Dark Enchantment (13 page)

He turned, slowly, deliberately. Not just his head, but his whole upper body. Arianna felt her insides begin to quake at the cold, naked fury in his eyes. “You would dare defy me in this?” His voice was low, caressing, all the more menacing for its softness.

She swallowed the irrational panic, squared her shoulders. “
Defy
you? Do you hear yourself, Caleb? What the heck do you think this is, the freaking seventeenth century?”

He didn’t respond, just continued to fix her with that black, indicting stare.

“You want a laugh?” she plowed on, digging the hole even deeper. “I’d almost convinced myself there had to be a logical explanation for what happened there. But every time I broach the subject with you, you brush me off. Now, why is that? I have to ask myself. Why do I get the feeling that something
really
weird is going on?”

Where angels dare to tread...
The words filtered through her mind.

“Belligerent to a fault, so you are,” he murmured. “So bold as to beard a lion in his den, without a thought to the consequences. Leastwise, not until the bloody beast has your stubborn head in his mouth.” He swore fluently under his breath in Gaelic.

“What-
ever
.” Arianna heard a scraping sound. Did people actually grind their teeth when they were angry? Hmmph, clearly the man was unaccustomed to dealing with a strong, independent woman. An equal. In the macho world of Caleb MacNamara, a female undoubtedly knew her place, respected the male’s dominant position in society.

Wrong woman, wrong society, wrong freaking century.
Arianna matched him glare for glare, outrage snapping from her eyes.

But then she saw his gaze slide down, and consider her quivering lower lip…as if he were contemplating catching the plump, juicy morsel between his teeth. And nipping. She felt a jolt of pleasure at the light sting of his punishment. And then she imagined his mouth covering hers. His hands tracing her curves, molding, possessing, stirring her hunger, as he redirected the fiery temper in her—in the both of them—into an explosive passion.

She shivered. Her defiance had not only fueled his fury, but seemed to have stoked up the boiler on his libido as well. Blinded by lust and rage, he was hot. Reckless.

Dangerous.

Caleb’s head turned slowly toward the door. And his eyes narrowed in concentration. The unmistakable snick of a lock engaging reverberated through the strained silence. Arianna shot a puzzled glance at the door. Then returned her gaze to him, staring slack-jawed.

No, he didn’t. He did
not
just lock that door.
With his mind.

With what seemed a perverse sense of satisfaction, he held her astonished gaze for several beats, while her mind busily sifted, sorted, catalogued data. After first considering, then discarding various hypotheses, she came finally to a conclusion of sorts.

“
Parlor
tricks,” she muttered, an ironic use of the word. “Smoke and mirrors, all of it.” Her lips curved in a frigid smile. “So, you’re an amateur magician. That’s it, isn’t it? Why you’ve kept putting me off? Not wanting to admit you let the juvenile games go way too far.”

“Amateur
magician
?” Caleb repeated her words quietly, incredulously, stressing the second one with cold precision, as if she had dared to cast an aspersion on his family name. She could feel the anger radiating off him. A match set to an already volatile keg of emotion.

Well, if he was so darn sensitive, he shouldn’t have been playing those games in the first place. Arianna tipped her head back, eyed him speculatively. “You’re good, though. I’ll have to give you that. A regular Irish Criss Angel,” she went on grudgingly, ignoring the unmistakable sound of thin ice cracking beneath her feet. “So, how’d you pull off the lightning thing? Come on, ‘fess up. After scaring me half to death, I think you owe me.”

A vein throbbed prominently in Caleb’s temple. Buried beneath the tons of mad she had going on, Arianna’s spidey sense had failed to get through to her. She had no idea that his control had snapped, tipping the scales, offsetting the precarious balance between the two sides of his dichotomous nature.

One that was very human. The other…not of this world.

Caleb leaned forward again, elbows resting on his knees. He sat quietly, staring into the flames, lost in thought as if he were plotting the course of some future action.

Finally, he turned to her again, his expression cold, aloof. His knuckles skimmed the underside of her jaw, then his thumb tipped her chin up, forcing her uncertain gaze to his. “Such a bold brat, you are,
a mhuirnín
,” he murmured, shaking his head in admonishment. “So very, very brazen as to think you can win a battle of wills against the likes of me.” His gaze dropped to her throat, where a rapidly beating pulse made a lie of his observation. “Or maybe not so bold.... But no matter. For I’ve a mind to grant your request. To, shall we say,
revisit
those things that seem to have snared your interest.” A chilling smile touched the corners of his lips. “And that,
cailín
, we’ll be doing my way.”

Chapter Fourteen

A
rianna shivered at the cruel twist of his mouth, a mouth with the skill to pleasure or punish at will. Now she didn’t like being snapped at. Usually gave as good as she got. But there was just something about the way he was looking at her that had her beginning to regret the provocation.

Still leaning toward the belief that all of the weird goings on had been nothing but a mind game, an illusion, she couldn’t get her head around why he would have staged such an elaborate hoax.

And her suspicions that he was a mentalist did nothing to lessen the spellbinding effect of that dark, hypnotic gaze. Though she fought it consciously, she could feel herself sliding under his power. Little by little, she succumbed to the serenity of a floating sensation that numbed her limbs, loosened her inhibitions. Joy, lust, fear, a plethora of jumbled emotions all jockeyed for first position inside her. She trembled. Amber-colored liquid sloshed over the rim of her glass, spraying tiny drops of honeyed mead across her wrist.

“Allow me.” Caleb’s husky voice trailed across heightened nerve endings, as he slid the crystal wineglass from her fingers. Setting it on a piecrust table beside his own, he raised her wrist to his mouth.

“What are you—?”

Eyes holding hers, he lapped up the sticky drops. The rough texture of his tongue poured accelerant on the passionate embers flickering low in her belly. “Mmm…sweet.”

Finding it difficult to separate dream from reality, she caught her lip between her teeth and bit back a low moan. Somewhere in the part of her brain still functioning with conscious thought, she noted he had neither acknowledged—nor refuted—the charges of trickery she had leveled against him. And yet…something in his enigmatic gaze whispered a warning:
None of what you’ve experienced in my company has been the result of sleight-of-hand, but rather, the invocation of some ancient and esoteric power.

His regard seemed to intensify. And for a single, hysterical moment, Arianna wondered again if he wasn’t reading her mind. Before she could fully process that thought, however, he was holding his hands out to her, palms turned upward. At her frown of confusion, he tipped his head, arched an ebony brow in an imperious command.

The summons made her mouth go dry. Her muscles seemed to atrophy. The arousing power rippling off the man in hot, sensual waves had her so seduced by this point that she feared the simple touch of his flesh would send her flying over the edge. With a tongue like sandpaper, she attempted to moisten parchment-dry lips. Again, his shameless gaze followed the movement. When his eyes returned to hers, embers of dream-spun passion smoldered in them, searing her insides. The look was raw. Elemental. Blatantly carnal.
A shared memory? God, help me. What’s going on?

“Arianna.”

She started at the low rumble of his voice. Forcing her heavy eyelids to open, she felt drowsy, disorientated. Had she dropped off to sleep? “Caleb, what....”

“Your hands,” he ordered quietly. The voice, the face was familiar. But not the eyes. Those were cold and implacable…the eyes of a stranger. “Place your hands in mine.
Now.”

She did as he commanded. Without hesitation, without question. Because, with this strong compulsion stirring her desire, stealing her very will, she could do nothing else. As her hands touched his, a jolt of static electricity arced between them. In reflex, she tried to jerk away. But those long, elegant fingers curled vice-like around her wrists held her shackled.

His touch enflamed her, a raw, aching desire within a floating, dreamy euphoria....

“What…?” It was the oddest sensation. An invasive, shivery feeling…as if he were seeking entrance into her mind. A seductive quest to be admitted into her most private heart.

Reaching deep within herself, she drew on her own strength of will to subvert whatever he was trying to do to her. If he were a mentalist, he was skilled in manipulation, in playing on parapsychological elements of the psyche.

Why then did she fear she would be laying herself bare to him? Risking him coming to know her every hope, every secret desire? Made privy to every resounding victory, every crushing defeat? Did she really believe that all the experiences of her lifetime would be open to his scrutiny?

Including her mad obsession with him, she thought, suddenly in panic mode, mortified that her secret yearning for him might be revealed, her untamed passion for him unveiled. She just couldn’t bear to have this nonsensical, incomprehensible, hopeless love in her heart stripped naked before him.

The truth came like a beacon light. It was all real, everything she had witnessed in his presence.
Caleb
was who…
what
her da had been warning her about.

“No,” she breathed, refusing to let him into her mind. She couldn’t…wouldn’t allow this…this…dream weaver…this creature, unclassified as man, angel, or demon from hell, to know her foolish infatuation with him. She sensed that the mental barrier she had thrown up against him had slammed a steel door shut in her mind.

Arianna could hear him…actually
hear
him…swearing darkly inside her head. She experienced the sullen ripple of his impatience as if it were her own.

“
Oscail, Cailín
,” he demanded softly in Gaelic. “Open your mind to me.
Now.
”

All at once, Arianna was flooded with childhood memories of him, of all the times they had walked together on that dreamswept shore. And although she sensed an aloofness there, a dark-clouded peril she had never felt in him before, he reciprocated his request for entry by opening himself to her first, enough to reveal that his honor in this thing was inviolate. Whatever the purpose of his exploration, he vowed, in the most intimate way possible, that he would eschew the secret places she marked as private. Leave untouched, unsullied, the cherished memories residing within her heart.

Slowly, of her own free will, she brought down the mental wall she had erected against him. The drugging numbness she had been experiencing intensified. A kind of psychic paralysis crept up her body and turned her limbs to stone.

“Caleb,” she moaned deep in her throat, as she felt him slide into her mind. It was a mating of souls somehow more seductive, more intimate, than a mere physical joining. So entangled in her thoughts was he—and she in his—that it was impossible to distinguish where one of them ended and the other began.
God, who...
what
are you?

Although certain he could hear her thoughts, her question went unanswered. Then suddenly the world turned upside down. The room in which they sat began to dissolve; the sofa, the floor, the very earth beneath her feet melted away. Like Alice falling through the rabbit hole, she began to tumble, head over heels, through a thick, viscous void, through a darkness suffocatingly devoid of light.

Spinning.... She was circling dizzily through a vast expanse of time and space, through a kaleidoscope of jagged shapes and luminous color. Eidetic images spun and twirled, puzzle pieces coming together in disjointed memories not all her own. For some were as old as the ages, as timeless as time itself.

She was alone and terrified, an apparition in a netherworld where hyper-intuitive senses warned that a monster prowled the night. Her perception shifted then. She was standing on a cushion of sand, the sea at her back, eyes raised to the splendor of a medieval fortress crowning the mountainside.

She searched the cliff’s edge. She sensed the presence of her dark lover, a man of hereditary magic cloaked in the Irish mists and dusky shadow.

A frightful memory began to emerge then, infiltrating the ethereal haze that surrounded her. To Arianna’s great horror, she discovered that she had stumbled back in time, sentenced to relive the terror of that fateful night on the coast.

Her gaze jerked first to the cloudless sky, taunting in its clarity, then settled on Caleb in silent supplication. And, as if on a director’s cue, he began to point.

No, no, God, please. Not again.

Her prayer must have been answered, because the vision no longer repeated history. Instead of conjuring a lightning bolt, Caleb’s outstretched hand indicated a specific location along the precipice overhead.

Against her will Arianna found herself searching for the shadowy male figure she had sensed before. She found him, crouched on a ledge above her. It was a strange sensation, she thought, this feeling of sharing her focal point with another. With Caleb, who seemed to be looking through her eyes, straining to see the face of the man hidden in the cleft of the rocks.

Arianna squeezed her eyes shut against the sensory overload. Holy God in heaven, this couldn’t be happening. She must be losing her mind....

* * *

Sensing her distress, Caleb ended their travel through the mists of time. Before departing her consciousness, however, he planted a suggestion that she would have no recollection of the experience, no ill effect from the experience. She would be left with a feeling of peace, a belief that she had simply nodded off to sleep in his arms.

Frustrated at not being able to identify the stalker, he uttered a pithy Gaelic curse and withdrew abruptly from the past. His fit of temper returned him to the present with an unpleasant jolt. Aware of Arianna’s fingernails digging painfully into the meaty flesh of his palm, he glanced down at her. Trembling like a frightened kitten, her normally sun-kissed complexion was pallid, her eyes scrunched tightly shut.

“Easy now,” he murmured, in the soothing tone he used to gentle a skittish colt. “All’s well, luv. The journey’s over.”

That her eyes remained closed, breathing shallow, he first attributed to an attempt to stave off nausea. A residual motion sickness often plagued the occasional time traveler.

A closer look at her, however, told a very different story. “
Dia’s Muire
, she’s hyperventilating.” Swearing grimly, he searched her face for some sign that she was regaining consciousness.

She wasn’t.

Planning to massage her neck and shoulders, to get the blood flowing toward her brain, he wrested one hand free of her determined grasp. A pitiful, mewling cry spilled from her lips. Eyes still clenched together, she swiped frantically at the air until he had slipped his hand back into hers. She had quieted, but there was nothing natural about her state of calm.

The Gaelic word for “catatonic” sprang to mind.

“Holy Mother of God, what have I done to you?” Bringing their intertwined hands to his lips, he blew on her fingers, his thumbs rubbing the tops of her hands. “Open your eyes, Arianna.” He gave the command a subtle push. “Come back to me. Here. Now.”

Still nothing.
Eyelids glued shut; nails, curved into talons, bit into his palms.

Caleb closed his eyes and summoned Seamus.

Within seconds, his old friend was unlocking the door and letting himself into the parlor. Brows drawn together, he stared at the scene confronting him. “What’s the story, mate? Has she taken ill? What seems to be her problem?”

“Myself,” Caleb muttered darkly, shaking his head. “I lost it, man.”

“How…what happened?”

“She was on about the lightning, so she was. Demanding answers I couldn’t give, winding me up. Finally, she got the notion that she was the victim of some kind of hoax. Accused me of being an amateur magician…em, how did she put it? An ‘Irish Criss Angel’ were her words exactly. Next thing I knew my bloody temper got the best of me.”

“
An amateur magician.”
Seamus looked stunned, then angered by the blatant insult.

Caleb’s response was defensive of Arianna. “She’s no understanding of who and what we are, Seamus. No clue that such a remark was akin to a racial slur.” The magic in a de Danann man’s blood defined his race, an integral part of who he was, of his history and heritage, no less than the color of a man’s skin. “The fact that she was innocent of any intentional affront didn’t weigh into the equation at the time.”

Seamus nodded his understanding as Caleb went on. “I asked myself then, did her faulty reasoning not serve the greater purpose? Did it not provide a reasonable explanation, not only for the feats of magic she’s already witnessed, but any she might do in future?”

“Logical,” Seamus murmured.

“But I was gone, my friend.” He sucked in a deep breath. “As sure as if a switch had been flipped inside me, my mindset became totally
sidhe
, of the faery world.”

Seamus winced at his confession of giving himself over to his alternate nature.

“Just like that,” a finger snap, “the cold-hearted side of myself slid into place, assuming dominion. ‘Twas in that state, I devised a strategy, a plan born of anger...excused by faulty reasoning.”

Caleb paused, searched Arianna’s face again.
No change.
“I thought it likely she’d caught a glimpse of the stalker. And was it not she herself, I argued, the one demanding we review the events of that day? And did I not—in my
magician’s
bag of tricks—possess the very tool with which to grant her wish?”

“The Sense of Innate Knowledge,” Seamus murmured, waving a hand absently at the hearth. The dying flames burst into brilliant plumes of orange, blue and gold.

“Exactly,” Caleb replied. “I’d only to forge a mental link between us and transport ourselves back to the day in question. Once there, the mind merge would allow me to identify the bastard by looking through her eyes. Armed with the knowledge of his identity, the Council could sit in judgement, make a ruling as to whether the Minion was to live or die.”

“Makes perfect sense. So, what did you discover?”

“Not a bleedin’ thing. She didn’t see his face.”

Seamus perched his large frame on the arm of the sofa nearest Arianna. Towering over her, he leaned down to examine her more closely. “She’s breathing normally, muscles functioning, holding her upright. Sometimes a full recovery takes a wee bit of time.”