Stronger Than Magic, page 10
For one terrifying instant he was certain that he was suffering from some fatal heart malady. Then reason prevailed and it struck him: his pain wasn’t radiating from his physical heart, the pumping and beating organ, but from a place whose existence he’d always scoffed at as being mere balderdash … his spiritual heart. More astonishing yet was the realization that his inner hurt was in some way connected to Alys, his unwanted ward.
Unwanted. The crushing pressure from what he now identified as a foreign emotion tripled at the word, forcing him to hug his chest in fear that it would explode. Lonely and unwanted. The emotion burst in a breath-stealing eruption of understanding.
And for the first time in his life Lucian Warre saw another person’s misery, and was strangely compelled to alleviate it.
But how? What could he do to make her feel less lonely and more wanted? He shook his head as Madame flashed a length of yellow-embroidered cambric before his eyes. It was true that he hadn’t bothered to make Alys feel welcome in his home. Hell. He hadn’t thought it necessary. To his way of reasoning, what she thought or felt was beneath his consideration.
Still contemplating the matter, Lucian stepped over to the next display table. When he looked down, he saw the length of iridescent silk Alys had been admiring earlier. As he lightly fingered it, he was struck by yet another notion.
Perhaps this curious business of her having an imaginary friend stemmed from his own disregard for her and her feelings. It made perfect sense when you thought about it, for she seemed to indulge in her odd behavior only when she was being ignored. Take today, for example. Aside from him ordering her to the sofa, neither he nor Madame had so much as acknowledged her presence while selecting the wardrobe.
For the first time in memory the rich and powerful Marquess of Thistlewood put himself in someone else’s place and tried to understand their feelings. As he did so, he had to admit that he didn’t like how he felt: insignificant and left out.
Determined to remedy the situation, though why in God’s name he felt obliged to do so he couldn’t say, he murmured, “Alys?”
“Yes, my lord?” By the slight quivering of her voice and the wariness of her expression, it was clear that she expected him to scold her for something.
Curving his lips into what he hoped was a reassuring smile, he gently inquired, “What do you think of having your coming-out gown made of this?” He held up the shimmering silk.
She looked so stunned that for a moment he feared she would faint. Then she rose to her feet, softly uttering over and over again, “Oh … oh!” If a person could float, Alys did so as she joined him at the table. “Do you mean it?” she whispered, reaching out to stroke the fabric as if it were something holy. “Can I really have a gown of this?”
“I take it that means it meets with your approval?”
“How could it not? I would feel like a fairy princess wearing a gown made of this.”
“A fairy princess, you say?” His smile widened so much that his lips actually parted. “In that case, it’s yours.”
“Really?” she gasped.
He nodded.
The radiance of her responding smile was so luminous that it filled him with a startling warmth that made him want to laugh, dance, and embrace the whole world at the same time. Never in his entire life had he felt so wonderful, so … happy.
She stared at him for several seconds, her still smiling mouth working soundlessly. Then she released a soft cry and threw her arms around him. Hugging him with a strength amazing for one so tiny, she cried, “I can’t believe it! Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
Lucian chuckled, sharing her pleasure. It was a rusty sound, true, but one issued from genuine delight. “You’re quite welcome, my dear.” Impulsively, he returned her hug …
… and made yet another discovery. Beneath her shapeless black gown was a small, but delectably feminine body.
Chapter 6
Lucian stood with his arms stretched out behind him as his bleary-eyed valet, John Cusworth, efficiently peeled off his evening coat. It was late, long past midnight, and he’d just returned from an evening of drinking and gambling at his club.
After draping the beautifully tailored corbeau-colored coat over the dressing stand, the servant turned back to him and nimbly unfastened the buttons on his white marcella waistcoat. That done, Lucian automatically lifted his arms again to allow the man to remove the garment. Like everything else in the privileged Marquess of Thistlewood’s orderly existence the nightly ritual of being prepared for bed required no second thought or spoken words between master and servant.
Tonight, however, as Cusworth silently slipped the waistcoat off Lucian’s shoulders and down his arms, the sound of Alys’s mocking laughter suddenly echoed through his brain. You would laugh too if you could see how ridiculous you look. You! A grown, competent man being dressed as if he were an infant. It makes one wonder if you’re ignorant of how to dress yourself and require such services not out of arrogance, but out of necessity. The memory was enough to make his face burn with what? Fury?
No. Not fury. This feeling was something entirely different, rather as if his insides were squirming every which way. Scowling at the odd sensation, he sat down
on the edge of an armchair and instinctively extended his leg for his servant to remove his low-heeled dress shoe. Hell, if he didn’t know better he’d say that the chit’s words had made him self-conscious, embarrassed even, to be assisted in such a manner.
Softly he snorted his disdain at the notion. Ridiculous! Why should he be embarrassed? It was perfectly natural and expected for a peer of the realm to be waited on. Nonetheless, he found himself lowering his foot back to the floor.
“My lord?”
Lucian glanced down at the valet, who was now kneeling at his feet, peering up at him as if terrified that he’d unwittingly committed an unpardonable act. Something about the sight of the man’s anxiety-riddled face disturbed him to the point of uneasiness. Was he really such a tyrant that something as trifling as a change in his routine made his servants quake with fear?
He considered the theory for a moment, then pushed it to the back of his brain to join the rest of the Alys-inspired absurdities congregating there. Of course his valet wasn’t afraid, he was … hmm … confused. Yes, that was it. Confused. And with good reason. During their ten years together, this was the first time he’d ever broken the methodical order of their nightly routine.
Though Lucian told himself that he was satisfied with his conclusion, his voice was uncharacteristically gentle as he ordered, “Go to bed, Cusworth. I shall finish undressing myself.”
“But, my lord!” The man looked as shocked as if he’d said that he was going to jump off the roof to see if he could fly.
For some inexplicable reason the servant’s reaction made Lucian defensive. Knowing full well that he was being unreasonable, yet powerless to stop himself, he said, “I don’t know why you and the rest of the servants persist in treating me like a half-wit child. I can dress and undress myself, you know.”
“O-of course you can, m-my lord,” his valet stammered, looking as if he expected to lose his position at any moment. “I never m-meant to suggest—”
“I know you didn’t,” he interjected with a sigh, immediately regretting his childish display of petulance. Whatever was wrong with him that he, the normally calm and composed Marquess of Thistlewood, would behave in such an erratic fashion? More confounded than he’d ever thought possible, he waved the man to the door, murmuring, “Just go. I’m feeling out of sorts and simply wish to be left alone.” He attempted to smile his apologies.
His unusual expression seemed to alarm rather than reassure the servant. Nervously wringing his hands, Cusworth inquired, “Do you wish me to summon the surgeon, my lord?” By the way he was staring at him, it was clear that the valet thought that he was possessed by evil humors and was in desperate need of being bled.
Lucian sighed. The man wasn’t too far off wrong on that account. He did have a miasma in his blood, and a poisonous one at that. And it had been injected by the sharp bite of Alys Faire’s scornful words. Bloody hell! How had she managed to get under his skin, and in just four days? The woman was crazy, for God’s sake!
At wit’s end, he distractedly ran his hand through his hair. Yet she’d done it. She, with her imaginary companion and unpredictable nature, had somehow managed to upset his comfortably tidy existence. And he didn’t like it a whit!
Vaguely he wondered if insanity, like smallpox or cholera, was a communicable disease. For Alys’s madness was tainting his every thought and perversely affecting his actions.
“My lord?”
Lucian returned his gaze to his servant, who was surveying him with goggle-eyed anxiety.
“Shall I summon the surgeon?” the man repeated, the creases in his age-wrinkled brow deepening.
“No, no.” He shook his head. “I’m fine. I’ve simply had too much to drink and not enough to eat.” As if on cue, his alcohol-soured stomach gave a very unlordly rumble.
That noise did what his smile had failed to do, it relaxed Cusworth. “Ah, well. In that case, I shall wake cook and have him prepare you a tray.”
Lucian pressed his fist against his midsection as his stomach roiled with queasiness at his own reminder of his overindulgence. What he really wished was to be left alone to contemplate his difficulties with Alys. And if he sent Cusworth down for a tray, he’d have to endure his fussing for at least another hour. Finding that idea unbearable in his current state of mind, he shook his head. “No. I shall go down to the kitchen and make my own selections.”
Not only did Cusworth’s shocked expression reappear, he bore the aspect of one who had been stunned speechless.
Amused, Lucian started to smile but caught himself in time, not wanting to alarm the poor valet any more than he already had. The man would undoubtedly suffer a heart seizure if he was to inform him that he often passed half the night down in the kitchen, sitting by the still-warm hearth and stroking the cook’s cat. It was his one guilty pleasure, a secret between him and the fat orange-striped tabby.
When the servant made no move to depart, remaining instead rooted to the carpet, gaping at him with eyes the color and shape of copper pennies, he said dismissively, “Good night, Cusworth.”
Mercifully the man still had enough of his wits about him to detect the finality in his employer’s voice. Snapping out of his gaping stupor, he bowed himself out of the room, murmuring, “Good night, my lord.”
Once the door closed behind him, Lucian made quick work of removing the remainder of his clothes and donning a warm, wine velvet dressing gown. After slipping his feet into a pair of fur-lined slippers, he retrieved the three-branched candelabra from the bedside commode. Though the wall sconces in the hallway outside his chamber and those leading down the main staircase would still be lit, he knew from experience that the servants’ back stairs would be as dark as his mood after a clash of wills with his ward.
His ward. He meditated upon the behavior of the ungovernable Miss Faire and its effects on him as he slipped from his room and sauntered down the corridor.
It was beyond perplexing that she, a chit barely out of the schoolroom, had managed to turn his well-ordered life upside down and thoroughly disturbed his piece of mind. It wasn’t as if he was unused to dealing with females. He’d dealt with scores of them over the years. Yet none of them, no matter how beautiful, seductive, or, yes, infuriating they were, had warranted more than a passing thought. They certainly hadn’t occupied his mind the way Alys had done this evening.
He raised the candles a fraction as he rounded the corner of the darkened west wing. In truth he’d gone to his club this evening to escape his maddeningly persistent thoughts of her, certain that a bottle of fine port and the camaraderie of his fellow clubsmen would turn his mind to other, more pleasant matters.
He’d been wrong. Miserably so. All he could think about was her. More specifically, about the way she’d felt in his arms when he’d returned her hug at the dressmaker’s As brief as their contact had been, there was something about the feel of her body pressed against his that haunted him as nothing ever had; something surprisingly right and almost familiar about the way her petite form fit his tall one.
Making a derisive noise at the notion that the incorrigible Miss Faire could suit him in any way, he started down the shadowy back stairs. It was clearly time for him to visit Reina and exorcise his body of its tiresome physical urges.
Unlike most men he knew, he found sex necessary but not particularly enjoyable. To him it was rather like blowing his nose, it simply cleared up the unpleasant congestion that formed in his nether regions from time to time. Once relieved, he was free to get on with the more stimulating aspects of his life, like overseeing his fortune.
He was still cursing his body’s bothersome needs when he reached the bottom of the stairs, which terminated at the far end of the kitchen. As he stepped from the stairwell, muttering to himself, he was arrested by the sight of someone sitting at the trestle table before the glowing hearth. It didn’t take a second glance to identify the person. It was Alys. He groaned inaudibly. So much for his nice peaceful pilgrimage to the pantry.
Clad in a baggy nightgown and wrapper of mourning black with her pale hair scraped back into a thick, waist-length braid, she was the most unappealing snippet of femininity he’d ever had the misfortune to see. At her left elbow sat a dented pewter plate bearing the remains of a hearty snack, in her hands was an ancient, but vaguely familiar-looking volume bound in faded red morocco.
As if her mere presence wasn’t bad enough, she was reading aloud, her glance straying from time to time to the chair on her right, almost as if she were reading to someone.
Lucian swallowed the groan that rose at the sight, not wanting to attract her notice. She was at it again, being eccentric, this time reading to her make-believe companion. Deciding that enduring his queasiness was preferable to dealing with Alys’s queerness, he backed away toward the stairs. He had just reached the foot of the steps when his stomach let out an obstreperous growl.
Her head shot up and she looked sharply at the empty chair on her right, then swiveled around to face him. Her cheeks staining the color of the half-eaten damson tart on her plate, she stammered, “M-my lord! What are y-you doing here?”
Glancing longingly at his escape route, he bit out, “In case you haven’t noticed, I happen to live here.”
“Of course you do,” she replied with a breathless laugh. “I just meant that you hardly seem the sort of man to frequent the kitchen.”
Lucian couldn’t help noticing that she was furtively kicking the chair to her right and making sharp waving motions beneath the table as she spoke. Clearly she was signaling for the departure of her invisible friend. He sighed. Oh, well. It could be worse. At least she wasn’t spinning around the room, muttering an incantation to make him disappear as the five-year-old son of one of his officers had been described as doing.
Apparently her companion was in an accommodating mood tonight, for she smiled faintly and gave a nod that would have been indiscernible had he not been staring at her so intently. Her pink lips still curled up at the corners, she tilted her head to one side and peered at him quizzically, clearly expecting him to justify his presence.
As Lucian opened his mouth to simply bid her a good night, intending to turn and leave without explanation, a hideous yowl arose from next to the stove. Before he could think, much less react, the kitchen cat hurtled across the floor and wrapped itself around his calf, clinging with all ten claws.
With a yelp, he dropped the delicate porcelain candelabra. Over the echoing crash of shattering china, he thought he heard Alys shout, “Hedley!” but her voice was drowned out by his own howls of pain as the tabby’s claws dug yet deeper into his flesh.
“Bloody cat!” he bellowed, losing his balance as he struggled to detach the animal. He tottered back and forth a couple of times, then collapsed onto his backside with a bone-jarring thud!
Rrr! The tabby sprang from his leg. Grr! It darted beneath the table where it sat lashing its tail and emitting a series of gurgling hisses.
“My lord!”
Lucian looked up from the bloody scratches on his calf to see Alys dashing toward him, her face the portrait of horrified dismay. “Are you all right?” she exclaimed, coming to a skidding halt in front of him.
“Fine. I just can’t imagine what could have gotten into that cat. It’s usually so tame.”
“You know the beastie?” she asked, her expression of dismay transforming into one of surprise as she knelt next to him.
“We’re old friends. Well”—he shot the cat a disgruntled look—“at least I thought we were friends. We should be after all the nights we’ve passed together sharing beef chops and warming ourselves at the hearth.”
“You come down here at night? To the kitchen?” Her surprise visibly heightened to shock at that revelation. Indeed, her reaction was annoyingly reminiscent of Cusworth’s.
“Where else? The cat is hardly one to frequent the formal dining room,” he snapped irritably. Why the hell did everyone seem to find it so scandalous that he enjoyed spending time in his own kitchen? It wasn’t as if he were down here plucking chickens and baking pies. Growing more defensive by the minute he scowled at Alys, waiting for her to bait him about this like she did everything else.
To his astonishment, she smiled instead. And not in the sneering manner he’d have expected. No. This smile was gentle and filled with such sweetness that his defenses quickly crumbled.
Briefly meeting his gaze with eyes as warm as her smile, she murmured, “I must confess that I’ve always loved kitchens too. They’re the one room that always makes me feel at home, no matter where I am. I suppose it’s their lovely smells.” As if to verify that last statement, she closed her eyes and sniffed. “Mmm.” The corners of her mouth edged up a fraction. “Cloves and cinnamon … like the spiced wine custard our cook used to make at Christmas. We had such grand Christmases at Fairfax.”
