Adam got up. “I’m assuming there’s a reason for the hurry.”
The P.A. fired up again. “Security to the sixth floor. Security to the sixth floor. Code green.”
“That would be the reason,” Bridin said. “One missing patient, who might be a little bit off in the head.”
Adam paused, staring from one to the other.
“It’s all right, Adam. She’s right. We really do need to get out of here.”
“Of course you do,” Bridin said. “The man you met earlier knows exactly where you are.
He’ll make us both his prisoners if he finds us, and probably kill you, Adam.”
Adam met Brigit’s eyes. God, there was so much he wanted to say to her, to tell her and to ask her. But he saw the urgency there. He’d find time to tell her...to tell her everything, before she left him for good.
And then he’d proceed to spend the rest of his life aching for her.
The three of them slipped out of the room, moving fast toward the elevators.
“We have to get Raze,” Brigit whispered as they hit the elevator button.
“I already did that,” her sister said softly.
“What do you mean? You’ve been with me the whole time.” Brigit went silent when the elevator doors opened to reveal a skinny, white-haired, stubble-faced man, grinning sleepily.
“My girls,” he said, arms opened wide. When they both hugged him, Adam knew he had to be the legendary Razor-Face Malone.
Brigit insisted they couldn’t go back to Adam’s place. Or to her own. She even felt it wouldn’t be safe to go back to Ithaca. Nor was it, she insisted, to remain in Binghamton.
They wound up renting suites at a hotel in nearby Vestal, and they sat around in one of them until the wee hours became dawn. Raze and Bridin filled Adam and Brigit in on everything. How they knew each other. Why Bridin had painted Rush in the first place, and how she’d put an enchantment on the painting before sending it out to find her long-lost sister. Which was why the Dark Prince couldn’t just destroy it himself, and why he’d hired Zaslow to do it for him. But Bridin’s magic had been strong, and the painting had done its job. It had brought the sisters together again.
“The fairytale is true,” she told Adam. “And now Brigit must return with me to Rush.”
Brigit looked right into his eyes, and he saw the tears pooling in hers. He wouldn’t make this harder on her. “I know,” he said softly. “I’ve known all along she had to go back.” He reached across the table, took Brigit’s hands in his. “It’s okay,” he told her, because he knew she was hurting as much as he, and he wanted to make it easier for her to leave him. “It’s okay. I’ll be all right.”
Raze cleared his throat, and sent Bridin a silent message. She nodded, and they both rose and went to their own rooms. Brigit got to her feet, and stumbled into the bathroom, closing the door behind her, and Adam knew she’d gone in there so he wouldn’t see her crying. She wanted to spare him from knowing how much this was hurting her, the same way he’d been trying to spare her seeing his pain.
Damn, if this didn’t kill him, he didn’t think anything ever would. After a while he heard the shower running. He sat on the bed, telling himself he could get through this, knowing it was a lie.
Brigit came out of the bathroom, wearing one of the complimentary hotel robes, and all of a sudden, it didn’t matter. He’d fall apart. He knew damned good and well he would. But not until after she’d gone.
She stood there, right beside the bed, and she stared down at him, and her heartache was in her eyes. He held up his hand, and she took it.
“Come here,” he told her.
She crawled onto the bed beside him. Snuggled into the crook of his arms, pressing close. Her damp, dark hair was cool against his chest, and he didn’t care.
“Adam, I don’t want to leave you. But I promised her. She said she’d save your life if I did, so I promised.”
“It’s all right, angel,” he whispered. “You have to go back. I know that. I’ve always known.”
“How?” She lifted her head, searching his eyes.
“Maire told me. She told me not to fall in love with you, that you had to leave me in the end. That my job was simply to show you and your sister the way back.”
“I’m so sorry, Adam.”
“I tried to listen to her,” he whispered. “God knows I tried. But I couldn’t do it, Brigit. I started falling in love with you the second I laid eyes on you, all those years ago, in that vision your mother showed me. And I never stopped.”
He drew her closer, kissed her lips. “And I never will.”
“I’ll never stop loving you, either, Adam. Maybe...maybe someday—”
“I’ll live for that someday, Brigit.” He ran his hands through her satin hair.
“I still can’t get used to it. I’m...”
“A fairy princess,” he finished for her. “An enchantress who stole my heart.”
Her smile was tremulous and sad. “The pendants glowed, Adam.”
He rubbed her shoulders, held her closer, so that she lay down again. “Will you do something for me, angel?”
He felt her lashes brush his chest when her eyes closed, felt the heat of her breath when she whispered, “Anything.”
He swallowed hard, his heart swelling. “Will you put it all out of your mind for just a little while? We don’t have much time left together. Right now...all I want to do is be with you. I want to hold you and love you. I want this night...because it’s going to have to last us awhile.”
“Yes.” She turned her face to his chest, and pressed her lips there. “But first I need to tell you...what I was, in the past. What I did.”
“The forgeries. I know already. We all make mistakes, Brigit.”
“You knew?” She stared at him, her eyes wider and rounder than he’d ever seen them. “You knew what I’d been. . . that I’d forged paintings for Zaslow?”
“Yes.”
“Adam, I had to do it. Raze was so old and frail and sick. We were living in a condemned building, stealing or begging just to eat. He would have died—”
He held her tighter. “I know you wouldn’t have done it unless you felt you had no other choice, Brigit. But it doesn’t matter now. I don’t care what you’ve done in the past, you understand that?”
“But...”
“When you left last night, why didn’t you take the painting? I told you it didn’t matter to me.” He continued stroking her hair as he asked the question.
She sat up again, and stared so deeply into his eyes he thought she could see his soul. “I couldn’t. You’ve been betrayed so often, Adam. By your father, and then your wife. I couldn’t hurt you that way. I wanted you to know that you could trust someone and not have it blow up in your face. I wanted to give you that, if nothing else, so that you could find someone worthy of you, someone who deserved a man like you. Someone to love.”
His throat swelled, because her words were so dead on. She hit his sore spots with speeding bullets. But they were shots that healed. Warmed him through and through. Made him know that he was all right. He could think about the past, about his father and his wife, and he could deal with it. Because of her. All because of her.
“Well, you succeeded, then. I learned to trust someone. I trusted you, angel, and you didn’t let me down.”
She closed her eyes. “I’m glad.”
“But I’ll never be able to find some other woman to love.” He shook his head slowly as he looked into her eyes. “Because I love you. And there’s never going to be anyone who can make me feel the way you do, Brigit. Not ever. You’re magic.” He closed his eyes because he felt tears threatening, and he didn’t want her to see them.
“I feel the same,” she told him. “There will never be anyone else for me, Adam. I’ll live forever on the love you and I had between us.”
He cupped her head at the base of her neck. “I want to make sweet love to you, angel. I want this night to be the one you remember w
hen you think of me.”
Her answer was a single teardrop, which he promptly kissed away.
Chapter Nineteen
As she rode with Adam in his car on the drive back to Ithaca, Brigit couldn’t stop thinking about the future. It loomed before her like a gaping black hole, devoid of life. Devoid of happiness. Devoid of anything good at all.
Because it would be devoid of Adam.
She’d find a way to get back to him. She would, someday. Though her sister had said the battle to regain control of Rush might take years, Brigit was determined.
And afraid. Terrified that the time when she could find her way back to Adam would never come. Or that by the time she finally was free of her promise to her sister, it would be too late. He would have found someone else.
He held her close to his side, driving one-handed. His arm tight around her as if he didn’t want to let her go.
At Bridin’s gentle insistence, she and Raze followed in the other car, Brigit’s car. Bridin had known Brigit wanted to be with Adam. Known she’d needed to be close to him, especially now, when she was so very close to losing him forever.
And Bridin had known other things, too.
Early this morning, while Adam had been sleeping after making love to her all night long, Brigit had been unable to rest. She’d left the hotel, slipping through the lobby and going outside to put her bare feet in the cool grass. To feel the morning dew on her toes and the morning air in her lungs and the morning sun on her face. To be sure everything hadn’t turned black and withered and died the way her heart felt as if it were doing right now.
And her sister found her there. She’d come up softly, so Brigit hadn’t heard her approach. And she’d settled herself down in the wet grass beside her.
Brigit tipped her head to the side, resting it on her sister’s shoulder. “I love you, you know.”
“I know,” Bridin said, and rested one hand in Brigit’s hair. “And I love you, too, little sister. I wish...I wish I could go back without you. I wish I didn’t have to hurt you this way. If there were another way—”
“I know.” Brigit closed her eyes to prevent her tears. “Is there...is there any way he could go with me?”
“Give up all he knows, his entire world, to enter one at war, where he could be killed at any moment? Would you ask it of him?”
Brigit lowered her head, ashamed.
“No, sister, there’s no way for him to come along. The doorway allowed him to pass once...because he needed to see it, so it would be burned forever into his memory. It was his fate to guide us back there. But it won’t let him through again. Very few mortals are ever allowed to pass. And never more than once in, and once out again. It’s that way for our people’s protection.”
Brigit sniffed, and brushed a hand over her eyes. “I should have known you would have suggested it yourself if it were possible.”
“I would have.”
Lowering her eyes, Brigit sighed. “I don’t deserve him, that’s why this is the way things are turning out. I haven’t been a good person.”
Bridin’s hand clasped Brigit’s. “You are good, Brigit. You are. Don’t doubt that anymore. You’ve risked everything you cherish, even your own life, to be sure the people you love most are cared for and safe. There’s nothing bad about that.”
“But the paintings—”
“You have a gift,” Bridin told her, echoing the words of Sister Mary Agnes so long ago. “So do I. Our mother had it, too, Brigit. She painted all the illustrations in the books she made for us.”
Brigit hadn’t thought about that before, but realized now it went right along with the rest of the story. Their mother had painted those vellum pages. So naturally she had inherited the talent from her. From Maire.
“You don’t have to copy other people’s work, you know,” Bridin went on. “If you just imagine the image you want to paint, just fix it in your mind...Whatever it is you want to create, create it in your mind first, and keep it there. Focus on it the way you do on another painting. And paint, Brigit. It will work. You’ll see.”
It did sound as if it would work. That Brigit had never had the confidence or maybe the desire to try it before, surprised her. Why hadn’t she seen what was so obvious to her sister?
“You are going to paint a storybook for your own little one. Carry on the family tradition.”
“My own...?”
Bridin ran one hand over Brigit’s belly, and for the first time she smiled fully.
Brigit choked. “You mean I’m“
“You mustn’t tell Adam. He’ll never let you go back to Rush if you do.”
Brigit’s joy in her sister’s revelation died a slow, painful death. Her first thought had been of sharing this with Adam. But she knew her sister was right. Telling him would only give him more reason for grief in the coming months and years.
And yet keeping the truth from him was just as wrong.
“Adam is waking, Brigit. He’ll be worried about you if he finds you gone. Go on. Go to him.”
Brigit swallowed hard. Her eyes were watering as she gave her sister a ferocious hug, and then hurried back to her room.
Now, in the car beside Adam, she told herself again and again that she might be able to survive without him, after all. Because she was carrying Adam’s child, and so she’d have a part of him with her always.
It was a solemn group that marched through the woods to the spot Adam had visited as a child. He wasn’t certain he could find the way back there, and part of him, most of him, actually, hoped he wouldn’t be able to. Hoped it simply wasn’t there anymore.
But he had a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach that it would be there. Just the way he remembered it. And he was about to lose the woman he loved forever.
Yet he stoically forced himself to do what he knew he must do. He loved Brigit too much to deprive her of returning to Rush. To her own world, her own people. He knew fully well she’d never felt as if she had fit in here, in the mortal world.
He’d already asked Bridin about going with them, and he’d known the answer before she’d explained. He’d known it in his heart. This was the end.
He led the way, as the four of them hiked up the hill behind his house, and into the woods. And his muscles seemed lumbering and slow, and his chest felt heavy. His feet barely dragged over the uneven ground, and with every step, his throat tightened more and made it harder to breathe. His eyes burned like fire every time he looked at Brigit.
God she was beautiful. The sun slanted through the trees, setting her ebony hair on fire. Her eyes glimmered when she glanced his way, and she was battling tears, too, though they brimmed more deeply each time their eyes met.
“I love you,” he said, for no other reason than that he had to.
“I love you,” she replied in a tortured whisper, and she squeezed his hand.
God, how the hell was he going to live without her?
“Are we close?” Bridin called from behind.
Adam shook his head, looking back over his shoulder at her. Her blue eyes glittered with anticipation, but he saw the sympathy there, too. She didn’t like doing this to her sister. Even old Razor-Face seemed to be battling tears.
“Bridin, I have to warn you,” Adam said, though he had to clear his throat several times in order to make his words audible. “I came out here not too long ago, trying to find the spot, but I couldn’t do it.”
“Of course you couldn’t. You came here a bitter, untrusting, cynical man. Your heart was older than Raze’s whiskers.”
“My whiskers and I resent that remark, Bridey.” Though Raze’s tone was light, Adam could hear the sadness in his voice.
“Today,” Bridin went on, “you come with the heart of a child, Adam. Today, you’ll be able to see the path as clearly as a four-lane highway. For though you’re crying inside, your heart is filled with love and goodness.”
He looked down, shaking his head from side to side. And then he stopped, because he did see it. A wa
vering trail, and it was so much more vivid than any other animal path in the woods, so different. “Dammit,” he muttered.
“Adam?” Brigit seemed worried.
Bridin stepped forward. “You see it, don’t you?”
He nodded, but his eyes were on Brigit, not her sister. And he saw his own heartbreak reflected there as her tears began spilling over.
“Lead on, Adam,” Bridin said.
He did. Gently, he pushed Brigit behind him, and crouched down when they came to the berry briars. None of those fragrant white blossoms, this time. Instead the branches were heavy with fat blackberries.
“We have to crawl from here,” he told them.
“So, crawl then,” Bridin said.
As the three of them stood watching, Adam self-consciously dropped down on all fours. He crawled along into the arched tunnel of berry briars, and he wished he’d never emerge. He wished he could grab Brigit and run off into these woods and never be seen or heard from again.
But that wouldn’t be fair to her, would it? He’d be denying her the chance to fulfill her destiny. He kept going, peering behind him to see Brigit crawling in the same way he was. And he knew the others followed as well. The ground swelled, and he crept over the rise.
Finally, he emerged from the briar patch. And he blinked, because he was on the far side of the same grassy hill he remembered. Despondency thickened his blood until he thought it crawled through his veins like molasses. He walked halfway down the miniature hillside. And then he stopped and just stood, staring into the dark mouth of the cave.
Shaking his head in wonder, he turned and watched the others emerge from the briars, one by one. Brigit hurried to his side, and slid her arms around his waist, burying her head against his chest as a loud sob escaped against her will. He held her close.
Bridin came next, and then Raze. There was a long moment of silence, while they all stood staring.
“Well,” Bridin said at last. “This is it, then.”
Raze moved toward her, put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m going with you, Bridey.”
She shook her head. “It will be dangerous.”
“Bridey, girl,” Raze said, and then he turned to Brigit. “You girls need to know something. Your father, John, he asked me to watch out for you. Way back when you were just babies. I was no more than a bum. Hell, what did I know about caring for little girls? I was the one who left you at St. Mary’s, and delivered your father’s note, ‘cause I knew they’d care for you there. And when you got separated, I went with you, Bridey, because I sensed you were the one who needed me most. I lost myself for a short time, when that Dark Prince got me under his spell, but I came around soon enough. I’d sworn to be guardian to both of you, for as long as I could. This doorway will open for me, Bridey. Your father promised me it would.”
Fairytale Page 27
