Dangerously Charming (9 page)

STUART
Wilmington Wadsworth III, Stu to his friends, very carefully swung his golf club and tapped his ball a little too much to the left so it went into the rough.

“Bad luck,” said his father, Stuart Wilmington Wadsworth II, as he sank a putt into the eighteenth hole. “That's just like you, isn't it? So close, but no follow-through.” He leaned down to pocket the ball.

Stu glanced at their caddies, who were studiously ignoring the conversation as usual. “I suppose you're right, Father. I guess this means I owe you a drink at the clubhouse.” He tapped his ball in, added up his just-lousy-enough score, handed his club to his caddy, Miguel, and climbed into the golf cart.

His father heaved himself up into the driver's seat. The two were clearly identifiable as family, although the elder Wadsworth was forty pounds heavier and what little was left of his hair was more gray than the brown it had started out. But they both had straight patrician noses, strong chins, and an air of
prosperity. When Stu looked at his father, it felt as though he could see a mirror into his future. It wasn't a comfortable sensation, although that was only one of the many reasons he saw his father as little as possible.

The fact that the guy was a merciless, mercenary, inflexible son of a bitch might also have something to do with it.

As they rode down the fairway toward the clubhouse and that promised drink, they returned to the conversation they'd been having when Stu threw the game. He'd hoped that gloating over his triumph would distract his father from the topic, but apparently Stu wasn't going to win there either.

“To be honest,” Stuart Senior said, his jowls jiggling as they bounced onto the path to the clubhouse, “I don't know why you stayed with her as long as you did. She was a nice enough girl, I suppose, but she wasn't good enough for you. I always thought she was after your money.”

Stu sighed. Jenna was a lot of things, but greedy wasn't one of them. At least, he hadn't thought so. Before. Ironically, he'd mostly dated her to make his father happy, since his playboy ways had gotten him into such trouble, and she'd seemed like a stabilizing influence.

“You think everyone is after our money, Father. Jenna didn't ask me for anything. She just stood there and lied to my face. Tried to tell me that the baby was mine, when she knew damn well I'd had a vasectomy when Julie and I were at the end of our marriage.”

Senior grunted. “And don't think I've ever forgiven you for that particular piece of stupidity either. I can't believe you threw away any chance of my having a grandchild from my eldest son just so you could thwart a woman you ended up divorcing two months later.” He scowled at Stu, barely taking his eyes off the road. “You're an idiot. You've always been an idiot. I can't believe you're my son.”

“Sometime I find it hard to believe, too, Father,” Stu said. He occasionally had fantasies about being the secret love child of his mother and the gardener. Or a plumber. Anyone other
than the man sitting next to him. Of course, if that were true, he'd be broke, and he wouldn't like that much either.

“So what are you going to do about the situation?” Senior asked, finally getting to the meat of the issue. Stu knew his father hadn't asked him to play golf just for the joy of his company.

“There's nothing
to
do,” Stu said. “I already told her that I knew the baby couldn't possibly be mine and that there was no way I was going to marry her and raise some other man's bastard. It was bad enough she fooled around on me, but trying to lie her way out of it was ridiculous. So I told her we were through, made sure that Mitchell understood that it wasn't in his best interests to keep her on as his personal assistant, and then wiped my hands of the entire mess.” He didn't mention how stunned he'd been by her betrayal, as unexpected as it was unfair. He'd actually been faithful to her, probably the first time in his life he'd ever bothered, including during his previous marriage. And this was how she repaid him.

“Are you completely certain the baby isn't yours?” his father asked, sounding both annoyed and marginally hopeful. “After all, vasectomies do fail occasionally.”

“That's what Jenna said,” Stu groused. “You know as well as I do that the odds are astronomical. It's a lot more likely she thought she could have both me and some piece of fun on the side.”

“What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, eh?” his father said in a smug tone. He prided himself on never straying from his marriage vows, even after he and Stu's mother moved into separate bedrooms. Stu didn't figure it was much of a hardship, since as far as he could tell the old man was a lot more interested in money than he was in women anyway.

“Still, you should at least get her to take a blood test. After all, there were astronomical odds against my grandfather striking oil the first time he sank a well, and yet here we are.
The Wadsworths are all about beating the odds. And taking advantage of every opportunity when it comes along. Get the girl to take a test, just in case.”

Shit.
“It's too late, Father. She's gone. Good riddance, I say.”

The golf cart screeched to a halt, startling a nearby flock of geese that had been dozing on a water hazard.

“What do you mean, she's gone?” His father turned around now and gave him the full force of the Wadsworth Senior basilisk glare.

Stu shrugged. “Gone. She's got no job and no prospects of one. I made sure of that. I hired a PI to check up on her.” Well, less to check on her than to find out who the hell she'd been sleeping with. Then the incompetent ass had failed to find so much as a clue. “It looks like she's cleared off. There's no sign of her. Like I said, good riddance.”

He thought actual steam was going to come out of his father's slightly sunburned ears. “Oh my God! What did I do to deserve such a moron for a son?” Senior threw his hands up in the air. “Situations like this have to be controlled. You can't just let the woman disappear into thin air. Who the hell knows what mischief she is up to?” His face turned reddish-purple, and for a minute Stu hoped the man would actually have a heart attack.

“You've always been a loose cannon, boy, bringing embarrassment to the family with drugs and partying and inappropriate women and bad business deals, but this is the last straw. Don't you realize what's at stake here? What if the child
is
yours? Then Jenna could go after your inheritance, what's left of it, plus try to get her hands on a chunk of the family money. Even if the child isn't yours, we need to be able to prove it.”

Senior shook his head. “Your brother Clive would never have let things get so out of hand. I've had it with you, Stuart. Go find the girl and get her to agree to a prenatal DNA test. I'm not waiting nine months to find out just how screwed we are. If that baby is a Wadsworth, it needs to be under our
control from day one. If it's not, we want to make sure your woman doesn't go around telling everyone it is.”

Stu opened his mouth to protest but his father silenced him with a wave of his hand, the sun glinting off the large gold-and-diamond ring on his pinky.

“I mean it, Stuart. It is time for you to step up and prove that you can do whatever needs to be done to protect this family. Or else you can consider yourself out of it, once and for all.”

*   *   *

ZILYA
stomped her foot. Daintily, of course. She might be peeved, but she was still a faery, and there were standards to be kept. In fact, that was the whole point, really.
Some
people, some
royal
people, might be willing to let the old ways go, but Zilya and many of her friends still thought such things were important. Plus, of course, those old ways worked in her favor. She wasn't about to let such an extraordinary and precious advantage go now.

Children were so rarely born in the Otherworld these days. At least to her people, although some of the lesser races still reproduced at an irritatingly regular rate. Even the Queen, mighty as she was, hadn't had a child in centuries.

Zilya herself had never seen the point in the whole messy, uncomfortable process, but she had no compunction against benefiting from others going through it, especially when she could turn her once-a-generation Human child into additional influence and power on this side of the doorway. The fact that she always placed “her” children with faery families who would value them and treat them well was a small weakness, one she blamed on her fondness for a long-dead blacksmith.

Zilya had been a potent force in her native Russia before most of the paranormal folks were forced to move to the other side of the doorways permanently. Once, bored with her usual forest haunts, she roamed farther afield than usual, entertaining herself by visiting her “cousins” in Britain. While there,
she had been captivated by a handsome Human, a humble blacksmith with huge muscles and a gentle soul.

Although he was intrigued and flattered by Zilya's attentions, he eventually chose Rose over her. Zilya had been furious, and frustrated, and maybe even a little bit hurt.

Although her ire had mostly died down over the years (mostly—faeries had long memories and held grudges longer than sequoias were tall), Zilya had grown to enjoy the benefits she derived from being able to sidestep the Queen's rule against stealing mortal children and bringing them to the Otherworld. As far as she was concerned, she was doing these children a favor. Humans were, after all, inferior beings; their short lives and gullible natures made them either playthings or inconveniences, not equals. The babies she carried away to the Otherworld lived long, pampered lives—what could be wrong with that?

If Zilya herself was able to parlay the gift of a baby into influence at court, to offset the disadvantage of not being allowed into the Queen's precious inner circle, well, that was all to the better. And no annoying snippet of a Human girl was going to keep Zilya from what was rightfully hers.

Nor, for that matter, was some damned interfering former Rider, or even the Queen herself. There was more than one way to skin a centaur, and Zilya wasn't about to let a little thing like a royal command get in her way.

After all, this was the Otherworld, and words had power—but one had to be quite certain one used
the right words
. The Queen had very clearly forbidden Zilya to go anywhere near Jenna and her unborn child. But she hadn't said anything about Zilya sending others to do her work for her, had she?

The stomping foot began to tap a gentle rhythm on the fern-carpeted floor of Zilya's modest but elegant home. Anger wouldn't get her anywhere. Planning, on the other hand, leavened with a dollop of underhanded scheming and a dash of ruthlessness, would ensure that she would end up with everything that was rightfully hers.

It was a pity she wasn't going to be able to see the look on Jenna's face in person when the Human finally realized that there was no way to beat the curse and that history was destined to repeat itself—at least for all those in her line—until the Earth stopped spinning around the sun. Or whenever Zilya grew bored with the game, which was likely to be about the same time.

*   *   *

AFTER
little Babs returned from school, she sat at the table with the other three, eating cookies by breaking them into four precisely equal pieces and dunking them into a bowl of milk. Since nobody else seemed to think it was strange, Jenna didn't bother to mention it.

“What are you all doing?” Babs asked after she finished off the last chunk and neatly drank the milk from the bowl. “Is it homework? I have homework, but I will do it after dinner.”

“It is, in a way,” Barbara agreed, tapping some more keys on her laptop. “We are trying to find the answers to Jenna's riddle.”

“I like riddles,” Babs said. “Maybe I can help.”

Jenna smiled at the little girl and pointed at the pile of notebooks taking up all the space on the table not currently being used by the laptop. “See that? It's full of research. It has all the notebooks my grandmother kept, plus everything I could find in the fairy tales I devoured that might possibly be relevant. I've read about legends and myths and curses until I see the information in my sleep. But I've never found anything remotely useful. So now we're looking on the Internet. But I'm afraid we're not getting very far. It isn't easy.”

Babs stared at her with round owl eyes. “Barbara says that most things worth doing are not easy. But that does not make them not worth doing.”

Jenna nodded. “That's very true. And Barbara is the one who figured out the line about ‘The sun's bright ray where none is slanted.' She is very smart, isn't she?”

Babs nodded. “What are some of the other lines?”

Mick gave her an affectionate smile. “Well, there's one that goes, ‘A rose's cry at rock enchanted.'”