Cates, Kimberly (16 page)

"Papa said she brought it with her from the land of the fairies when she fell in love with him."

Fairies again! Hadn't he heard enough nonsense about them since he'd been exiled to this infernal place? For an instant, Redmayne almost spoke his thoughts aloud. The people of this island were so certain the place was infested with them, it was a wonder any man could take a step outside his own door without treading on half a dozen of these fairy folk. But something stopped him. The vulnerability in every line of Rhiannon's face? The soft lilt of her voice? Or the way she looked at him, so trusting, so open.

"Every morning, Papa said, they spent an hour together, sipping tea. Mama would tell him tales about Tir naN Og, and the two of them would weave dreams about the future. Mama dreamed me then."

"Dreamed of having children, you mean? It was a logical enough assumption, I would think, after marriage."

"No. Mama knew that I would be born, a girl child. She knew everything about me. What my favorite doll would be, that I would know about healing herbs. That was why I was to be named Rhiannon—the goddess of healing, who either eased the wounded ones or, after death, guided them to paradise, leading them by the hand."

The words were piercing, uncomfortable, the name far too fitting for this woman who sat across from him. Absurd, though, to think that anyone, even a mother, could sense so much about a child before it was even born.

"Mama knew how much Papa would love me and I would love him. It comforted her, Papa said, though he didn't understand why. Only later did he realize that she knew they hadn't much time to be together. Before long, she would have to return to the fairy kingdom and leave us behind."

She was waiting for him to say something. Redmayne could sense it. But he was at a total loss.
No wonder your father lost your home. The man was obviously mad—
would hardly be appropriate. "Uh, I suppose she had some pressing fairy business to attend to. Whatever the blazes that might be," Redmayne began. Then he grimaced, something in Rhiannon's face demanding truth instead of wry humor. "Rhiannon, you don't really believe—"

"Sometimes I do. When I'm alone too long or the night is too dark, I want to believe. It's so much prettier than any of the other tales I could come up with as to why my mother left me behind."

Redmayne didn't expect her words to echo in his own most secret places, the sick clutching of betrayal, abandonment, searching every window, every face in every crowd, desperate to see someone familiar, someone who could scoop you into his arms, tell you it had all been a terrible mistake. Someone to answer the question
why....

She lowered the cup, strained the tea into it, careful, so careful not to fill it too close to the broken rim. But instead of sipping it herself, she held it out to him across the little table.

"What are you doing?" He eyed the bit of china as if it might explode. "The cup is yours. You need whatever you think the thing possesses."

"Whatever?" She smiled just a little, her lashes dipping over the sea green of her eyes. "Magic, you mean? Fairy magic? Something you don't believe in."

His throat felt raw, his nerves chafed. He forced a laugh. "I'm afraid I'd be drummed out of the army, my dear. I assure you I'll survive without drinking from your magic cup."

"Survive, yes. That is what you're best at, isn't it?" Why did she sound so sad? She peered down into the teacup, the jagged place reflected back at her, broken edges he knew she wanted to mend—in a bit of china or in a man. "Then why am I so certain that you need this right now, Lion? Even more than I do?"

She put the cup back into its saucer as tenderly as a mother might lay a cherished babe in its cradle.

"Rhiannon, the tale isn't true. You know that."

"It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. It's the believing that's important."

She turned and started to walk away. He should have let her go. He wanted her to go, didn't he? Until he could shore up the places inside him she'd managed to chip away at? But he caught her by the arm, drew her back. She turned toward him, and something thudded in his chest.

Dangerous. She was far too dangerous. The knowledge thrummed in his head. Panic tightened in his gut. Didn't she know he had to escape?

"You want to know what I believe in, Rhiannon?" he growled. "No sip from some enchanted cup. I need
this."

He meant the kiss to shake her to her core, frighten her enough so she'd back away from him. The taste of her—sweet compassion—had been perilous enough by the streambed. But now it was far more potent.

He could discern the faint taste of grief over the fox she'd set free. He could taste every sip of lemonade she'd comforted herself with as a child, deserted by her mother, blinded by fairy tales she must've suspected were not true.

He'd decimated the resistance of as many women as he had opposing forces. Once he'd chosen the best course, no force on earth could turn him back from it. But as his mouth melded with Rhiannon's, it wasn't persuasion, it wasn't even passion that drove him. Some emotion jagged-edged from disuse as the cup she'd tried to get him to drink from came drifting to the surface. His fingers threaded through the cinnamon silk of her hair, his thumbs against the babelike softness of her cheeks. His lips gentled, and for a moment, just a moment, he knew that emotion for what it was: tenderness.

A sharp stab of something akin to terror pierced his chest. He would have pulled away from her, except that her fingers had found his own face, stroking it with such ineffable wonder that he was stunned, unnerved, intoxicated.

No one had touched him this way since he'd lost the shadowy otherworld that was now as unreal to him as Rhiannon's fairyland. Images too hazy to be called memory—firelight, his father's deep voice spinning the tales of King Arthur. The loving stroke of the hand that had tended so many suffering patients smoothing across Lionel's own hair.

It was unthinkable to allow himself to be drawn closer to the cliff edge of remembering by such fragile, soft hands, but for some reason beyond his comprehension he followed Rhiannon's lead.

Fire ignited low in Redmayne's belly—a poisonous mixture beyond lust, beyond manipulation, beyond the logic and order that had become his whole reason for being. He kissed her, stumbling into her disorderly world where vines of sensation tangled around even the most resolute, where riotous blossoms tumbled and flourished, where sunlight kissed faces turned up to the sky, where anything imperfect—from a chipped cup to a half-blind dog to a wounded soldier—was drawn into a warm, loving circle, a cherishing place that was half madness, half miracle.

Bloody hell, how he wanted to dismiss what he was feeling, shove it aside. But Redmayne had schooled himself to be as ruthlessly honest with himself as he was logical. She felt so damned good in his arms as he drew her tighter against him, felt the lush pillows of her breasts flatten against his chest. Her waist, narrow and feminine, her hips flaring ever so gently with a womanly curve he wanted to explore slowly, carefully, with a thoroughness that would leave her gasping.

Need. It pounded in his loins with the fierce call of battle drums, irresistible, stirring his blood with heat, with eagerness, demanding that he storm barricades of feminine petticoats and skirts as he'd stormed barriers of stone walls and cannon fire.

His hand slipped up to cup her breast through the fabric, his mind charging forward, imagining peeling away the layers of cloth as if it were the skin of some luscious fruit that he could feast upon.

She whimpered, arching into his hand, and Redmayne couldn't keep himself from unfastening four of the buttons that held her bodice together. Skin—sleek and tender, delicate and blushed with rose—his knuckles brushed it, savored it. His mouth trailed kisses across it, but it was too sweet, too perfect, too tempting. It was almost as if he could taste everything Rhiannon was—things that terrified Captain Lionel Redmayne far more than violent death, sabres, cannons, and hopeless charges into the teeth of the enemy.

He drew away to catch his breath, regain his moorings. Try to recall the reasons why he'd thought it was such a brilliant idea to pretend to seduce this innocent woman.

He might have succeeded in remembering, in rallying his troops if she hadn't caught her lower lip between her teeth and put her trembling fingers on the buttons at his throat. His pulse tripped as he felt the first button tug free.

"Rhiannon." He growled her name, his whole body rigid.

"It—it's all right. I... understand," she said in a voice as unsteady as the beat of his heart. "What you want, I mean."

"You don't have the damnedest idea."

"I've been thinking about it all day. And you see, I... well, I want it, too."

"It? What the devil?"

"To make love with you." The confession was so soft, so fragile, so impossible that for a heartbeat Redmayne couldn't draw breath into his lungs.

"Have you lost your mind?" he demanded, but she was unfastening the next button and the next, concentrating on them as if the fate of the world were tangled amid the awkwardly stitched holes.

"No. I'm merely being honest."

It was damned disconcerting when the enemy one was laying siege to suddenly began tearing down its own blasted walls. "I think, er, you should take the romantic advice you gave that fox of yours—about not accepting the first male who stumbles across your path."

"Lion."

Blast, why was it that every time she spoke his name it gave him such a jolt? Why had he ever told it to her? He should have told her to call him William or Frederick or James.

"I accepted a long time ago that, living as I do, wandering on the road, there would never be a man I could love—a husband, children, things that I once took for granted I'd have someday."

"Madam, I am far from husband material, if that is what you're thinking."

Her laughter was a little raw, a little sorrowful, a little amused, he could sense, at the discomfort they both were feeling. "I don't intend to force you to the altar, if that is what you fear," she said, sucking in a shuddering breath, and flattening her soft palm against his bare chest. "I know you don't love me. But you
do
care about me. And I care about you. And... and you want me."

Want her? He'd never wanted any woman the way he wanted her. That was the infernal coil. It was merely the fact that he'd been celibate so long, combined with his restlessness, trapped here in her little gypsy hell. But his body was clamoring for release, and Rhiannon Fitzgerald was offering it to him, damn her to perdition.

"I know it sounds wanton to you," she said. "Perhaps it is. But just once I'd like to feel the magic of someone touching me, kissing me. Just once, so that I can remember it always." She turned the full battery of those misty green eyes upon him, her very soul stripped bare. Completely vulnerable to him, a man who had plotted to manipulate her, to use her generous heart against her to get his own way. He should have felt contempt at such weakness—his grandfather had all but beaten that lesson into him when Redmayne was a child. Why, then, did he feel something altogether different?

Self-disgust. He'd never bothered much with it in the past. Now it scratched against his nerves, irritating, unfamiliar, mingled with anger, not at Rhiannon so much as at himself, at that part of him that was sorely tempted to take what she was offering.

"From the first I sensed there was something special between us," she was continuing, making the totally irrational seem almost reasonable. "A bond struck before these hills were green. And today at the stream and later, when you found me crying in the clearing and tried to comfort me, I realized what it was—that you were my chance to find out what loving between two people can be."

Destiny again. Gifts from the fates. And a wounded hero, come to give her a dream. Hell, it was a miracle she didn't think he was some sort of apparition from another world. She was gazing up at him as if she believed... what? In legend-spun lovers and magical possibilities? More terrifying still, for one paralyzing moment, he wanted to reach out, drag her toward him, close the space between them where doubts and fears and ugly manipulations swirled.

With an oath, he grabbed her arms, this time to keep her from touching him, yanking free what hold he still had on his sanity. "Stop this, damn it," he snarled, furious at himself, impatient with her.

The light in her eyes shifted, from awe-filled eagerness to dark confusion. "Stop what? I—I don't understand."

"That is one thing I'm certain of."

Then he saw that infernal dawning of what the woman thought was understanding, as if she had gauged his motives. "You needn't be noble," she said. "I have no expectations. Only tonight, this one time, this one chance."

"Nobility is the last quality anyone should be fool enough to attribute to me!"

"Then tell me, what is it? What is wrong? You can tell me anything, as long as it's the truth."

"Can I?" he bit out coldly, hiding the panic inside him. Hell, he was as desperate as an animal caught in the jaws of a trap, willing to do anything, even gnaw off its own leg to get free. "Is it the truth you really want?" he demanded. "Fine. This was all a ruse. A ploy. A way to get you to take me back to my blasted garrison."

"Wh-what?" She paled, then tipped up her chin, stubborn. "I don't believe you. You're a good man. I sensed it under the layers of pain. There was something between us. I
feel
these things, sense them."

"Then perhaps your magic powers are a bit off-kilter at present. Did you sense how blasted irritating I find this place? That I'd rather risk an assassin's bullet than stay here another moment? Did your powers even give you a hint that I tried to think of some way, any way, to force you to release me?"

He was hurting her. But, damnation, it would hurt her far more if he let her believe... believe what? In some sort of destiny? In one night of lovemaking that would mean nothing to him and everything to her? He might be the cold-hearted monster people claimed, but even he couldn't stomach the thought of this woman carrying an idealized image of Captain Lionel Redmayne in her heart forever because for one insane night his lust had overcome his logic.