Uncertain Magic (14 page)

He answered her movement with a harder pressure. She saw the anger waver in his eyes, the intent go hot and unfocused. He gripped her shoulders and drew away and rammed again, filling her with short, deep thrusts. She whimpered under the pleasure-pain, closed her eyes and threw her head back, felt his breath harsh on her throat as he kissed her.

"Damn you," he rasped. "Damn you for a liar. Or an innocent babe."

Roddy did not understand. Her mind would not focus on words. The sentences made only a jumble of sound as he buried his face in her hair. She saw nothing but his shoulder, a glaze of sweat and firelight that moved as he did, with his weight and his drive that dragged her upward on sensation. "God help me," he groaned in her ear. "It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter now."

Nothing mattered to Roddy now. Nothing but him. Her breath was gone and her body was exploding. She clutched at him, at his arms and his back and his hips, frantic for something she could not name. She made a sound—a long, low, inhuman moan that rose from deep within her throat as he met her seeking. Her legs spread and her body rose, arching and straining to his surging thrust, until she cried out in fright and pleasure as the tremors racked her limbs.

Then she was in his arms, sobbing for air, cradled and kissed and covered with his scent and her own in mingled warmth. She collapsed back into the curve of his arm, limp and stunned and absurdly sleepy.

She raised her lashes to find him looking steadily down at her. There was cool speculation in his blue eyes, and for one terrible moment she thought he was still angry. Then his gaze drifted down to where her breasts still heaved quickly as she worked for air. He watched. After a long moment, she saw the taut line of his mouth relax.

"Good," he said, with his devil-smile. "You liked that."

Roddy tried to stop panting. She swallowed and took a deeper breath. His grin was infectious. She tilted her chin up and giggled.

Yes. Oh, yes. I liked it.

And she liked it still when he lay on his side, his arm around her, curving her body close into his. She liked the feel of his chest rising and falling against her back. She liked his hand moving over her skin, its rhythmic stroke a drowsy beat that seemed to guide her into sleep. His low voice barely reached her through the haze when he asked in a soft and oddly intent voice, "Do you ride your horses astride, little girl?"

It seemed a funny question, not at all what she would have thought he might want to know. "Only to… race," she mumbled, struggling to hold herself out of sleepy mists. "Don't tell…" She yawned, slurring the words. "Don't… tell m'mother."

"No." He pulled her a little closer into the warmth of his body. His breath stirred her hair as he added softly, "I wouldn't tell."

She relaxed against him. "Faelan," she whispered, half conscious and drifting. "Faelan. I love you."

His hand paused, but she was already sliding down the dark hill. In the fuzzy edge between sleep and waking, she dreamed that his mind was open to her, and thoughts echoed through and around and between them both.

I love you. I love you.

I love you, little girl.

The couturière thought slowly, in simple words, because she had to translate from French to awkward English before she spoke. Such concentration gave Roddy a headache. She let her mind go fuzzy as she stood amid pins and ribbons, which was a way to block not only the dressmaker's lumbering thoughts, but also the crush of humanity from the city outside. London was noise and emotion, a confusing babble. Roddy found her talent dulled, blunted by the countless thoughts and voices that jumbled together into the city's tumult.

Slowly, she was learning how to cope. How to relax and think of the chaos as something like the wind: a natural force, an elemental energy that would flow around and past her if she let it. But it sapped her strength to maintain the balance. All the other changes: new life, new place, new people; they all combined to wear her soul down to exhaustion. There was only one refuge in the tempest—Faelan—and she clung to him with desperate vigor.

He had given Madame Descartes strict instructions. The demure young ladies of the city were wearing shapeless, high-waisted gowns of luxurious fullness, made of yards of shirred material that puffed at the sleeves and below the bodice. It was an effect that Roddy was sure her mother would have approved.

The new Countess of Iveragh, however, was to dress with no such becoming modesty. The gowns that Madame had created for Roddy were at the forefront of fashion. Flimsy tubes of sheer muslin, low-cut necklines, and tiny sleeves evoked Mediterranean sunshine rather than the English winter. Her pastel-colored slippers were no more than shaped pieces of silk with ribbons that wound up around her calves, and the matching gloves did nothing to hide her body or warm her skin. When she walked down the cold marble stair to where Faelan waited in the lofty salon, she felt that the heat of her blush alone must raise the chill of the room ten degrees.

Madame fluttered after, trying to give an appearance of calm sophistication as she searched for words to explain Roddy's shortcomings.

"The hair," she said quickly, "the pretty blond, it will cut, yes? To be—to make the curl. Now—too long, you comprehend? Short you want. Curls. But the figure—" She grinned slyly at Faelan. "Very pretty, eh, monseigneur? Very straight. Perfect."

"Perfect," he agreed, and smiled at Roddy in a way that made her heart contract and her knees go liquid.

For a week she had gone about with such wobbly knees, and they were not all the result of long days in a traveling carriage. A hundred times a day he touched her, or smiled at her; a caress in passing, a kiss on the nape of her neck as she bent over a letter to her parents or strained to read by the light of a wavering candle.

And at night… oh, God, at night there was a whole world she had never known existed. He taught her; he made her body sing with pleasure. So now, when he asked her to dress in these scandalous fashions, she felt she could not refuse. She wanted badly to please him.

Turning in the clinging gown, she peeked uncertainly at him over her shoulder. "Do you like it, my lord?"

He glanced at the couturière, and the woman responded to the silent command without hesitation, gathering up the net she had been about to suggest for a veil and disappearing back up the stairs toward the bedroom.

After she was gone, Roddy waited nervously, searching for some sign of approval, all too aware that Madame Descartes had considered Roddy's coloring hopelessly unfashionable, with her slash of black brows against golden hair. Dark tight curls were the rage: dark hair and coolly classic features, not Roddy's strange combination of storm and sunlight. After trying seven different styles, Madame had thrown up her hands in frustration and sent Roddy for viewing in the gown she had on, having never before encountered a face that could not be complemented, a face too striking to be softened or improved by the dressmaker's art.

The moment of waiting dragged into a small eternity. Roddy stared at Faelan's boots in despair, certain that he must think she wasn't even suitable to be presented in public.

When the apprehension became unbearable, she hesitantly raised her eyes.

He was smiling at her, a slow, sensuous smile that might have meant anything. It made her breath stick in her throat. Beneath lowered lids his gaze traveled from her toes to her hair, lingering at her hips and breasts and mouth.

"A witch," he said. "My golden witch."

Roddy moistened her lips in dismay. "A
witch
, my lord? Madame Descartes did say I was… difficult, but I hoped—"

"Come," he interrupted and held out his hands. He looked down at her as she obeyed him, sliding his palms up both sides of her neck, caressing her chilled skin with warm fingers. "Don't let Madame trouble you."

She held his gaze, feeling his spell creep around and inside her. His fingers spread, his thumbs pressed upward under her jaw. The kiss was slow, heady, the way he had taught her. "In Ireland," he murmured, "they'll see you for what you are. One of the
Daoine Sidhe
."

She frowned in confusion. "Deena shi?" The strange syllables made an unfamiliar slur on her tongue.

"The fairy folk." His gaze wandered over her face. "The people who live between day and night, and drink the dew that's neither rain nor river nor spring nor sea." He caressed a lock of gilded hair. "The Shining Ones."

She looked up into his azure eyes, and thought that it must be he who, lived between dark and light, like a demon prince. "My lord—" she whispered. "Do I please you, then?"

"You're mine." The soft, certain words sent a shiver of wild music down her spine. He bent his head and brushed her mouth and cheek with his lips. "You're mine," he murmured against her skin. "And you please me."

London was empty this time of year, he told her, which made her want to giggle hysterically. Empty? The city nearly crushed her, a multitude of thoughts and feelings so enormous it had a kind of monolithic life of its own, surly and intense on days when the wind blew sleet and cold, and lighter-hearted, bubbling, on a sunny winter day like this—the first one on which she and Faelan had ventured forth from the house.

They walked, because after the jolting trip from Yorkshire Roddy was heartily tired of carriages, and in her light dress and cashmere shawl she preferred some exertion to keep her warm.

She could not avoid glancing back at the house as they strolled across the broad courtyard toward the iron gate. The dwelling was as rich as—far richer than—her expansive home in Yorkshire. A proud, princely house, with a double row of tall windows capped by elegant pediments. She counted the top row, and doubling that figure came to the impressive number of twenty-two windows on the front facade alone. Then there were the stables and the carriage house, set to either side of the square court, and behind it all the garden which she had seen from her bedroom window, stretching five times the length of the house to the next line of magnificent buildings beyond. Inside, there was no sign of reduced circumstances in the light and expensive French furniture or the intricate plasterwork upon the walls. She forced her gaze away from the mansion and found Faelan watching her.

"My mother's house," he said, in that tone he used sometimes, that seemed to Roddy ominous in its utter indifference. "You needn't fear that the rest of family is as destitute as I."

Roddy made no comment, but thought darkly that "the rest of the family" must enjoy a fine income, given the quantity of servants and the quality of the interior appointments and the fact that Banain House, as the majordomo had informed Roddy with pride, was kept open at all times, even though Her Ladyship traveled in great style ten months of the twelve.

A fine income, for the mother of a man who had stood within a hairsbreadth of losing his estate to debt and taxes.

Her Ladyship was traveling now; no one knew just where, or particularly cared. The generously paid servants functioned with the same efficiency under the majordomo whether the mistress was at home or not. They had their opinions on Faelan—unbounded respect for his authority and considerably less for his morals—and a sharp curiosity about his new bride. But they hid all that behind paper-board expressions, and treated Roddy with perfect solicitude.