Charming the Devil (4 page)

“Simply a means of coaxing little Faye to realize her potential?”

She covered her eyes with her hand. “What have I done?”

“I believe you have forced her to face her fears.”

“What if she gets hurt?”

“She already hurts,” he said. “The question is, who else might be injured while she learns to control her powers.”

“She’s so very gifted. Much more than she knows. But her past…” Maddy lowered her hand, found his gaze with her own. His eyes looked old and calm, even in the darkness. “What happened to her? Why won’t she tell us?”

He touched her face, etching her cheek as if memorizing the lines. “
You
rarely speak of the past.”

She closed her eyes to the feel of his fingers against her skin. “It’s too terrible,” she said. “Her past, it’s too awful to face, isn’t it?”

“She’s here with us now,” he said, and swept a lock of hair behind her ear. Feelings, soft and mellow, skittered like rainbows along the course taken by his magical fingertips.

“Because of you,” she said.

He smiled a little, that rare gem of contentment that made her world right. Safe. “I brought her here. She stayed because of you.”

Turning onto her side, she kissed his fingers. “Thank you,” she said.

“For what?”

Tears blurred her vision. “For saving her. For saving Ella.” She closed her eyes to the memories, to the pain.

“The committee pays me to find the most gifted,” he said. “You know that.”

“I
was not the most gifted,” she murmured, and opened her eyes, finding him in the darkness. Finding peace.

“Perhaps not then,” he said.

“I can never repay you,” she whispered, and at her words his ancient eyes grew more solemn still.

“You have already given me more—” he began, but she placed a finger to his lips, stopping him.

“I
want
to repay you,” she said, and ran her hand down his chest. It was as hard and smooth as glass. Strong and dark and beautiful.

“Ahh, well…” His words were little more than a sigh. “If you must.”

She moved closer, felt his desire shift against her. “I must.”

“Though I suppose it will not be as pleasant for you as if I were as large as say…a Scotsman.”

She smiled at the lovely edge of jealousy in his voice. She supposed she was petty. She also supposed she didn’t care. It had taken him years to reveal any emotion at all, and she could not help enjoying watching his eyes darken, hearing his breathing change. “Ahh, McBain,” she said, and sighed.

“God help us,” he groused, shifting away, and she laughed as she wrapped her hand around him, capturing his full attention

“I wouldn’t trade you for a dozen Scots,” she murmured, and kissed the corner of his mouth.

“Are you certain?” he asked.

“Unless they were as large as—” she began, but in that moment he kissed her, making her forget that Scotsmen even existed.

R
ogan McBain’s eye was throbbing.

He stood alone in the kitchen of his rented town house and gazed out on the street below. The sun was just now rising from its rosy slumber. The time that always made him introspective.

Perhaps he should not have returned to London. He had seen enough trouble here in the past, and God knew he didn’t belong amid the preening
ton.
Hell, he barely belonged
indoors.
But where
was
he to be these days? He had been a lieutenant in His Majesty’s Army for more years than he cared to count, but it was no secret that some called him the Celtic Beast.

Below him, a bright chestnut clopped past, bearing a man in a scarlet waistcoat and blue greatcoat. A Redbreast, he was called, a member of London’s newest attempt to curb crime. But this city would forever revel in chaos. Perhaps the same could be said for the world at large.

Cupping his right shoulder with his left hand, Rogan rolled the joint backward, trying to alleviate
the pain, but it was there to stay. One of a dozen aches to be expected after a score of years on the battlefield. The Anglo-Mysore Wars, the Battle of Boxtel, the Storming of Badajoz. He winced at the bloody rush of memories. What had those battles gained him? Gnarled scars, burning nightmares, aching limbs, and an eerie ability to sense the advent of trouble. Yet, despite his oddities, good men had died. Good soldiers and others. Innocents. And for what? So some foreign hunk of soil could be exchanged among the English hierarchy? Aye, his father had been English, but his mother’s kin had been Scots to the very roots of their brawny beings. His mother’s brothers, who had initiated him to battle, and who, in later years, had followed him into more than a few. His mother’s brothers, who had given their lives a thousand miles from their beloved Highlands.

They should never have ventured onto Spanish soil. Should have understood the curse that stalked Rogan McBain. But they had refused to turn back. When a Celt set his mind, there was little one could do to change it.

On the street below, a scruffy lad trundled a barrow of parsnips down the darkened lane. London was forever filled with ragged children. Cheap labor, they were, and little more. Chimney sweeps, millworkers, parish apprentices. McBain winced as memories marched in.

“Bain!” Connelly’s voice boomed through the house as he banged the front door shut and strode
through the foray, boots rapping on hardwood as he passed through the great room, with its sparse furnishings. “Bain!” He came nearer, glanced into the narrow sitting room, then turned into the doorway of the kitchen. “What the hell happened to you?” he rasped.

“Nothing to concern yourself with,” Bain said, and in that second the carefully guarded concern fled Connelly’s eyes, replaced immediately with a spark of mischief as if he already guessed at the embarrassing cause of the other’s pain.

McBain scowled, scrunching the skin around his damaged eye. Despite the fact that it had blossomed into a dozen vibrant colors even before he’d found his bed, he had almost forgotten its existence. Just another benefit of too many battles. Or too much introspection.

He poured tea carefully into a ridiculously small cup and lifted it to his lips. It was hotter than Hades, so he set it gently onto its matching saucer to eye his so-called friend. “She must have been something special,” Bain rumbled.

Connelly gave him an arch look as he retrieved a walnut from the basket on the table and tossed it in his hand. “Who?”

“Someone else’s wife,” Bain guessed. Although Connelly was happy enough to share the town house’s rent, he rarely spent a full night in his own bed. But neither did he generally linger elsewhere, even when there
wasn’t
an angry husband involved. Which was, most probably, a rare occasion.

“Ahh, yes, well, Marguerite is a unique…and very umm energetic…woman. But…” He smiled at Bain’s battered eye. “Don’t distract me. Tell me the tale.”

Nonplussed, Bain poured water from a pitcher into a basin, then squeezed the excess from a saturated rag. He had no desire to discuss the previous night, but before he could apply the cloth to his eye, Connelly had snatched it from his fingers.

“Dare I hope
you
were involved with an angry husband?” he asked.

Bain increased the intensity of his glower. “Hand over the rag, Connelly, or be gone from my sight,” he growled. Introspection—who needed it?

“Sight!” Connelly laughed and waved a well-manicured hand in front of Bain’s face. “Are you saying you can still see, old man?”

“Give me that,” Bain said, and, snatching the rag back, put the cloth to his eye. It felt wet and cool and soothing against his heated flesh as he lowered himself into a chair, which groaned beneath his weight.

“So honestly…” Connelly settled his lean hips against the table, crossed his long, booted legs, and grinned happily. He was a champion at playing the dandy to the posh London crowds. “Who struck you?”

“Go sleep it off,” Bain suggested, and tilted his head back against the wall behind him with a sigh.

“Or perhaps it was a
what,
” mused the other tapping his cheek. He had a long face and long fingers. In fact, according to Connelly himself, everything about him was long. He stroked his chin, making a show of looking thoughtful. Generally, it was his second-most-irritating expression, the first being happiness. “But I thought trolls were just a thing of old tales.”

“Why are you not yet absent?” Bain gave Connelly the evil eye from his left orb and spoke past the cloth now draped across most of his face.

“Or maybe it was an inanimate object. Might a house have struck you, my friend?”

Bain didn’t respond. It was usually best not to encourage the vociferous bastard.

“Well, whatever the case, I can see that apologies are in order. It seems I should have stayed at Mrs. Tell’s and looked after you, but the lovely Marguerite was not only energetic. She was
impatient
as well.” He shrugged. “Still, I would have sworn it would be safe to leave you unchaperoned. None of the fashionable pinks there looked especially fearsome. But wait…” His voice was musing again as if he’d come upon some great insight. Bain refrained from rolling his eyes lest the right one pop from its socket and roll across the floor. He had no wish to do anything to cause Connelly that much unfettered glee. “Perhaps the culprit was the gaffer with the cane. True, he was older than the Almighty Himself. But he did look decidedly grumpy.”

Bain clenched his jaw and wished to hell he’d never met Thayer Connelly, but it was damned hard to turn back the clock. Besides, the cocky Irishman had come in handy on more than one occasion. Not that Connelly didn’t owe Bain. Indeed, he did, for when they’d first met, a cuckolded little Italian had been threatening to castrate the other with a hot poker. Bain might well have let the irate husband have him, but at that precise moment Bain’s brigade had been a few men short, and rumor was that Connelly was fair to middlin’ with a blunderbuss. The rumors had been true. Had Connelly not joined their ranks, Bain’s corpse would still be rotting on some distant field. Although, at that precise instant, that possibility didn’t seem to be the worst of all options. Once the mouthy Irishman learned Bain had been bested by a lass no bigger than a wood sprite, death might well seem preferable.

And how the hell had that transpired anyway? One minute Bain had been minding his own affairs, glaring out at the dance floor and the next, he’d been staggering across the garden like an inebriated Spaniard.

Memories tingled through his brain. Very well then, perhaps a little something had happened between the glaring and the staggering. Perhaps there had been a woman.

Breath caught tight in Bain’s throat at the memory. For she had been more than a woman.
She had been a golden-haired angel with silken-sand cheeks and eyes like an amber promise, or so it had seemed at the time.

“But no. Hold up,” Connelly was saying. “I do believe that old man was knocked flat by an onerous draft of wind. Last I saw of him he was trying, rather valiantly I might add, to rise to his feet. Hmmm.” He canted his head to the side, eyes narrowed. “Might he have trounced you
after
he gained his balance?”

Bain steadied his breathing. He was acting like an infatuated dolt. And why? She had hardly been a woman at all. Just a slip of a lass, really. Except she hadn’t seemed like a lass either, for her eyes spoke of things only the ancients should have seen.

A shiver coursed through his body.

“Or might it have been the wee lad what took the ladies’ wraps?” Connelly continued. “Might you and
he
have had an altercation?”

“It appears as if I might have been wrong,” Bain rumbled past the cloth, keeping his body carefully relaxed.

“About the fact that you could best the wrap boy?”

“About the fact that you were judicious enough to know when to be reticent.”

Connelly laughed, uncrossed his legs, and stepped forward. “Well, I’d be worried about inciting your wrath, big as you are, but knowing
you were felled by a girl little bigger than a spring hare…” He paused, letting his words fall into silence.

Bain sat up slowly, allowing the rag to drop from his face as he found the Irishman with his eyes. “I should have let him have you,” he said.

Connelly raised a mercurial brow. “The Italian?” he guessed.

“Perhaps you would be less irritating as a gelding,” Bain explained, and Connelly howled with laughter.

“So I’m right!” he said, and slapped his leg as if no greater news had ever been shared. “You
were
bested by a maid.”

McBain refrained from gritting his teeth and rose slowly to his feet, careful to keep his movements casual, to remain cool. So Connelly had only been guessing. He should have known. The Irishman thrived on these foolish mind games, and though there may be proper circumstances for such cerebral sport, there was, from time to time, nothing more fun than putting Connelly’s head through a wall.

“I thought you had learned your lesson about drinking to excess,” Bain said, and Connelly laughed again, ignoring him.

“I, too, saw the lass,” he admitted, still grinning. “A tempting armful, I’ll grant. But she was already taken by the fair-haired fop, or so I thought. Rogan McBain, however…” Drawing an imaginary hat from his head, Connelly swept it in front of his
too-tight breeches to bow dramatically. “Far be it from that great warrior to leave a bonny lass to a lesser swain.”

“Now might be a fortuitous time to learn to shut your mouth,” Bain suggested, but to no avail, for Connelly’s eyes were as bright as a zealot’s on a binge.

“I could barely believe my eyes when I saw you follow them into the gardens.”

He shouldn’t have, of course. That much was now obvious. Surely he’d learned better years ago. But beneath the maid’s polished veneer he had thought he’d sensed something else. Something fearful and fragile. He’d had little choice but to follow them. Or so he’d thought at the time. Though he’d know better from this point forward. Next time he saw a damsel in distress, he’d hie himself in the opposite direction as fast as his timber-sized legs could carry him. He was fair fast for his size.

“I admit I meant to go out myself just to watch the action, but by the time I extricated myself from the charming Marguerite, the girl was already fleeing past the front door. And I thought to myself, Thayer, you winsome devil, you should go see to matters in the gardens. Your good Scottish friend might once again be in need of assist. But when I arrived out of doors, Goldie was laid out flat, and you were gone. Which got me to thinking—”

“It seems unlikely,” Bain said, and, rising, pushed his way past Connelly to the pantry.

“Thinking…” Connelly added, turning to watch him, “that perhaps you made some sort of advance toward the lass.”

Bain gave him a glare over his shoulder. Connelly raised his brows.

“Though, I’ll admit,” he said slowly, “you’ve not been much of a ladies’ man in the past.”

Retrieving a loaf of oat bread and a pot of honey, Bain pushed his way past Connelly as he moved toward the table.

“And why might that be, I wonder.” He was musing again. The bastard. “I mean, true, you’ve not the good looks and charm of myself, but then, you’re not Irish.” He shrugged his shoulders. “So that is surely to be expected. Still…” He canted his head quizzically. Bain stared balefully in return. “You’re not half-ugly. Well…” he corrected ruefully. “You’re
half
-ugly. But some maids will trade good looks…” He motioned toward himself, then stepped closer to Bain. “For sheer”—he trailed his right hand through the air—“freakish size.”

Bending, Bain pulled a long-handled knife from the top of his boot. “If you’re wanting to retain that hand, you’ll be keeping it out of my face,” he warned, then sliced a chunk of bread thick enough to use as a discus before sitting to drizzle honey carefully on top and take a good-sized bite.

Connelly grinned ecstatically. “Which brings me to wondering…might my giant Scottish friend be an even better friend than I realize?”

Bain swallowed, put his bread down, and set
tled against the back of his chair, motionless as he waited for new foolery. “And what might you be meaning by that, laddie?” Sometimes when his ire was up, his brogue deepened, and he forgot all the fine words he had learned while reading through the eve of battle.

Connelly was grinning like a Syrian monkey. “Tell me true, McBain, have you been coveting your neighbor’s arse?”

Bain’s chair scraped ominously against the floor as he rose to his full height. He curled up his right fist. It still ached from the time he’d spent in Ceylon, but that hardly mattered. “Spoiling for a bit of sport, are you, lad?”

“Not your sort.” Connelly laughed and backed away.

“And what kind of sport might you be thinking that would be?” he asked.

“Two men, one bed, and—” he began, but in that moment, McBain reached for him.

Connelly tried to dodge away, but McBain had already curled his fingers into the Irishman’s shirtfront.