Books by Maggie Shayne (271 page)

“The man you call your father has one just like it, doesn’t he? One he carries with him everywhere he goes.”

Slowly Duncan’s dark gaze rose from the blade, to my eyes. “Yes. He does. But that doesn’t mean—”

“I know it isn’t enough, alone. But there is more, Duncan. More that I can show you…” I stepped closer to him, my hands, trembling, going to the button of the jeans I wore. Duncan went utterly still, his gaze riveted to my fingers as he dropped my blade to the sand.

“You have a birthmark, Duncan. When we were together in the lighthouse, you only took off your shirt. So I couldn’t have seen it. But I know about that mark all the same. It’s in the shape of the crescent moon, and it’s on your right hip.”

Blinking, he said nothing. But I saw the amazement in his eyes. And then they darkened as I tugged my zipper down, and pushed the jeans down over my hips. They tripped my feet, making me clumsy, so I stepped out of them, right there on the shore in the biting October wind. I lifted the T-shirt slightly, moved the panties I wore so my right hip was revealed to him, and whispered, “Look.”

He did. And then the color drained from his face.

“We’re all born with the crescent, Duncan. That’s how I knew you had it.”

“That… that can’t be real. You… you put it there.” I could hear the desperation in his voice.

“Do you really think so?”

His knees bent. I never knew whether he knelt deliberately or simply lost the ability to stand, but the result was the same. Duncan on his knees in the sand, his face very close to my hip. I felt his warm breath on me there, and closed my eyes. This was no time to let carnal desires overwhelm me. But then his fingers came to me, running over the crescent, tracing its shape, making me shiver more even than the cold wind was doing.

“Madness,” he whispered, so close I could almost feel the movements of his lips. “This is utter madness…” And then his mouth touched my hip. His lips moved over it, pressed to it, parted as if to taste my skin, leaving it damp and vulnerable to the wind. I drew in a jerky, noisy gasp when his tongue ran along the mark, hot and wet. Hungry.

Shuddering, I sank into the sand in much the same way he had done, until I knelt before him, facing him, seeing the desire burning in his eyes just the way it used to do. “Duncan,“ I whispered.

He kissed me—pushing me backward into the sand, pressing me down with his body, he kissed me. And it was as if he felt the frustration of the three hundred years of waiting as desperately as I did. Or maybe it was a different frustration. That of wanting so badly to remember and not being able to. I didn’t know. I only knew he wanted me as much as I wanted him, for I could see it in his eyes and feel it in his touch. He wasn’t gentle. I didn’t want him to be.

Already atop me, he ate at my mouth with unrestrained greed, then lapped a path over my throat. One hand gripped and squeezed my breast while the other battled my flannel shirt, and the T-shirt underneath, relentlessly striving to bare my body. As if he couldn’t wait, his mouth closed on that breast, despite the T-shirt barrier. The shirt grew wet from his nursing, my nipple felt sore, deliciously hurting when he bit and tugged at it. And at last he shoved the clothes away, tearing them over my head, shoving my panties down now as his hands closed on my buttocks, fingers parting, exploring the dark, damp places of me. His mouth found my breast without defenses now, exposed, and returned to applying exquisite torture.

One hand moved around to the front of me, cupped me, and then two fingers pushed my folds apart, wide apart, while another stabbed up into me. I arched against him, whispered in his ear, “Don’t make me wait, my love. I’ve waited so long already.”

His breath shuddered out of him, but he complied, loosening his own jeans, pushing them down, and then pressing his erection against me. A second later he filled me, and the sigh that initial thrust drove from my lungs seemed to contain all the longing of the past three centuries—for it all melted away with that first joining. It was as if I’d come home.

I held him, kissed him, moved with him there in the sand, told him I loved him over and over. My hands on his back, his shoulders, feeling him, knowing him so well. And then I forgot everything as Duncan drove me higher—to points beyond those where conscious thought existed. To a place where only feeling lived. My body writhed with pleasure as I cried his name aloud and clutched him tight with every part of me, and he cried mine, when he emptied his passion into me.

Then he was still, braced up on his elbows, staring down into my face with something—wonder? Awe—sparkling in his eyes. His fingers tangled in my hair, and he bent to kiss me.

“You’re going to be all right, Raven. I promise you that. I’m going to make you all right.”

Blinking away the haze of pleasure, slowly understanding that he still didn’t believe me, I felt all my joy fall to the ground like the dying spark of a falling star.

“You still don’t believe me.”

He stroked my forehead, pushing my hair away. “There’s something to what you’re saying, I realize that. The birthmarks… that’s too much to be coincidence, I know. And whatever it is, it’s feeding this… this…”

“Fantasy? Delusion?”

He smoothed my hair again, kissed it. “Don’t worry about that now, Raven. All that matters is that you get past it. I want you well, because I… I feel something for you. Something I can’t explain.”

“I’ve
already
explained it.”

He kissed me again, my forehead this time. “I’m going to call my doctor and force my father to go along with us on this. Arianna, too, if she’s involved. Then I’ll take you there myself, and we’ll get to the bottom of this, one way or—”

“Your so-called father has the mark as well, Duncan.”

He stopped talking, went silent, looked down at me with such sweet sympathy and genuine worry in his eyes that I almost laughed at him.

“I know you think I’m insane, but before you drag me off in a straitjacket, at least do me the honor of checking. Nathanial Dearborne bears the same mark we do, but his is on the left flank, just as it is with all the Dark Ones.”

“Raven, you have to let this go—”

“He adopted you, didn’t he?”

Rolling off me, slowly righting his clothes, Duncan nodded. “But that has nothing to do with any of this.”

“No? Then why do you both have the mark? Not heredity, Duncan. Look at the man. Find a way and you’ll see I’m right. He wants me dead, Duncan, and that’s why he adopted you.”

“No,” he said.

“He used you, Duncan. He knew you’d find me again one day, and when you did, he would as well. Because he wants me dead.”

“Stop it, Raven. He wouldn’t—”

“My Goddess, I wouldn’t be surprised if he were even instrumental in getting your natural parents to give you up. Perhaps he even harmed them once he realized who you were! All just to—”

“That’s enough!” Duncan sprang to his feet, glaring down at me. “God, I must be as crazy as you are to have let this happen.”

I gasped, cut to the quick. But slowly I sat up, gathering my clothes, retrieving my dagger from where it lay in the sand. “I’m sorry it hurts you, Duncan, but it’s true. All of it, and you have to know.”

“It’s impossible, that’s what it is. You’re spinning yarns too farfetched to even be called a fairy tale, and expecting me to turn against my own father based on them. God, Raven, do you know what a vile thing that is to say? That he had something to do with my birth parents dying in that accident?”

I lifted my head, met his eyes. “Then they
are
dead.” I lowered my eyes. “That bastard.”

He fell silent and lowered his head.

“Duncan…”

“He’s my
father
,” he whispered.

I’d gone too far. I knew it then. “I’m sorry, Duncan…”

“Get back in your boat and go home, Raven. I… I thought I couldn’t say it, but it turns out I can after all. Stay the hell out of my life. Stop playing with my head. Leave me alone, and more important, leave
my father
alone. If you go anywhere near him, I’ll have you tossed in jail. Understand?”

Blinking, I nodded. “I understand. But you should understand something, too, Duncan. That man murdered my mother, and probably yours as well. He’s tried to kill me more times than I care to remember, and brought nothing but grief to me all my life. But none of that matters to me.
You
are what matters to me, Duncan. And if it takes my very life, I’m not going to let him hurt you. You won’t die because of me. Not this time.”

He closed his eyes. I got to my feet, pulled on my jeans.

“I love you Duncan. You loved me, too, once, so much you gave your life trying to protect me. So don’t feel badly if I return the favor this time around, okay? It’ll only be karma evening things up.”

He whirled on me. “What the hell are you saying? Are we making some kind of suicide pact now?”

“No. If I die it will be at Nathanial’s hand. And if it happens, Duncan, no matter what you believe now, I want you to leave here. Get away from him as fast as you can, because you’ll be next.”

I turned to leave, striding toward my boat.

“Dammit, Raven, wait!”

I stopped. Duncan ran up behind me, catching my shoulders and spinning me to face him. Then he kissed me, hard and long and deep. And when he stopped, I saw moisture in his eyes.

“Do you have any idea what I feel for you? No matter what kinds of ridiculous tales you spew, I… Raven, it’s powerful, this feeling. It could be so much, if you’d just let it be. I think about you all the time, dream of you at night,
ache
for you, for Christ’s sake. It’s going to kill me to lose you, and I know that sounds like bull, because this is so new, between us. But that’s what it feels like.”

He searched my eyes, shaking his head, and the wind lifted his hair as it was lifting my own.

“Please, just let all this nonsense go. Stop harassing my father, stop spinning these fantasies. And just… just be with me. Just be with me, Raven.“

Tears blurred my vision, but I blinked them back. “I tried it that way last time.” I sniffed. “Then you used to beg me to trust you with the truth, the entire truth, the parts you sensed I was keeping from you. I didn’t… and you died because of it. So this time I’m telling you all my secrets, Duncan. But you don’t believe them, don’t even want to hear them. You want me to pretend they don’t exist, like I did before. And just be with you. The way I did then. But I can’t. No matter how wonderful the memory is of all those nights in your arms, I can’t do it to you again, Duncan. Because the memory of the way it ended is pure agony.” I touched his cheek. “It would kill me this time, I swear it would.”

He frowned so hard his brows touched.

“Know this much,” I whispered. “I love you. With every breath I take, I love you Duncan Wallace, just as I have for three hundred years while I wandered this earth in search of you, mourning you, aching for you. Utterly alone, I waited all this time to find you again. And now that I have, you won’t have me.” I lowered my head. “Your father and I have to settle things, Duncan, and when it’s over, one of us will be dead. If it’s me, don’t mourn. Just get away from him.”

He shook his head. “You won’t be hurting my father, Raven, and he won’t be hurting you. I’m going to protect you from each other. And you… from yourself.”

I nodded. “And if it comes to a choice between him and me?”

“Jesus, Raven, he’s
my father
.”

It was as if he drove a blade straight into my heart. But I said nothing. Just walked to my boat.

Duncan watched her go, a tear rolling down his cheek. Why did it have to be this way? What kind of madness was inside her that she had it in for his father the way she did? God, would she really try something? And why? Why did he fall in love for the first time in his life with a woman who had so many problems?

And why was this insistent feeling in his gut telling him she was perfectly sane, and that everything she’d said made some kind of sense?

He wanted to make it all go away. To love her so much she’d forget about all of this. To hold her and cherish her and exorcize whatever demons must be tormenting her.

But he also wanted to continue building a relationship with his father. A real one, a genuine one. The one he’d been hoping for and dreaming about since he was old enough to dream.

Hell. He couldn’t risk that Raven might actually try to harm Nathanial. She wouldn’t, though. She wouldn’t
really.

As for the rest of it—his dreams, his memories, the fact that she’d called him Duncan Wallace—a name he’d never heard before, but that sounded perfectly familiar when she said it—the dagger, the birthmarks—all of those things, he refused to think about. For now.

Or thought he did.

But they were there, niggling at his mind, eating away at his disbelief. Making him wonder.

Two hours later he arrived at the courthouse in town, determined to be his father’s shadow until he knew for sure just how much of a threat Raven was to him. Until he knew for certain she was imagining things when she said his father wanted her dead.

When he got there, Nathanial did something so out of character that Duncan
knew
he was sincerely changing.

He handed Duncan the small black iron pot that Raven had tried to steal the other day.

“What’s this about?” Duncan asked, confused.

“I want you to give it to that girl. Raven… what’s-her-name. You know who I mean.”

Duncan could only stare at his father in surprise.

Nathanial shrugged. “Hell, son, it seems to mean something to her. I suppose in her poor twisted-up mind she must think all that she was saying was true. I have no reason to fight with her. So I thought, as a gesture of friendship, I’d let her have the damned pot.” He shrugged. “Call it a peace offering.”

Taking the pot from his father’s hands, Duncan shook his head slowly. “That’s really kind of you,” he said. “It must be worth—”

“It’s only money.” Nathanial waved a hand in dismissal. But his eyes seemed to be watching Duncan’s face very closely. As if he were doing this for a specific reason, and that reason had to do with Duncan’s reaction. As if it were a part of this whole act he’d been perpetuating. This whole “I-want-to-be-your-father” game the old man had been playing for reasons Duncan didn’t understand.