Alison's Wonderland (16 page)

He fell into a deep slumber, and Lorilei stole from his room, the crop in hand. In the morning, she charged him for his stay and he went on his way. Whether he knew the crop was missing or not, he did not say.

Weeks later, Eric jauntily approached the inn. His thread-bare, saffron tunic was clean and outlined his trim frame. Lorilei stopped washing in the wooden tub to stare, noticing his finely muscled legs. He was like spring leaves rustling through the reds and golds of fall. Her breath caught as the sun gilded the waves of his hair.

He stopped and looked a Lorilei, then bowed and asked, “Do you have space for the evening meal?”

“Yes, that and a room if you need.”

Eric shook his head, his emerald eyes flashing in the sun. “Ah, no, my lady. I have here a trusty cot, both magic and comfortable.” He patted the bundle of sticks and leather at his back.

Lorilei’s eyes grew wide. A magic cot. Now, what would that do? “Of course, my lord…”

“Eric. I heard told that my brothers, James and Jon, came this way and recommended your hospitality.” They had
also mentioned her desire for their meager enchanted treasures. But Eric hoped to gain his own treasures.

Lorilei brought out her best ham, potatoes and squashes. She poured Eric spiced wine and sat with him, listening to his tales. But mostly she found she couldn’t help but stare into his eyes.

Eric for his part wanted to linger in her fiery radiance, soak in Lorilei’s natural joy. Eventually, he bade her good-night and repaired to the barn. Lorilei climbed to her bedroom, vowing that she would not trick this man, for she sensed his honest gaiety. Pacing her room from armoire to bed and back, she found she could not settle, and crept out to the barn. For just a look, that was all.

Eric knew she couldn’t resist and lay waiting, having not yet used the magic words. He stared up at the loft, his arms tucked behind his head. The barn door creaked open and he smiled.

As Lorilei approached she was disappointed to see nothing more than a worn cot. But the man upon it warmed her heart. She blushed and said, “I just came to see your wondrous cot.”

“Just that?” asked Eric, laughing. He patted the cot for her to sit. And as she did, he said, “Bed, bed, show a fine spread.”

Lorilei laughed as the bed rumbled, doubling in size, the thin linen changing to sumptuous silks and a brocade coverlet in umber and peridot. Pillows appeared, as a canopy of fine blue muslin spread out from the posts sprouting at each corner. She clapped her hands. “Oh, what a delightful piece of magic.”

Eric watched her and reached out to touch her face. He began to kiss his way up her neck and nibble her ear. “You are a better piece of magic.”

Lorilei closed her eyes, sinking back as he kissed along her arm, gently sucking her fingers. He inched her gown up, kissing, licking, tasting along the way. Lorilei sighed and wrig
gled, grasping his hands or his face to lay delirious kisses along his flesh. He tasted of honey, wood smoke and cedar. She breathed him in as their bodies slid along each other.

It was much later, after Eric had sucked her rosy nipple, trailing his tongue from her navel to her clit, bringing her to an apex of orgasm, that he entered her, his cock melding with Lorilei so that they moved unconsciously, tempos changing, slowing, building until they came together, passion vibrating through them, clenching them closely.

In the morning, as the first radiant rays of sun slanted through the barn door, Lorilei and Eric lay entwined and the other travelers had to fend for themselves.

Lorilei drew in a deep breath, smelling the salty musk of their lovemaking. Never had she found a man like this and she now knew her need for magic had been fulfilled, for she had found the greatest treasure.

Two brothers returned home to the tailor’s house for a while. Eric only returned to invite them to the wedding.

“Erik, stop the car!” Phoebe shouted.

With a dramatic sigh, Erik slammed on the brakes. “Girlfriend,” he said once the car halted, “you are going to give me a heart attack.”

But Phoebe wasn’t listening. She was already out of the car, a few hundred yards back on the narrow tarmac road through the tiny Irish town of Arderra, staring up in rapture. When Erik joined her, she breathed, “Isn’t it magnificent?”

Erik grudgingly agreed that it was, although he grumbled that it wasn’t on the list and he didn’t even know what little Irish town they were
in,
anyway. She knew he wasn’t really angry; they’d been friends since before he’d figured out that he was gay, and she knew his dramatic ways.

Besides, he’d been just as enthusiastic about this trip as she, ignoring the warning of friends that they didn’t have a publishing contract and it would be a waste of money. He agreed with Phoebe: Even if they didn’t sell the book, they’d have had a glorious vacation in Ireland, right?

She hoped the book would fly. She believed it would. There were enough Anglophiles in the U.S. to appreciate a
coffee-table book of gorgeous photos of unique pub signs, accompanied by the stories behind the signs. No prefab Saint George and the Dragons or the King’s Arms—no, they were going for local legends and exceptional original artwork.

Like this one. Phoebe shivered with excitement.

In the foreground was a fiddle, finely etched with Celtic knotwork. It was broken, however—the neckpiece split and lolling drunkenly, the snapped strings dangling so realistically that Phoebe thought she could hear their tortured death twang.

It wasn’t just the lifelike artwork that had caught her eye, though. In the upper corners, faded and half-seen like ghosts, were two women.

The one on the left was a redhead, with creamy skin and sad emerald eyes. The opposing woman had black-as-night hair that glittered with diamond-like drops of water. Between them stretched a night sky, clouded and wild, a bolt of lightning sundering the picture and forever separating the women.

Which, Phoebe supposed, was probably a good thing. Somehow, instinctively, she knew the women were rivals.

“Well,” Erik said, “it
is
getting late. We might as well stay here tonight, and you can pump someone for information about the sign.”

“Deal. I’ll get us checked in.”

She asked the usual questions as she acquired rooms for them, but the desk clerk, a pretty young thing with a wild thatch of tangled black hair to her waist and a ring in her nose, said vaguely that it was about some sort of legend, and she should be asking Harry, the owner, tonight at the ceilidh. He’d be running the bar, see. They
would
be coming down for the ceilidh, wouldn’t they?

Phoebe assured her that they would.

It was a gloriously traditional pub, all dark red upholstery and wood so old and scarred it looked black beneath the loving polish. A sooty stone fireplace held a low, peaty fire.

They watched the band set up as they ate (prawn cocktail and steak-and-kidney pie for Phoebe, Camembert and fresh salmon for Erik, and apple-blackberry crumble with hot custard for both of them).

“Yes, he’s mighty fine,” Erik said, propping his chin on his hand.

“Who, what?”

“That delicious boy you’re ogling. I’d fight you for him, but I’m already sure he’s as straight as a road in Iowa.”

Phoebe knew it was useless to deny she’d been ogling. The young man across the room who was pulling a fiddle from its case
was
delicious. Hair as black as coal and curling silkily to his collar, eyes as blue as twilight eve. High, sharp cheekbones that looked as though they’d been chiseled out of marble. Pale skin that would have made Snow White blanch with envy. Slender but sturdy, wearing a pair of faded jeans so snug he must have had to use a shoehorn to get them on. She spooned another bite of crumble, laughing to herself. He was barely more than a boy, and at thirty-two she felt like a dirty old woman for contemplating his impressive bulge.

By the time they finished their meal the crowd was gathering for the ceilidh, and they managed to snag two chairs by the fire just in time.

The band played reels that left Phoebe breathless with melodies that leaped like cold, wild streams. Reels with boundless energy and a relentless beat that made her think of really great sex.

The fiddle player’s hands flew over the strings, made a blur of the bow. He played his instrument with passion, and she imagined that passion extended to other areas in his life.

That left her breathless for another reason altogether, and with her nipples tightening beneath her shirt. She shouldn’t, she told herself, be thinking about the young man’s lips and how they might feel on her skin. But she squirmed in her seat all the same.

During a break in the music, Phoebe went to the bar, waiting until the crush of people cleared so she could actually get a few words in to Harry, a slender, clean-cut man with graying hair and a calm demeanor in the face of the frenzy of Saturday night at the pub. A score of taps lined the bar, glasses hanging from racks overhead and stronger spirits in bottles on the wall behind. She ordered another pint of Guinness, watched approvingly as he poured it with a deft hand to create the outline of a shamrock on the foam, and slid her coins across the bar.

“My friend and I, we’re doing a book on unusual pub signs,” she said. “A coffee-table book. He takes the pictures, I write the text. You’ve got a gorgeous sign out front—what’s the story behind it?”

“A book, eh?” Harry swiped a towel across the gleaming wood between them, then leaned on the bar.

“We don’t have a publisher yet,” Phoebe admitted. “But I don’t think we’ll have a problem selling the project. It’ll be good publicity for you.”

Harry gazed fondly around the packed pub. “Ah, I don’t think I’ll be needing much of that—not that I’ll ever turn it away, mind you. I’ll tell you who can really spin the tale for you is Finn over there.”

She tried to follow his gaze. “Finn?”

Harry indicated her sweet fiddle player. Ah,
Finn.
It suited him.

“Will he be spinning me a tale, or telling me the history of the sign?” she asked.

Harry waggled his head in a yes-and-no motion. “A little
of both, I’ll warrant. But he does know the tale of the sign better than any of us. He actually did the research on it, for a school project.”

“He’s something of a scholar, is he?”

“A little here, a little there,” Harry said. “I don’t think his time at uni was wasted.”

So he’d been to college. Maybe she wasn’t quite as dirty or as old as she’d thought.

Someone jostled up to the bar beside her.

“Two black-and-tans and a snakebite, Harry,” the man said without a glance at Phoebe.

Phoebe thanked Harry and retreated to her seat with her drink.

“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” she asked Erik again.

He shook his head. “I’m fine, darling. Except I’ve got a headache, and I’m afraid the music isn’t helping it. I’m going to abandon you for my bed and the very real possibility of a
Black Adder
rerun.”

“Because I know how you feel about Rowan Atkinson.”

“Especially in the Elizabethan series. Oh, honey, that codpiece.”

She missed Erik, but she certainly had enough to occupy her with Finn in the corner of the room. There was no stage; the band had mostly just grabbed nearby chairs. Yet somehow they all seemed higher than the rest of the room, the music advancing them onto an unseen but very real stage.

They finished the next set with an air, a sweet sad song that made Phoebe forget about her drink. The notes curled through the air, burrowed under her skin, clouded her throat with beautiful despair.

Finn stroked the bow across the strings as if he stroked a woman, and his only thought, his only care, his only goal was to coax and tease from her the most exquisite sounds. A raven
wing of hair fell across his brow as he concentrated, eyes half-lidded.

Then he set the fiddle aside and began to sing. His pure, strong tenor filled in the spaces made by the other instruments, until the pub was wrapped like a body in a linen shroud. It was as if, for a few moments, they existed only within the song.

When it ended, first there was silence. Even the locals, who presumably had heard the song before, seemed frozen by the music’s spell. Then the clapping started, and the whistles and cheers, and Finn took a deep, theatrical bow that took nothing away from his performance. When she could move again, Phoebe took a long draft of her Guinness.

She looked up from it to find Finn, all gloriously lanky length of him, standing before her. She shivered, deep inside, at the smell of his spicy aftershave piercing through the scent of the peat fire, at his proximity.

“I hear you’re wanting to talk to me,” he said.

She smiled. “Did Harry send you over?”

“That he did.” Finn easily rested a hip on the small round table between the chairs. “But your friend also put in a word before he left.”

“Erik talked to you?”

“Aye. He told me that you fancied me.”

Phoebe blushed. “Well, you do have a way with that fiddle of yours,” she said, hoping to diffuse the subject. But Finn’s eyes, twilight-blue and perceptive, held hers. There was a hint of amusement in their depths—and also a hint of desire. She was sure of it.

She caught her breath.

“Thank you,” Finn said. “Although I’d be sorely disappointed if the only thing about me that interested you was my fiddle.”

He had the typical Irish accent, where the “th” became a “t” or “d”: “Altough I’d be sorely disappointed if de only ting about me dat interested you was me fiddle.”

She loved it. She absolutely loved it.

“Well, that and your research on how The Broken Fiddle got its name,” she said.

She really did care about that. But she also found herself leaning forward, revealing a bit more cleavage, putting a hand on his knee.

He put his hand over hers. She could feel the calluses on his fingertips from his fiddle playing. She imagined what those gifted, swift fingers, those rough pads, would feel like on her breasts, between her legs, and excitement skimmed through her, pooling at her groin.

“And why are you so interested in that?” he asked.

It took her a moment to realize he wasn’t talking about sex. She told him about the book. He looked impressed.

“You’ll be putting our little town on the map.”

“It would be nice if more people could appreciate the sign—and come here to appreciate your music,” she said.

Before he could reply, the squeeze-box player shouted, “Finn! Leave the bird be and get your arse back over here.”

Finn squeezed her hand, then reluctantly stood. “We’ve got one more set to play,” he said. “Will you be waiting for me afterward? I’ll tell you all about the sign.”

The way he said it somehow sounded like a promise of an assignation, of stolen kisses and much, much more.

“I’ll be waiting,” Phoebe promised.

She found out from Harry what whiskey Finn drank, and had a shot waiting for him after he stowed his fiddle in its case and got through the crowd of people, all of whom wanted to clap him on the back and say hello.

He grinned at the sight of the drink, tossed it back and said,
“I see I already told you the price of the story was a single malt and a kiss.”

Phoebe raised an eyebrow. “The whiskey’s the down payment,” she said. She leaned closer, feeling the heat of him beneath his linen shirt, indigo like his eyes. “The kiss, though—well, I’ll pay you that after I’ve heard the story and agree it’s worth the cost.”

He laughed softly. “Is that so? Then I’ll have to make it worth your while.” He held out his hand. “Walk with me, girl, and I’ll tell you the tale of a fiddle and a heart both cleft in twain.”

Despite the late hour, the sky hadn’t achieved full blackness. At the height of summer, this far north, it never got past the velvet-blue of deep twilight. When she was a girl, Phoebe had believed that time of evening to be when the fairies came out. Here in Ireland, she could almost believe it again.

There was little light pollution from Arderra, and glittering stars blanketed the sky. A moon just past full gave enough light for Phoebe to see where to put her feet as Finn led her through the pub’s back garden (pointing out a corner of tangled overgrowth, beneath which was a holy well, he said) and up the hill beyond. She was glad for her sturdy hiking boots and jeans as they tromped through thigh-high grass and vines and occasional bramble.

They crested the hill, and once again, she caught her breath. Maybe she
had
been transported to fairyland.

Below them, in the cup of the hills, lay a small, still lake, black as night but with a path of shimmering white laid down by the moon. Darker shapes against the gorse looked to be the ruins of a small building, possibly an ancient tower.

When they got to the bottom of the slope, it was as if the village no longer existed. Any noise from the departing pub-goers had vanished. A pair of crickets serenaded each other, or perhaps they were flirting. Beyond that, there was just the
sound of hers and Finn’s breathing and the brush of their feet through the undergrowth.

Irish roses, wild and untamed, tangled around the broken stones, their heady scent making Phoebe light-headed. Or maybe it was Finn’s warm, strong hand resting on the small of her back, guiding her through the rough terrain.

He led her to a hip-high wall that was relatively flat.

“I’m going t’ tell you a story now,” Finn said, and Phoebe automatically settled herself into a comfortable position on the stones. She knew what Irish storytelling was like. They could be here till dawn.

She wondered if the lake had the popular legend that many did, that anyone who survived a full night on its shores would either go mad or become an amazing poet. If so, she crossed her fingers for the latter.

“Many years ago—no one’s quite sure of how many, but they all agree that it was quite a few and then some—there was the small village of Arderra here, smaller than it is now. Farms and the like scattered around it. The pub was here, but it had a different name then, one no one remembers now.”