With Heart to Hear (5 page)

Susan, and her real world, leapt unbidden to Elise’s mind. Garth, however, offered her adventure beyond anything she’d imagined or hoped for as a child.

“We can go on as before. They’ll not find us in Faerie.” He kissed her fingers, sending a small sad shiver of remembered bliss through her.

Was that where she’d spent the last four days? Had her mind been fogged by a Faerie glamour? Was that why she couldn’t remember the names of flowers she’d studied for years? Why she hadn’t sketched even one of the strange flowers she’d seen?

Elise looked again into his now black eyes, aching from the choice forced on her, then turned, and walked toward the bridge. Garth kept hold of her, following her with stiff, heavy steps.

Near the edge, Elise turned to him. “Come back with me.”

Garth started, wide eyed. “Leave Faerie? You would have me die for you?”

“Die?” She stopped, horrified.

“I will become mortal if I leave here. I would be sentenced to the human span of years.”

Sacrificing immortality was a great deal to ask, maybe too much. Or perhaps it was life’s very shortness that made its joys and sorrows more piquant. “Has eternity brought you happiness?” She turned away, but he held her arm more tightly.

Elise looked at his grasp biting into her flesh. “Is this how you cherish me? How you cherished Margaret?”

Slowly his hand slipped from her wrist.

She stepped onto the stone arch. The familiar reluctance dragged at her feet, but she forced herself to take another slow step and then another.

“Why do you go?” he cried after her. “What is there in that shadow world for you to go back to?”

“Myself,” she said, tears welling. Then she stepped off the bridge.

“Stop!” Garth’s voice was sharp and commanding, but he remained at the far edge of the stone arch as though straining against some barrier. “Faerie is part of you now. You will never be free of it!”

Elise looked back, grieving for the joy they’d shared. His noble features were tinged with mottled green.

Elise crossed the field alone, mincing with each painful step toward her tent, birdsong grating in her ears.

*

“I’m worried about her, William. She’s been this way for a week. It was bad enough she refused to attend our dinner party, but she barely eats, and I seldom get a word from her,” Elise heard Susan say in the next room. “She hardly speaks to our callers. They must think she’s a mute. She just sits and draws all day, but she won’t show anyone her work.”

“I warned you no good would come of indulging her scandalous whims,” Lord Crandall answered. “I don’t know what you expect me to do. Send her back to her father. Let one of those London spiritualists have at her.”

Lord Crandall’s words barely registered as Elise strained to listen for music she could no longer hear. She tried to swallow the ache that rose in her throat as her pencil made its careful way over the page of her new sketchbook. She studied the velvet leaves of Susan’s African violet, but it was Garth’s image that took its place in her mind. Shade and light, curve and line filled the page until she pulled back to examine her finished work.

It was the same as always: a competently executed rendition of a
Saintpaulia ionantha
. And in the margins surrounding the drawing, images of a snaggle-toothed troll-man with dark lonely eyes.

Should she have stayed with him? Had her choice doomed him to live in sorrow forever? Her heart felt hollow, the bright joy her art normally brought was tarnished and dull. Had she doomed them both?

No. Garth had made his own choices. As much as she longed for his embrace, she could not have spent forever there in his Faerie glamour, forgetful of the studies and interests that made her who she was.

The knocker sounded distantly in the front of the house. Elise covered her sketch and prepared to leave. She had no interest in enduring another of William and Susan’s callers. A footman brought a card on a silver salver.

Elise was almost out the conservatory door when William said, “Lord Sheehan? Who the devil is he? Well, show him in. Show him in.”

Through the open French doors, Elise stared as Garth strode into the parlor. She froze, her fingers on the latch of the outer door. He’d left Faerie. And become mortal?

William harrumphed his gout swollen foot to the floor, then straightened as he took in Lord Sheehan’s noble bearing. Susan extended a hand which Garth bent over and released. Elise’s pulse sped. He was dressed in the height of fashion, but she could still discern the shape of his excellently formed body.

“Forgive my intrusion, Lord Crandall, but I believe I found something which belongs to a member of your household. He gestured with a stained and moisture warped sketchbook, but did not give it into William’s outstretched hand.

Her drawings! Cast away with her clothes in the field. He’d brought them to her.

She must have made some sound because Garth turned and fastened his emerald gaze upon her. She heard a distant echo of music. Walking toward her with a measured grace, he took forever to cross the two rooms, but she could see only his clear green eyes, flashing with joy and doubt.

“I’ve come a long way to return this to you, Miss Craft.” He tilted his head as he placed the soiled book in her hand. His fingers were warm and smooth. “Your work is quite remarkable. I especially admire this one.” He opened the loose cover to reveal her drawing of the ivory flowers by the stream.

There, pressed between the pages, was a single stem with two open blooms, and the scent that rose from them was full of hope.

Read an excerpt from
LIGHTBRINGER
,

A Celestial Affairs Novel:

Jared Price is a Celestial, one of a race of beings often taken for angels. His assignment: keep a demonic assassin from killing Cassie Lewis without letting the psychic young woman know who he really is. He’s already saved her once, and now he and his friend Gideon are preparing to defend her and her friend Linda from another attack.

Jared forced himself to meet Cassie’s eyes so he wouldn’t run his gaze over her curves. She’d changed into jeans and a blue V-necked sweater that made her green eyes look like the clear Caribbean ocean off Seven Mile Beach. He shoved his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her. “Are you okay?”

She nodded and unfolded her legs to stand up. “Except for a few scrapes and bruises. Thanks to you.”

“I was just in the right place at the right time.”

“Uh huh.” Cassie stretched her arms over her head, raising the edge of her sweater and revealing a couple inches of creamy skin.

Jared couldn’t look away.

Cassie lowered her arms and stepped around the coffee table. He ought to step back. Maintain the usual comfort zone distance. But he couldn’t do it. His feet felt rooted to the floor. Worse, he wanted to draw her closer, slip his fingers along that smooth skin above her waistband that he knew would feel petal soft.

Jared tensed as she put her hand on his arm, holding his mental barrier firm.

“I don’t know why you’d want to complicate your life with my problems, but I’m grateful. If it wasn’t for you, I’d probably be dead right now. Thanks.”

Cassie stood on tip-toe and kissed the corner of his mouth.

Jared couldn’t help himself. He turned to meet her lips fully. Her lips were soft and sweet as he teased them with his tongue. The tingle of contact effervesced through his blood like fine champagne. Cassie must have felt it too, because she made a little mew of delight as she opened her mouth, taking him inside. Electric fire ran through him, zinging down to his toes and fingertips. Without thought, his arms rose and pulled her closer.
Bad idea. Bad idea
. A voice in his head rang like a warning klaxon, but he wasn’t listening.

She softened against him, playfully meeting his tongue with her own, twining her fingers into his hair. Jared’s body jumped to attention and his shaft thickened. He gathered her in, sinking into the warm surface of her mind. Her soul was beautiful, and it danced with a startled passion that delighted him. He fed her his own hunger in return as he slipped his hands under her sweater. She shivered, but didn’t pull away. Her soft skin delighted his touch, inflaming his desire. His hands roamed over her back and around her side so he could sweep a thumb over the smooth lacy cup of her bra. Her nipple rose under his caress and she nipped at his lip, then sucked it into the moist heat of her mouth.

He wanted her, body and soul. He started to draw her into himself, when suddenly she went rigid in his arms, gasping for breath.

Damn me!
His control must have slipped.
What was I thinking?
How much of his true self had she seen? Then a wave struck him and Cassie’s vision enveloped him.

A man in black slipping through the night. Shadows wrapped themselves around him, maleficent intent flowing from him like a fountain of hate. Linda’s kitchen. Himself. Gideon. A blur of violence. Pain. Blood.

Jared blinked Linda’s living room back into focus as Cassie went limp and drew in a deep shuddering breath. He held her tight, grieving that her heart had been touched by that darkness. A darkness he recognized.

Cassie stared at him, her eyes wide and frightened. Her mouth worked, but all she said was, “Aelziroth.”

LIGHTBRINGR
is available at all major online retailers
.

*

Read an excerpt from
DANGEROUS TALENTS
,

Book One of The Vinlanders’ Saga:

Available spring 2012

“You can pay me the rest now.”

Cele pointedly looked around. There was nothing but steep rock, scraggly brush, prickly pear, and saguaro cactus in sight. Then she cast a sharp look at her guide, Berto. He’d stopped beside two ancient stone cairns that rose shoulder high on either side of the pitiful excuse for a trail. “I don’t see any petroglyphs.”

His dark brown eyes wouldn’t meet hers. “They are close. Just a little way farther on. You get there easy.”

“So take me there.”

“No. No. This is as far as I go.”

“You promised to take me to the glyphs. That’s our deal.” Cele had met Berto at Udall Park before dawn so he could take her to see the Fifth World petroglyphs. Most experts doubted they existed, but a few sources claimed they were unlike any others. Cele couldn’t resist and had sent out feelers for more information. Berto had responded to her queries.

“This is a sacred place,” he said. “I cannot go. I wait for you.”

“Sacred?”
Crap
. She wanted very much to photograph those petroglyphs, but she
didn’t
want to get in trouble with the Tribal government. “But we’re not on the rez.”

Berto met her eyes. “No. They do not come here. Not for many years.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Her guide’s gaze slid away from hers again, and she started to wonder if she’d made a mistake coming here alone with him. She’d checked Berto out. He’d worked for couple of her archeologist friends, who had spoken well of him, so this morning she’d followed his battered pick-up north and east of Tucson, down a little-used dirt road and past a sagging, metal gate. From there the old track rose steeply into the foothills, twisting and turning into the Catalina Mountains. It was much too rough for her vehicle, so she’d parked her Civic and climbed into Berto’s ancient Ford.

Eventually the road grew too rutted even for the truck, and they’d started to hike through the scrub. Berto had said it would only be a short walk, but if she’d known they’d be bushwhacking, she’d have worn jeans instead of hiking shorts, no matter how hot it was. He’d followed a trail that looked like little more than an animal track until they’d reached this place marked with dry-stacked rocks fitted neatly together to form two five-sided towers that rose shoulder high. There he’d stopped and shifted nervously from one foot to other.

“Berto, what’s the problem?” she repeated.
Are there smugglers in the area?

His eyes darted all around before they returned to hers. “The spirits walk here.”

Cele relaxed. He wasn’t worried about somebody shooting him. “The spirits?”

“
Sí
. This is the place where the Old Ones disappeared. Sometimes the spirits who took them come looking for more.”

Cele grinned. “That’s a cool story. I’d like to hear the rest of it. You can tell me while you take me to the petroglyphs.”

“No. I will not go beyond
la señal de madrina.
”

The sign of the godmother?
Was he using this nonsense to jack up the price? “No glyphs, no more money.”

“Pay me what you agreed!” Berto took a step forward, and Cele retreated beyond the towers, ready to use her self-defense skills if necessary. The guide, however, didn’t follow.

She’d paid him half, and she already had a spot picked out on her wall for these photos. Her mother had taken an impressive collection of photos of Southwest Indian artifacts and petroglyphs, and Cele wasn’t going to let superstition prevent her from adding to her mother’s legacy. “Look, if your story is a good one, I can sweeten our deal. How does another forty sound?”

“No!” Berto’s posture grew even more rigid, but he didn’t come any closer.

Cele frowned, confused by his flat refusal. “There’s no way I’m going to pay you before I see the glyphs.”
And I’m sure as hell not going to pay him before I’m back in his truck.

“This was a mistake. I should not have brought you here. Forget the money. We go now.” Berto wiped his sweaty palms on his jeans.

Shit!
He was really scared, not just greedy. Cele stepped forward, one hand outstretched. “Wait a minute! I’ll tell you what. How far is it? I’ll go, take my pictures, and then you can take me back to town. Then I’ll pay you the rest. Okay?”

Berto hesitated and then nodded. “Okay. I wait. One hour.”