Bedeviled (17 page)

Since Claire was one of the rare artists who actually made a living with her painting, her time was her own. She had no employer to answer to and no employees to worry about. Maggie envied that in a way, but seen from another light it meant Claire had few ties to bind her to a place. And as someone who was entrenched firmly in her rut of family and home, Maggie didn’t know how Claire managed to thrive so far from her own real home.

“Anyway,” her friend said, jolting Maggie from her thoughts, “I didn’t call just to talk.”

“Something
is
wrong.” Was that a cold draft of air sighing across her or just a twinge of worry? “What is it?”

“It’s you, Mags.” Claire’s voice went softer. “I called to warn you.”

“Warn me?” That cold she’d felt settled down on her now, chilling her skin, seeping into her bones. “About what?”

Claire sighed, and the ripple of it sounded across the phone lines despite the thousands of miles of ocean separating them. “Look, how long have we known each other?”

It felt like forever, but in reality . . . “About ten years.”

“And in all that time,” Claire said, her Scottish accent rolling softly over the words, “have you ever known me to be crazy?”

“Are we counting the night we got drunk and went to the lighthouse to chase ghosts?”

“No, we’re not.”

“Then no,” Maggie said, trying to ignore the worry in Claire’s voice. “You’re not a nut. Any more so than any of us, that is.” Besides, thinking about how weird her life had been lately, she had a far higher spot on the crazy ladder than Claire could lay claim to.

Still, Maggie hugged the quilt to her now and wished she had an electric blanket. Seriously, the cold she felt kept getting colder. “Just spit it out, okay?”

“Fine. I had a vision.”

Maggie frowned. “A dream, you mean.”

“No, a vision.” Maggie could almost see her friend rubbing her bottom lip, a nervous habit Claire was forever indulging in. “I don’t talk about this much, for obvious reasons, but the women in my family have the sight.”

What was she supposed to say to that? “Uh-huh.”

To someone else Claire shouted, “I’m telling her, Mother, if you’ll leave me be. . . .” There was a brief pause. “Sorry. There’s only the one phone in the bloody house and it’s in the kitchen, and can you get a bleeding moment to yourself? No.” Her voice shifted again, and became almost an apology. “Yes, Mother, I know you’re only trying to help—”

“Yoo-hoo!” Maggie called into the phone.

“Right. Sorry again. Honest to God,” she muttered, “now I remember why I moved thousands of miles away. So, it’s the second sight we have,” Claire said, talking faster now, as if she could sense Maggie’s disbelief and was doing all she could to combat it. “It’s a knowing, I guess. Of future events. Of things that might happen.”

“You can see the future.” One fist tightened on the quilt and held on as if she were in the front seat of a roller coaster, shooting down the tracks.

“Possible futures.” Claire’s voice was loud now, drowning out her mother in the background.

“Okay . . .” Maggie’s gaze drifted to the window again and seemed to hone in on the single lamp burning in one of Nora’s windows. A small beacon of light in the black.

“Fine,” Claire told her, her voice almost as chilly as Maggie felt. “Don’t believe me. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lost a friend over this—”

“Who’s lost? I’m right here! Didn’t say I didn’t believe you.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“Claire.” Maggie sighed her friend’s name. “If you knew what’s been going on around here for the last couple of weeks, you’d understand how a psychic pal is
not
going to make the headlines in my life.”

“So you do, then . . . believe me?”

“Why not? Trust me. When I tell you what I’ve found out about me, you’ll think I’m the fruitcake.”

“What you found out?” Claire asked. “You mean about the Fae thing?”

“Huh?”
Maggie gaped at the phone in her hand. “The Fae thing? You knew? How did you know and I didn’t know?”

“Hello? Visions,” Claire said patiently.

“Right. Vision girl.” Maggie flopped back against her pillows; then something occurred to her and she bolted upright one more time. “You have
visions
? So did you see when Mike cheated on me?”

“Um . . .”

“Did you know when Todd was planning to up and leave?”

“Now, don’t take on so—”

“And poor Joe. Did you see
that
?”

“What about Joe? I thought you broke up with him. You didn’t take him back, did you?”

“No, I didn’t take him back,” Maggie snapped. “He was eaten!”

“Hmm. Didn’t see that coming. What? Hold on, Mags.” She must have half covered the phone with her hand. “For the love of God, Mother, I’ll actually
pay
you to give me five bleeding minutes on the phone all by myself.” When she came back, Claire said on a sigh, “Well, call that ten pounds well spent. So. Joe was eaten, you say? Demon?”

“How do you know about demons?”

“Visions.”

“Right. But apparently not full-coverage visions, huh? I mean, you would have told me about Joe being snack food if you’d known, right?”

“God, yes. That’s just so awful. Poor Joe.”

“Poor Joe? Let’s have a little sympathy for the innocent bystander, okay?” Maggie tucked her quilt tighter around her. “So these visions. There are some things you miss?”

“I didn’t say they were perfect,” she muttered. “And think about it: If I had told you about what losers Todd and Mike were, what then?”

“Then I’d have had a warning that they were creeps.”

“Oh, please. Everyone but you knew that already.”

“Nice. You still could have warned me.” One more time, Maggie flopped back against her pillows.

“And of course you’d have believed me.”

“Hmm.” Maybe not. “Good point.”

“Look, Mags, we can talk about the other stuff when I get home. I only called because of what I saw. It’s about Nora.”

Maggie sat up straight, the cold forgotten as the quilt pooled in her lap. “What about Nora?”

The phone went dead.

“Claire? Claire!” Maggie shook the damn receiver as if it would help, then scowled at it when the line remained silent. Stomach pitching wildly now, she fought back a rising tide of panic. “What the hell? Nora? She had a vision about Nora? What’d she see?”

“Maggie.”

“Jesus H. Christ!” She threw the phone and shrieked as the air rippled in front of her and Culhane appeared out of nowhere. “
Stop
doing that! If you’re trying to kill me, it’d be easier to just hit me over the head or something.” She slapped one hand to her chest as if to keep her heart where it belonged.

“I wasn’t meaning to scare you, only to talk with you.”

“Well, I’m talking to my friend. Or I
was
.” She scrambled to retrieve the phone, hung it up, then lifted the receiver to call Claire back. Find out what the hell she’d seen in her vision about Nora. But there was no dial tone.

“Damn it. What’s wrong with the phones now?” She glanced across the yard at Nora’s little house and thought about sprinting over there to check on her sister and her niece. But it was the middle of the night, and she knew they were fine.

Wasn’t Quinn the Viking there? If there was danger, which Maggie didn’t want to believe, then he was more than capable of dealing with it.

Unless, she told herself suddenly,
he
was the danger.

On that disturbing thought, she jumped out of bed, brushed past Culhane and grabbed her jeans off the easy chair beneath the window. “No time for you now, Culhane,” she muttered. “I’ve got—”

He simply reached out, grabbed her upper arm and pulled her to him. The air left her in a rush when her chest hit his, and just for a second she forgot her sister, her niece, hell, even her own
name
. Staring up into his eyes she watched as those pale green eyes went even paler than normal until the soft color blended in with the whites and she felt as though she were staring through windows into eternity.

Oh, boy.
Now she was getting as crazy as the world around her.

Heat she couldn’t deny slipped through her, chasing away the cold that Claire’s phone call had built, and for that she was grateful. But, she told herself as she tore her gaze from Culhane’s captivating stare, she couldn’t fall into a swoon here. She had to check on Nora. Eileen.

Family first,
then
her hormones.

“Let go.”

“No.” His grip on her shifted, tightened as he wrapped both strong arms around her middle.

Pressed along the length of him, Maggie felt every inch of his hard body, and her own responded instantly to a particularly hard region of his. Yet more heat pooled low in her belly, and need reared up inside her. Her breath was strangling in her lungs as his big hands smoothed up and down her spine, defining her curves, sliding over the thin fabric of her nightgown.

She looked up at him again. Big mistake, she realized as she found herself lost in his eyes. Even through the haze of what she could only think of as a complete body meltdown, she felt him respond to her nearness. Felt his heartbeat quicken as hers did and knew, when he only strengthened his hold on her, that he was caught in whatever silken vise held her.

Oh, she’d never felt this before, and Maggie, for a moment, luxuriated in it. The fire, the heat, the soul-swamping
lust
.

She wanted him more than she’d ever wanted anyone or anything. But there was something else there, too. Beyond the lust. Beyond the heat. Beyond the yearning. There was a thread of connection that had been there from the moment they’d first met in her kitchen. From the first time he’d appeared in her life and told her that her world was about to change.

She didn’t entirely trust it. Didn’t know if she wanted it, even. But she wanted
him
.
That
there was no doubt about.

Here was the excitement she’d dreamed of. The man who could make her
feel
more than she’d ever thought to. The shake-up of the very comfortable rut she’d made for herself. And oh, she was ready.

So ready.

“You’re beautiful in the moonlight,” he said, and the soft music in his voice played on her every nerve ending. “It would be better, easier, if you weren’t,” he admitted, lifting one hand to stroke her hair back from her face, only to then touch his fingertips to the curve of her ear.

She shivered at the caress, but it was heat driving those shivers now, not the cold.

“I’m not beautiful,” she argued. “Nora’s the beauty. I’m the creative one.”

He smiled, one of those rare actions that never failed to make Maggie’s breathing catch in her throat.

“You’ve no idea what you are. Your beauty is there for anyone with an eye to see it. But it’s not only your beauty that pulls at me.” He sighed and let his hand drop to her waist. “It’s what’s in you. What you’ll do. Who you’ll be.”

That stiffened her, made her step back from the heat, away from the want. Locking her gaze with his, she asked, “And if I’m not what you think I am? If I can’t do what you expect, then what?”

He shrugged, and she had to admire the slow ripple of muscle. “It’s impossible. You are the one.”

“I don’t want to be the one,” she murmured, and her voice was lost in the darkness. Half turning from him, she looked out the window and focused again on that solitary light burning in Nora’s window.

Two weeks ago she’d known who she was, what she was. Now that had been stripped away, and she didn’t have any idea as to what was left. Was she still Maggie Donovan? Or had the Faery dust already begun turning her into someone . . . something else? And if she wasn’t Maggie, then who was she?

“You wonder,” he said, moving up behind her, laying his big hands on her shoulders until she felt both the weight and the warmth of him sliding into her. “You wonder what comes after.”

She lifted her chin, trying to push her doubts and worries aside. But they remained, niggling at her, tugging at her until she responded the only way she could. “You’re the one with the private pipeline to the future—why don’t you tell me?”

“Possible futures,” he reminded her, using the same words her friend had just a few minutes ago.

Remembering Claire and the phone dying on her and Nora in danger . . . “You have to leave. I have to go see Nora.”

“Not now.”

“Yes, now. Don’t tell me what to do.” Maggie pushed her hair back and stabbed her index finger at him. “You may be some hotshot warrior where you come from, but here you’re only a guy who shows up without being invited—too damned often—to be a pain in my ass.”

“Maggie—”

“Go away.”
Please go away,
her brain pleaded. She didn’t need to be drawn to him, to the very man who’d tossed her life upside down. She didn’t have time for a man in her life, and if she did, she sure wouldn’t be picking a guy who could appear and disappear whenever the hell he wanted to. “I mean it, Culhane, go away.”

He only sighed. “Your training’s begun, and still you don’t believe. Your power grows, and still you won’t listen. Perhaps it’s time you
see
.”

Moving for her jeans, she glanced at him. “See what? No, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Go away. I have to get dressed and—”

He didn’t listen, simply waved one hand in front of her, and just like that, Maggie was dressed: jeans, dark green sweater, even her tennis shoes were neatly tied.

“Impressive,” she finally said.

“It’s time for you to see,” he repeated. “I should have done this earlier; I realize that. But I wanted you to have time to understand what’s happening to you. Now I know you won’t truly comprehend it until you’ve seen for yourself.”

“Seen
what
?”

He only shook his head, wrapped her in his arms and tucked her head beneath his chin. Maggie knew she should have tried to push away—for all the good it would have done her. He was huge, after all. Way stronger than she was. Then there was the simple, humiliating truth that she
liked
him holding her. Liked the way he felt pressed along her body. Liked the way it made her feel.