The Lost Enchantress

by Patricia Coughlin

  She was still able to hear Hazard groan, “Oh God,” and bang his head against the wall a second time in the heartbeat before he grabbed her at the waist and spun them so that they were right back where they started, except this time they were both half-naked and panting and wild-eyed.

  “My move,” he half said, half grunted.

  Eve braced her hands on the wall on either side of her to keep from swaying as he took hold of her skirt from the bottom and worked it up over her hips, bunching it at her waist until there was no more room to bunch.

  He murmured with surprise and delight when he discovered all she was wearing underneath were the pretty yellow panties that matched her bra and covered about an inch and a half of her flesh.

  Even that was too much for him to be denied. Eve gasped, startled, when he dipped his shoulder and lifted her off her feet with one very strong arm. She clung to him as he used his free hand to strip her panties off with amazing skill and agility; then he set her back down and slipped his hand between her legs and touched her, revealing a gift far more amazing.

  Eve gripped the wall and gladly let him have his way. With the hand not driving her mad and making her whimper, he stroked the curves of her hip and waist and breasts. His mouth closed hungrily over hers, swallowing the sounds she made, his tongue pumping inside her in slow, evocative thrusts that made her want one thing only . . . want it badly and right away.

  “Now,” she pleaded, grabbing his hips and moving against him. “Now.”

  Hazard was torn.

  The habits of several lifetimes and everything he believed were commanding him to slow down, hold back, play gently. It was folly to rush a woman, even a woman pleading to be rushed, especially a woman pleading to be rushed if that woman was Eve. He knew intuitively that her life was as lacking in romance as it was flowers from male admirers. He couldn’t fathom why it was so—the tastes and proclivities of modern men often baffled him—but he knew it was that way. And he knew that if anyone needed and deserved to be courted and wooed, it was Eve

  The trouble was that, competing with those noble commands, rising from a darker, more primitive place inside him, were demands that were selfish and urgent and carnal. They clamored for him to act, to seize, to give her what she wanted, as hard and fast as she professed to want it . . . as hard and fast as he knew he wanted it.

  Whatever nobility was in him was already hanging by a very thin thread when she suddenly dipped her head and bit his lip and snapped the thread altogether.

  He grabbed and lifted her.

  She wrapped her legs around him, tightly, and slid lower, slowly.

  He held his breath, concentrating on sensations, diligently, skillfully, like a master safecracker listening for the perfect alignment of tumblers, and when he felt her soft, wet heat open to him, he thrust up and into her, filling her and fueling the desire that was driving him through a spiraling tunnel toward release and the safe, sweet darkness of oblivion beyond.

  It had been so long . . . so long . . . and never like this.

  He felt her moving with him, her hunger and excitement a perfect match for his own.

  And when their gazes met and locked, her eyes mirrored the same wonder he felt, the same passion that was surging inside him.

  She was with him, both of them inside the same storm, both riding the same blessed, merciless wave.

  When they were almost there, she reared up and tossed her head back, radiant with beauty and power . . . power that ignited the air around them. He could taste it on his tongue and feel it scorch his skin.

  And just before they crashed, in that final, fleeting, endless speck of time, he sensed it winding around them, pulling them even closer together, a gossamer ribbon of quicksilver, piercing and flowing through her and into him.

  The drawback to making wild, unrestrained, up-against-the-wall love with a man is the awkward aftermath. Eventually the heavy breathing stops and—unlike Carl Sandburg’s fog, which comes prettily on little cat feet—silence falls like a lead veil. Reason slowly returns, and all too soon you realize there’s just no graceful, dignified way for you to . . . disentangle, straighten the clothing you still have on and retrieve what’s missing.

  Unless the man you tangled with is Hazard.

  With Hazard in charge, Eve found herself back on solid ground, supported by his strong hands at her waist until it was certain her legs weren’t too wobbly to hold her. Before she could stutter a single syllable, her skirt was unbunched, her shirt and bra were in her hands, and Hazard’s back was to her as he attended to his own buttoning and zipping.

  He finished before she did—probably because he didn’t have himself as a distraction—and walked over to a recessed steel panel on the wall near the bar. He passed more time fiddling with buttons and dials and soon the music of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata streamed from a half dozen small speakers mounted close to the ceiling.

  Interesting, she thought, no photos, no tchotchkes, and not so much as a stale cracker in the kitchen, but there was a state-of-the-art sound system and a small distillery’s worth of top-notch whiskey. Boys will be boys . . . no matter how many centuries old they happen to be.

  Once she was dressed, she looked around and found her purse.

  “Do you mind if I use the bathroom,” she asked Hazard.

  “Not at all. It’s just down the hall on—”

  “The left,” she finished for him. “I remember.”

  “Of course.” He snagged her hand as she walked by and held onto it. When she turned to look at him, he used his other hand to smooth her hair back from her face and then stroked her cheek with the back of his fingers.

  “So soft.” It was as if he were talking to himself. His deep voice was pitched low; it blended with the music and Eve had to strain to hear. “I’d forgotten how soft skin can be . . . I hadn’t realized how much I’d forgotten . . . how much there was to forget.”

  “Maybe it’s time to start remembering,” she told him.

  His mouth crooked in a faint smile, but his gray eyes were somber. For a second she thought he was going to say something else, but he only lifted her hand to his lips to kiss the back of it and then he let her go.

  Her hand tingled all the way to the bathroom.

  The man definitely had a gift. Several actually, as evidenced by the delicious, lingering hum of nerve endings in other strategic places on her body. She knew many well-mannered men, well-mannered by twenty-first-century standards anyway, and she couldn’t name one capable of pulling off a hand kiss with a fraction of Hazard’s effortless grace. He raised gallantry to an art form.

  Which is why the sudden change in his behavior was so unexpected and confusing.

  When she returned to the living room, he was half sitting with one leg hitched up on the back of the low-slung sofa, a glass in his hand.

  He lifted the glass toward her. “Whiskey?”

  “No, thanks. I only drink whiskey when I’m going into shock,” she explained in an attempt at humor.

  “Perhaps you’d prefer a glass of wine? Something intense and complex but ethereal . . . a Prosecco would suit you, I think.” The words were polite enough, solicitous even, but there was an unmistakable coolness in his tone, as if someone had stopped by in the three minutes she was out of the room and told him she was a serial killer. “Or tea . . . a soothing cup of tea. Or chocolate.”

  Wine? Tea? Chocolate? She thought about the barren kitchen. Was it possible he had another kitchen tucked away somewhere? Or a wine cellar?

  “Wine would be lovely,” she replied, trying not to sound uneasy even though that’s how he was making her feel.

  “Yes, it would,” he countered. “We could settle ourselves here on the sofa and snuggle. You could tell me that you’ve never done this sort of thing before; I could tell you that no other woman in my considerable past compares to you.” He took a serious swallow of whiskey. “Unfortunately for you, Enchantress, I don’t have wine here. Or anything else you might want or need or
deserve. And I refuse to feel guilty about it.”

  Is that what this was about? Some misguided notion of chivalry? Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised. It was entirely possible that his attitudes were as old-fashioned as his manners.

  “There’s no reason you should feel guilty,” she assured him. “I’m a big girl, Hazard. I knew what I was doing.”

  “Did you?” He eyed her with open skepticism. “Could you possibly?”

  “I’m not looking for promises, if that’s what this is about.”

  “Good. I told you I had nothing to offer you and I meant it.”

  “And I told you that we had tonight and that was enough. And just for the record, the night’s not over.”

  His jaw clenched and his gaze hardened. “It is for me.”

  Fifteen

  “Oh dear.” They were the first words Grand had spoken since Eve began her recounting of everything that happened at Hazard’s. Well, not everything. She went as far as the moment Taggart took off after Pavane and kept the rest to herself. First, because it was no one else’s business that she and Hazard had made love . . . had sex . . . call it what you will. And second, because she wasn’t sure herself what it meant. Or what she wanted it to mean. Especially in light of his abrupt shift from hot to cold just before she left.

  It would be easy—humiliating and disappointing, but easy—to conclude that she had misread things from the start and that he’d never been interested in anything more than the time-honored, adrenalin-fueled WBTM. Talk about a lack of truth in advertising. He appeared to be the antithesis of the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am type, but she supposed anyone could crack under pressure. They’d just been through a highly charged and stressful situation; he was wired, she was wired. Spontaneous combustion happens.

  Except that wasn’t what happened.

  There had been more to their coming together than a surge of unruly hormones. Much more. She’d felt it. What’s more, she’d felt him feeling it right along with her. For some reason he’d tried to hide the truth from her afterwards. Maybe because he was trying to hide it from himself. Maybe his way of dealing with complicated emotions was to deny them until they went away. That might be good enough for him; it wasn’t good enough for her.

  Hazard was a fascinating man, on many levels, and Eve wanted to know more about him. Poking and probing and gathering information was one of her talents, but before she turned herself loose on Hazard, there were some things she needed to know about herself.

  That’s where her grandmother came in, or should have. Eve shook her head in exasperation.

  “Oh dear? That’s it? I tell you Phineas Pavane is alive and that he claims it was the talisman and me that returned him to this realm, and that he’s stolen the talisman for the second time and is right now off God-knows-where, doing God-knows-what with it, and that Hazard is two hundred years old and possibly also immortal, and you say oh dear?”

  “Oh dear, that is quite an amazing tale. Better?” There was a faint glint of humor in her grandmother’s blue eyes.

  “Amazing but true,” Eve countered. “You believe me?”

  “Of course I do. I believe every word of it,” Grand assured her. “I’m just not as certain of what we should do about it.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Oh, there are a number of things. We could appeal to the High Council of Mages; the theft of a magical implement as powerful as the talisman would fall within their purview. The problem is they have limited recourse for dealing with anyone calling solely on dark magic, which I’m certain is the case with Pavane. And they’re slow.”

  “Slow?”

  “Yes. You would think that after countless centuries they would have streamlined operations, but oh, no, the council is ruled by conservatives. Not that I’m opposed to tradition, but there is such a thing as being too much of a purist. I mean, really,” Grand drawled in exasperation, “where is it written that council decrees must be done by scribe on parchment rather than computer?”

  “Beats me,” replied Eve, reaching for her wineglass. Her grandmother did the same.

  They were comfortably ensconced in the family room. It would be hard to be anything but comfortable sitting on the overstuffed cream suede sofa . . . or on any other seat in the house for that matter. It was the antithesis of Hazard’s place. For starters it was a home, not a home décor ad. The furniture was a casual mix of new and old, the overall look lovingly fine-tuned over the years and still an ongoing group effort. There were handmade pillows and bright jewel tones and offbeat pieces of art Chloe had brought home from all the exotic places she’d visited. And there were family photos everywhere, a happy hodgepodge of them, all in silver frames.

  “You said there were a number of things we could do,” Eve reminded her.

  “Yes. I have friends I could call on to help recover the talisman. Their methods can be a bit . . . unorthodox, but they work much faster than the council.” Her expression grew troubled. “There is great risk involved in confronting a dark sorcerer as experienced and ruthless as Pavane, however, and I would be asking others to assume that risk for what is really T’airna business. In the past, T’airnas have always prided themselves on dealing with these matters directly.”

  Eve felt the weight of the unspoken word in her grandmother’s calm, unwavering gaze, and her chest tightened with a sense of foreboding.

  “In the past, T’airnas had the talisman, and the power to get the job done. Do we?”

  Grand expression was sphinxlike. “One of us does.”

  Eve tensed. Damn, damn, damn. She had to go and ask. She’d thought she was ready to hear what Grand had wanted to tell her for so long, but suddenly she wasn’t so sure. Maybe it was better to let some questions go unanswered. Life was certainly easier that way and maybe easier was better. After all, it wasn’t as if she could unanswer them if she didn’t like what she heard. Did she really want to know something that could complicate her life even more than it already had been complicated? Forget complicated, was it smart to go poking a stick at something that could change her life in ways she couldn’t predict, much less control?

  Of course, a better question would be did she still have a choice in the matter.

  The auction had bumped her off the neat orderly path she’d chosen to walk, spun her around and dropped her onto a new and unfamiliar path, one with sharp turns she couldn’t see around and no exits. She couldn’t get off and she couldn’t turn around and go back. She had to keep moving forward and find her way out as best she could. And now she had to do it knowing Pavane was lurking out there somewhere, waiting. His promise that she would see him again very soon had sounded more like a threat . . . a threat she doubted she could avoid or outrun.

  So the answer was pretty much a resounding no, she didn’t have a choice; she had to take the threat seriously and act accordingly.

  Part of her didn’t want to hear it . . . or hear what Grand had to say; it wanted to find the nearest bedcovers and hide under them until the problem resolved itself, for better or worse. But another, braver part had responded fiercely when Grand spoke of T’airna pride, and that part of her was feeling greater indignation and animosity toward Pavane with every passing minute. The man deserved to pay for the harm he’d done to her family, and to Hazard, and to who knew how many others. He was a predator, and she’d reported on enough predators of the human variety to realize that he would go on hurting others until someone stopped him. If that someone was supposed to be her, she at least ought to know about it. Forewarned is forearmed and all that.

  She might long for an easy way out, but it wasn’t in her to take it, or to run and hide. She was a survivor; she’d survived tragedies and crises before, and she would find a way to survive this one. She sighed, steeling herself, and surrendered to the inevitable.

  “Tell me about the prophecy,” she said to Grand.

  “I’ll do better than that,” her grandmother responded, slowly getting to her feet. “Come with me.”


  Eve followed her to her bedroom.

  Her grandmother waved her hand in the direction of the bed, a cherry four-poster with pineapple finials, one of which still bore teeth marks from the time Chloe had tried to take a bite.

  “Sit,” she ordered.

  Eve sat.

  Grand lifted a box from the center of her dresser and joined her, placing it on the bed between them. The dark wood box had an intricate parquet band just below the lid and brass corner pieces. Eve looked on as Grand pressed two fingertips to the brass keyhole and murmured a few words in the language that flowed like honey from her tongue, and she heard the metallic click of the lock opening as smoothly as if Grand had used the key that had been lost years ago.

  Her grandmother lifted the lid and removed the fitted tray inside, then carefully took out the items underneath and put them aside as well. Each of them was familiar to Eve, evoking happy childhood memories of being allowed to peek inside Grand’s treasure chest. There was a pair of combs that had belonged to Grand’s mother, with silver filigree as fine as lace; a locket that held a baby picture and lock of hair from Eve’s own mother; and a small stack of old letters tied with a faded red ribbon. The letters were from her grandfather, sent home from the region in France where he had fought and died. Before putting them aside, Grand gave the letters a kiss, the way Eve had seen her do so many times before.

  When the box appeared to be empty, she did something Eve had never seen before: she ran her fingertip along the inside edges, her lips pursed in concentration. Curious, Eve leaned forward to get a better look just as Grand located a slender black cord and tugged on it to remove a panel Eve hadn’t known was there.

  “A false bottom,” Eve exclaimed. “Very clever. But couldn’t you have just set wards to protect whatever it is you have hidden under there?”

  “I used wards as well. I wanted to protect it, but I also wanted to be certain it was somewhere you would find it if this moment never came and I was no longer around to give it to you myself.” Grand held out a yellowed parchment scroll tied with a black cord.