Hard to Handle--A Beauty and Beast Novel

by Christine Warren

  Ash, Drum, and Maeve tucked into their breakfasts. Though she could go a considerable time without water or sustenance, Ash found the meal delicious. The salty bacon was tender at the center and crisp at the edges, the eggs clearly fresh, and the scones flavored with snips of bright green chive. She ate eagerly while Maddie sipped tea and confined herself to sharing the latest village gossip with her children. The woman also brought them up to date with stories of their other siblings and assorted nieces and nephews. The evidence suggested that the Drummond clan was a close-knit one.

  “That’s the other reason why you and Ash can’t just go tearing back to Dublin, Michael,” Maddie said. “Síle and Meara are both coming to dinner tonight, and if Bridget Sorley delivers by seven, Sorcha may come by for a nightcap. You can’t deny me a chance to have all five of my children in one place at one time, now can you? You wouldn’t be so cruel.”

  Ash saw Drum surrender before the deep sigh passed his lips. “Madelaine Connelly Drummond, world’s foremost wielder of guilt,” he proclaimed, but his lips curved up at the corners. “You win, Ma. When Ash and I are done at the ruins, we’ll come back and stay for dinner. But we’re leaving tonight. I’m opening the pub in the morning, and Ash deserves to be home at a decent hour.”

  Maddie smiled in such a way that Ash now understood how a person could be said to beam. Previously, she had thought only bright lights and stars capable of that action. “Of course, of course. We’ll eat early, at six. That way you have plenty of time for the drive back.”

  “Then it’s settled.” Maeve stood and reached for the jacket she had tossed on the next chair. “We should get going. It’s only a mile or two, but Ash will want plenty of time to ramble about.”

  Drum’s eyes threw daggers at his sister. “I thought you were going to stay here and help Ma with the washing up, Mae.”

  Maeve sent the blades right back. “Whatever gave you that idea, Michael?”

  Maddie simply ignored them and began gathering the soiled dishes. Both of her children watched as if waiting for her to speak. Ash had the feeling that Drum expected his mother to back him up, while Maeve believed she would win the woman’s support. Maddie herself gave nothing away as she carried her tray back to the kitchen.

  “You’ll not cut me out of this, Michael Stephen,” Maeve hissed, checking to see if their mother was listening.

  “This is none of your concern, Maeve Rowena,” he shot right back, keeping his voice low. “The only one who needs to see the ruins is Ash, and only one of us needs to show her the way. I’m going. You’re staying here.”

  “I’m not. Have you forgotten who had the vision that started this whole thing?”

  “No, but I think you’ve forgotten that I am your older brother, and that it’s my job to keep you out of harm’s way.”

  “To hell with that! Let me tell you, big brother…”

  Rolling her eyes, Ash shrugged into her own jacket and walked around the table to the kitchen door. The arguing siblings didn’t even seem to notice. She recalled spying some sort of stone ruin in the distance when she had climbed out of the car earlier. She felt confident that she could find the place Drum had described all on her own. Maddie Drummond winked as she walked past and stepped out into the dappled sunlight.

  It was obvious who had the brains in that family. Too bad the trait had not proven hereditary.

  Chapter Eight

  Drum thought smoke might still be pouring out his ears when he caught up to Ash as she crossed the border of his parents’ property. Technically, since his father’s death more than a dozen years ago, the place belonged to his mother alone, though she leased out most of the fields to local farmers, but old habits were not just hard to break; sometimes they felt indestructible.

  The Guardian did not acknowledge his presence. She simply continued into the neighbor’s field, taking the most direct route toward the ruin on the hill.

  “You won’t want to continue this way,” he said after a moment of matching his stride to hers. The novelty of doing that with a woman was not lost on him. Most of the time he had to slow his pace to accommodate the disparity in length of leg, but Ash stood only a couple of inches shorter than he and had legs that lasted forever. He remembered that from last night. Among other things.

  “Why not?”

  She sounded snappish, and he felt another wave of gratitude that he’d succeeded in browbeating Maeve into staying behind. He wouldn’t come out and say that blackmail had been involved, but he had set aside some very interesting photos a few years back in case of emergency.

  “Because after the next field, you’ll hit the pasture where Billy Evers grazes his prize bull. Fionn mac Cumhaill has a wee bit of a temper.”

  “Your neighbor named his bull after a legendary leader of warriors?” She glanced at him skeptically, but slowed her pace a little.

  Drum shrugged. “As a calf, he felt more inclined to bang himself in the head than have a nap.”

  Ash snorted. “Which way then?”

  “We’ll head right. There’s a path through the corner there that will take us around where we need to go. It’s not much out of the way.”

  They walked for a while in silence, for which Drum was grateful. It might not be entirely comfortable, but an hour in the car with his magpie of a sister followed by his mother’s gentle inquisition had brought his headache roaring back. The pain only served to remind him of all the whiskey he’d consumed last night, and that in turn made him think of last night’s other big mistake.

  He should never have kissed her. Ash had made that clear when she’d sent him flying with no more than a casual shove. He would hate to think of the force she might have brought to bear if he’d tried to take things any further. He probably would have woken up with his teeth on the pillow beside him.

  Drum wanted to blame the whole thing on the liquor, but not even his own conscience was buying that story. He had done a lot worse with a lot less alcohol in his belly, which perhaps indicated that his problem had more to do with a sorry lack of basic intelligence.

  He didn’t enjoy calling himself stupid, but the shoe was beginning to slip on with disturbing ease. It would be much more to his liking if he could blame his lapse in judgment on Ash instead. The trouble with that was that the female hadn’t flirted with him, hadn’t even so much as batted her long, dark eyelashes in his direction. She hadn’t invited the kiss. He had simply fallen on her like a ravening beast. Unless he could prove that she exuded some sort of irresistible pheromone that short-circuited the wiring of the male human brain, the only one to blame for the debacle was himself.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was that every time he looked at her, he wanted to do it all over again.

  There must be something wrong with him. They could barely speak to each other without arguing. They agreed on nothing. They approached everything from opposite perspectives. For fuck’s sake, they weren’t even the same bloody species, and yet he hardened every time she turned those fathomless dark eyes his way.

  He should thank his maker she wasn’t watching him right now. Hiking through muddy fields with an erection was no man’s idea of a good time.

  Clearing his throat, he attempted to focus on something other than the way his companion affected him. “You’ve read a lot of Irish mythology, then?”

  “I have read nothing,” she said. “I did not exist before you saw me last night. But all Guardians have knowledge of warfare, both how to wage it and how others are said to have waged it in the past.”

  “Fionn mac Cumhaill is a legend, though. And the Fenians. No one knows if those battles were ever actually fought.”

  “No one knows they weren’t.”

  Right. So much for conversation.

  They tromped across fields, avoiding Billy Evers’s, until the tower ruin loomed before them atop an isolated hillock. A cloud had rolled across the sun, leaving the landscape dulled and the stone a stained and dingy gray, where before it had glinted white
and silver in the bright light. Trees and bushes had grown up all around the tumbled stone, and vines of woody nightshade crept up an outer wall, fighting a carpet of ivy for its foothold. The place looked empty and forgotten, one of the thousand remnants of a bygone age.

  Drum looked over to Ash. She stood at the base of the hill, one foot forward and braced on the slope upward. Her hands rested on her hips, and her narrowed eyes were locked on the ancient pile of rubble. For a moment he wondered if she might see something he couldn’t, because her gaze seemed fixed on a specific point. But she said nothing.

  Instead, she let her hands drop to her sides and pointed her chin toward the top of the hill. “Let us go.”

  She climbed the short distance quickly, her strides long and steps sure. Drum followed without comment, and in moments they stood in front of the yawning archway that had once been the tower’s entrance. He expected her to hesitate, but she pushed forward into the dim confines of the enclosed space without a second thought.

  “Be careful,” he called as he scrambled after her. “The roof may already have fallen and the upper floors rotted away, but the ends of some of the beams are still up there, and the tops of the walls are none too stable. Keep your eyes open for something falling on your head.”

  Ash didn’t bother to answer, but he thought he heard a grunt. He supposed he would have to satisfy himself with that.

  While she inspected her surroundings, Drum took the opportunity to look around him with fresh eyes. He’d spent many an hour with his sisters chasing and being chased through and around this old heap. It didn’t require much imagination to recall the sound of childish giggles and taunts shouted in Irish, as if it were their own secret language.

  He and his sisters had grown up learning their native language in schools alongside English, but his grandparents had been educated in a time when teaching the old tongue was still forbidden and his parents in a time when using it was seen as backward. So for the five Drummond siblings, Irish really had seemed like a private code no one else could crack.

  Drum had been back a few times over the years, usually on quick passes by when he took rambling walks during his visits home. He had seen the evidence of time marching on. The walls stood less tall than he remembered, partly because he had grown, and partly as they continued to disintegrate under the fingers of the wet and windy Irish weather. The space seemed less vast, as well. What had felt cavernous to a child now seemed no larger than half of the front room at the Bones.

  Ash paced around him, the soles of her boots crunching against the floor, whose cobbles had long since disappeared beneath a layer of crushed rock and spreading moss. She frowned as she examined the walls, from the crumbling remains of a demolished hearth to the large hole where a narrow arrow slit had grown through age or violence into a gap through which the two of them could have passed abreast.

  She looked at Drum. “There is nothing here.”

  “I told you that before we left Dublin. It’s an empty ruin. What did you expect?”

  “Something more than this.” She threw her hands into the air and growled. Not simply a growllike sound of frustration, but an actual growl. If the last Irish wolf had not been killed before the turn of the nineteenth century, he would have checked over his shoulder to see if one lurked in the shadows. “Why would your magic have shown you this place when you attempted to locate my Warden if it offered no evidence of his existence?”

  “If you’ll recall, I pointed out the lack of a relationship between an unknown person and a familiar place. Also before we left Dublin.”

  Okay, Drum acknowledged to himself. That may have been a little snippy. But between the frustration of finding himself in a situation so far out of the realm of normal that it featured magic and gargoyles, and the torment of the inexplicable arousal he experienced just from looking at the gargoyle standing next to him, his temper was what you might call slightly frayed.

  It didn’t help when a sudden tremor that made those of the night before seem like a case of hiccups rattled the earth beneath his feet and tossed him right on his arse. It felt the same as before, as if someone had just shaken out the ground as if it were a giant rug, only Drum was standing on it when those cosmic wrists gave their powerful flick.

  At least this time he wasn’t the only one to go flying. Ash landed beside him with a thump and a curse in what he thought might be Latin. “No force of nature has caused these earthquakes,” she hissed.

  “I told you,” he said, gasping a little to regain his breath. “Ireland doesn’t have earthquakes, not ones we can feel.”

  “You felt that one.”

  “I did.”

  He also felt his stomach drop when he heard a sudden crack of stone, louder than the blast from a cannon, ring out in the ruined tower around them. Adrenaline rushed through him as instinct had him throwing himself—literally—at the woman he’d been lusting after since midnight. He wasn’t making a pass, though; he was reflexively and idiotically attempting to shield a being made of stone from being crushed beneath the rocks falling from the tower walls. The structure was coming down on top of them. That was where the noise had come from, and to his surprise Drum discovered in himself a willingness to die in order to protect a woman he barely knew.

  Who would have thought?

  Only he didn’t die, and the stones never fell. Instead of doom falling from overhead, it approached from below. The ground at the center of the tower’s interior split open, a giant seam appearing in the mossy rubble. The edges spread apart like a great, yawning maw and exposed the darkness beneath.

  At least the sight gave them some warning of the next tremor. Fat lot of good it did them. The motion sent them rolling toward the chasm too fast for them to scramble away. Drum felt them hit the edge, and then the sickening sensation of the earth falling away beneath him. He screamed, a small part of his mind shaking free of the terror to wonder whether or not he sounded like a little girl. Not that it would matter when he died the instant they landed.

  He felt the sting of air whip across his cheeks for a moment before the momentum of the fall jerked to a sudden stop. Beneath his frantic, clinging fingers, he felt a tingle of electricity and the shifting of cloth and flesh into something very different. As they spun through the air, Ash cast aside her human form and spread her wings in the darkness. They caught the air and arrested their drop to the center of the earth.

  At least, it looked like the center of the earth. He couldn’t say how far they had fallen, but then, the air around them was utterly black. The tear in the earth above them looked a very long way off, and the light from it didn’t filter down more than a few feet. They hadn’t reached the bottom yet, but at least they hadn’t gone splat.

  Drum bit off his cry, snapping his jaw shut with the click of teeth hitting teeth. Maybe he would survive until dinner after all. Good. That would save Ma the trouble of killing him.

  He heard the heavy beat of Ash’s wings stir the air. Moments later, he felt solid ground beneath his feet an instant before his knees gave out. He collapsed into a gasping, panting pile of spent terror and blinked up into near-total blackness. Ash touched down beside him with a quiet rustling sound. Unable to see her, he reached out a hand and fumbled around until his fingers brushed the smooth skin of her bare calf. To hell with personal boundaries. She would need that axe of hers if she wanted to make him let go.

  “Are you all right?” Her voice had taken on that growling tone again. Apparently, she appreciated being thrown into the bowels of the earth as little as he did.

  “I’m alive, and I don’t think I broke any bones, but that doesn’t make me any closer to all right than Dublin is to Timbuktu.” Drum levered himself into a seated position but kept his fingers wrapped around her leg. “How the bloody everlasting hell did that just happen?”

  “As I told you and your sister last night, this must be the work of the nocturnis. I can feel the earth objecting to their defiling touch.”

  “Brilliant. But
now that I think on it, I suppose the more relevant question would be, ‘How the bloody everlasting hell are we going to get out of here?’ Any ideas?”

  As he spoke, Drum used his free hand to fumble in the pocket of his jeans for his key fob. Since buying the pub almost five years ago (with a great deal of help from his family), he had taken to working some very late nights. It hadn’t been long before he realized that bumbling around in the dark only led to frustration, curses, and large amounts of wasted time. He had quickly begun to carry a small but powerful LED flashlight on a ring along with his keys. He located it and pressed the button just in time to intercept Ash’s expression of disbelief at his ignorance.

  In the circle of bright light, he saw her point a finger behind her own shoulder. At her wings. “The same way we avoided a most unfortunate landing. But first, I must look around.”

  “What? Down here? Is this Warden fellow of yours some sort of cave troll?”

  She turned away from the beam of his flashlight and peered into the darkness. “Do not be foolish. The last troll on this plane went extinct centuries ago.”

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Drum mumbled, releasing his grip on her calf as she stepped away. He pushed himself to his feet and swept the light in a circle around them.

  If he hadn’t remembered—in vivid detail—how he and Ash had landed in their present circumstances, he might have thought they had simply walked into a natural cavern. He could see the walls of stone to the right and slightly ahead of them, as well as those curving around behind on the same side. To the left, however, the flashlight’s beam petered out into the thick, inky shadows.