“You don’t have to do that. Mystic Bay is very safe.”
“My car’s on the other side of the store. Have to walk that way anyway. Besides, I wanted to ask where you’d like to eat. Has to be a tourist trap. I can’t afford the Tidewater Inn.” Of course, he really could afford it. But it was best to stay out of places where the Drakes hung out.
Aunt Robin’s restaurant was good but expensive, naturally he could not take her there. “How about the Crab Hut?” They served excellent seafood but did not have a liquor license.
“That would be great. I’ll see you at seven.” He raised a hand in farewell.
“But you don’t know where I live.”
“Rosewood Cottage on the grounds of the Tidewater Inn?”
“Yes.” Robin had given her a break on the rent, claiming that Moira was providing a vital service to artists in her colony. Moira had accepted the lower rent offered by her aunt, because she didn’t want to dig too deep into her savings while she waited to see if she could make a go of the store.
She had long ago sold the family home to finance her gallery. And because without Mom and Dad it was no longer her home. When Guinevere and Rowan Fairchild had sailed west, the old house had lost its charm for her.
“I’ll look forward to it.” For one heart-stopping moment she thought he was going to kiss her in the open street, but he only winked and moved fluidly down the sidewalk. The miasma of alcohol lingered, along with a scent both potent and masculine.
Whoever heard of a fairy falling for a drunkard?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Quinn~
He had a date with the fairy princess and was going to pick her up from her fairy cottage. The cottages behind the Tidewater Inn were new build, but they were designed to match the elaborate Victorian mansion that housed the inn. They dripped with gingerbread. Their shingled sides were painted pale pastels. Each one was cuter than the next.
Rosewood was painted three complementary shades of pink. It was trimmed with lavender and white. It had a pale gray roof. White rambling roses grew over the white railings of the little porch. It looked like a storybook cottage, the perfect abode for a fairy.
He wondered if Moira would invite him into her bower. He could imagine her boudoir. It would be all white lace and pink ruffles. And Moira would be the rose at its old-fashioned heart.
He went home to complete his forest painting and spent the afternoon dashing off another portrait of his fairy instead. That silvery-gold metallic he had acquired this afternoon gave precisely the effect of the highlights in her hair. She wore it pinned up, but he painted her with it flowing over her shoulders in a rippling waterfall that concealed her pink and white nudity.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Moira~
At exactly six, Moira chased the last indecisive customers out of the art supply store. By six ten she was letting herself into Rosewood Cottage. It wasn’t very big, but it had two bedrooms and it was large enough for her furniture. It was an excellent stopgap.
She had sold her condo, but the furniture had been almost new, bought since her partnership with Whitlock. If she had sold it she would have taken a huge loss. Besides, each piece had been lovingly chosen. Eventually she would have her own place here on West Haven, where her modern Italian furniture would not be a stylistic mismatch.
Aunt Robin had been kind enough to remove the shabby-chic furniture that Rosewood ordinarily came with. The white iron bedstead and slipcovered couch and other things were now stored somewhere in the inn’s outbuildings. Moira kicked off her high heels and padded over the wooden floors in her bare feet.
All afternoon she had fielded questions from various residents who had just happened to find themselves near her store. She had done a brisk trade in those trifles she kept on the counter to tempt the unwary. Sable brushes small enough to be used for makeup, erasers in the shape of West Haven, and other novelties, had added a healthy and unexpected boost to the day’s sales.
The rack of hand-painted cards had been picked almost bare. Good news for her and for the artists who sold them on consignment. She had to remember to call around and order more. She had enough to restock tomorrow, but if she had another day like today, she would rapidly run short.
She glanced at the kitchen clock and filled her red electric kettle. Its sleek design did not fit with the white bead-board kitchen and farmhouse style cupboards, but she loved it and her other red and black appliances. She had time for a cup of green tea before Quinn arrived. And tea would help if she was to be interrogated by Robin.
Now that her parents had elected to sail west, Robin was her closest relative. Moira had been surprised not to already have had a phone call from her aunt. The kettle whistled and she filled her tiny teapot. Sat down at her glass-topped table on the matching chrome chair, and waited for it to steep.
On cue, her phone burbled with Robin’s private chime. “Hey,” Moira said. “How are you, Robin?”
Robin’s silvery laugh was musical. “I’m very well indeed, Moira. I hear you have a hot date with an artist.”
She poured herself a first cup. “Quinn and I are going to the Crab Hut for dinner.”
“I like that young man,” Robin said approvingly.
That was a surprise. Moira had been braced to defend her choice. “Do you? As in you think he’s a good match for me, or as in I need to get out more?” Few people knew that Aunt Robin was the matchmaker behind the old West Haven saying, A match made in West Haven is a match made in Heaven. But for 200 years, Robin had been setting couples up for their happily ever afters.
“Both, actually. How do you feel about him, Moira?”
“Weird. For a drunk, he certainly has a lot of charm.”
Robin made a gentle choking noise that might have been laughter. “Does Quinn drink?” she asked.
“He never seems drunk, but every time I see him, he smells like he’s been on a two-week bender.”
There was absolute silence. “I wouldn’t want you to take up with a drunk,” Robin eventually said. “I suppose I could be mistaken. There’s always a first time.”
Robin did have an impressive track record of happy marriages behind her. Perhaps this meant that Quinn could be salvaged before he drank his talent away. Although Moira had not been thinking of anything that permanent.
More like a summer fling destined to end when winter drew Quinn back to the mainland. After all he was a hunter. Hunters seldom stuck around. And fairies weren’t supposed to marry them. Hunters were tolerated on West Haven, but given the history of the island, it was not too surprising that interbreeding with them was actively discouraged. Ditto marriage.
It was probably natural, however, that Robin was hoping for something permanent. Despite a long-term relationship with Gordon Sullivan, her aunt had never married. Moira was the only daughter of her only cousin. The Fae were picky, not much interested in sexual relationships, and not very fertile when they did marry. Obviously Robin had visions of changing that with intermarriage with a shifter.
“You do know that Quinn is a hunter?” she informed her aunt. She deliberately used West Haven slang for predatory shifters. It was the equivalent of calling the Fae the Little People. Accurate, yet slighting.
There was a longish pause. Robin cleared her throat delicately. “Who told you that?”
“You should have seen him and Lloyd doing that male stare-down thing in the Bean. Lloyd came out of his haze just long enough to inspect Quinn.”
“Does the idea of a hunter put you off, dear?”
Moira thought demonizing predatory shifters was desperately unfair. Not when Owen Haverstock’s breeding partner had been a Fairchild. Not thankfully one of Moira’s forebears – Olivia Haverstock had left no descendants. Yet the horrors of the Haverstock Era reverberated down to the present, prejudicing West Haven attitudes toward hunters.
It seemed even more unfair when you considered that it was an alliance of cougars, dragons, bears and other hunters that had solved the problem pos
ed by the Haverstocks. Their extermination had ended a twenty-year reign of terror during which the Haverstocks had robbed and killed every non-sensitive on the island, and begun to work their violent way through the sensitives.
Owen Haverstock had been a grizzly. A psychopathic grizzly. Although Moira doubted that was a term much in use in the mid-nineteenth century. But long before he started raising little criminals with her, his stolen fairy mate had been the original evil fairy, feared and loathed by her kin and other sensitives. The taint of Olivia and Owen’s murderous offspring still clung after all these years. But not to the Fae. To hunters. Talk about unfair.
Moira said none of this to Robin. Robin knew her West Haven history. She finished the last drops of green tea in her cup. “I better go change for my date.”
“I assume that’s a no?”
“Hmm.”
“You needn’t dress up for the Crab Hut.”
“I just am going to add a wrap for later.” The ocean breezes always picked up as soon as the sun went down. “And find some flats.” In case Quinn wanted to stroll down to the harbor and watch the sea lions. Or something.
“Enjoy yourself, my dear. I’ll call tomorrow.”
CHAPTER NINE
Robin~
“The Council is going to squawk,” Gordon Sullivan warned.
In deference to Robin’s sensibilities, her widowed brother-in-law had taken off the smelly oilskins he wore to run his sightseeing cruises and trimmed his beard to a respectable sleekness. His blue blazer and gray pants made him look jaunty. But nothing could make this burly weather worker appear tame.
Robin Fairchild met Sully’s blue eyes calmly. She gave his opinion careful consideration before she commented. “Probably,” she said after a pause in which she thought about the members of the Mystic Bay Town Council. “But we have to bring West Haven into the twenty-first century. Those hidebound traditionalists on the Council are going to keep us Fae so pure we go extinct.”
Sully nodded. He too was on the Mystic Bay Town Council which ran not just the town, but the entire island. They made the rules and enforced them. Both the written and unwritten laws.
He stopped pacing Robin’s sitting room and sat down in the armchair she had created just for him. The pretty, brocade-covered piece was intended to support his muscular frame in comfort. She had done a good job. It did not even creak as he placed his square frame in it and leaned back against its blue and cream cushions.
“You could have started with something other than a hunter-fairy match,” he said heavily.
Robin only smiled.
Sully placed hands like hams on his knees and waited.
She didn’t have to justify herself. When auras resonated and complemented one another, there was nothing more to be said. She hadn’t created a match between their niece and that dragon. It just was. But under Sully’s bright blue gaze, Robin’s placid certainty wavered.
“They are going to have beautiful babies,” she offered. “When was the last time a fairy had a child on West Haven?” Moira was the first and last fairy born in more than sixty years. Sully and Nightingale had never had one. She herself was childless and unmated. The Fairchilds might live a long time, but they were dying out.
“Huh. Didn’t look into the future myself. Babies, eh?” Sully’s big broad face split with an attractive grin. She could tell he was envisioning himself with a great-niece or nephew on his knee.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “Without Quinn, Moira will probably never have any. She’ll remain a spinster. Like me. Without Moira, Quinn will marry a Muggle who is not a virgin, and enjoy a sterile union. Together they will have several children.”
“Powerful children,” Sully interjected the warning. “Which is precisely what the Council is afraid of.”
Impatience ruffled her calm for an instant. But she caught herself, and let serenity settle around her like a cloak. “It’s been nearly 200 years since the Haverstock Era. In all that time we’ve never had another psychopathic family on West Haven. Never had a single rogue hunter. We have no reason whatsoever to think that interbreeding with hunters causes criminal behavior.”
“Hybrid vigor,” Sully dropped those two damning words into her elegant parlor like the bombs they were.
She had known this was coming. She sat up straighter in her own dainty chair. “If only we sensitives had chosen a euphemism that sounded less scientific,” she said. “Hybrid vigor actually refers to the fact that outcrosses produce offspring that are bigger and stronger than their parents – or not. Just subtly different enough to be better adapted to their environments. There is nothing necessarily evil about hybrids.”
“The Haverstock brood were worse than evil,” Sully reminded her.
“Olivia Fairchild was a wicked fairy long before Owen Haverstock abducted her. She spent centuries turning her neighbors into frogs. And worse.” Mostly worse.
“I know. But it’s the children she and Owen had that folks remember. As evil as their parents, but much stronger.”
“Murderous, thieving cannibals would frighten anyone. But just because Owen was a hunter doesn’t mean all hunters are murderers or thieves. Let alone cannibals. It’s absurd. Two hundred years ago, the sensitives of West Haven hired hunters to get rid of the Haverstock gang. When they had performed that task, we encouraged them to hang around. Isn’t it about time we integrated them fully?”
“Integrated,” Sully rolled the syllables around on his tongue. His tone was ironic. “In-te-gra-ted.” He laughed humorlessly.
Robin’s eyes rested fondly on him. It had been almost twenty years since her sister Nightingale had sailed west, but he had remained family. Lately she and Sully had engaged in a new dance – one that felt entirely foreign to her spirit, but which was also peculiarly satisfying.
“Integrated,” she said firmly. She knew that the non-shifter residents of West Haven thought of themselves as the real residents of the island, and shifters as visitors. Unwelcome visitors. But that had to change if West Haven was not going to die.
“People are afraid of hunters,” Sully said. “Keeping them in their place makes the Council feel safer.”
Robin sighed. “Hunters pay the lion’s share of taxes on West Haven in general, and in Mystic Bay in particular. Donations from the big clans enable us to have our library and community center and a dozen other amenities. Yet not one hunter has ever sat on the Council. Taxation without representation. How fair is that?”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Robin. But the Council always argues that the hunters knew the rules when they bought their land,” responded Sully. “Jumped at the opportunity to buy tracts of land where they could shift and let their beasts run free.”
“That’s true. But how fair is it that not one hunter clan owns their property free and clear? Every single one holds their land – and we’re now three and four generations on – at the discretion of the Town Council.”
“Which has never expropriated a single acre,” Sully pointed out.
“But we could. And we keep them off the Council. We take their money and fret when they marry out of their order. It’s foolish. Who’s a better citizen, or has done more for West Haven, than Lloyd Furlong? Yet he’s never been offered a seat on the Council.”
Sully laughed. His big, booming laugh comforted her. “Lloyd is a good man, for all he’s a dragon. No one I’d rather have to watch my back in a brawl. But he’d rather die than accept the responsibility. Besides, Martha has been on the Council several times.”
“She has. But do you think she would have been allowed on, if she and Lloyd had had any children?”
“Probably not,” Sully admitted.
“Even though they would have made excellent parents. And had lovely children.”
“Lloyd wasn’t the only Vietnam vet to have a vasectomy,” Sully pointed out. “Martha knew that going in.”
“I don’t blame Lloyd, Agent Orange causes woeful birth defects.” Robin waved a hand. “We’re stray
ing from the point, Sully, which is Moira and Quinn. How do you think the Council will react to a marriage between a hunter and a fairy?”
“Badly. But our laws do not forbid marriage. Just interbreeding without it. I wonder how the Drakes will take to being kicked off the island for breaking the rules?”
“We have to make sure that doesn’t happen,” Robin conceded.
“Besides, I heard he drinks just as much as Bramwell,” Sully said. “I wouldn’t like to think of our niece tied to a drunk.”
Robin chuckled. “Quinn is in disguise. He doesn’t want anyone to associate him with the Drakes of Shoreside. He’s no alcoholic.”
“Just a hunter who paints. Downright peculiar occupation for a dragon. For any hunter.”
“Oliver Bramwell is a grizzly,” Robin pointed out tartly.
“And look what happened to him. Turned to drink and started painting nightmares. I was damned glad when he took the ferry back to the mainland.”
“I’ll admit that I didn’t see that coming,” Robin said. “I should never have rented him Willow Cottage. The Old Ones did not like him.”
“Know what I think?” Sully folded his arms across his chest.
“What?”
“I think he went hunting in the Old Forest.”
The shock went right through Robin. “There’s no hunting on West Haven.”
CHAPTER TEN
Quinn~
He was embarrassingly, boorishly early. It was barely six thirty. Rosewood Cottage was as delicately tinted as he remembered. The sun was low in the sky and its golden rays hit the shingled walls, turning them to a deeper, peachier rose. The cottage looked like an illustration for a fairy-tale.
The climbing roses twining lushly around the posts and railings of the diminutive house were the frosting on the cake. The two white wicker rockers on the porch looked cozy but designed for much smaller frames than his. Moira could sit there, framed by roses, in dainty splendor, to enjoy the last of the spring sunshine. That fragile antique wickerwork would collapse if he attempted to join her.
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