He went on blinking, his vision switching between Charlotte’s beautiful, luminous eyes and the darkness inside him. “You’d give up such enormous power?”
“Yes.” Wariness tightened her expression. “You seem to find that unbelievable.”
He tried to answer, but his pulse had begun thudding with such force, it broke his breath into soundless pieces.You were right.The words were turning him all soft inside, and he began to panic. Softness meant his defenses were failing. Already he could hear whispers rising from the dark. He wanted his sword. He wanted to bloody well stop feeling at all. But Charlotte was touching his face now, muttering something about how he could trust her, and a barrage of hope, lust, fear, grief threatened to completely overwhelm him. Damned if the witch wasn’t doing housekeeping in his heart.
He could not bear it. So he picked his favorite of those feelings and, capturing her jaw a little too roughly in his fingers, began kissing her out of her sleepiness into a tumult of emotion right along with him. She murmured against his lips but did not pull away, and he took that as permission. He tasted the warmth of her—felt the crack of a birch switch against his back—tilted her chin so he could kiss the silky white throat beneath it—crawled into a corner—clenched a fist in her bright, honey-colored hair—turned his face to the wall, although that was no sanctuary from birch or bootheels or the spitting Latin that fired books across the room at him until he said one word enough times for it to count...
“Sorry,” he whispered again now, the sound trembling against Charlotte’s pulse.
She answered him, but her words echoed with the clatter of tiny golden bee charms as a fist slammed against his ear. “Sorry,” he said again, following a path of tiny freckles down, down, toward shadowand secrets... He breathed in for one last desperate moment before memory drew him under.
He cringed as the closet door slammed shut on him. The whole world turned to shadow.Sorry,he cried, and the darkness crawled into his lungs, filling them with the sensation of clinging, corrupting damp. He imagined rotting away in that darkness, amongst his father’s old coats. When Deirdre unlocked the door for him two days later and demanded a proper apology for whatever it was he’d done, he was unable to answer, all his words decomposed.
“You don’t get out until you say sorry,” Deirdre warned, smiling in the way that always made him think of hooks and bones. She held the door half-open, ready to slam it shut at a whim’s notice. Her voice, dry and crackly from years of incantating instead of walking across a room to pick up whatever she wanted, dropped hard little promises at his feet. “Say sorry and you can come out. Say sorry and you can have dinner. There’s bacon, Alex. We all know how much you love bacon. Say sorry and there’s hot chocolate.”
He tried, but only managed a crippled sound. “S-s-s-”
Deirdre laughed and started to shut the door again.At least I’ll die in peace,he thought.
But his father, furious and determined to make a man of him somehow, pulled him out—dragged him through the kitchen where he could smell the bacon and thought only with surprise that Deirdre had been telling the truth—and tossed him out of the house ten feet above Lough Caragh...
His body flashed cold as if it were hitting the water again. He felt himself being sucked terrifyingly deep into the old dark. With an instinct of hope and longing, he reached up toward light—and as hemoved, the shift of his legs against hard wooden planks beneath him brought time crashing back into place.
Floor, not lake bed,he told himself.Walls, window. Now, not then.
Breathe...
“Breathe, Alex.” Charlotte’s voice came out of the dark, taut but certain, like a lifeline. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
He supposed her sensitivity had sensed tension in the air; either that or he’d been screaming without realizing it. Which, judging from past experience, was always possible. “Nothing’s wrong,” he said. He could swim for himself. He always had. He didn’t need anyone now.
And then he felt a warmth against his heart. She was touching him again.
Oh God.
“Alex,” she said, uncharacteristically gentle. “Your pulse is racing.”
He gave her a swaggering smile. “It’s because you’re so close, sweetheart, and I want to—”
He stopped, choking on the words as if they were lake water. Shewasso close. She was right inside his soul, prodding bossily at all the things he kept hidden there, making him forget how to be sardonic, or seductive, or any of the measures that had protected him from himself these past twenty years. This was why he’d worked hard to create a reputation that would attract only the kind of women who wanted to ring his doorbell then run away before they were caught. But of course witches made it their business to get in.
“What do you need?” Charlotte whispered, still prodding.
He answered her in the same way he drew his sword whenever someone disturbed him—immediate, unthinking, with sharp edges and a brutal warning. “For all the bloody witches in the world to have their power stripped away.”
But Charlotte only stroked the wall across his heart, undaunted. “All of them, you say?”
“One of them,” he relented. “One Lancaster witch who found herself in Donegal some two-and-twenty years ago with a fancy for a man, never mind that he was already taken, and a determination to get herself a home even if it had to be made from bones pasted together with blood.”
“That doesn’t sound very weatherproof.”
He laughed. Good God—she made him laugh, even in the midst of talking about Deirdre. It was some kind of magic.Shewas magic.
Her hand pressed with a firm serenity against his pulse as if she could settle it just from her will alone. “This witch hurt you.”
“Aye, well, who didn’t, darling? Once one person starts, seems it’s hard for everyone to stop.”
“And is she still alive, resident in Donegal?”
