So Enchanting (34 page)

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Authors: Connie Brockway

Tags: #Fiction, #Romance, #Historical, #General

BOOK: So Enchanting
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Chapter Forty-one
Bernard swung around, already firing, and this time he did not miss. The bullet caught Grey, spinning him around and throwing him back into the hall.

 

“Grey!” Fanny screamed as Bernard snapped off another round. The bullet hit the doorframe, blasting it into splinters. Bernard dodged back into the room, grabbing hold of Fanny and dragging her in front of him. A sense of déjà vu seized Fanny. She’d been here before, shielding a craven while Grey stalked him.
Amelie had pitched herself onto Hayden and was working frantically to untie the ropes binding him. Bernard paid them no mind. His gaze was riveted to the doorway. Fear glided beneath his tense expression. “Lord Sheffield. Come out or I will be forced to shoot Mrs. Walcott.”
“Didn’t you hear her, McGowan?” Grey’s voice was strong and sarcastic. “If you hurt her I will go to your house and destroy every one of your stamps; then I will return here and kill you.”
“You wouldn’t,” Bernard breathed in horror.
“I would. I will. In fact, if you do not surrender yourself this minute, I’ll be off. You can watch the fire from here.”
“No!” Bernard shouted. Sweat beaded his forehead. The veins stood out like cords on his neck, and a red film coated the whites of his eyes. “No. You mustn’t,” he sobbed. “You can’t.”
“Let her go.”
“No!”
“Then good-bye.”
Breathlessly, Fanny waited. She heard the sound of footsteps receding down the hall and a door opening and shutting. Bernard shoved her away, and she fell to the ground as he ran to the front window, tearing open the drapes and flinging open the casement. He leaned out with his rifle. “I’ll kill him! I’ll kill him!” he muttered feverishly. “Where is he? Where is he?”
“Here.” Grey stood once more in the doorway.
Startled, Bernard jerked back from the window, firing randomly. Grey started forward, a look of fierce anticipation in his eyes. Bernard fired again, but he was rattled now, his hands shaking, and the bullet went awry. He fired again and the hammer fell on an empty chamber.
“Sloppy, Lieutenant McGowan,” Grey said. “Six bullets. You’re done.”
With a growl, Bernard swung the butt of the rifle, aiming for Grey’s head. With a low snarl, Grey caught it midflight. Bernard’s eyes widened in amazement.

 

“No one threatens Fanny,” Grey said, and for the second time in six years, he knocked a man clean out a window.

 

Hayden stumbled to his feet, feeling ridiculously light-headed now that the danger was past and he realized just how much of his blood was on the floor, on his shirt, and on Amelie’s dress. He sat down again, cursing.

 

Luckily, Amelie didn’t seem to find anything lacking in his attempted heroics. She kept weeping and touching his face and weeping again and declaring that a broken nose was no great matter if properly set at once.
Grey had fared far better. McGowan’s bullet had hit him in the biceps but caused only a flesh wound that Fanny had grimly, and silently, bound. Afterward Grey had tied up the unconscious McGowan and left him lying on the front lawn. In the meantime, they would wait for Donnie MacKee. He had stayed at the end of the drive awaiting Grey’s signal, per Grey’s instructions, Grey having been concerned that the rotund inn-keeper would be more liability than aid. Then MacKee could haul McGowan away to his bar’s cold cellar for keeping until the authorities arrived.

 

“But, Grey, how did you do it? We all heard you walking away and the door closing,” Hayden said, beginning to enjoy the cooing ministrations of his beloved.
“Ploddy,” Mrs. Walcott said. Grey smiled at her admiringly.

 

“Ploddy?” Hayden repeated.
“Yes,” Grey said. “I found him outside when I arrived, trying to decide whether or not to mount a rescue by himself. Would have done it, too, if I hadn’t shown up. Grand old gaffer. Came into the house with me and stood right next to me the entire time. As soon as I said I was leaving, well, he left. Bernard made the proper assumptions and . . .” He shrugged.
“Ploddy, a hero,” Amelie said wonderingly. “Where is he now?”
“He’s guarding McGowan. I think he’s settling in to enjoy his newfound hero status.” Grey’s gaze drifted toward Mrs. Walcott, who’d been uncharacteristically silent.

 

Hayden watched, trying to decide if there was anything to Bernard’s claim that Grey and Mrs. Walcott were romantically involved. He didn’t think so. They were both far too self-possessed, their natures too chilly and superior to ever know the sort of love he and Amelie shared.
Ah, well.
He pulled Amelie closer.

 

Grey watched her, his heart, his only desire, and when she rose and left he followed. He found her on the terrace, looking out on the dark meadow. She must have heard his footsteps, but she didn’t turn. Her eyes were raised to the night sky, a spangle of stars strewn across its black canopy.

 

“Bernard pushed the urn over,” she said.
“So I assume.”
“You
assumed
it was a cat.” He heard the smile in her voice.
“For a while,” he admitted.
She turned then, and he caught the glint of pearly teeth. “Why did you come back?”
“Enchantment,” he said. “You cast a spell on me, and I was compelled to come to you, to find you, to remain at your side. It was a very fairy-tale moment.”
She laughed, a full, throaty sound. “But you don’t believe in magic.”
He stepped closer to her, and damned if he didn’t hear nightingales begin to sing sweetly from nearby. “Don’t I?”
“No.” She sobered a little. “But you should. Grey, I cannot be anything other than what I am.”
He studied her face, falling in love all over again. “Fan, I do not know what you are, but I do know who you are, and that is a maddening, audacious, vinegary, and yes,
enchanting
woman whom I madly, ardently, stupidly love, and I would not change one thing about you. Ever.”
She gazed deeply into his eyes, and whatever she saw there brought a shimmer of tears to her eyes. But she would not let them last long, lest he think he’d brought her anything but joy. “Not one?” she asked.
“Well,” he allowed, “except for this strange obsession you have about clean-shaven men . . .”
And then he was pulling her into his arms and kissing her thoroughly, passionately, and deeply. And she did not protest about his lack of skill with a razor.
Not at all.
Chapter Forty-two
London,
One year later

 

Lord Grey Sheffield was finishing his second cup of coffee and enjoying a lively account of paranormal activity when an enormous round shadow slid across his paper like a solar eclipse.

 

He glanced up and promptly did a double take.
“Good Lord, Fanny,” he said, sitting back in his chair. “You’ve outdone yourself. I feel confident in saying no other woman in London is capable of balancing an entire table of ornamentation atop her head with as much sangfroid as you.”
His wife, decked out in an extravagant hat and a lacy white dress that fit her form like a second skin, smiled. “So, you like it, then?”
“God knows why.”
“Because it is chic,” she said, shifting a small furry lump from one arm to the other, “and you, through your stubborn refusal to spend any time on your own appearance, must perforce delight in my elegance.”
“Hmm,” said Grey, his eyes falling on the whitish mound. “Is that another dog?”
“No. You told me no more dogs.”
“Only because the howling at night has become a matter for some dispute with the neighbors. What is it then?”
“A rabbit. Quite quiet. I’ll let it go in the garden.”
“There is no garden. Your beasts have destroyed it.”
“They’re not mine.”
“Yes, I tell myself the same thing about me.”
She laughed and bent to set the rabbit on the floor.
“Amelie sent another letter yesterday. They are in Brazil now,” she said.

 

“How many months is this honeymoon of theirs to last?” Grey asked.
“You can’t blame them. Amelie’s hungry to see the world, and Hayden is only too glad to show it to her.”
She moved behind him and leaned over his shoulder. She knew he wasn’t able to concentrate when she did that.
“What are you reading?” she asked innocently, her breath warm against his ear.
“An account of a man who claims to be able to move objects with the power of his mind.”
“Do you think it’s true?”
“Doubtful,” he said.
“But not impossible.”
“Not impossible,” he agreed. “Though most of what we take for magic is simply a mystery whose answers have yet to be found.”
“And which am I? Magic or mystery?” she whispered in his ear.
He turned and found himself looking up into her eyes. Once more, and as always, time became suspended, his heartbeat stuttered, and time slowed to a long, liquid moment while he was lost in her gaze. “I don’t know,” he murmured. “I’m still working on it.”
She wrapped an arm around his shoulder and slipped around to his front, sliding onto his lap. “Do you think it will take long to figure out?”
“A lifetime,” he said, tucking her closer and inhaling the scent of her hair.
“You must be very committed,” she said, and hissed with pleasure as his mouth prowled down her cheek to the curve where her neck met her shoulder. He traced her ear with his tongue, and she shivered.

 

“Oh, I am most resolute,” he said, turning her in his arms.
“Perhaps I can prove my abilities,” she said, a thrill of excitement shimmering in her eyes. “Would you like me to conjure something for you?”
“And only me.”
She twined her arms around his neck and drew him to her. His mouth opened hungrily on hers. He’d never be able to kiss her enough, never be able to control the passion that erupted so spontaneously between them. When he finally drew away to give her a chance to catch her breath, a wicked gleam had entered her eyes.
“Yes, indeed,” she murmured, pulling him back to her. “I certainly feel something stirring. . . .”

 

It was noon in Little Firkin. A perfectly lovely spring day. The sun glimmered on the river that danced happily along the town’s boundary, and a breeze riffled the flags atop stakes delineating the site of a future pottery factory.

 

The people of Little Firkin leaned over their back fences for their daily chin-wag, enjoying the warm sun, while the shopkeepers swept the plank board-walk outside their shops. Children played Kick the Can in the street outside MacKee’s Bank (formerly McGowan’s), and a group of Little Firkin’s finest young men flexed their muscles self-consciously as they unloaded building timber from the railway’s loading dock, for a group of young ladies who pretended not to notice.
But when a capricious breeze nickered to life in one of the town’s back alleys, kicking up a dust devil of leaves and halfpenny candy wrappers, and a voice like a strangled cat pealed through the town center, they stopped whatever they were doing and headed for Main Street.
An ancient crone with a face like a withered apple appeared at the end of the town amidst a swirl of dust, her ragged, multicolored skirts whipping around. On either side of her, legs braced and hackles raised, stood two enormous hounds, their lips curled back over huge fangs. The crone lifted a gnarled bole over her head and shouted, “Be there anyone here to dispute my claim to Little Firkin?”
Little Firkin turned its collective head, looking around hopefully, but no one appeared to accept the old dame’s challenge. She glared about and then, satisfied, dropped her bole, dug into the velvet pouch hanging from her belt, and withdrew two bits of something, which she then popped into the monster brutes’ waiting maws to a chorus of canine lip smacking and tail wagging.

 

“Good lads,” the woman muttered, and turned, hobbling back down the street, followed by her two not-quite-so-ferocious-looking companions.
At the same time, a middle-aged representative of the Art Workers Guild let the curtain drop back down over the bank window through which he’d been watching.

 

“What in the name of all that’s holy was that?” he asked, turning his bemused gaze to the rotund man sitting across the desk from him.
“That be Grammy Beadle,” said Donnie MacKee. “Our witch.”
Read on for a teaser from Connie Brockway’s
Skinny Dipping

 

Available from Onyx
Early September

 

Splat!

 

“For Chrissakes!” Eighty-two-year-old Birgie Olson lurched upright on the derelict swimming raft she occupied, setting it teetering precariously.
She looked around. Inches from her feet lay a broken blue balloon amidst a bright sunburst of orange tempura paint.
“What is it?” Her great-niece Mimi asked from somewhere alongside the raft.
“Some little shit launched a water balloon filled with orange paint at me.”
“Splotchball,” Mimi said.
“Huh?” Birgie rolled over onto her stomach, dipping her side of the raft a good six inches lower into Fowl Lake than its opposite. She was a large woman.
Below her, Mimi lay spread out atop an ancient, much-patched tractor tire’s inner tube, her twin pigtails of dark hair floating amongst the duckweed. She wore a shapeless, faded Speedo swimsuit, much like the ones she’d worn when she was sixteen. Her eyes were shut.
“Splotchball,” Mimi repeated calmly. “The kids made it up. It’s like paintball, except no one here can afford the special guns and ammo, so they adapted slingshots and water balloons. Really, it’s pretty enterprising.”
Birgie ignored Mimi’s admiration. “There he is!” She spotted a furtive figure plastered tight against the side of one of the six cottages that comprised the Olson family’s ancestral vacation retreat, Chez Ducky. He looked like an albino spider monkey, all arms and legs, his towhead gleaming like a beacon. “Who is he? There. By Cottage Six!”
Mimi craned her neck to look around. “I think it’s Carl Junior,” she said after a minute. “Maybe Emmit. Could be Hal. Young Scandinavian males all look pretty much the same.”
Birgie stuck out her arm and pointed at the kid, shouting, “You hit me with one of those things again and I will hunt you down and skin you alive, you odious example of unprotected intercourse!”
With a shriek of delight, the kid darted into the woods, a small motley dog dashing after him. Having dealt with the interloper, Birgie settled back and folded her hands over the field of blue hibiscuses printed on her bathing suit, a Lands’ End double-wide, and stared at the beach.
“Who the hell are all those people?” she grumbled.
“What people?”
“Those kids. Emmits and Carls and Hals and God knows who all.”
“Those would be the people staying at Chez Ducky,” Mimi replied. Birgie could hear the smile in her voice.
“It’s not funny.”
“Well, it is sort of funny. Now that Great-Aunt Ardis has passed on, you’re the matriarch of Chez Ducky. You oughta know the names of your loyal subjects.”
Birgie sourly surveyed the domain that tradition was attempting to dump in her lap. At the edge of an old white pine forest, a series of derelict cabins spread out equidistant from one another, leading to the Big House, a white clapboard construction rising two stories high, its fieldstone foundation padded with moss and its oft-patched roof wearing a Jacob’s coat of different-colored asphalt. A few scraps of the original gingerbreading still clung tenaciously to the upper eaves, but other than this initial stab at gentrification, no attempts had ever been made to gussy the place up. Named Chez Ducky by some wit, the compound had been built over a hundred years ago on eighty acres abutting a third-rate lake situated five hours north of the Twin Cities and half an hour west of the nearest town, Fawn Creek.
“Some kingdom,” Birgie muttered, though in truth she was very fond of the place. She was fonder still of the fact that she could escape the summertime heat of her principal residency in Florida and spend the season up here for free. “If nominated I will not run; if elected I will not serve.”
“No one’s asking your permission. It’s a hereditary position,” Mimi replied. “Chez Ducky has always been run by the oldest Olson female.”
Easy for Mimi to say, Birgie thought sourly. With a few silver strands just starting to appear in her dark pigtails, her peeling nose tip tilted and freckled, and faint smile lines permanently stamped at the corners of her mouth, Mimi reminded Birgie of a superannuated Pippi Longstocking. At forty-one, Mimi still occasionally showed up in mismatched socks or oversized sweatshirts turned inside out.
No doubt about it, Mimi had it good: no responsibilities, no obligations, no one to answer to. Birgie had it good, too—or at least she did before her big sister, Ardis, had up and died.
“Mimi,” Birgie said, “I’m eighty-two years old, and I’ve learned as many new names in my life as I want to. Besides, most of the people here aren’t even related to me.”
She nodded toward Chez Ducky’s beach. Little figures chugged up and down the shoreline, toting folding chairs, blankets, ancient TV trays, portable Weber grills, bags of charcoal, and cans of lighter fluid in preparation for the picnic later that afternoon. Birgie didn’t know two-thirds of them.
Chez Ducky was like some petri dish experiment run amuck.
Seeded more than a hundred years ago with a few grains of expensive, indiscriminating, and congenial Olson DNA, the Chez Ducky population had exploded over the decades, devouring anyone with the slimmest association to an Olson. There were ex-wives and ex-husbands and new wives of ex-husbands and children of new husbands from former marriages and half brothers and sisters and their friends and . . . gawd! It made her head hurt thinking about it. She knew none of this was necessarily a bad thing, but it wasn’t the same Chez Ducky she’d known growing up. And Birgie wasn’t the only one expressing discontent with what Chez Ducky had become.
“Oh, I imagine you still have room in your old gray head for a few more names,” Mimi said.
Birgie wondered whether Mimi would be so calm if she knew that certain family members, some of them the legal heirs to the property, were discussing selling the Chez.
If Chez Ducky got sold, that would be that. On the up side for Birgie, there’d be no family enclave to be the head of; on the downside, she’d be stuck in Everglades City year-round because she didn’t have enough money to rent a place up here and she couldn’t stay with one of her Minnesota relatives for more than a few days.
And where would Mimi go? As far as Birgie knew, this place was the only constant in Mimi’s life. No doubt about it, they’d be screwed. But what could either of them do about it? Still, she supposed she ought to say something to Mimi . . . just let her know people were talking . . . but . . .
Beneath her blunt and blustery facade, Birgie knew herself to be a coward. She’d been too cowardly to get married, to have kids, to move into the head surgical nurse position at the hospital where she’d worked for forty years, or to tell someone bad news. She’d long ago come to terms with this failing in her character. She could, she reasoned, have had worse flaws. For instance, she could have been a Republican.
It wasn’t that she thought Mimi would break down and bawl. Even when Mimi had been eighteen and the courts had declared her father legally dead, she hadn’t blubbered. But Birgie never wanted to see that stricken look on Mimi’s face again.
“What would you do with your summers if you didn’t spend them here?” she asked as casually as she could.
One of Mimi’s gimlet dark eyes opened. “But, I
do
spend them here,” she said. “And I intend to spend them here. Always. Until they wrench the key to Cottage Six from my cold, dead hand. And who knows?” Mimi mused, closing her eyes again and grinning. “I might not even go then.”
“What? You’re going to haunt the place?”
“Maybe.”
Birgie snorted. Mimi was a tele-spiritualist . . . or was it tele-medium? Birgie never could remember what the operators of Uff-Dead—Birgie’s pet name for Straight Talk from Beyond, the paranormal hotline Mimi worked for and which catered to Minnesota’s Scandinavian population—called themselves. Unlike the rest of the Olson clan, who, uncertain whether they should be concerned, conciliatory, or amused about Mimi’s career and so opted to take the traditional Scandinavian route of ignoring it, Birgie wasn’t above open scoffing. Not that she had many opportunities to do so.
The only time Mimi referred to her job was when someone suggested aloud that Mimi’s father, John Olson, who’d disappeared when Mimi was eleven, was dead. Mimi would look the offender straight in the eye and reply, “If my dad was dead, I’d be able to contact his spirit, wouldn’t I? But I can’t, so he isn’t.” That generally shut down any further conversation.
Birgie didn’t know what Mimi’s mom, Solange, thought of her daughter’s refusal to entertain the possibility that her ex-husband was dead, but she’d guess Solange didn’t ignore it. No, sirree. Mimi’s mom, Solange, was the anti-Olson, focused, insistent, and relentless. Not that Birgie considered Solange a bad person. It must have about killed her to return Mimi to the midst of her indolent former in-laws every summer after the divorce. But she had. And she’d continued to do so even after John’s disappearance.
Solange and John had met in college at a University of Minnesota job fair—she was there for a job; John Olson was there for the free hotdog. Solange hadn’t seen the carefree, wanderlust-prone young man as her polar opposite. She’d seen a gorgeous Gordian knot of potential she itched to unravel. John saw a pretty, starry-eyed girl who hung on his every word and enjoyed sex. No one had ever hung on any of John’s words before. They married.
When Solange finished unraveling John, a process that took an embarrassingly short time, she realized he wasn’t ever going to amount to anything, big or otherwise, and that was exactly the way he wanted it. Sadder but wiser, Solange divorced John and swept their black-haired baby girl off to her parents’ palatial home (Solange’s great-granddad being Jacque Charbonneau, the depilatory king, creator of Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow). There, Solange wasted no time trying to root from Baby Mimi any suspected slacker tendencies she might have inherited from her dad. Her fears, Birgie conceded, were not without justification. As it turned out, Mimi was a slacker of the first order. Unfortunately for Mimi, it also turned out she had a sky-high IQ.
Solange, not one to suffer waste gladly, set about “encouraging” Mimi with extracurricular activities, handpicked play-groups, accelerated this and fast-tracked that—at least that’s what Mimi’s dad, John, had said. This encouragement met with mild success and probably would have escalated had not Solange remarried a decade later and forthwith produced two more bright little girls who, unlike their older half sister, not only
wanted
Solange’s encouragement but actually seemed to benefit from it. And substantially, too. Mary and Sarah, Birgie recalled the girls’ names.
Not that Mimi talked much about them. She kept her relationship with her Charbonneau relatives strictly separate from that with the Olsons. Or more specifically, her relationship with Chez Ducky. Since her dad had disappeared, Mimi had been living pretty much like she had a terminal disease. She had no responsibilities to anyone but herself and didn’t owe anyone anything. Owning nothing of value, she had nothing to protect.
Except Chez Ducky.
That, Birgie thought sadly, was the hell of it. You couldn’t get out of life without at least a few things sinking their hooks into you. And the fewer things that got to you, the deeper they set their hooks. For Mimi it was Chez Ducky. For Birgie, too, damn it.
She cleared her throat. “Mimi. You . . . ah, you got anything going on in your life?”
“Nope. I’m free as a bird. What do you want and when?”
“That’s not what I meant. I meant, do you have a boyfriend? Or a girlfriend? Or anyone?”
“You are acting
so
weird today,” Mimi said, wiggling her way up onto her elbows to peer at Birgie. “You feeling all right?”
“I just . . . you know. I want to you to be happy,” Birgie muttered uncomfortably. Mimi’s peer turned into a stare. Birgie understood. She was a little surprised to hear such maudlin crap coming out of her mouth herself.
“The thing is, things are changing so fast,” she said, carefully feeling her way. “And, ah, they could change even faster.”
“Birgie, I realize this is rough for you,” Mimi replied, looking nauseatingly sympathetic, “but no one expects you to replace Ardis.”
“Good. Because I’m not going to.”
“And no one wants you to. You know that, right?”
“Right.” She took a deep breath. “Look, Mimi, there’s something you maybe ought to know—”
“No, there isn’t,” Mimi said quickly. Mimi had always seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to uncomfortable subjects and a successful tactic in dealing with them; she simply blew right past them.
“Really. I think—”
“I think we should go skinny-dipping!”
“Ah, geez, Mimi,” Birgie burst out in strenuous objection, secretly relieved. At least she could tell herself she’d tried to warn Mimi of the way things looked to be heading. “You’d think you were a goddamn nudist. Look at the sky. It’s broad daylight.”
“So what?” Mimi said, dropping off the side of the inner tube into the water. “I’m suggesting skinny-dipping, not nude sunbathing. We’re a hundred yards from shore and our lady parts will be discreetly hidden by the water. Come on. You can strip underwater.”

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