The Trouble with Magic (Loveswept) (17 page)

“Are you kidding?” she asked, examining the illustrations with a furrowed brow. “There’s no two alike. It’ll take us a month to try them all ... not to mention the months of physical therapy afterward.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, stepping close to her, sliding his hands down her soft, smooth curves. “Your agility has amazed me a couple times already.”

“Stop that,” she murmured, her mind fuzzy with sensation, her skin flushed—not from the shower.

The now familiar clutching in his abdomen triggered his unprecedented and perpetual hunger for the slim, slightly imperfect woman he held. Her immediate response to his touch fed his urge to exert control over her. The haze of passion in her eyes made him feel powerful. The thrill of feeling her tremble in his arms lent him an air of omnipotence.

He smiled and helped her into the pajama top. The sensations he felt were precious, but fleeting and false. Her power over him was far greater, deeper, and infinitely more satisfying to him. He was like an ill-fated pyromaniac—driven, compelled to light the fires, only to find himself caught, trapped, and doomed to perish in the flames.

He couldn’t think of a better way to die.

“Still cold?” he asked, buttoning only the three middle buttons, deliberately skimming his knuckles against her pelvic region.

Hardly, she thought.

“Freezing. I think I’ll get a robe,” she said, stepping around him to the door. “Better yet, I have flannel pajamas with feet in them.”

“With? Wait a second,” he said, confused, following her out into the hall and into his bedroom. “Get into bed. I’ll keep you warm.”

“I’m chilled to the bone,” she said, stalling for time, heading for the hidden hallway between their rooms. “I’ll get my coat too.”

“Come back here. I’ll take the chill out of your bones.”

With door handle in hand she turned to him, vibrant, vivacious, the vision of a vamp.

“You’d do that?” she asked, playing sweet and seductive, fully aware of the slit openings of the pajama top. “You’d warm up my bones for me?”

Quick to catch on and fast to rise to the occasion, Payton inched forward. “Come here and see.”

“Uh-uh.” She shook her head. “You want these bones, you’ve got to catch them.”

He was on to her before she finished her sentence. She slammed the door in his face and raced to the other end of the hall, locking that door behind her. By the time he reached it, and swore a blue streak on the other side, she was leaving her room by the other door.

Excitement made her giggle as she bound from the last step on the main floor, just as Payton began his descent. His great long legs were his advantage, but she was agile and she knew the house better. There were several close calls but she managed to elude him, until she crept into the long unused ballroom and pressed herself against the wall to catch her breath.

The air was musty and chilled. The floor was ice-cold, and it stung her toes. But even before she could breathe regularly again, she was mesmerized by the beauty of the moon glowing through the walls of glass, spreading a gossamer carpet of silver across the floor.

The room was enchanted with the sparkle of frost on the windows. Friendly shadows beckoned her, invited her to the party.

She stepped away from the wall and was suddenly bathed in pixie light; her arms and legs were pale, graceful, luminous. As if by magic, he emerged from the darkness, tall and silent.

“So beautiful,” she said, her voice hardly more than a breath of air.

“So beautiful,” he agreed, his gaze fixed on the vision of her.

They paced to the middle of the huge room and wordlessly embraced. They danced, circling, round and round. Neither was cold, neither was too sure they were even awake.

“It is like magic, isn’t it?” he said, his voice a reverent whisper, as if he were dancing in a holy place.

Magic.

Magic.

The word pierced her heart and mind in one swift, brutal thrust. It was magic. She was screaming and sick inside. It was magic. She stumbled, and he wrapped his arms about her.

“I’m cold,” she murmured around the painful lump in her throat. It was magic.

“Let’s go upstairs.” His lips pressed against her temple as he turned them to the wide oaken doors. His heart was brimming with love and protectiveness and ... it was magic.

“Love me, Payton. Hold me.”

“I do. I am. I will.”

She had to tell him. It was magic. She had to tell him. But she wanted just one more night.

“All night. Till morning.”

“All night.” He kissed her as they mounted the stairs. “And all day tomorrow. And all day the day after, and the day after that.”

She pressed closer and heard the steady rhythm of his life.

It was magic.

It was simply magic.

Only magic.

M
EN ALWAYS TOOK BAD
news better with a full stomach—didn’t they?

Harriet wasn’t sure if anything was going to make what she had to tell Payton any easier, but cooking their breakfast kept her from biting her nails to nubs and held her tears at bay.

At least she’d finally realized why she wasn’t sleeping well. How could she have been so stupid? So thoughtless? So cruel? How could she possibly sleep ever again, unless her conscience was clear?

She closed her eyes and ground her teeth. She would have the rest of her life to call herself names and flog herself.

Payton was the true victim, and she had to tell him.

“Have you seen the snow?” he asked, coming into the kitchen behind her, his hair still damp from his shower.

She glanced out the window. Snow was beginning to stick to the grass and trees, the beginnings of a winter wonderland—she couldn’t have cared less. Spring could have been in full bloom and the world would have looked just as bleak to her.

“Think we’ll be lucky and get snowed in here before tomorrow?” he asked, sounding far too chipper on such a rotten morning.

“No.”

His brows rose perceptively. She was slow to wake in the mornings, but she usually wasn’t grouchy.

He circled the work island and turned her to face him. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, distressed. “I did it again, didn’t I?”

“What?”

“Kept you up too late. I tried—”

“No. I’m not tired,” she said, brusque in her dread. “Here. Eat. We need to talk.”

He took the plate from her, his confusion plain on his face.

“Okay. Let’s talk.”

“Eat first.”

“I see. We’re going to
talk,
not have breakfast conversation,” he said, following her to the table. “Must be serious.”

“Eat.” She was afraid she’d lose her nerve, take a coward’s way out.

The meal passed in silence, the tension between them escalating until Payton popped the last bite of toast into his mouth, finished his coffee, and cleared away his dishes. He sat opposite her, laced his fingers together, and ordered her to speak.

“Let’s have it,” he said, a successful businessman who was used to getting to the point and facing problems head-on.

Her heart felt as hard and cold as ice, and it hurt as if it had been dropped and cracked in a thousand places.

“Payton, I don’t know how to tell you this without ...”
Hurting you,
she was about to say. The thought was impossible to voice aloud.

“I’ve made a terrible mistake, Payton, and I ...” want to say I’m sorry, she thought. Sorry wasn’t enough. “What I’ve done is unforgivable.”

“Come on, Harri,” he said, half-amused with her inability to complete a sentence. “You’ve spied on me, interfered with my business, and kidnapped me. How bad could it be?”

“Bad. I ...”

His brows rose higher to indicate his interest as he patiently waited for her to finish. There was no good or easy way to tell him, she finally decided, chewing her lower lip. She took a deep breath. “I let myself fall in love with you.”

“Well,” he said, taken back. He wanted to laugh but sensed danger in the undercurrent of her words. “That
is
unforgivable.”

“I promised you I wouldn’t, remember?”

“No.”

“I forced you to come here and to fall in love with me,” she said, words beginning to roll like an avalanche from her mouth. “I brought you to the island specifically to expose you to the magic, to show you it was real, so you could understand the importance of my keeping the island. I ... I thought I could handle it, that I’d keep my head on straight. I didn’t think I’d fall in love with you too. I thought I might learn to like you eventually, which would be proof enough for me that the magic worked. But then ... I didn’t mean to fall in love with you, and I certainly didn’t mean for you to love me. I thought you might end up liking me a little, but I had no idea how powerful the magic really was.”

“Harri,” he said, touching her hand, trying to calm her and his heart at the same time. “You don’t really think I love you because I’ve fallen under some sort of spell or something, do you?”

“Don’t you? Aren’t you convinced yet?”

“I’m convinced that I love you, but the only spell I’ve fallen under is yours. It doesn’t have anything to do with the island, and it certainly isn’t magic.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know, dammit,” he said, fear creeping like a fungus inside him.

“You can’t know. And it would be so unfair of me to take advantage of you under these circumstances. So, tomorrow—”

“Tomorrow, I’m still going to love you.”

“Perhaps. But when the boat takes us back to St. Peter’s Bay tomorrow, I’ll be going straight to the sheriff’s office to confess everything I’ve done to you, and you’ll go back to your life. That was the deal.”

“The deal?” he said, his eyes narrowed, his fear turning to excruciating pain. “The deal? Is that all this was to you?”

“That’s not how it turned out, no. But it was a deal. I promised you that I wouldn’t hold you to anything when it was over. I shouldn’t have let it go so far. I can’t regret it for myself, but I do for you.”

“This is crazy,” he said, as if to alert her to the world’s sudden madness. “It’s crazier than you kidnapping me in the first place.”

Who knew better than she?

“I ... I said I’d let you decide what to do with the island once we determined whether or not the magic was real. So, I’ll—”

“Real?” He stood with enough force to push his chair over. “I’ll tell you what’s real. I’m real. You’re real. And what we feel is real.”

“You’re right,” she said, reaching to touch him, needing to touch him, to ease his pain, to soothe him. He pulled his hand away. “But don’t you see, that’s the trouble with magic. It all seems so real, but it’s not. I tricked you. It’s not love we feel, it’s just the magic.”

“To hell with the magic,” he bellowed, wanting to scream like a lunatic. “There is no magic. There never was. I can’t explain what happened to all your damned ancestors or how all this nonsense got started, but there’s no such thing as magic or love potions or anything else. If anything, we made our own magic.”

“I know this must be difficult for you to understand. And I don’t like it any more than you do,” she said, the cracks in her heart beginning to bleed. “But I could never live with you, or myself, knowing that I’d tricked you, forced you to love me.”

“You didn’t,” he stated, then suddenly decided to change tracks. “You’re right. You did trick me. You forced me to fall in love with you, and I demand that you accept responsibility for your actions. I insist that you stay with me until I fall out of love with you.”

She stood before him with a bittersweet smile for his cleverness.

“I wish ...” it were real, she wanted to say. But it felt too real to make it sound otherwise.

“What? You wish what?”

“I wish you great happiness, Payton. I wish you knew how much you deserve to be happy. And I hope ...” her voice faltered, “I hope you’ll let some other woman see what you’ve shown me. That you’re good and kind and loving.”

He saw the tears in her eyes and wanted to shake her.

“Harriet, stop this. I don’t want another woman. I want you.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I love you!”

“Why do you love me?”

“Because ...” He was a fast thinker, he could do this. “Because ...” There were a thousand reasons globbed together into one huge unexplainable emotion. “Because I do.”

“You see,” she said gently. “It’s just the magic.”

Payton wanted to tear his hair out; he wanted to tear
her
hair out. By late afternoon he was desperate to do something to get her attention.

She’d spent the day gathering her personal possessions—things that didn’t belong to the house—and packing them into boxes.

“I’ll arrange to have these removed from the house as soon as possible. They’ll need to go into storage with the rest of my things,” she told him in passing, stepping around him as he tried to impede her progress.

“Storage? Why do you have things in storage?”

“They aren’t yet,” she said casually, labeling the contents of a half-filled box. “But they don’t let you take a lot of personal stuff to prison, you know.”

“For crissake! Will you stop? You aren’t going to prison. You know I won’t press charges.”

“Yes, and I’ve been giving that some thought,” she said, calm and serious when she looked at him. “It is possible that it may take some time, several days, a week or more maybe for the magic to wear off, and you’ll feel more inclined to press charges then. I just wanted to mention to you that if the authorities can’t locate me here or in St. Peter’s Bay, that the only other place I plan to go is back to Massena. They can contact me through the college, or I can write down my address for you, if you’d like.”

He left the room, swearing and muttering unintelligibly, too dumbfounded to argue.

He gave her plenty of time to reconsider between his next two attempts to make her see reason, not that it did any good. He entertained the notion of dropping something on her head to pound some sense into her, but decided that with his luck she’d develop amnesia and forget who he was altogether. During dinner he was tempted to choke her until she agreed to be logical, but the mere thought of his hands on her throat brought the customary clutching sensation to his abdomen. When she bid him good night at
her
bedroom door, it was all he could do to keep from dragging her to the floor and using all he’d discovered about her body to bring her mind to order. But he was all too conscious of who controlled whom in the throes of passion and thought it safer not to—for fear she’d convince him to have her sent to the electric chair before they were finished.