The Wedding Night (30 page)

"I'll have to study the design myself, Jack."

"But not for days yet, Mairey. We've a marriage to begin."

He was such a fine man, immeasurably decent. She grasped at that tiny shred of hope and logic. He loved her. And that being so, wouldn't he, in his enormous capacity to understand, also love what she loved? Wouldn't he see the infamy in scraping away the willows to mine a cold-breasted metal that had no meaning to anyone? Wouldn't he see that not all treasure can be held in the hand?

"When did you find it, Jack?"

He looked
sheepish,
a scoundrel caught doing a good deed and liking it too much. "This morning, in one of
Larkenfield's
trunks. Can you imagine my luck?"

Yes—and all of it cruel; ill-timed and far-reaching.

"You've had the Knot since this morning, Jack, and you didn't tell me."

"No time, my love." He lifted her chin, studied her eyes. "You fainted, Mairey, if you recall. And then there was our baby"—he spanned her waist with his hands—"and a wedding at the registrar's office. And we've been making love every moment since." His easy smile devastated her. "Priorities."

"Yes." They fell into place too easily. A pledge; a promise to keep. One of them older and bred in the bone. A daughter's duty to her father, as deeply felt as a son's. Jack would have understood—if she'd been able to explain to him all the reasons she had to leave him tonight.

"I thought you'd be a little more excited, Mairey. After all, I've done a rather miraculous thing."

Her miracle. She couldn't move for the grief bearing down on her. "You've overwhelmed me, Jack."

He feigned injured pride with one of his roguish brows. "I've seen you overwhelmed, my love, and you make a lot more noise than that." He leaned her backward against the pillows and began his tender crusade to steal what little she had left of her heart. "Let me see if I can do better this time."

To embrace him once more, to last through all their lives—long into those empty years when she would reach out for him and he would be but her dearest memory.

"I love you, Jack!"

"You are my heart, Lady Rushford, forever more."

She took him into her, and, in the same exquisite moment, she found the Knot beneath her hip, cold and exacting. Furious and already grieving, she shoved it over the side of the bed, unwilling to share her last embrace with its shadows. It landed with a leaden clunk, a sound that echoed through her heart.

Jack looked up from his nuzzling, a brow cocked. "Not going to sleep with the
Willowmoon
Knot under your pillow to help you dream about a silver mine?"

Her wayward dragon,
who
would never learn his own strength, whom she loved more than her own life.

"Oh, Jack, I'd much rather dream of us." Mairey gloried in his touch, wept through every caress, and spent her passion for him through that final release, while the moon in its infallible course crept across the counterpane.

Jack was deep into his untroubled dreams when she left him.

Without another breath, for fear of collapsing into sobs and slipping back into the bed beside him, Mairey retrieved the
Willowmoon
Knot and stole out of Jack's life forever.

Chapter 19

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"
W
ake up, Anna!"
Mairey's
hands were icy cold and shaking badly as she
untucked
the covers from beneath Anna's chin. "Sweet? You've got to get up now."

Anna stretched and yawned, then blinked up at her through the dim predawn light of the garret. "Mairey? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, sweetheart. We're going away. "Mairey hadn't shed a tear since she'd gotten to the lodge—couldn't, because there wasn't
time,
and the girls would panic. She had to get them out before
Drakestone
House began to stir and Jack found them. She feared that most of all.

"Going where?" Anna sat up. "Where's Lord Jack?"

Lost to us, love
. "He's sailing away to
Canada
on the morning tide, to see to an emergency in one of his mines."

Anna scooted out of bed. "Lord Jack went to
Canada
without us? Without
you
, Mairey?"

"He wants us to live in the country while he's gone. You remember our old village—the one we used to visit sometimes when Papa was alive. We're going to wait for him there."

"He'll come and get us?"

Oh, how this wicked knot had tangled their lives!

"Of course, he will. Come now, sweet. Dress in these." She helped Anna into a pair of knickers and a shirt that were miles too big but would serve as a disguise. Jack wouldn't be looking for three little boys and a young man in a stableman's hat; he'd be tearing up the world for his wife and his child, for three little girls whom he loved. He'd said it plainly enough: that he'd lost one family to his carelessness; that he wasn't going to lose another. Because he loved too deeply, and without end.

"Should we wake Aunt
Tattie
now, Mairey? She takes hours to dress."

"No, Anna." She couldn't risk
Tattie's
questions. She wasn't a Faelyn; had never heard of the village that was tucked away beneath the
Willowmoon
glade.
Tattie
would never accept
Mairey's
story of Jack's drowning at sea. She would return to him at
Drakestone
, very much alive and seething in his anguish, and he would descend on Mairey and her village with all the devices of hell.

Her heart broken to bits, Mairey fumbled with the buttons on Anna's coat and sniffed back tears that clung to the insides of her chest. "Auntie's staying here at
Drakestone
to look after the lodge while we're gone." Jack would surely take care of her; he'd need her support, her devotion.

"For a whole week?"

"Maybe a little longer." How long was a lifetime? And how long could a heart grieve? Mairey wound Anna's hair into a knot,
then
settled a woolen cap onto her head.

They roused Caro, who had great fun dressing up in lad's short pants and coat, charged with adventure and caught up in the whispering.

Poppy slept on, completely unaware, as Mairey dressed her and carried her past Aunt
Tattie's
dear snoring and down the stairs. They took little with them, just enough for a long day's ride on the train. They would make the village by sundown and begin a new life, but a far lesser one, without Jack.

Mairey and her three little loves left
Drakestone
through the quiet woods, following the deer trails and leaving new, trackless ones as they
went,
Jack's child and the
Willowmoon
hidden close against
Mairey's
heart.

I'll love you always, my valiant dragon. My Jack.

* * *

"Mairey!"

Jack woke in a blind, groping panic, a biting fear gnawing in his gut and his heart trying to tear out of his chest.

He was in his room,
their
room, in their marriage bed. But something was vastly wrong.

Mairey was gone. Her scent, her clothes. He slid his hands over the mattress and into the hollow of her pillow, but even before he'd felt the chill of long-empty sheets be knew that she had left him hours ago.

For the lodge, surely. Out of habit—to check on her sisters. They rose before the sun to do their mischief. Jack's pulse settled as he counted up the reasons why Mairey would have slipped out of bed.

To study, the
Willowmoon
was the very first—the most probable. She had seemed so unaffected by it last night. He'd presented her father's legacy to her on a platter, and all she could do was to stare at it as though it bored her. A testament to the intensity of their love-making, he supposed, to the newness of their marriage—and the child.

He looked around for the disk, but it was gone from where it had fallen the night before.

That was the answer, then. She'd awakened with the birds and was now in the library, hard at work deciphering the bewildering tracings—her wedding gift to him, an equal exchange.

Such diligence. He nearly laughed at her timing. He pulled on trousers and a shirt and then left the bedroom for the library mezzanine, intending to entice her back into their bed. He would lock the door this time and never let her go.

"Mairey! Have you unraveled it yet? Have you found me my silver mine?"

But there was no answer as he descended the spiral of stairs to the main floor, not even an echo of his own voice. The library looked just as it had for the past few months: a harmonious blend of stuffy mining baron and eccentric antiquarian.

But Mairey wasn't there, nor was she in his office. Sumner hadn't seen her, and neither had cook. He set off toward the lodge, trying to balance his growing anger at having to chase her down again with the baseless panic, the paralyzing fear that had settled in his bones when he'd found her missing from his bed.

He arrived at the lodge to find the door standing forlornly open and
Tattie
flying down the stairs in her night-robe and curl rags.

"
Tattie
, have you seen—"

"Your lordship, my little ducks are gone!" Jack's heart stopped. "What do you mean, gone?" He raged up the stairs and went from room to room,
Tattie
on his heels, but found only empty beds and a terrifying loneliness.

"We have to tell Mairey, sir! She'll know what to do."

Jack caught the woman's arm. "You mean she isn't here? You haven't seen her?"

"Not since you took her off to your honeymoon last night."

"Christ!" Jack tore apart
Mairey's
bedroom and the library looking for clues, then roused the household to search the grounds and the woods.

It wasn't until mid-afternoon that he put all the pieces together. They glittered and danced before his eyes, blinding him with their dazzling clarity.

Silver
. It had been the treasure all along. A brilliant hoax, concocted by him, but executed to the finest detail by the very talented Mairey Faelyn.

Tales of fairies and giants and dragons. Enigmatic riddles. Kings and loyal queens and caravans of jewels.

All for his benefit. Whatever it took, she had been ready for him. Costumed in scholarly innocence, bountiful with her false love and her practiced tears. She even dangled her little family in front of him—his family, too—long enough to distract him from her artifice.

And he had believed every part of her tale—because she had made him love her.

But she would get nowhere with her dreams of silver. Let her study her Celtic map and sell its secrets to the highest bidder. He would know the moment that ground was broken on a new mine.

And she would soon discover that she had stolen one treasure too many.

She had stolen his child.

* * *

"I've never seen so many trees, Mairey!" Caro threw great handfuls of willow and maple leaves into the air and let them rain down on her head.

"I thought you'd like it here, Caro."

Once upon a time, the glade of the
Willowmoon
had been
Mairey's
favorite place in
all the
world, with its seasons of high color and brilliant drama as the silver-trunked willows' leaves turned from fresh green to gold.

But now her peace felt like a gray-walled prison with too much sky. Though her sisters frolicked and the sun shone down on the cusp of summer and fall, these three days away from Jack had been bleaker than she could bear.

What a terrible price she had exacted from the man she loved. Dear God, the mess she'd made of his life and hers. She'd left
not a note nor
a hint of where they had gone. He was a good man and would only suspect betrayal at the very end, denying it in his heart as he employed every resource to track her down. She was exhausted, weary from running, her energy sapped by the baby's need to make her sleep all the time and by the grief that overtook her constantly.

"When is Lord Jack coming to get us, Mairey?"

Sweet, Poppy, you'll have to settle for a less dizzying height than our Jack's broad shoulders.

"I don't know, Poppy." Oh, what an unblinking liar she had become.

"I want him to come home today." Poppy's lower lip stuck out wretchedly as she ambled from tree to tree, giving each of them a hug, as though she thought her Lord Jack might feel her embrace from across the phantom sea.

"I'd like that more than anything." Here was a fairy tale that needed telling: the
dragon come
to rescue his princess from the malevolent treasure she was guarding. The world gone topsy-turvy and magically right.

"Will he come by Christmas, do you think, Mairey?" Anna had found one of their grandmother's flower presses in the attic of the old house and was collecting an assortment of leaves to start a specimen book.

"It's a very long way to
Canada
," Mairey said, sitting down on a low outcropping of shale, "and an even longer way across the country."

She would have to tell the girls some day that he wasn't coming for them—fabricate some agonizing tale about a shipwreck and their beloved Lord Jack drowning at sea. What a horrible day that would be! Killing Jack to make them forget him, so they wouldn't go looking for him one day. Wicked lies and tender hearts.

She had buried the
Willowmoon
Knot the morning before; had come here to the glade and found a perfect and lasting place to hide it. She had prayed for her father and mother and given thanks for all the
Faelyns
who had gone before, who had sacrificed so much. It was over now, and her village was spared the fate of a crushing mine works.

There was no turning back on this promise—no returning to her husband to beg forgiveness. She would find her joy and contentment in raising Jack's child, and live out her days in the peace of the village, where she could watch her sisters grow to womanhood and then leave her to seek the wide world.

"What are you doing, Poppy?"

Her sister was spinning like a top, her arms outstretched and her chin lifted to the sun. "I'm wishing for Lord Jack to come home from the sea."

"Wish him home for me, Poppy."

I love you, Jack.

The girls began throwing handfuls of leaves at each other and then turned the barrage on Mairey, until everyone was squealing and laughing and falling all over each other.

"Not fair! Three against one!" Well, two, Mairey thought, touching her hand to her belly.

I'll take care of your child, Jack. He'll know what a fine man his father was. No better man in the world.

Mairey scooped up a
skirtful
of leafy ammunition, ready to toss it at her sisters, but they had stopped, frozen in their battle stances and staring at something in the woods behind Mairey.

Something wonderful, by the looks of
wideeyed
awe on their little faces. A heron perhaps, pausing in the treetops.

"Lord Jack! Mairey, it's him!"

"Jack!" He'd found her, here in the glade! A sob of relief and joy and absolute terror wrenched from her chest; made her turn and stare, and gather her sisters close. He was her world, her life, and he'd come to destroy her.

He was framed in the gray trunks of the willows, huge in his fury, silent and flinty as the winter, capable of tearing the trees from the ground with his bare hands. The sharpness of the sun pierced the canopy and dappled his shoulders and his greatcoat in emeralds, turned his black hair to ebony. His eyes gleamed with demon fire, possessive and hot, and made her heart yearn for him.

The willows shook as he started toward them, a hunger in his gait, a bloodlust. Mairey tried to hold the girls back, clutched at arms and hands, but they wouldn't be held as Jack approached.

"Take us home, Lord Jack!"

"Don't ever go away again!"

She watched them stumble over each other in their headlong dash to meet him. He lifted them into his arms as he walked, took their kisses and their hugs, and returned them fiercely, but all the while he was looking at Mairey, the glint of obsidian in his gaze.

"See, Mairey!" Poppy laid her cheek next to his and squeezed him in delight. "Lord Jack came back when I wished him! I told you he would."