Fairytale (36 page)

“Come here,” he told her.

She crawled onto the bed beside him. Snuggled
into the crook of his arms, pressing close. Her damp, dark hair was
cool against his chest, and he didn’t care.

“Adam, I don’t want to leave you. But I
promised her. She said she’d save your life if I did, so I
promised.”

“It’s all right, angel,” he whispered. “You
have to go back. I know that. I’ve always known.”

“How?” She lifted her head, searching his
eyes.

“Maire told me. She told me not to fall in
love with you, that you had to leave me in the end. That my job was
simply to show you and your sister the way back.”

“I’m so sorry, Adam.”

“I tried to listen to her,” he whispered.
“God knows I tried. But I couldn’t do it, Brigit. I started falling
in love with you the second I laid eyes on you, all those years
ago, in that vision your mother showed me. And I never
stopped.”

He drew her closer, kissed her lips. “And I
never will.”

“I’ll never stop loving you, either, Adam.
Maybe...maybe someday—”

“I’ll live for that someday, Brigit.” He ran
his hands through her satin hair.

“I still can’t get used to it. I’m...”

“A fairy princess,” he finished for her. “An
enchantress who stole my heart.”

Her smile was tremulous and sad. “The
pendants glowed, Adam.”

He rubbed her shoulders, held her closer, so
that she lay down again. “Will you do something for me, angel?”

He felt her lashes brush his chest when her
eyes closed, felt the heat of her breath when she whispered,
“Anything.”

He swallowed hard, his heart swelling. “Will
you put it all out of your mind for just a little while? We don’t
have much time left together. Right now...all I want to do is be
with you. I want to hold you and love you. I want this
night...because it’s going to have to last us awhile.”

“Yes.” She turned her face to his chest, and
pressed her lips there. “But first I need to tell you...what I was,
in the past. What I did.”

“The forgeries. I know already. We all make
mistakes, Brigit.”

“You knew?” She stared at him, her eyes wider
and rounder than he’d ever seen them. “You knew what I’d been. . .
that I’d forged paintings for Zaslow?”

“Yes.”

“Adam, I had to do it. Raze was so old and
frail and sick. We were living in a condemned building, stealing or
begging just to eat. He would have died—”

He held her tighter. “I know you wouldn’t
have done it unless you felt you had no other choice, Brigit. But
it doesn’t matter now. I don’t care what you’ve done in the past,
you understand that?”

“But...”

“When you left last night, why didn’t you
take the painting? I told you it didn’t matter to me.” He continued
stroking her hair as he asked the question.

She sat up again, and stared so deeply into
his eyes he thought she could see his soul. “I couldn’t. You’ve
been betrayed so often, Adam. By your father, and then your wife. I
couldn’t hurt you that way. I wanted you to know that you could
trust someone and not have it blow up in your face. I wanted to
give you that, if nothing else, so that you could find someone
worthy of you, someone who deserved a man like you. Someone to
love.”

His throat swelled, because her words were so
dead on. She hit his sore spots with speeding bullets. But they
were shots that healed. Warmed him through and through. Made him
know that he was all right. He could think about the past, about
his father and his wife, and he could deal with it. Because of her.
All because of her.

“Well, you succeeded, then. I learned to
trust someone. I trusted you, angel, and you didn’t let me
down.”

She closed her eyes. “I’m glad.”

“But I’ll never be able to find some other
woman to love.” He shook his head slowly as he looked into her
eyes. “Because I love you. And there’s never going to be anyone who
can make me feel the way you do, Brigit. Not ever. You’re magic.”
He closed his eyes because he felt tears threatening, and he didn’t
want her to see them.

“I feel the same,” she told him. “There will
never be anyone else for me, Adam. I’ll live forever on the love
you and I had between us.”

He cupped her head at the base of her neck.
“I want to make sweet love to you, angel. I want this night to be
the one you remember when you think of me.”

Her answer was a single teardrop, which he
promptly kissed away.

As she rode with Adam in his car on the drive
back to Ithaca, Brigit couldn’t stop thinking about the future. It
loomed before her like a gaping black hole, devoid of life. Devoid
of happiness. Devoid of anything good at all.

Because it would be devoid of Adam.

She’d find a way to get back to him. She
would, someday. Though her sister had said the battle to regain
control of Rush might take years, Brigit was determined.

And afraid. Terrified that the time when she
could find her way back to Adam would never come. Or that by the
time she finally was free of her promise to her sister, it would be
too late. He would have found someone else.

He held her close to his side, driving
one-handed. His arm tight around her as if he didn’t want to let
her go.

At Bridin’s gentle insistence, she and Raze
followed in the other car, Brigit’s car. Bridin had known Brigit
wanted to be with Adam. Known she’d
needed
to be close to
him, especially now, when she was so very close to losing him
forever.

And Bridin had known other things, too.

Early this morning, while Adam had been
sleeping after making love to her all night long, Brigit had been
unable to rest. She’d left the hotel, slipping through the lobby
and going outside to put her bare feet in the cool grass. To feel
the morning dew on her toes and the morning air in her lungs and
the morning sun on her face. To be sure everything hadn’t turned
black and withered and died the way her heart felt as if it were
doing right now.

And her sister found her there. She’d come up
softly, so Brigit hadn’t heard her approach. And she’d settled
herself down in the wet grass beside her.

Brigit tipped her head to the side, resting
it on her sister’s shoulder. “I love you, you know.”

“I know,” Bridin said, and rested one hand in
Brigit’s hair. “And I love you, too, little sister. I wish...I wish
I could go back without you. I wish I didn’t have to hurt you this
way. If there were another way—”

“I know.” Brigit closed her eyes to prevent
her tears. “Is there...is there any way he could go with me?”

“Give up all he knows, his entire world, to
enter one at war, where he could be killed at any moment? Would you
ask it of him?”

Brigit lowered her head, ashamed.

“No, sister, there’s no way for him to come
along. The doorway allowed him to pass once...because he needed to
see it, so it would be burned forever into his memory. It was his
fate to guide us back there. But it won’t let him through again.
Very few mortals are ever allowed to pass. And never more than once
in, and once out again. It’s that way for our people’s
protection.”

Brigit sniffed, and brushed a hand over her
eyes. “I should have known you would have suggested it yourself if
it were possible.”

“I would have.”

Lowering her eyes, Brigit sighed. “I don’t
deserve him, that’s why this is the way things are turning out. I
haven’t been a good person.”

Bridin’s hand clasped Brigit’s. “You are
good, Brigit. You are. Don’t doubt that anymore. You’ve risked
everything you cherish, even your own life, to be sure the people
you love most are cared for and safe. There’s nothing bad about
that.”

“But the paintings—”

“You have a gift,” Bridin told her, echoing
the words of Sister Mary Agnes so long ago. “So do I. Our mother
had it, too, Brigit. She painted all the illustrations in the books
she made for us.”

Brigit hadn’t thought about that before, but
realized now it went right along with the rest of the story. Their
mother had painted those vellum pages. So naturally she had
inherited the talent from her. From Maire.

“You don’t have to copy other people’s work,
you know,” Bridin went on. “If you just imagine the image you want
to paint, just fix it in your mind...Whatever it is you want to
create, create it in your mind first, and keep it there. Focus on
it the way you do on another painting. And paint, Brigit. It will
work. You’ll see.”

It did sound as if it would work. That Brigit
had never had the confidence or maybe the desire to try it before,
surprised her. Why hadn’t she seen what was so obvious to her
sister?

“You are going to paint a storybook for your
own little one. Carry on the family tradition.”

“My own...?”

Bridin ran one hand over Brigit’s belly, and
for the first time she smiled fully.

Brigit choked. “You mean I’m“

“You mustn’t tell Adam. He’ll never let you
go back to Rush if you do.”

Brigit’s joy in her sister’s revelation died
a slow, painful death. Her first thought had been of sharing this
with Adam. But she knew her sister was right. Telling him would
only give him more reason for grief in the coming months and
years.

And yet keeping the truth from him was just
as wrong.

“Adam is waking, Brigit. He’ll be worried
about you if he finds you gone. Go on. Go to him.”

Brigit swallowed hard. Her eyes were watering
as she gave her sister a ferocious hug, and then hurried back to
her room.

Now, in the car beside Adam, she told herself
again and again that she might be able to survive without him,
after all. Because she was carrying Adam’s child, and so she’d have
a part of him with her always.

It was a solemn group that marched through
the woods to the spot Adam had visited as a child. He wasn’t
certain he could find the way back there, and part of him, most of
him, actually, hoped he wouldn’t be able to. Hoped it simply wasn’t
there anymore.

But he had a sick feeling in the pit of his
stomach that it would be there. Just the way he remembered it. And
he was about to lose the woman he loved forever.

Yet he stoically forced himself to do what he
knew he must do. He loved Brigit too much to deprive her of
returning to Rush. To her own world, her own people. He knew fully
well she’d never felt as if she had fit in here, in the mortal
world.

He’d already asked Bridin about going with
them, and he’d known the answer before she’d explained. He’d known
it in his heart. This was the end.

He led the way, as the four of them hiked up
the hill behind his house, and into the woods. And his muscles
seemed lumbering and slow, and his chest felt heavy. His feet
barely dragged over the uneven ground, and with every step, his
throat tightened more and made it harder to breathe. His eyes
burned like fire every time he looked at Brigit.

God she was beautiful. The sun slanted
through the trees, setting her ebony hair on fire. Her eyes
glimmered when she glanced his way, and she was battling tears,
too, though they brimmed more deeply each time their eyes met.

“I love you,” he said, for no other reason
than that he had to.

“I love you,” she replied in a tortured
whisper, and she squeezed his hand.

God, how the hell was he going to live
without her?

“Are we close?” Bridin called from
behind.

Adam shook his head, looking back over his
shoulder at her. Her blue eyes glittered with anticipation, but he
saw the sympathy there, too. She didn’t like doing this to her
sister. Even old Razor-Face seemed to be battling tears.

“Bridin, I have to warn you,” Adam said,
though he had to clear his throat several times in order to make
his words audible. “I came out here not too long ago, trying to
find the spot, but I couldn’t do it.”

“Of course you couldn’t. You came here a
bitter, untrusting, cynical man. Your heart was older than Raze’s
whiskers.”

“My whiskers and I resent that remark,
Bridey.” Though Raze’s tone was light, Adam could hear the sadness
in his voice.

“Today,” Bridin went on, “you come with the
heart of a child, Adam. Today, you’ll be able to see the path as
clearly as a four-lane highway. For though you’re crying inside,
your heart is filled with love and goodness.”

He looked down, shaking his head from side to
side. And then he stopped, because he
did
see it. A wavering
trail, and it was so much more vivid than any other animal path in
the woods, so different. “Dammit,” he muttered.

“Adam?” Brigit seemed worried.

Bridin stepped forward. “You see it, don’t
you?”

He nodded, but his eyes were on Brigit, not
her sister. And he saw his own heartbreak reflected there as her
tears began spilling over.

“Lead on, Adam,” Bridin said.

He did. Gently, he pushed Brigit behind him,
and crouched down when they came to the berry briars. None of those
fragrant white blossoms, this time. Instead the branches were heavy
with fat blackberries.

“We have to crawl from here,” he told
them.

“So, crawl then,” Bridin said.

As the three of them stood watching, Adam
self-consciously dropped down on all fours. He crawled along into
the arched tunnel of berry briars, and he wished he’d never emerge.
He wished he could grab Brigit and run off into these woods and
never be seen or heard from again.

But that wouldn’t be fair to her, would it?
He’d be denying her the chance to fulfill her destiny. He kept
going, peering behind him to see Brigit crawling in the same way he
was. And he knew the others followed as well. The ground swelled,
and he crept over the rise.

Finally, he emerged from the briar patch. And
he blinked, because he was on the far side of the same grassy hill
he remembered. Despondency thickened his blood until he thought it
crawled through his veins like molasses. He walked halfway down the
miniature hillside. And then he stopped and just stood, staring
into the dark mouth of the cave.