Daughter of the Spellcaster

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She gave him a quizzical look, like a puppy who’d just heard an odd noise.

“Maybe I’ll stay awhile,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

She dodged his mouth with an elegant dip and a bob, and wound up standing a foot away. She looked scared. “I said you could be in our child’s life, Ryan. Not in mine.” Turning, she headed for the exit. “She’s due in February. You can come and visit then, if you want.”

4

Lena didn’t know what she was expecting when she made her exit. Maybe for him to come chasing after her, begging her not to go. Maybe at least an apology. But he did nothing, said nothing, just let her leave. So she sat amid the masses of humanity on the bus ride home, hiding behind a pair of very large, very dark sunglasses. She’d picked them up for three times their worth at Port Authority when she’d realized she was teetering on the brink of tears for the twelfth time since she’d jumped into the taxi.

Stupid to cry over him. So freaking stupid. Stupid to keep remembering that last night, the awful things he’d said. Stupid.

She leaned back in the seat, closed her eyes and thought about it anyway.

She’d decided she was going to tell him she was pregnant that night. It was time, she’d thought. She’d cooked dinner at his place, and she hadn’t thought of it as trying to show him how domestic she could be or anything, although she could see where someone else might have thought so. She roasted a small chicken with lots of veggies and dollops of sour cream. It was nice.

He wasn’t.

Oh, they were getting along great at first. And then, after they’d eaten, when they were all snuggled up on his sofa and surfing through the pay-per-view channels, she sort of took the cowardly way in. She told him a friend of hers was pregnant, and that she was wondering what the guy she’d been dating was going to say about it, and what did he think about that?

And it went zoom, right over his head. “If the guy has any brains, he’ll run screaming in the other direction,” he said, and he was dead serious.

Lena felt like he’d slapped her. “Why’s that?” she managed to ask through her rapidly closing windpipe.

He was manning the remote, pausing to read the info on anything that looked interesting to him, not looking at her. “Isn’t it obvious? She’s trying to get him to marry her.”

“That’s not true! She doesn’t want to marry the guy. She just thinks he has a right to know he’s going to be a father.”

“Right. She doesn’t want to marry him.” There was more sarcasm in his tone than there had been sour cream on their roasted veggies. “Tell me this, does he have money?”

“Well, yes. Quite a lot of it, actually. But that doesn’t mean—”

“Yeah, it does.” He set the remote down and looked at her. “No one gets pregnant by accident in this day and age, Lena. And believe me, before I met you, every woman I dated was after one thing and one thing only—my father’s fortune. They’d have done anything. Some of them even tried, but I was too smart. I was careful. I protected myself.”

“Did you, now?” She focused on her hands in her lap, thinking she needed a manicure, unable to meet his eyes. Mainly because there were hot, angry tears surfacing in her own.

“I did.” He shook his head. “I pity the guy, but it was his own stupidity. Guys with money need to be more careful than anyone about shit like this. He should have known better. Now he’s doomed.”

“Doomed?” That brought her head up, and the anger burning a path up the middle of her chest rose with it. “Marrying her would be his doom?”

“Marrying a woman who tricked him into it, yeah. Doom.” He smiled at her, still completely oblivious. “You know, this is something I wanted to talk to you about right at the beginning, and I kept getting distracted. Totally your fault, by the way.” His eyes softened, and he pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed the lobe, sending a warm shiver down her spine, despite how pissed off she was at him. She wished she could grab that warm shiver by its neck and choke it to death.

“Talk to me about it now, then,” she said. She didn’t think she was going to like this discussion, but she figured she needed to hear it.

“Well, I just… you know… have no intention of… you know…”

“No, I don’t know. I’m a witch, not a psychic. You have no intention of what?”

He sat back, and the lightbulb finally went on in his eyes. “Whoa. You’re pissed.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “No, I’m not.” She sighed, then shook her head hard. “Yes, dammit, I am. I thought we had something wonderful happening between us, Ryan.”

“We do,” he said quickly. “We really do. I mean, it’s been great. I’m enjoying the hell out of being with you.”

“But you don’t want anything… more?”

“No.” He looked away. “I mean, certainly not now, anyway. It’s been eight weeks, Lena. Don’t you think it’s way too soon for this particular conversation?”

“Oh. You think I should wait until I’ve put in eight months and then find out I’ve been wasting my time?”

He was hurt. She saw it in his face. She was being completely irrational. Under any other circumstances it would be too soon to be having this conversation. But she was carrying his child. Not that he would ever believe she hadn’t planned it. She realized that now, and it was crushing her heart slowly. Like a vise with some big guy gradually turning the screw.

“You think that unless we’re heading for marriage, you’re wasting your time?” he asked, handsome and dense and so out of touch with his feelings that it was beyond belief.

Or was he just out of touch with her feelings? With who she wanted him to be? Her dream prince. The one who would have died for her.

She lowered her eyes, knowing she’d hit on the truth. “No. Of course I don’t think that. Our time together has been…” She tried to swallow and couldn’t. “It’s been the best time of my life, really.” Her tears were audible that time, her voice tight and strained and an octave deeper than usual.

He tried to look at her eyes, but she turned her face away. “Are you crying?” he asked.

“I have to go.” She got up, went to the door, needing to escape. Now.

“Hey. Wait a minute.” He followed. “What the hell just happened here?”

She turned slowly and forced herself to look up at him. To let him see her tears. It was the honest thing to do, though it made her feel like a fool. She saw him through her swimming eyes and knew beyond doubt that if she told him she was carrying his child, he would believe she had planned it that way, intending to trick him into marrying her so she could get her hands on his dad’s billions.

Which was a joke. Ernst adored her. If she’d wanted money, she probably could have just asked him for it. But she didn’t want his money. She wanted his son. She had allowed herself to fall—had fallen willingly, knowingly—into her own childish fantasies, where he had been her exotic desert prince and she had been his beloved slave girl.

“Lena?” he asked. And he sounded genuinely puzzled.

“I think we want very different things, Ryan.” It was hard to talk, hurt to force the words through her spasming larynx. “I think my feelings for you are getting close to the point of no return. If you’re not heading in the same direction, then…” She let the sentence just hang there.

He stared at her as if she’d grown a second head. “It’s good between us. Why fix what isn’t broken?”

“Because if I stay, it’ll be my heart that gets broken.” She blinked as fresh tears flooded, and then she stood on tiptoe and pressed her mouth against his, drinking in the taste of him one last time, promising herself to remember it forever. “I don’t regret a day of it, though.”

And then she turned and she left. She knew his head was spinning, and that he must think she’d lost her mind. But he’d made himself clear. Which meant she didn’t have a choice.

Lena snapped herself out of the memory, realizing it was doing her no good. She was more eager than ever to return to the rural community she now called home, the low-key people there, the easy, laid-back pace. The peace and serenity of it. That old vineyard had healed her since she’d been living there with her mom. She’d just reopened an old wound, that was all. Maybe she had to let out a little of the poison that had been festering there. She would heal again. Just as soon as she returned to Havenwood, her little piece of heaven.

Ryan sat in the den, doing what he supposed could be described as brooding, until it hit him that his father’s mansion was emanating a feeling of emptiness. The post-funeral gathering must have ended. No one had come in to bother him. No one had come in to say goodbye. He doubted anyone even knew he was in there, other than Bahru, and God knew there was no love lost between the two of them.

The funeral and the attendant gathering were over. It was all over. Lena was gone, and she’d taken his baby with her.

Sighing, he got up out of the chair where he’d been sitting like a tranced-out zombie for the past two hours. He had to get home.

Why? What’s the hurry?

Shut up.

He went to the bookshelf to get the ornate wooden box, and for some reason he opened it again. The gold-colored knife lay there nested in its red velvet. He reached for it, and that same tingling sensation started up in his palm, but he ignored it this time. Pushing past it, he closed his hand around the gleaming hilt and picked up the knife.

The tingling moved up his arm, and as he frowned at that golden blade, it seemed to glow again. Just like before. Only the sun had gone down now and the desk lamp was on the far side of the room, so there was no believable explanation for that glow.

“What the hell is this?”

He lifted the knife a little higher, turning it slowly to examine that gleaming double-edged blade and then the engravings he realized were inscribed into every millimeter of the hilt. There was even a symbol on the flat end of it, he noted, and he tipped the blade forward to get a better look.

There was a pop and a recoil, snapping his wrist back as if he’d just fired a gun—and the curtains were on fire!

Ryan swore a blue streak, lunging across the room to yank the drapes, poles and all, out of the windows and stomp on them before they set off every fire alarm in the place. Finally it seemed he’d put it out. And he just stood there in the smoke, staring down in disbelief at the blackened edge of a burn hole about the size of a grapefruit and the way the thin gray ribbons still winding up from it encircled his calves.

Blinking, he looked from that smoke to the blade in his hand, and then, after a few final stomps to be sure the fire was out, he retrieved the box and pulled out the red velvet in search of an explanation.

Underneath the velvet lining there was an envelope with his name scrawled across the front in his father’s unmistakable handwriting. He opened it and started to read.

Ryan,

I found this knife in an undiscovered burial mound in the Congo. Could’ve been arrested if I’d been caught smuggling it home, but something told me I had to. That you needed it. I know you don’t believe in that kind of thing, but I do, son. I do. And I’m sorry I haven’t been a better father to you since your mother died. I fell apart. I don’t know why, but something told me this was the best way I could make up for it. To get this blade for you. So I did. And I keep dreaming that you’re not supposed to tell anyone you have it. So, keep it to yourself. It’s something to do with you and Lena. That’s all I know. I love you. And I’m sorry.

Him and Lena? Ryan thought, almost bitterly. Why did everything have to keep coming back to him and Lena?

He returned the knife to its box and set it in an empty drawer, kicked the ruined curtains behind the sofa and sank into his father’s chair, remembering that first night. That very first time. When he and Lena had been snuggled in each other’s arms in his bed right after round one and she’d said, “It felt powerful to me. Did it… did it feel that way to you, too?”

Here we go, he’d thought. He didn’t think she was a gold digger. She was probably one of the romantics. Those who thought they were in love after their first—and subsequently only—encounter.

And yet, beyond his cynical side, some deeper part of him whispered that he’d felt it, too, and he knew it. “Powerful how?” he’d asked, stalling for time.

“Like the Great Rite.”

Frowning, he’d rolled over and searched her face. God, she was beautiful. “The great what?”

“The Great Rite. It’s the most sacred ritual of witchcraft.”

“Witchcraft?” Rising up to rest his head on one elbow, he said, “Tell me more.”

“Well…” She pulled on one of his T-shirts that he’d tossed onto a nearby chair and bounced out of the room, flipping on lights on the way. “Wow, this is nice,” she called. He heard rattling, water running. Her footsteps headed back in his direction, lights going off in her wake.

Then she was beside the bed, a wineglass half-full of water in one hand and a carving knife in the other.

A little sizzle of alarm shot up his back. “What the—”