Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (23 page)

And she’d learned long ago the folly of dreaming.

*   *   *

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?”

Thinking herself alone, Bianca swung around, catching back a gasp. Mac stood in the stillroom doorway, brushing rain from his hair, shaking the weather from his oilskin coat.

“When did you return?”

“Just now. Jory had some calls to make in the village, so I decided to collect and organize what we need from Adam’s stores.”

“This is why you came to Surrey. To do what Adam did. To break the curse.”

“It is.”

“Do you think you’ll be able to?”

“I have to. I have no future otherwise.”

Inhaling the confusion of sweet, musty scents, Bianca regarded the hundreds upon hundreds of specimens dangling from the rafters. It kept her from having to meet Mac’s eyes and see the determination in his face. It also kept him from seeing the foolish tears burning on her eyelashes.

“It must have taken Adam months to gather all this,” she said with a forced cheerfulness, reaching up to pull down a bunch of simple lavender, the dry sprigs crackling in her hands. Their perfume lingered, soft and grandmotherly. “But if anyone had the patience to find these plants, Adam did. I can still picture the last afternoon we spent together. He stopped by to borrow a book and stayed to help in my garden. Afterward we sat in the parlor and chatted about Dr. Smith’s view on Linnaeus’s order
Decandria Monogynia
.”

“Now, that’s friendship,” Mac answered. “Or torture,
depending on your perspective. Adam once asked my opinion on Basil Somebody’s account of some bishop’s garden. We were under fire at the time, so my answer was short, to the point, and not repeatable.”

She laughed. “Poor Adam. He
was
quite keen. His interest in botany was far more clinical than mine. I loved the beauty. He loved the science. My father was of the same mind. He could prose on about Dillenius and Sherard for hours. Guests to dinner came prepared with paper and pencil.”

Arms folded over his broad chest, Mac leaned against a shelf, regarding her with an intimacy she found both alarming and compelling.

A proper lady would have been embarrassed. A decent woman would have felt ashamed or awkward. After all, she’d welcomed him into her bed. She’d risked scandal and the loss of her reputation. She’d stripped body and soul, gone against every vow she’d made, and thrown every bit of practical good sense out the window for a rippling abdomen and a pair of muscular shoulders.

But instead of seemly discomfort, anticipation cruised her skin and heat gathered in the pit of her stomach as she imagined his body beneath the heavy coat, the long, lean length of him, his sun-bronzed skin. A strange ache knotted her chest when she remembered the way he’d gentled her through the worst of her fears, his soft laughter, their whispered conversation.

“Your father and Adam sound like two of a kind,” Mac said.

“They were. Perhaps it’s why Adam and I grew so close. He reminded me a lot of my father and of my life before England.” She bit her lip as she began to
smile. “My aunt Eustacia once said my father would rather make love to a shrubbery than a real woman. My father responded by saying if his choice were between the boxwood and my aunt Eustacia, she was absolutely right.”

“A botanist and a comic. You’re fortunate. After my mother’s death, my father became a different man. Emotionless. Distant. So wrapped in his own grief, he couldn’t see his children were as miserable as he was. It was like Siobhan and I had lost both parents.”

“Is that your sister?”

“Aye. She was a wee sprout when I left. No more than eleven. I shouldn’t have abandoned her. If I’d been a good brother, I’d have stayed. Taken care of her.”

“You did what you had to.”

“Did I? Or was I selfish and thoughtless?”

“Is that why you want to return? For your sister?”

“I return because to be without clan or kin is to be completely alone. To have an enormous part of me missing. A gaping emptiness that nothing can fill. I’d do anything to be whole again.”

“My father died a few months after my marriage. I know that feeling of isolation and the desire to belong.”

He straightened and strode across the room, coming to a halt before her, head tilted to the side as if she were a specimen he wanted to study. Mac’s gaze seemed to pierce her very thoughts. How had this man grown so familiar to her—and so dear? How had she lost her head so completely?

“The past is unchanging and the future is uncertain, Bianca,” he murmured, tipping her chin upward when she sought to evade his stare, “so we need to
hold tight to the few precious moments we have and hope for the best.”

“
Poor Richard’s Almanack
?” she teased.

He gave a short bark of laughter. “One of Mac Flannery’s trite maxims. Hardly philosophical, but it’s the best I can do.”

Warmth rushed to her cheeks, a new strength rising from the wreckage of her old defenses. Is this what Sarah and Deane held between them? This easy camaraderie? This sharing with someone who cared? Had she ever had this with Lawrence—even in the beginning, when she’d been full of hope and innocence? She couldn’t remember. Too many years and too much misery lay in between.

Fear and excitement and desire and dread boiled up in her until she felt as if she might explode. She had spent so many years building walls to keep everyone out that to step through the breach and risk everything on a crazy whim threw her into a panic, her heart drumming under her ribs, her palms damp, her mouth dry.

“What are we doing, Mac?” she asked, suddenly afraid. Of what she was feeling. Of this closeness that threatened every barricade she had used to protect herself from hurt. “This can’t be. Can it?”

He cupped her chin, caressed the line of her cheek. “You should be used to impossible by now.”

*   *   *

“Most should be among Adam’s collection. Those missing, we’ll have to search for in London,” Jory explained.

Mac sat opposite, their heads bent over the book,
Mac with pen and paper to hand as Jory studied Adam’s notes. Since Jory’s return home, they’d spent the past two hours poring over pages of complicated instructions mixed with endless lists and haphazard directives. Perfect work to take his mind off Bianca and the growing tangle he’d made of their relationship.

Hold tight and hope for the best? You should be used to impossible?
He sounded like a bloody book of bad proverbs. Eighteen months of enforced solitude had made him rusty; he just hadn’t realized he’d become a tavern bounder with the most wretched poetic banter in history.

“Are you certain about this plant? Haymaids?” Mac asked, dragging himself back to his current problem to face the scrawl of Adam’s handwriting. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s alehoof, sometimes called ground ivy. See there? In the margin he’s noted it alongside its Latin name.” Jory withdrew a flask from his pocket, topping up the coffee Marianne had placed at his elbow. He offered it to Mac, who—understanding now how Jory downed the stuff without gagging—accepted with a nod of thanks.

“Cooks as if she’d been raised in heaven’s kitchen, but her coffee is worse than the devil’s spit. Like drinking burnt glue,” Jory said with a sigh.

Mac took an experimental sip of his own. Burnt glue laced with whiskey wasn’t much better, but he tactfully remained silent.

Fog swirled close around the house, but it carried none of the dank London stench nor did it lay thick with sulfur and smoke at the back of Mac’s throat. Instead it held the damp, loamy mustiness of forests thick
with oak and ash and rowan. He felt his senses stir, his instincts heighten. Tonight he would be free to venture beyond the refuge of a locked door. He would use the cover of the fog to stretch his limbs and shed the confines of his human shape for a few precious hours. Who knew when such an opportunity might come again?

Mac pulled free Adam’s
krythos
from its pocket. Ran his fingers over the familiar notched edges and the smooth, glassy surface. Adam must have felt the same inexplicable need to hold on to the far-seeing disk despite its deafening silence. That discovery underscored his friend’s death as standing beside his grave never had. Adam was gone. The break in their friendship would never be healed. There would be no more trading of brotherly insults or good-natured ribbing. No more whiskey-laden conversations.

“Is that a
ph
or a
qu
?” Jory turned the book one way then another. “Adam’s bloody handwriting. Could the man crowd more letters to a page?”

“We’re lucky he didn’t cross his writing to save on paper.” Mac stretched, listening to the scratching of Jory’s quill and the snap of the afternoon fire. Damn, but he grew maudlin. He should be dancing for joy. He had Adam’s journal. He had a potential remedy for the Fey-blood’s curse. He had a beautiful woman in his bed.

He also had Fey-bloods on his trail, a body that resembled a side of pounded beef, and—oh, yes—a beautiful woman in his bed.

Bianca deserved better. She deserved someone who could love her as she ought to be loved. Someone free to offer her a life and a heart not divided into daylight and darkness, man and beast.

He rolled his neck, his shoulders, his arms. Shifted in his seat. He needed to concentrate. Focus. Pull his mind out of his breeches.

Jory shoved the book across to Mac. “What do you think:
ph
or
qu
?”

Mac scanned the page. “Maybe
bl
?”

Jory snatched the book back with a grumbling, “Damn it to hell. I’ve had enough of this tedium. My head’s about to split in half.”

“Here, now. Both of you take a break before your eyes cross.” Marianne knocked the door wide with a shove of her hip, her hands filled with an enormous tray. Behind her came Bianca carrying another platter, napkins draped over her forearm.

Perfect.

He’d not thought about the blasted woman for ten complete seconds and here she was in the flesh. Flesh he now knew intimately. Flesh sweet as summer fruit and warm with life. Flesh he wanted to free of those confining clothes and devour one delicious inch at a time.

Jory leaned back with a sigh. “How do you do it, Flannery?”

“Pardon?” Mac started up in his seat. “Do what?”

“This.” Jory waved a hand over the spread of paperwork. “How do you keep from going barmy sitting at a desk all day, staring at a mess of numbers?”

Mac rubbed his forehead in hopes of alleviating a growing headache. “Not much choice. The farms at Concullum are lost to me.”

Instead of leaving the tea and food, Marianne joined them at the table, her sharp eyes falling upon Adam’s journal with a frown. “Any luck on finding what you seek?”

“It could be months before we’ve riddled it out. And that’s being optimistic.” Mac rose to work off his frustration, offering Bianca his seat, restraining himself from touching her as she smiled at him in response. He made himself look away before he kissed her stupid. “It would take a damned brigade of scholars to make sense of Adam’s notes.”

As Marianne fixed plates, she and Jory exchanged a look that was all too easy to interpret; their desire to help warred with their concern over the danger Mac represented. He couldn’t blame them. He’d react the same way if he had children of his own to protect. But without Jory’s help, he didn’t have a glacier’s chance in hell to unravel Adam’s journal. Even with his assistance, it was a mind-bending puzzle.

Marianne pasted on her best hostess smile, but the fear in her eyes gave her away. “Ah, well. It will come, but for now have a bite. You need some feeding up. You’re thin as a fence rail and pale as a prisoner.” She poured out a beer from the pitcher. “And no wonder, working in that horrid city. You need some fresh air and proper looking after.”

“Leave off pestering the man,” Jory scolded good-naturedly. “Don’t you have enough children of your own to worry over?”

Marianne shot her husband an imperious look. “I’m thinking Flannery would be a sight more biddable than any of my own flesh and blood. Do you know what Jamie has done now? He’s—”

“
Erythronium americanum
.”

The three of them swung their attention toward Bianca, who’d bent over to read Adam’s journal.

“What’s that?” Jory asked.

“
Erythronium americanum
. That’s the plant here.” She pointed at the page Jory had been deciphering.

He leaned in close. “
Er
. Of course.”

“Do you know what it is?” Mac asked, coming back to stand behind Bianca’s chair.

She looked at him over her shoulder, eyes shining with knowledge. “Adder’s-tongue. It has a pale yellow flower and mottled leaves. Blooms in April and May.”

“Now, where on earth did you learn all that?” Jory asked.

She grinned. “My father studied botany and our housekeeper used to distill the juice from the leaves and dose me with it for all sorts of complaints. Swore it cured everything but death.”

Marianne paused in the midst of lighting candles against the lengthening afternoon shadows, her eyes fixed on Bianca. “Are you men thinking what I’m thinking?”

Jory flicked a cautious glance toward Mac, then pushed pen and paper across to Bianca. “She’s not a brigade, but she might be all we need.”

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