Tammy Falkner - [Faerie 02] (4 page)

Lord Phineas Trimble bounced his knee beneath the wench’s bottom to eject her from his lap. However, the scrawny bit o’ muslin just wrapped her arms around his neck and pressed her breasts firmer against his chest. “Not tonight, love,” he murmured. He unwrapped her from his person and set her to the side as he got to his feet.

“Never thought I’d see the day when you turned down a tumble,” the wench remarked, looking closely at him. “You haven’t replaced me with another, have you?” Her auburn brows drew together sharply.

“I could never replace you,” he soothed, stroking a finger along the line of her chin. “I simply have somewhere I need to be.”

“That mistress of yours is keeping tight to the reins,” she remarked.

He held up his hands as though in surrender. He had no mistress, though the wench had no reason to know that. Mrs. Katherine Crawfield had let him down, not so gently, and had found another protector months ago. She’d also started a little rumor about his prowess in the bedchamber. Mrs. Crawfield had a bit of a mean streak. The rumor was spreading like wildfire in his social circle, and he wasn’t surprised by the number of people who’d already heard about his lack of attention to her needs.

It wasn’t his fault that the only woman he even thought about was Claire Thorne. Every time a wench touched him, he recoiled. All because she wasn’t Claire. Just thinking her name made his heart quicken and his manhood get hard.

Finn called for his carriage and climbed into it alone. He wasn’t used to spending so much time by himself. He usually had the Duke of Robinsworth, his brother, and his daughter, Lady Anne, to occupy his free moments. But since his brother had married Sophia Thorne in the land of the fae, they’d been gone from Finn’s world and had no plans to return any time soon.

His last missive from Robin had bid him to check up on their mother, who lived at the family seat, and to take care of Robin’s holdings for a time. So, Finn had moved himself into the Hall and taken up residence in his brother’s house. And taken up Robin’s life, it appeared. Aside from the fact that Robin was a recluse, Finn was beginning to see the attraction to staying at home where one couldn’t hear the whispers. Robin’s life—now that Finn was taking care of his holdings, his lands, his tenants, and his investments—left little room for dalliances or social engagements.

Finn preferred his life of leisure but was certain he would be able to get back to it soon. But what he would prefer even more was to find out what had happened to Claire Thorne. He’d spent one life-changing night with her, and when he’d woken up, she was gone. He’d traveled all the way back to London through the thickening snow, trying to find some glimpse of her, but she had vanished into thin air and was nowhere to be found. At least not in this world. He wanted to ask Robin if he knew her whereabouts, but doing so would call attention to his desire to find her. That simply would not do.

Finn let Robin’s butler, Wilkins, take his coat and walking stick when he walked into the residence. “Lord Phineas,” Wilkins said stoically. The man rarely cracked a smile, though he did seem more lively when Robin was in residence.

“Wilkins,” Finn murmured. “Anything I need to take care of before I retire?”

Wilkins held out a note on a silver salver. Finn’s name was written in Robin’s bold script across the front.

“The garden gnome delivered it this afternoon,” Wilkins informed him.

“How was Ronald?” Finn asked.

“He was… himself.”

“Pity that.”

The land of the fae employed varied creatures to do their bidding. Though the garden gnome, Ronald, hated Finn with all his being, he still carried missives to and from their land. Finn snorted. Their land. Like Robin and Anne belonged there with Sophia. He shook his head. Perhaps they did. It must be nice to belong somewhere.

Finn scrubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands and headed for Robin’s study. He would look at any pressing matters, any notes from solicitors or business associates of Robin’s, and then he would slide gratefully into his empty bed.

He tore open Robin’s missive and began to read.

Dearest Finn,

We’re planning to return soon.

Best regards,

Robin

Finn had always appreciated that Robin was a man of few words. Until now. He wanted details. He wanted to know everything there was to know about the land of the fae. It existed. But he didn’t understand how it could be possible. And he wanted to know if Claire would be returning as well, but he didn’t dare ask his brother.

Tossing the rest of the day’s business to the side, Finn started up the stairs toward his bedchamber. He was too tired to do any more.

He let Robin’s valet, Simmons, remove his clothing, and he slid into a silk dressing gown. The man bustled about the chamber long enough to be irritating, until Finn finally motioned for him to leave. With a quick bow, Simmons exited the chambers. Finn was quite certain Simmons didn’t want to be his valet, but the man needed employment while Robin was gone. He might as well make himself useful.

Finn poured a snifter of brandy and drank it in one healthy swallow, hissing as it made a fiery trail down his throat. He poured another. He slept better when he was foxed, if he had to sleep alone. He preferred to sleep sober with a warm, and preferably damp, body wrapped around his.

The brandy began to seep into the corners of his mind, and he relaxed in an overstuffed chair. When he was sufficiently numb, he stood up, shed his dressing gown, and sat down on the edge of the bed. The thought of a warm bed-partner stirred something within him, and he momentarily considered having Wilkins arrange for a visit, but it was just as well that he went to bed. Wilkins couldn’t bring him Claire Thorne, and she was the only woman he wanted.

He scrubbed at his eyes again and stared absently around the room that wasn’t his. The home that wasn’t his. The life that wasn’t his.

Movement against the far wall caught his attention, and he strained to see into the dimness. A small door appeared. Finn blinked, adjusting his brandy-hazed brain to see more clearly. Perhaps he was already asleep; he couldn’t be certain. But then the door flew open and fog rolled out in small waves, clouding the room until it was smoky and hazy. He swiped a hand in front of his face. A shimmer of lights sparked from the opening, and through it tumbled a tiny creature, no more than four inches in height.

Finn got up and bent at the waist—regretting the action immediately when the room rolled like the deck of a moving ship—and glared at what had to be a figment of his imagination. But then the little lady reached behind herself and fluffed her wing, which had gotten bent when she tumbled across the floor.

“What the devil?” he remarked to himself.

The faerie looked up, got to her feet, and placed her hands on her hips. She shook a finger at him and words tumbled from her lips, but he couldn’t hear a word of them.

“I can’t hear you,” he said, leaning closer.

Before his very eyes, the little faerie grew to human proportions. Fog and sparks covered some of her change, but the rest of it he saw. She grew. She grew from four inches tall to where the top of her head reached the bottom of his chin.

Her cheeks were flushed a rosy red, and she put a hand over her eyes. But with her free hand, she continued to shake her finger at him. In her fist she clutched a… paintbrush?

He heard not a word. Finn let his gaze wander from the bodice of her pink gown down to the odd little slippers she wore. He finally made his eyes move back up to her face. Her cheeks were still red and growing even redder, as were the edges of her wings. Wings. Dear God, the lady had wings. Her hair tumbled over the implements of flight, which looked like lace and ephemeral material, if that could be an apt description. Her strawberry blond hair fell in mad disarray over her shoulders and tangled around the edges of lace on her wings. He moved to disentangle her. She must have gotten mussed when she’d rolled into the room.

“My lord,” she cried, when he reached out to touch her. He knew that voice. It seeped into his brain slowly. Claire Thorne.

“Miss Thorne?” he asked. He’d never seen her in faerie form. He knew she was one. But he’d never seen it. Not with all the glimmer and shine, and the wings. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She looked everywhere else.

“My lord,” she began again. She looked down toward his feet. And then spun to face away. She hooked his dressing gown with her finger and held it out to him. “Perhaps you should dress.”

Finn took his dressing gown from her crooked finger and shrugged into it. “What brings you to London, Miss Thorne?” he asked casually. Like he was commenting about tea or her frock or some other nonsense, rather than the fact that she’d just appeared through a tiny door that wasn’t there anymore. What he really wanted to ask was where the devil she’d been for the past four months. And why she’d vanished without talking to him about what happened between them.

“That would be none of your concern, Lord Phineas.” She lifted her pert little nose higher in the air and started for the door.

“Miss Thorne, you just tumbled through a magical doorway right into my chambers.” He stopped and shook his head. That sounded ridiculous even to him. “A door that has disappeared, by the way.”

The lady pivoted on her heel and looked back at where the door should have been and then began to pace.

She raised a fingernail to her lips and began to nibble as she mumbled something to herself that sounded like, “The paintbrush usually leaves a way for me to get back.”

He didn’t even try to interpret it. “By God, are they always that big?” He reached out to tentatively touch the fine edges of her wings, which looked like lace, but now that he was closer, he realized they were edged with fine down, and they matched the color of her skin.

She looked down at herself and rolled her eyes at him. He found that social ineptitude a little endearing, actually.

“I could ask you the same,” she said, with one delicate golden brow arched at him. Her gaze roamed up and down his body, a body she’d just seen way too much of. She already knew it intimately.

“I was preparing for bed.” Heat crept up his cheeks. “You look very pretty in pink.”

“Thank you,” she murmured. She shook out the folds of the short skirt so that it swished around her knees. Finn had never seen a more erotic sight than that of her trim little silk-clad ankles. Good God, he was losing his mind. He picked up his empty glass and stared into it.

She closed her eyes tightly and her wings disappeared. They vanished. No popping, no cracking, no smoke. They just left. He reached out to touch the place where they’d been, but she dodged his hand. “Go to bed, my lord,” she said. “Tomorrow you will wake and this will all seem like a dream.”

His dreams of her involved her gasping and moaning beneath him, since he hadn’t been able to get the memories of her actually doing so out of his mind. His dreams would not involve her tumbling through a door into his room. He raised his foot and tapped his big toe against the wall where the door had been. “Where did it go?”

She shrugged. “I have no idea.”

She looked a little put out by its absence. “How do you get back?”

“I have no idea about that, either. One minute, I was in my land without any magic. Now I’m in your land without any magic.”

She shook her head and began to pace. “What does that mean, no magic?”

“It means I am as human as you are right now.”

Only, she was dressed like a faerie. “You can’t go back?”

She bent down and knocked on the wall where the door had been. “It appears not.”

“Is that a paintbrush?”

“It appears so.” She drew her bottom lip between her teeth.

“What’s your plan?”

“I don’t have one yet.”

“You’ll have to stay here.”

“For the night.” She nodded and looked perturbed.

“You don’t have a chaperone.”

She looked down at the thing that someone might mistake for a gown. Someone stupid. “Not unless she’s in my pocket.”

If she had a pocket hidden somewhere on that dress, he would sell his eyeteeth to find it. “You’re all alone.” Thoughts of the last time he’d been alone with her still made him ache.

She nodded, rocking back and forth from the balls of her feet to her heels. “I believe we already discussed that.”

He was honor bound to take her in. To take care of her until one of her kind came to collect her. “Robin and your sister will be returning soon,” he said. Robin might be the one to collect her.

“Thanks for the warning,” she said dryly.

God, the woman made him want to chuckle. But that could be the drink.

Finn pulled the cord for a servant. “I’ll have someone show you to your chambers for the time being.”

“Do you plan to lock me in?”

“Do you plan to bolt?”

She shook her head. “My land is the last place I want to be right now.” She held out her hands in surrender. “Not to mention that I have nowhere else to go.”

“Quite true.” Something was wrong. She was much too complacent.

A knock sounded on the door. “Enter,” Finn bellowed.

Wilkins entered the room and stopped short. But he recovered quickly. “You summoned?”

“It appears we have a visitor.”

The stoic old butler bowed to her.

“Don’t you want to know how she got inside?”

“Not particularly, my lord.” Wilkins tugged at his necktie and then folded his hands behind his back. “Please do let me know if there is a security breach I should take care of.”

Finn doubted that Wilkins could handle her kind of breach. Finn’s eyes were trained on the pale pink skin that was exposed by her bodice. Until she began to snap her fingers in his face. He dragged a hand down his mouth in frustration.

“I’m up here, my lord,” she reminded him. Thin brows that arched as much as her mouth turned down met him when he finally found the wherewithal to look up.

What was up there was as pretty as what was down there. And everywhere in between. By God, he was losing his mind. They’d be calling a coach bound for Bedlam by the end of the night. “Am I going mad, Wilkins?” Finn asked.

“If you are, my lord, I’m going with you.”

***

Claire paced back and forth across the Aubusson rug in the chambers where they’d stashed her. “Stashed” was the only appropriate word for what they’d done. She didn’t have a single thing to wear. Nor did she have any money. Or magic. The only thing she could do was shrink herself down to faerie size and then back to human size again. And apparently, she could paint. But that was all she could do. She could get everything she needed if she only had some magic. But she had none.

She looked at the tip of the paintbrush and snorted. That was the only magic she had? It was left over from more than twenty years before. It had allowed her to paint that door handle on the door, and then the door had opened like a beacon on a dark night. And she’d walked straight into it. Look where it had gotten her. She’d paint her way out of it if she could come up with a safe destination. But she couldn’t think of a single place she could go.

Her chambers were extremely fine, much finer than what she’d had at home. From the thick carpet beneath her feet to the tapestry on the wall, this place was much more extravagant than anything she’d ever had assigned to her. When she came to this world, she was usually installed as a servant and given a tiny room in a drafty corner of a manor house. The Hall, which belonged to the Duke of Robinsworth, was monstrous in size, and Claire was afraid she’d get lost in the corridors if she even attempted to bolt.

A knock sounded on the door. Claire turned just as the door slowly opened. “No, I didn’t intend for you to wait for my call to enter,” Claire sniped. But a kind face appeared around the door and an old woman walked into the room.

“Grams, you’re supposed to wait until she calls for you to open the door. What if she were undressed?” Lord Phineas bellowed at the old woman. She held an ear funnel up to her ear, and he leaned toward it.

The lady shrugged her narrow shoulders and yelled back, “She doesn’t have anything I haven’t seen before, I can assure you.” She shot Lord Phineas a telling glance. “And I dare say nothing you haven’t seen before either.”

His face flushed scarlet. He was quite handsome when he was discomfited. The corners of his mouth lifted in a grin. “See here, now,” he began. But he just stopped and shook his head. He gestured to the woman. “Miss Thorne, this is my grandmother, the dowager Duchess of Robinsworth.”

Claire curtsied as best she knew how. “Grams has agreed to act as your chaperone while you’re here.”

“I do not need a chaperone.”

The dowager lifted a funnel to her ear. “Did you say mascarpone? Call for a tray. I’ll share it with Miss Thorne.”

“Not mascarpone, Grams!” Lord Phineas bellowed. “Chaperone. Miss Thorne needs a chaperone! For propriety’s sake.”

“Oh, who cares about propriety?” the dowager said, waving her hand in the air. “You could crawl in bed with her and I’d have no idea of it. Why avoid the obvious?” She glared at Claire. “Do you plan to fornicate with my grandson?”

“Oh God,” Lord Phineas said as he buried his face in his hands and groaned.

Claire stifled a grin. “I have no intention of engaging in any form of fornication.” Not today. Not ever again. Not with Phineas Trimble.

The old lady looked toward Lord Phineas. “There’s more than one form of fornication?” she asked.

“Grams,” he growled. “I will not discuss fornication with you.”

“Then why did you bring it up?” She glared at her grandson.

“I didn’t,” he growled. Then he threw up his hands and quickly left the room.

The old lady laid down her ear funnel. “I do so love to do that to him.”

“I can tell.” Claire extended a hand to the old lady. “I have heard stories about you,” Claire confessed. The dowager duchess had been good friends with her own grandmother when they were younger.

“All true,” the lady said. “And the stories they made up, they’re true too as long as I come out smelling like roses in the end.”

Claire chuckled. It was the first true laugh she’d had since Sophia and Robin had showed up in the land of the fae. It felt good to laugh. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Why are you here, my dear?” the woman asked, her voice softening.

Claire heaved a sigh. “I don’t know. The door brought me here.”

“What door, dear?” The lady cocked her head to the side.

The
door
in
the
painting. I went through it. The sign over the door said “
Dulcis domus
.”
But she couldn’t say any of that. “I ended up in Lord Phineas’s bedchamber.”

“Many a lady has found herself in my grandson’s bedchamber. And many who weren’t ladies, too, if you understand my meaning.”

Claire did. She understood it all too well. She was one of them, once upon a time.

“You’re Sophia’s sister?”

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“A lovely girl.”

“Yes, Your Grace.” Everyone thought Sophia was lovely. And charming. And smart. And the Trusted Few had even allowed her to marry outside the fae. With no recriminations. No clipping of her wings for committing Unpardonable Errors. Every last one of them. It was like Sophia was charmed. “She’s the new Duchess of Robinsworth.”

“So, I hear.”

The dowager duchess made a sucking noise with her tongue against her teeth.

“I won’t stay long,” Claire began.

“I don’t expect you to. In fact, I suspect that you will be gone by morning.”

Claire’s mouth opened and closed. She didn’t know what to say. She probably looked like a blasted salmon.

“Rest well, my dear. I’ll have a maid sent up with something you can wear.”

Clothing. If she had clothing, she could leave the Hall. The farther she could get from Phineas Thorne, the better.

“Good night, dear,” the old woman said.

“Did you mention you would send someone up with some clothes?”

“Oh yes, yes. I’ll send someone up.”

“Thank you.”

Claire would linger long enough to get dressed, get a bite to eat, and then she had to get as far from Phineas Trimble as possible. Before he figured out her secret.

***

Finn crept quietly down the corridor toward Claire’s room, determined to get some answers from her if it was the last thing he ever did. It might be, if his mother or his grandmother caught him lurking in their wing of the estate near Claire’s room.

The last time he’d seen Claire, she’d looked just about as disheveled as she did tonight after rolling through the tiny door. Her hair had been down, and he’d brushed it back from her forehead as she laid her head on his shoulder. He remembered the feel of her head lying trustingly on his chest as her breaths slowed. As he’d caught his own breath. As he’d realized what they’d done.

He slowly turned the handle to her door and stepped inside. A single candle burned on the bedside table, and it cast a hazy glow about the room. Her form was outlined by the lump under the counterpane, and heat shot quickly to his groin as he wondered what she was wearing beneath that blanket.

Finn sat down gingerly on her bed and lifted a hand to her shoulder. He would gently wake her before taking her to task for disappearing the way she did. His heart thumped like mad within his chest, and his hand shook just before he nudged her awake. But the lump he thought was her wasn’t her at all. Finn jerked the counterpane back and jumped to his feet.

“Damn her,” he cursed. She was gone. Again.

A muffled laugh sounded behind him. He turned quickly, prepared to defend himself if he needed to do so. But it was just Miss Thorne, lounging on a chaise before the fire. She wore a white nightrail that must have come from his grandmother. Her tiny toes peeped out from beneath the hem. She wiggled them and Finn bit back a groan. “You find something amusing?” he bit out.

“The look on your face when you realized that was a lump of clothing beneath the counterpane.” She laughed again. She laughed like a child being tickled, and he found the innocent sound of it to be most arousing. Everything about her stirred the fire in him, from his fiery anger to his manhood.

“Where have you been?” Finn asked sharply.

“Here and there,” she teased. “A little more there than here.”

“Are you all right?” he asked, fighting not to strangle her. Or kiss her.

“As right as I can be,” she said with a shrug. She lifted a cup to her lips and took a swallow. When she laid it down, he picked up the cup and brought it to his nose. “It’s just tea,” she said with a smirk. “Though you may have some if you’re that parched.”