A Kind of Magic (23 page)

As he came closer, she held out her arms in eager welcome.

The door opened before she could take him in her embrace. “Well,” the White Lady said as they both jumped back and turned toward her. “I see my house is still here. And so are the pair of you,” she added as she came in and put her basket on the table. The White Lady gave Rowan a thorough, critical look. While a deep blush colored his face, she turned her scrutiny on Maddie. “Easy to see what you two have been doing.”

“We’re man and wife,” Rowan pointed out.

The White Lady leered at him. “So you are.” She touched a spot on his throat.

“She’s a wild lass, I see.”

“D’ye enjoy seeing me blush, woman?” She wasn’t in the least put off by his growl and within moments he found himself leering too as memories of lovemaking filled his mind. “Aye, it’s a wild wife you found for me.”

“For which you should be grateful. I hoped that I’d give you enough time to find that out while I was gone. With any luck you planted a bairn in her belly in the last few hours.”

“I pray so.”

Maddie didn’t understand what the White Lady and Rowan said but their expressions and tones were not hard to read. They were discussing her and Rowan’s having had sex, and Maddie was shaken by both outrage and shock. How dare they be so open and frank about something meant to be private? The embarrassment she felt singed Maddie to the core. She looked at the floor as she muttered, “This has been a terrible mistake. I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have…” She covered her mouth before she finished, overwhelmed at the realization that Rowan and she had made love in this woman’s house, in her bed, and the other woman knew it.

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A Kind of Magic

“Oh God,” Maddie whimpered. She covered her face with her hands. “Please, could I just curl up and die from the embarrassment right now?”

“What did she say?” the White Lady asked Rowan.

“I haven’t a clue,” he replied. “The necklace came off, you see,” he told the wisewoman. “She lost the understanding of our tongue.”

The White Lady nodded thoughtfully. “I suspected some such change might come over her when she was freed of the spell.”

“And were prepared for it?” Rowan asked. He pointed suspiciously at the bubbling pot on the hearth. “That has a fine and fancy smell to it. Did it set our tongues to wagging?”

She gave a dirty chuckle. “Your tongues have been doing more than wagging, Rowan Murray.”

“No potion was responsible for that,” he declared of his and Maddie’s lovemaking.

“Of that I’m certain.”

She patted his shoulder. “True, lad.” She looked around her small house. “The spell is broken, the necklace is off and you and your wife have consummated your marriage.

Not a bad night’s work.”

Rowan frowned at her satisfied smile. “You act as though it were all your doing.”

She put her hands on her hips. “I’m making light of serious subjects, lad. You’d do well to see the humor in life upon occasion.”

“I do. Upon occasion.”

“Not on any occasion I’ve heard of. Och.” She waved a hand at him dismissively and concentrated on Maddie. “He’s your problem, lass, not mine.”

Rowan fought the urge to step between the two women. He knew he had no reason to protect Maddie from the White Lady, yet the protective urge was strong in him for her. Though Maddie was the larger of the two women, she seemed to shrink before the White Lady’s gaze. In fact, when the White Lady looked at her, Maddie clutched her arms tightly around her waist and backed into the shadows away from the fire. “She doesn’t understand your words,” he defended his wife’s behavior. “It frightens her.”

That her earlier dismay at the loss of the language had returned was the only explanation he could think of for Maddie’s touchy response to the other woman. He didn’t understand such backsliding since she’d been eager to learn Gaelic before the White Lady had returned. Though he was puzzled by her behavior, Rowan didn’t hesitate to go to Maddie. He stood behind her, his arms circled her protectively, but he made her face the White Lady.

Maddie was both annoyed and shaken by her own emotional shifts. She wanted Rowan to touch her but wanted to slip out of his embrace as well, at least while the other woman was looking at them. “I am so confused,” she muttered. “Maybe it’s just because too much has happened too fast tonight.”

133

Susan Sizemore

Rowan felt as if he were hugging a stone but he didn’t let Maddie go. “It is late,” he said. “Perhaps we should all just rest.”

His hope was to take Maddie off to a dark corner of the house and settle down for the night beside her with their bodies snugly wrapped together in his plaid. In the morning they could leave and spend the ride back to Cape Wrath learning to speak to each other. He had a vision of a secluded place where they could stop along the way to make love.

“It’s early enough,” the White Lady said. She turned and took the bread back down from its shelf. “No guest goes to bed hungry in my house.” She gestured for them to sit.

Maddie managed to get over her embarrassed shyness long enough to steal a look at Rowan. He looked annoyed but he nodded at something the woman said and stepped forward, pushing Maddie before him.

“Hey!” she protested.

He sighed, pointed at the bread then at the White Lady. The other woman set plates on the table then a dark yellow wedge of cheese. There was a bowl of berries as well. It all looked delicious. “
Dìot mhór
,” he said, and urged Maddie toward the table.

Maddie decided to interpret this as dinner and let her empty stomach override her awkward feelings.

Before Maddie could sit down, the White Lady put a hand on her arm. Maddie turned to the woman while Rowan moved past her to take a seat. The White Lady gave her a reassuring smile then took down a cup made of carved horn. She put a dipper full of liquid from her the pot on the hearth and held it out to Maddie.

Maddie reluctantly took the cup and realized just how cold she’d become when the warmth from the liquid radiated to her palms.

The White Lady said something then smiled and nodded at Maddie before giving Rowan a quelling look as she gestured him to stay seated.

Maddie heard Rowan grumble out a question but most of her attention was on the lovely little cup cradled in her palms. It was dark brown and shiny, the outside carved in a delicate Celtic knotwork pattern. It was very pretty but what it contained was what drew her complete interest. She’d gotten used to the delicious aroma that permeated the house, but now she breathed in fresh scents as steam lifted from the cup. She couldn’t keep from holding it closer to her nose.

“Wonderful.” Her mouth began to water.

Anything that smelled so good must taste fantastic. She heard the White Lady urging her to, but didn’t need anything but the fascination with the lovely aroma to lift the cup to her lips. She was suddenly terribly thirsty. Hot as the liquid was, she found herself gulping it down.

While Maddie drank, she heard the other woman speaking reassuringly to Rowan.

The Gaelic was lilting and lovely on her tongue. “…
leighis copan
will do her a world of good.”

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A Kind of Magic

Leighis copan
, Maddie thought, means “the healing cup” and had trouble switching the words from Gaelic to English. “I’m thinking in Gaelic.” The cup—the healing cup—

dropped from her numb hands.

Rowan grabbed her by the shoulders, though she wasn’t aware of his moving from the table. She looked up at him. He was managing to glower and grin at the same time–

a combination she was sure only Rowan could manage. “You’re speaking Gaelic,” he said.

She had no trouble understanding him. The room, quite disconcertingly, began to spin around her. “I’m dizzy.” There were also small explosions being set off in her stomach, behind her eyes and in the dense matter between her ears where her brain was supposedly located. “All my nerve endings seem to be celebrating the Fourth of July,”

she said. “I can’t feel my feet. Are you holding me up, Rowan?”

“Aye.”

“That’s good.” She blinked. It was a slow, laborious, process. “This is magic, right?”

“It’s magic,” the White Lady said, her voice sounding very distant. “A simple spell to replace the understanding the fair folk took away. I saw in a vision that you would need this when you came to me.”

Maddie giggled. The room had stopped spinning. It was now melting. The low ceiling had been replaced by an arch of exploding stars. Maddie’s head fell slowly back as she became enthralled with watching the lightshow going on above her. She tried to reach up and touch the stars but her body was turning into a mass of boneless putty.

“Wow.”

“She’s ill,” Rowan said.

She sort of felt him lift her in his arms. His worry slid over her, shadowlike. His concern was more like a comfortable warm blanket.

“She’ll be fine.”

“Magic,” Maddie said. “Real magic. I get it.”

“Of course,” the White Lady answered as the stars rippled and shifted overhead. “I see that you believe at last.”

“Yeah. This is great,” Maddie said. She giggled and passed out.

135

Susan Sizemore

“Drugs.” The word came out of her sore throat in an almost choking rasp.

I was drugged. I don’t know what was real from what was hallucination—because I was
drugged.

How could she do that to me? Why?

A sense of betrayal was the first thing Maddie became aware of when she woke up.

She regained consciousness and instantly knew that the crazy, so-called
wisewoman
had given her drugs. She didn’t try to open her eyes. She didn’t want to know anything about her present situation. She had to analyze what had happened prior to her having passed out. Then she would try to deal with the secondary knowledge that she was lying on a dirt floor, tightly wrapped in warm wool and Rowan Murray’s snug embrace. She didn’t have to actually look at him to recognize the soft sound of his breathing and the firm feel of his body. Even when she’d been unconscious, she’d known she was safely sleeping beside his large, lean form.

She wasn’t going to think about Rowan’s body even though they were cuddled up together spoon fashion in a way that had her buttocks pressed against his bare thighs.

She wasn’t going to dwell on this unseemly arrangement or try to edge out of it. Not yet. She didn’t try to move away. She was far too warm and comfortable to consider the situation in solitary seclusion. She felt protected. This might be a false assumption but the physical comfort was real enough.

Maddie recalled everything that had happened the night before quite clearly. She just didn’t know how much of it was real. First there must have been the effects from the steam messing with her thinking then she’d been foolish enough to drink the stuff in the pot. She had taken a drink, hadn’t she? Yes. She was pretty sure that part had been real. As for the rest of it—well, the necklace had come off and she and Rowan hadn’t been able to understand each other. Right?

She’d actually been looking forward to learning Gaelic from Rowan. The thought threaded through her mind, leaving a melancholy sadness in its wake. It would have been a way for them to grow closer, something for them to share.
How foolish you’re
being
, she chided herself.
Everything that happened last night was just a dream.

Everything?

The sadness lifted somewhat as memories—memories she was sure were not false ones–flooded through her. For a time last night she had been wild, uninhibited, and so had Rowan. Only—had he wanted to make love to her or was it a side effect of the hallucinogen?

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A Kind of Magic

Then again, maybe she was just imagining that she remembered making love. How could she be sure it wasn’t something she’d dreamed? Because she
knew
she had done all those lovely, sensual, sexual things, she decided after considering what she remembered and how she currently felt. It wasn’t just how she reacted emotionally but her body was—different. Yes, definitely different. Awake. She was somehow more aware than she had ever been. How could making love make one feel more alive? Not to mention a bit bruised and strained in places and definitely a bit sore in one specific very private spot she wasn’t used to even thinking about that much let alone using.

“I don’t think I’m a virgin anymore,” she found herself muttering.

Rowan’s arm tightened around her and he chuckled in her ear. “No, lass, that you’re not.”

He sounded inordinately pleased about the whole thing. Which led Maddie to believe that he actually had been there during the process, which was how she remembered it having happened.

She was glad that they’d made love, even if it had been under the influence of some sort of drug. Maybe it was even a good thing that the drug had lowered her inhibitions enough to let her do something she wanted. Because she really had wanted Rowan. She wasn’t going to pretend that she hadn’t wanted last night’s events to happen. She’d been waiting all her life for someone like—no, she’d been waiting all her life for Rowan—to make her feel as she had in his arms. It was nice that for once nothing had happened to stop them from getting together. On the other hand, wasn’t using a behavior-altering substance, even inadvertently, cheating?

Who had it cheated? Him or her? Both. Yes, definitely, both of them. The so-called witch had created a situation where neither Rowan nor she had behaved or responded in their normal manner. They’d been higher than kites and had behaved like a pair of over-sexed bunnies because of it.

Then again, she hadn’t needed a drug when they’d started to make love by the lake.

That had been a very natural high. Who knew what might have become of it if the pain from the necklace hadn’t knocked her out?

And what about the necklace? And had they said the things to each other that she recalled or had she imagined a conversation about trust and love and believing in the reality of magic?

“Magic,” she complained, and threw off Rowan’s encircling arm.