would go pretty well over the fireplace, actually.”

Coming closer, I admired the sure, strong brush strokes, the way he’d managed to evoke the slanting quality of the autumn light. “Or you could, you know, put it in the gallery.”

His face went still. “You know I don’t sell my stuff.”

“Well, why not give it a try?”

“Because putting my art in the gallery just because it’s my gallery isn’t a good enough reason. It’s like…selling your kid’s finger-paintings or something.”

“Um, if I had a kid whose finger-painting was this good, I’d sure as hell be selling it.” I wanted to put my arms around him, if only to get that dead expression off his face, but since he was still holding a brush with wet paint on it, I decided that wasn’t such a good idea. “You’re selling my jewelry, aren’t you?”

“Well, that’s different. People really like it. That’s why I have you working your fingers to the bone, getting together enough stock for Valentine’s Day.”

That was true. Oh, I wanted to be working, and it was gratifying to see the way my pieces sold so quickly, but the pace at which I’d been churning out earrings and pendants and talismans was a lot more intense than back in Jerome, where the demand hadn’t been as high. “You are a slave driver,” I agreed with a smile. “And I also think you have a weirdly distorted idea of how people are going to receive your work. Why not put a couple in there, see what happens?”

His expression was still dubious. “I don’t know.”

“How the hell did you manage to get an MFA if you have so little confidence in your work?”

“I did, once. But….”

He let the words trail off, but I had a good idea what he meant. Yes, when he was surrounded by people who encouraged him, he felt good about his art. When he came back to Flagstaff, though, he was stomped on by Damon, who had some weird notion that being an artist wasn’t good enough for a Wilcox. Whatever. Damon seemed to be out of the picture for now, so I certainly didn’t care what he thought…and neither should Connor.

“Then this should be a real confidence booster. And if they don’t sell, if they sit neglected in a corner for more than a week, then I swear I’ll never bring it up again. Deal?”

For a minute he didn’t say anything, just stared at the painting, brows lowered. His fingers tightened around the brush he held. Then, slowly, “Deal. I’ll pick two or three and get them installed tomorrow. I needed to do some rearranging anyway, since one artist who was supposed to get me several pieces just emailed this morning and said she was running behind schedule. This can fill in the gap.”

“Good,” was all I said, but inwardly I was rejoicing. Maybe once he got some outside confirmation of how good he really was, he’d stop this nonsense about only painting for himself. Not that I wanted him to do anything that didn’t make him happy, but he was going to paint no matter what. It was a compulsion. He could go a few days without picking up a brush if he had to. However, he’d get moody if too much time passed without working on something. The gallery wasn’t so busy that he had to spend all day there, especially now the holidays were past, so most of the time he could paint four or five hours a day. We were going to end up drowning in canvases if he didn’t start selling some of them.

The next morning he took three of his paintings down to the gallery with him — one of a windswept tree on the Grand Canyon’s rim, one a rather brooding winter scene with a dark pine forest, patches of snow gleaming on the ground, and another that looked like it might be someplace in Sedona, maybe in Oak Creek Canyon, with autumn-hued trees hanging over a narrow stream and red rock canyons looming above.

“Don’t expect too much,” he told me. “Even pieces from in-demand artists can take a while to move. It’s not like buying a postcard or something.”

“I know that,” I replied. “I dropped about ten grand a few months ago on work for the Jerome house.”

His eyes widened a little. “So who’s the rich one around here?”

“We both are, I guess, which makes things nice and even. Just promise that you’re going to put a fair market price on these.”

“Oh, I was thinking maybe fifty bucks for the big one,” he began, and I swatted him on the arm.

“Don’t you dare!”

A flashing grin, and he bent down to kiss me before tucking the two smaller paintings under his left arm and picking up the remaining one, of Oak Creek Canyon, with his free hand.

“Can you get the door for me?” he asked.

I hurried over and opened it for him, then watched him go, smiling as I shut the door. Once I was alone, though, the smile faded. What if I was wrong? What if people didn’t respond to his paintings the same way I did? Being good was no guarantee of success.

Since it was a fairly quiet time of year, his assistant Joelle more or less ran the gallery, so he didn’t stay down there after he’d gotten the paintings installed. He came back up and started working on a new one, now that the aspen picture was drying. It was fascinating to watch his process at this stage, the way he arranged a bunch of photos of the scene he wanted to paint on a tack board to one side, then started sketching in the outlines of the projected painting on the canvas. More trees, these ones like flaming torches in a high alpine meadow.

I lingered to one side, watching him, wondering if he was going to tell me to leave, but he didn’t. Maybe he’d forgotten I was there. In a way I didn’t mind, because it gave me a chance to really study him, watch the fine profile outlined by the light pouring in through the big windows off to one side, the way his heavy dark hair kept falling forward as he worked and how he kept shoving it out of the way with an impatient hand. His hands were beautiful, too, lean and strong, the fingers long and sensitive. I recalled how those fingers felt, touching me, and a little sigh escaped my throat.

He turned then and looked at me. “This must be sort of dull for you.”