Awaken the Curse (9 page)

“I could rest for the next ten years and this leg wouldn’t be any better. You and I both know that. Almack’s dance floor is forever safe.”

She bit her lip, her gaze cutting away, and the moment of camaraderie was broken. It had been this way between them for weeks. Katherine had maintained a cool distance, never spending time alone with him unless forced to. Even then she refused to look him in the eye or speak more than commonplaces. Occasionally, she would falter and they would share a laugh or he’d catch a glimpse of some deep emotion in her gaze, but it would vanish as quickly as it arose, and he couldn’t be certain he’d even seen it.

He’d allowed this strained civility to continue, but only because it was safer on his bruised heart than hearing the blunt truth. If she didn’t say the words, he could pretend she still loved him. That those hours within the ruin had not been all he would ever have of her.

But that ended now.

“I’m leaving at the end of the week,” he said. “I’ve been away from London too long, and there are people I must see.”

Annoyance leaked from her face, replaced by an expression he couldn’t read, but she remained silent.

He’d the urge to shake her ’til her teeth rattled, the silly gudgeon, but for the fact her ridiculous assumptions weren’t completely wrong. He took a deep breath, scanning the clearing—the barren circle of pounded earth with naught but a few tumbled stones at its center to prove the obelisk ever existed; the broken and leaning trees at the edge of the wood as if a great hand had scythed them down; and the unmistakable bristling crackle of Fey magic electrifying the air like a summer storm charge. “The Fey won’t be happy to see their work undone and their prisoner freed.”

She followed the track of his stare. “Everyone believes Lucan a cruel and vicious murderer. A monster.”

“Are they wrong? His treachery and crimes led to suffering unimaginable—for Other and Imnada.”

“I can’t believe that, James. He saved us. We would have died without his help.”

“One small good against an eternity of evil won’t tip the scales. If anyone ever discovers the truth about who he is, he’ll be hunted down by both sides. Lucan may be freed of the obelisk, but he remains as trapped as ever.”

“It’s hopeless?”

He shrugged. “I didn’t say that. Where there’s life, there’s always hope.”

Her gaze lifted to his in recognition. “Lucan spoke the same words.” Reaching within her bodice, she withdrew the silver disk, still upon its chain. It turned in the breeze, the light catching the etched runes, winking like a joke. “He gave it to me, but it really belongs to you.”

A smile tugged at his mouth. Oh, yes, this was a hurdle he could leap with or without a game leg and a body that felt like a pugilist’s punching bag. In fact, he savored the challenge. He leaned close. “Would you mind doing the honors?” he asked sheepishly, bowing his head.

He felt her reluctance. Felt the tremor in the air that signaled her uncertainty. But she did as he asked, lifting the chain over his head. The links were cool upon the back of his neck. The disk heavier than he remembered. But he was more interested in the brush of her fingers sending shivers down his spine and the warmth of her breath upon his cheek. He stepped into the circle of her arms before she had a chance to back away. “Things have gone wrong between us, Katherine. I would mend them before I go . . . if I could.”

She sought to retreat, but he held her firmly. She would hear him out before she crushed his last hope. “I love you, Miss Lacey. Then, now, and forever. And I also know what keeps you from returning that love.”

She drew a sudden, startled breath, brows quirked in question.

“Your father explained your questions and your lingering doubts. And you’re right. I did come to Wales half hoping to make you fall in love with me again.” She stiffened in his arms but he kept talking, hammering away at her resistance. “I never imagined in a million years, you actually would. Or that I would fall as hopelessly in love with you this time as I did all those years ago in your father’s parlor.” He lowered his head so he might gaze directly into her golden eyes, his voice hoarse, barely more than a whisper. “I would smash the world if it kept you safe. And I would offer it to you in the palm of my hand if it would bring you back to me.”

She choked back a sob, her breathing quick and sharp, and then her hands were pulling him against her, each fitting perfectly against the other like spoons in a drawer. He kissed her hair, the edge of one ear, the only things he could reach while her face was buried in his shirtfront. She said something, the words lost in his cravat.

“What was that?” he asked, happiness bubbling up through him like champagne.

“I love you, James Farraday, and this time you’re awake to hear it.” She curved a hand around his neck, pulling his head down to hers. He paused just at the last, her lips a bare inch away, his body like a plucked wire.

“Marry me, Katie love. Say you’ll be my lady.”

She looked up, her eyes alight with stars, a smile piercing his heart. “But I doubted you. I suspected you of horrible schemes.”

“The most odious imaginable.” He laughed, tilting her face to his, her lips soft as he kissed her, his body hard as he dragged her close enough to understand how long it had truly been. “But I’ve waited five years to make you mine. I’ll not let you off the hook that easily.”

“Then that is most very definitely a yes, my lord.”

He pulled her against him as he poured his need into a slow, sensuous seduction that would put any remaining doubts between them to rest. His mouth moved from behind her ear to her neck and into the valley of her breasts. Her scent acted like an aphrodisiac, his every nerve raw and jumping with a craving only she could appease. Her shawl slid away, ribbons pulled free, buttons popping one by one as he explored, with hands and mouth, the silken slope of her shoulder, palmed one luscious breast, his thumb lazily tracing her sensitive nipple. He smiled as she arched into his touch, her hands braced upon his shoulders as he teased her with his stroking touch. Gods help him, if his bad leg gave out now, he’d drag her down with him. His mouth curved against her flesh.
Not a bad idea, though perhaps not the most convenient place for a consummation.

She moaned, eyes closed, lips parted as a shudder ran through her.

A jolt of electricity jumped from his groin to his brain and he gave a half-gasping laugh as she slid a hand within his breeches. Suddenly a wild thought punctured the hazy spell wrapped round them.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, her eyes dark and glassy with arousal.

He gazed over her shoulder. “I don’t know why, but I keep waiting for your father to interrupt.”

Her hand moved, steadily mounting waves of pleasure pushing him ever close to a teetering edge. “Let him bloody well try,” she whispered with those perfectly pink, perfectly full, perfectly kissable lips. Then she kissed him.

Keep reading for an excerpt from DEMON’S CURSE:

Book One in the Imnada Brotherhood Trilogy

By Alexa Egan

Available from Pocket Books in January 2013

1

ST. JAMES’S PICCADILLY CHURCHYARD, LONDON

OCTOBER 1816

Bianca paid off the hackney with the last shilling she’d tucked in her reticule that morning. She could only hope the rain that had threatened all day would hold off a few hours more. She didn’t relish a long, soggy trudge, especially since she’d stupidly worn her newest bonnet and a lovely pelisse in violet merino wool she could barely afford. She pinched her lips together. Actually, she hadn’t been able to afford it at all, but Adam insisted the color became her perfectly. Like a graceful purple
Iris ensata,
he’d raved. Rain or no rain, it seemed fitting to wear the outfit to say good-bye to her dearest friend.

She regretted coming as soon as she descended onto the flagway. A mob thronged the area around St. James’s. What did they imagine? That they might catch sight of Adam’s naked, ravaged body? That he might rise from the grave to point an accusing finger? Expose his murderer to the world?

Whispers swirled around her.

“. . . recognize her from Covent Garden . . . Viola last spring . . . beautiful . . . no better than she should be . . . foreigner . . . actress . . . dead man’s whore . . . murderess . . .”

A shiver raced up her spine, but as if she were preparing her entrance onstage, she firmed her shoulders, straightened her back, and lifted her chin, eyes sparking. Adam had been her friend. He hadn’t deserved to die as he had, and she owed him a final farewell. Crowds and their ugly slander be damned!

Bianca passed through the churchyard to the grave site. Once beyond the ghoulish sightseers, she found herself almost alone in her grief. A minister presided over a trio of men standing awkwardly, their faces arranged in expressions of mourning, though she questioned their sincerity. After all, she’d never seen any of them before. Not once in all the time she’d known Adam.

Perhaps a clue rested in the uniformed crispness of one, his hat tucked beneath his arm, a sword hanging loosely from his hip. Bianca knew that Adam had served for years in the army, selling out after the emperor’s final defeat at Waterloo the summer before last. Could these men be former brothers in arms?

They looked up as one when she swept forward to stand unapologetically beside them. She sensed a slow-burning appraisal from the golden-haired Adonis to her left, greatcoat hanging elegantly from his wide shoulders, cravat tied in careless perfection. A gentleman with the looks and—if she read him right—the knowledge of his own power to attract.

A regal gentleman at the foot of the grave eyed her down his straight aristocratic nose, lips pursing ever so slightly, hand tightening on the knob of his cane. It didn’t take a mind reader to interpret his disapproval.

Only the officer spared her no more than a glance before returning his attention to the minister reading from his Bible.

Dismissing the three men with a jerk of her chin, she focused on the reason she was here. Adam Kinloch. A true friend and gentleman when so many others of her acquaintance wanted something from her. Her talent. Her favors. Her body.

Adam had never asked for more than her friendship. And in offering his in return, he’d reminded her of the life she’d lost when Papa died and Lawrence had swept her from the gardens and greenhouses outside Baltimore to the clogged and cluttered streets of London.

What sort of monster would have killed him in such a horrible, shocking way? Would leave him naked and gutted, abandoned like so much refuse to be scavenged by dogs and beggars?

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, her stare burning to hold them back. No doubt these cold-eyed men assumed, like everyone else, that she and Adam had been lovers. She’d always let people believe what they wished. Better that than discovering the far more disturbing truth.

As if sensing her thoughts, the uniformed man met her watery gaze. His strange almond-shaped eyes were a pale green-gold, long-lashed and deeply set. His lips were full and sensuous. Smiling, he would have been devastating. But he didn’t look as if he smiled often, if at all. In fact, he could have been carved from stone. From across Adam’s grave, he watched her steadily as if he could see right into her heart. She knuckled her hands together, refusing to look away first. He wanted to stare? Fine. He could stare all he liked. She was used to eyes on her.

As the service concluded, the others drifted away, leaving her alone with the gravediggers clutching their spades.

She dropped the small nosegay she’d purchased from a flower seller into the grave. “I’ll not forget you, my friend,” she whispered. “And never fear, as you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours. You have my promise.”

As the first scoop of earth thudded against the coffin’s lid, the heavens opened, the autumn rain falling in a chilling drench that immediately drooped her ribbons and soaked through the expensive wool to her gown beneath.

Shielding her head as best she could with her reticule, she turned, almost knocking into the officer, who had lingered behind.

“Pardon,” he said, his voice a gruff rumble, his gaze doubly intense at a distance of inches. He opened his mouth as if he might say more, but she dodged past him in her haste to leave this awful, forlorn, hopeless place.

The crowds had dispersed in the downpour. The sidewalk was empty but for a knife grinder hurrying for shelter and a man selling meat pies to a dripping-wet customer.

She lifted a hand to hail a hackney before remembering she had no fare. Instead she hastened east down Piccadilly on foot, all the while feeling a gaze leveled at her back, tickling her shoulder blades. She would not turn around, but her steps came faster until, cowardly as it made her feel, she was almost running.

*   *   *

“The woman knows, I’m sure of it.” Captain Mac Flannery splashed brandy into his glass before downing it in one quick gulp, letting the heat travel soothingly through him. Without any explicit invitation, the group of old friends had ended up at Gray’s town house after leaving the cemetery.

Mac poured another, trying to wash away the grave stench clinging to his nostrils, the roof of his mouth. The memory of earth striking the coffin lid as Adam was entombed. The Imnada did not hold with enclosing their dead in the ground but released their spirits with fire, the better to send them back through the Gateway to be reunited with their ancestors. Unfortunately, Adam’s murder had garnered too much public attention to make that possible.

Instead, he’d died as he’d lived: in exile from his clan. His kind. Only Mac’s intervention keeping him from a pauper’s lye pit with the rest of the unclaimed dead.

“You think Adam betrayed us to an out-clan?” Gray demanded from his seat by the fire.

Mac hadn’t seen de Coursy since the chaotic days following Waterloo. The estranged heir to the dukedom of Morieux lived a reclusive life in the north, rarely venturing to London, and even then shunning the usual Society entertainments. Some gossip blamed it on a horrible disfigurement acquired during the war. Others whispered he kept his mad wife locked in a tower. The most salacious hinted at black arts and satanic rituals carried out in the catacombs beneath his bleak north country estate.

If only the truth were that simple.

“Was that Bianca Parrino paying her last respects?” David St. Leger paused in shuffling a deck of cards to hold out his glass for Mac to refill.

“Who?” Mac asked, glancing at the faces of the men he’d once soldiered with. Men who at one time had been as close as brothers. The Fey-blood’s curse had shattered that bond as it had destroyed so much in their lives.

Friendships forged by blood and steel had frayed like ragged cloth as if each of them had hoped to flee the curse by running away from each other. They should have known their fates and Fey-blood magic had tied them too closely for escape. They were bound by darker forces than the war.

“All work and no play, Captain Flannery.” David gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Do they have you chained to your desk over there at the Horse Guards?”

Mac chose not to answer. This wasn’t David’s first refill.

“She’s an actress at Covent Garden,” he continued. “All the rage this year. Audiences love her.”

Of course. That was why the woman at Adam’s funeral had seemed so familiar. Mac had seen her penned likeness staring out at him from countless newspapers. They didn’t do her justice.

Statuesque as any Nordic queen, she carried herself with a pride that bordered on the insolent. Hair blond as corn silk. Eyes a chilling blue. And just enough of an accent to give her an air of the exotic. But it was what she’d said more than how she’d said it that had truly rooted him to the spot.
As you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours.

Had Adam been foolish enough to trust her with the Imnada’s existence? And could this reckless confession have led to his murder?

“They say she’s high in the instep as any duchess. Throws men into a quake with one glance from those alluring blue eyes,” David said, refilling his own glass this time. “They also say she and Adam were lovers.”

Gray rose to toss another log on the fire. “I find that hard to believe while the Imnada are forbidden marriage outside the clans.”

“I never said he was marrying her. I said he was swiving her,” David said with a leer.

Gray’s face betrayed his disgust.

“Wrinkle your princely nose all you want, de Coursy, but you know as well as I do that as long as we lay under the curse, a quick shag is all you and I are ever going to get.”

“That may be, but some of us still wish for more than a tumble with some faceless, nameless doxy.”

David shrugged. “Wish all you want. It won’t change the facts. Besides, what does it matter to the man they refer to as the ‘Ghost Earl’? With that tall, dark, and mysterious act, you’ve got every woman in England panting for you, ring or no ring.”

If David’s smirk was any indication, Mac and Gray would do best to ignore him. St. Leger had always been a loose cannon. It was doubtful whether the curse had diminished his reckless ways.

Mac stepped into the breach. “Terminology aside, if Adam and Mrs. Parrino were lovers, she might know about the Imnada. About us.”

“I still don’t believe it,” Gray declared. “Adam would never have betrayed us to an out-clan. It was his very determination to keep the Imnada’s secret that led to the . . . to our . . .”

“Say it, de Coursy,” David urged, his features rigid. “Or are you too frightened to speak of it out loud? Will the shade of our maker rise up from the grave and strike us down? Curse us again? What the hell could he do that’s worse than what we already suffer? Forcing the shift . . . renunciation by the clans . . . Death would be preferable.”

David’s histrionics aside, Mac had to agree.

Tainted by Fey-blood magic, the four of them had been declared mortally damaged and a blight on the clans, their bloodlines forever corrupted. Worthless. Contemptible. Abominations.

And yet, they’d not been offered the swift mercy of a falling ax or a sharp snap of the neck. Instead, the Gather elders had pronounced a far harsher sentence of exile, severing the four of them from the protection and community of clan and holding, cutting them off from everyone they cared about, erasing them from the world they knew as if they’d never been born.

Mac’s back twitched with the memory of the destruction the Ossine’s enforcers wreaked upon his body as they stripped him of his clan mark. His bowels loosened as he recalled the violent shredding of his mental signum, as if a great claw had ripped through his brain. Both punishments had destroyed every bond with his past, leaving him adrift and alone. He’d only survived by hardening his mind and his heart against any pain and any loss, becoming as unfeeling and remote as a speck of dirt, focusing no further than the next day, the next cycle of the moon, the next season.

“Had your grandfather not caved to the Ossine’s commands, we’d have faced a quick end and you could have been the Ghost Earl in earnest then,” David jibed.

“That’s enough.” Gray’s terse command was unmistakable.

St. Leger lashed out, smashing his glass down on the tabletop, the shards spraying his hand, cutting his cheek. Blood slid down his face like a single crimson tear. “You’re not my superior officer anymore. I don’t take your orders.”

“Did you ever?”

David froze for a moment, his expression unreadable. His body poised as if he might throw himself on Gray and beat him to a jelly. It wouldn’t be the first time these two had come to blows. Like oil and water, they were, with Mac the inevitable peacemaker. He’d thought those days long past.

But as quickly as David’s rage had ignited, it dissipated in a bout of laughter. “Damn, but I forgot what a right bastard you are.” He passed the palm of his hand across his cheek, wiping away the blood.

“Feeling’s mutual,” Gray grumbled.

Mac swallowed back his aggravation. “That woman is aware of our existence. I’d bet on it. We’re vulnerable—the Imnada are vulnerable—until we discover the extent of the danger.”

Immediately his mind returned to Bianca Parrino. Her whispered words had set a queer pang jolting through him. Worry had taken root, and no amount of scoffing by these two chuckleheads would dissuade him.

“You think Adam was killed because he was Imnada? None know the clans survive. The enforcers have seen to that.” David plunked himself down on a couch, dabbing at his cut with a handkerchief.

“Would you bet your life and the lives of every man, woman, and child within the clans on that assumption, David? Would you bet the lives of your family? Your friends?” Mac argued.

“Friends? Family? Where were they when the Gather pronounced our sentence? When our clan marks were obliterated and we were cast out half-dead into the world?”

“Not all of them wished us ill. There were those who spoke against our exile.”

“For all the good it did us. No, Mac. We’re
emnil
. Outlawed and living on sufferance. I say let the clans fend for themselves.”

“Then forget the clans and remember Adam. He was our friend. We owe him justice, if nothing else,” Mac challenged.