Must Be Magic (13 page)

Hermione clambered into the carriage with the aid of her footman and waited for Leila to enter before answering. “We're concerned, dear, that's all. The girls stopped to visit Ninian, and you know how that is.”

Leila did. Ninian mothered everyone, even though she was younger than half her cousins. Leila might resent everything about her angelic married cousin, except it would be like resenting the sun or the moon. They merely beamed down anyway.

“
Maman
, I don't suppose I could talk you out of this, could I? I've already offered Dunstan Ives our help in clearing his name, and he's refused it.”

Hermione rapped on the driver's door, and the carriage lurched down the drive. “I don't doubt he did, but you can never know what an Ives is thinking. They're positively inscrutable.”

Dunstan was not. He was as obvious as a blizzard on a sunny day. He wanted her, and he hated her for it. Simple. In a billow of skirts and petticoats, Leila flopped down on the seat cushion. “We could ask his maidservant if she knows where he has gone, I suppose.”

“That's what I thought,” Hermione replied, tugging at an unfastened glove loop.

Leila rolled her eyes as her mother's ancient carriage rumbled down the drive.

Dunstan had warned
her
to stay away, but he hadn't said anything about her mother.

Riding behind a tenant who was returning the oxen to their field, Dunstan noticed a movement on the rocky hillside harboring Leila's cave. His heart lurched and his palms perspired in expectation until he urged his mount past the animals and realized the activity on the hill in no way involved Leila.

He cursed his foolish disappointment even as he identified the climber as a young lad. When another figure pushed up from a prone position near the cave vent, Dunstan's disappointment turned to rage. If some wretch had discovered Leila's bathing place and spied on her—

Slamming that thought to a halt, he pondered the idiocy of caring and scarcely heeded the man who stood on the crest of the hill—until he realized that the Herculean figure silhouetted against the sky was watching him.
Adonis.
Or whatever in hell his name was.

Adonis had first appeared out of nowhere at the marriage of Drogo and Ninian. He'd been appearing and disappearing ever since. He was more Ives than any Ives—with a more prominent nose, a browner complexion, and thicker, blacker hair than any of them. But he hung on no known branch of the family tree.

Unable to ignore the Ives talent for breeding sons—in and out of wedlock—the family had accepted Adonis's appearances with wariness and his departures with relief. Adonis never seemed to care one way or another.

A youthful shout from the side of the hill returned Dunstan's attention to the forgotten climber, and his heart nearly stopped beating. His son, Griffith, hung on a rocky shelf, attempting to pull himself over. What the
devil
was he about? He would kill the boy, if the boy did not kill himself first.

With a lazy stride, the big man on top of the hill sauntered down a path nearest the lad, leaned over, and apparently spoke a few words of encouragement. Heart in mouth, letting the oxen driver go on without him, Dunstan halted his horse at the foot of the rocks to watch his one and only son clinging to his precarious perch. He didn't dare shout at him from down here. One quick move, and the boy could plunge to the rocks below. It wasn't a long fall, just a cruel one. Images of his son's broken, crumpled body obliterated all other thought.

Grasping the last shred of his control, Dunstan dismounted just as Griffith found a handhold and began hauling himself upward. Dunstan gulped a lungful of air and swore that if he didn't keel over in terror first, he would heave the pair off the top when he reached them. Why, by all the planets, had the boy's mother let him loose in the company of the lunatic Adonis?

With careless disregard to his coat and stockings, Dunstan took the shortest route to the top, pulling himself up by tree trunks and through brambles. By the time he reached the crest, Griffith lay gasping for breath in the grass while Adonis looked on with amusement.

“Well met, my friend,” he called. “I believe this one belongs to you.”

Griffith shot up like a jack-in-the-box. Still gangly and loose-limbed at fourteen, his ragged dark hair falling across his bronzed brow, he scowled at Dunstan with an easily recognizable Ives expression. The boy had been sullen earlier this spring when Dunstan had left him behind with his mother. He had apparently graduated from sullen to rebellious in a few short months.

“Does your mother know where you are?” Dunstan all but shouted. He never knew what to say to his son. He and Bessie lived in different worlds, and he'd long ago come to accept that a child belonged with his mother. Yet he wasn't so certain how much longer Griffith could be called a child.

The boy crossed his arms and glared. Dunstan raised a questioning eyebrow to the man who looked on—the man who always looked on, observing and never participating.

“I found him tramping the road to London.” Adonis answered the unspoken inquiry with a shrug of his wide shoulders. “Thought maybe you'd want him more than the rogues he accompanied needed him.”

“They were my friends,” the boy muttered. “I was fine. You didn't have to interfere.”

The big man gently cuffed the back of the boy's head. “They were rogues who could have sold you to the press gangs or employed you as a thief, among other things.”

Trying not to let his terror of what might have happened explode into rage, Dunstan focused on the one argument that was capable of making an immediate impression on his rebellious child. “Or they could have been rogues who would terrify me and your mother by holding you for ransom,” he added. He knew his son was devoted to his mother.

“What would
you
care?” Griffith retorted, though he had the grace to look guilty.

“You're my son. What do you think?”

The boy narrowed his eyes. “I think you wish I'd disappear, that I'd never been born. That's what I think.”

Dunstan crossed his arms and glared back. “I think you wish
I'd
disappear and never been born, and then you wouldn't have to deal with anyone but your mother.”

“That's stupid,” the boy retaliated. “If you hadn't been born, then I wouldn't be here either. Everyone knows that.”

Dunstan lifted his gaze to Adonis, who was grinning openly. “See, he's an Ives. Not stupid, just pigheaded.”

“So I've been told, though I've yet to discern the difference.” Adonis nodded at a carriage rumbling down the road below. “Why is it that whenever a tempest brews, a Malcolm appears?”

“I might ask that of you,” Dunstan replied grimly, glancing in the direction indicated but not recognizing the vehicle. How could Adonis know who was in it?

Ignoring the gibe, Adonis chortled and tugged the boy's collar. “If the Malcolms get you in their clutches, you'll be fortunate if you aren't transported home on a broom.”

Griffith looked as if that possibility would be far preferable to reaping his father's wrath. He glanced toward the road with interest.

“I'll leave the two of you to the ladies.” In threadbare shirtsleeves, his coat flung over his shoulder, Adonis eased toward the far side of the hill. “I'll catch up with you later.”

“Wait!” Dunstan called after him. He despised being in debt to any man, and he owed this one a far greater debt than he could ever repay. To lose his son would have killed him—a sudden insight that hit him with the impact of a runaway carriage. “I owe you. Come to the house, and we'll talk.”

Adonis eyed him skeptically. “There's naught we can say to each other.”

Dunstan grasped his son's shoulders with both hands and let a tide of gratitude relieve him of the hostility and suspicion he'd harbored for the interfering stranger. “He's all I have,” Dunstan said simply, squeezing Griffith's shoulders and telling himself it was the sun causing the moisture in his eyes now that he had the boy in his hands again. “Come for dinner.”

Adonis glanced at the approaching carriage, then back to the wide-eyed boy who was soaking up the exchange. “Later, then.”

Although he strolled away as if he had all the time in the world, he was well out of sight before the carriage reached the foot of the hill.

“He's peculiar,” Griffith muttered.

“You're in a cauldron of trouble,” Dunstan retorted, releasing him.

Dunstan had been only seventeen when he'd fathered the lad, eighteen the day Griffith was born. He'd held him as a babe once or twice when he'd been home from school, watched him grow from a distance, but Celia's death had separated them as surely as his marriage had. He abhorred the thought of hurting his child, yet he didn't seem capable of doing anything else.

The role of father did not come naturally to him. Dunstan's own father had barely acknowledged his existence, so he had no good example to follow.

If, as Leila had accused him, he'd been blinded to her nature by his prejudice against society, was it possible that his feelings of resentment toward his father had spilled over into his relationship with Griffith? Just how narrow-minded had he been all these years?

And how the hell could he fix it?

With younger brothers aplenty, he knew how to play the role of older sibling. Perhaps that would suffice for now. “Come along. I imagine you're a mite peckish after that climb. What were you trying to do?”

“Adonis said this is a faerie hill, and I was trying to find a way in.” Griffith scrambled down the path. “I'm so hungry, I could eat a cow.”

Dunstan lingered a moment longer, watching the ancient carriage rattle and jolt below, and wondered again—how the devil had Adonis known who was in it?

***

Leila stepped from the coach and eyed the bleak stone front of Dunstan's cottage. “He's not here,” she told her mother as the footman assisted her down.

“How do you know that, dear?” Hermione asked placidly, catching her floating scarf and knotting it over her bodice. With a vague gesture, she sent the footman to knock.

Leila always knew when Dunstan was near, but she didn't try to explain that to her mother.

She removed her lace cap from her pocket and tied it in a demure bow beneath her ear so she did not look quite so disheveled in her dusty gardening clothes. She watched as Dunstan's maid appeared in the doorway, then threw them a glance over the footman's shoulder and shook her head.

The footman returned with the message that the master was with the men in the south field and was not expected back until dinner.

“Perhaps we could go to the south field,” Hermione suggested.

Catching the scent of new-mown grass carried by a sudden breeze, Leila shook her curls. “He's on his way,
Maman.
Let's go in and have some tea.” She strolled up the stone walk. “My mother has traveled a distance,” she said to the maid still standing in the entrance. “Might we rest and have some refreshment?”

Minutes later, they were comfortably ensconced in Dunstan's front parlor when the front door sprang open and a dirty young man flew across the threshold, followed by Dunstan in a rumpled and dusty frock coat.

Leila hid a smile at her host's disheveled state. She shouldn't have worried that she wasn't elegant enough for him.

From beneath lowered lashes, she watched Dunstan's surprise and what she hoped was a brief flash of appreciation at her appearance. Then he concealed his expression and collared the lad to perform the necessary courtesies. His son! She'd known Ives boasted of bastards, knew of Dunstan's illegitimate brothers, she'd just never thought to come face-to-face with his son, especially one nearly full grown.

The boy grimaced and looked longingly toward the kitchen. The dark coloring, large bones, and stubborn jaw proclaimed him Ives well enough, but his nose lacked the usual prominence. Leila knew nothing of boys and could not ease the awkward silence that fell after introductions were completed.

“Martha will feed you. Don't go any farther than the kitchen until I come for you.” Dunstan sent the boy away and glanced down at his own dirty attire. “I apologize, ladies. I did not expect company. Will you give me a moment?”

“We shouldn't have come,
Maman
,” Leila whispered as Dunstan disappeared upstairs.

“Nonsense.” Hermione bit delicately into a watercress sandwich and glanced about her. “After years of raising girls, I find these Ives men fascinating. Even the young ones are exceedingly… masculine.”

Grumpily, Leila snapped a ginger biscuit and savored the flavor. “You have two full-grown stepsons,
Maman
. And Father isn't exactly lacking in masculinity.”

Hermione tut-tutted and sipped her tea. “You know perfectly well that they have their lives, and we have ours. It is all very polite and not at all the hurly-burly of Ninian's household, where men are underfoot at all hours. The poor dear. With her sensibilities, I cannot imagine how she suffers the chaos of all those big men hurling passions about as if they were javelins.”

Sometimes, her ladylike, gentle mother was entirely too perceptive. Contemplating Dunstan and hurling javelins, Leila did not dare reply.

“Martha, I thought I told you to get rid of this soap.” An irritable male voice floated down the stairs and through the partially closed parlor doors. “I'll not go about smelling of perfume!”

Leila lifted her gaze to watch a spider spinning a web in a corner of the ceiling.

Martha's murmured reply could not be discerned, but a deep growl carried easily. “Then who put the blamed thing in here? I threw it out this morning.”

Hermione raised her eyebrows over the brim of her teacup. “You're making soap on your own now, are you, dear?”

“I must practice on something.” Leila wanted to get up and walk out, but that would only raise her mother's foolish suspicions. The marchioness dearly wanted to believe her eldest daughter had inherited her gifts, but Leila had never made a person happy or content or even moderately satisfied with her fragrances, as her mother did. Although, if Dunstan's shouts were any indication, she'd certainly succeeded in eliciting his anger.

“Practicing on an Ives is a trifle untraditional, is it not?” Hermione suggested softly as heavy footsteps clattered down the stairs. “I did warn you about them, did I not?”

Thankfully, Dunstan burst in before Hermione could voice her disapproval of what must be written all over Leila's face. Her family meant well, but they interfered at the most embarrassing moments. She sipped her tea to hide her flush.

“I apologize for making you wait, my ladies. How may I help you?”

Dunstan had smoothed back his thick dark hair, secured it with a ribbon, and donned a frayed frock coat of midnight blue trimmed in the barest hint of silver to match his gray vest. Leila liked that he'd dressed for her, but he could just as well have worn rags. She saw the man inside the clothes, and she quivered at the hungry look he bestowed on her. Physical awareness heated the small parlor far better than any fire.

Hermione cast a disapproving look at Leila and shook her head—whether in dismay or acceptance of the inevitable, Leila couldn't tell.