The Wish Club

by Stella Cameron

  BOOKS BY STELLA CAMERON

  Only By Your Touch

  His Magic Touch

  Fascination

  Charmed

  Bride

  Beloved

  Breathless

  Pure Delights

  Sheer Pleasures

  True Bliss

  Dear Stranger

  Wait For Me

  The Wish Club

  Stella Cameron

  THE WISH CLUB. Copyright © 1998 by Stella Cameron. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  For information address Warner Books, Hachette Book Group, 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017.

  A Time Warner Company

  ISBN: 978-0-7595-2201-5

  A mass market edition of this book was published in 1998 by Warner Books.

  The “Warner Books” name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  First eBook Edition: January 2001

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  For Jerry, Matthew, Clement, Claire, Kirsten, and Bryan.

  You remind me that life is here, and now, and full of joy.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  Scotland, Spring 1834. On KirkcSaldy land.

  Max was the only name he knew was truly his. Just Max. MNothing more. He’d become Max Rossmara because a good man had rescued a desperate boy destined for a London workhouse, or worse, and given him a family name to call his own. He was nobody, not really, yet he’d been made part of a great family tradition, and he was expected to bear its standard high.

  Did he really want to call that standard his own?

  If he took it up with his entire heart and bore it with the weight of all it meant, might he pay for the shelter of its privilege with his soul?

  Yes.

  Would he do so anyway?

  Answering yes again would likely cost him what he loved most.

  He scanned the wild countryside he’d come to love so well. Overshadowing the surrounding landscape, Castle Kirkcaldy rose atop its mound, a massive, many-towered, and castellated bastion, harsh against a crystal blue spring sky.

  Presently the home of his father’s older brother, Arran, Marquess of Stonehaven, Kirkcaldy had been held by the noble family of Rossmara for generations.

  And Max, the boy who had once picked pockets in London’s Covent Garden, had been given the right to move about that castle with as much freedom as if he had been born there.

  In its sharp, gorse-scented snap, the air bore the memory of winter. The breeze tossed his hair and stung his eyes. He turned his back on Kirkcaldy’s hill to regard instead the simple croft where Robert and Gael Mercer lived with their children, Kirsty and Niall. She was inside—Kirsty was inside. He knew because he always knew when she was near. And she would feel his presence soon enough, if she hadn’t already.

  Robert Mercer was also near, watching from the chicken coop, while pretending not to watch, and worrying about his beloved daughter and what he perceived as the danger of her being hurt by a man above her station.

  Max could never hurt his sweet Kirsty, not if there was a choice. And the choice was his unless he allowed that choice to be taken from him.

  His boots making no sound, he entered the croft.

  The flood of feeling surging into every part of him grew stronger each time he saw her, and he was not fool enough to pretend that those feelings were entirely of the higher nature he’d have sworn to as a boy.

  The boy had become a man.

  With her back to him, Kirsty bent over the table in what served as the Mercers’ rude kitchen. She hummed and plunged her hands into a bowl of water.

  Max walked softly across the earthen floor of the croft until he stood behind her.

  Sunlight through the open door made a halo of the fair hair she wore in long braids pinned on top of her head. Curls sprang at the nape of her thin neck. The soft, vulnerable skin there brought Max another rush of emotion, and need.

  The stuff of her blue-and-white-checked dress was cheap, but on Kirsty it looked fresh and pretty. Slightly made, she was neither tall nor short, and although she didn’t have her mother’s red-gold hair, there was much about Kirsty that reflected her pretty, fragile mother’s aura of sensitive inner strength.

  He could not give her up.

  Max stopped. He couldn’t loosen the fists he’d made, or fight down the swell of tenderness that mixed with anger in his breast.

  “Master Max,” Robert Mercer had said not ten minutes earlier, doffing his battered woolen bonnet and winding it in work-scarred hands. “It’s no’ my place t’say as much, but ye’d be doin’ me a favor if ye left my lassie alone the now. Ye’re no’ a laddie anymore, a laddie who wants t’play bairns’ games. Ye’re a gentleman. A gentleman, and kin t’the lairds o’this great estate. My lassie’s—my lassie’s no’for the likes o’ ye.”

  What Robert Mercer had meant was that he feared Max would use his daughter as other men of means sometimes used humble young females. He also meant he’d guessed that a childhood friendship had grown into something more, something so much more, and that he didn’t approve any more than Max’s own father would approve. Well, what he and Kirsty shared was more than a childhood friendship, but less than Max longed for it to be.

  A gentleman? He was a bastard. He was Struan Rossmara, Viscount Hunsingore’s adopted son.

  “I feel ye sneakin’, Max Rossmara,” Kirsty said without looking at him. “And I feel ye standin’ there, starin’ at me.”

  Of course she did. They had often confided how they felt close even when they were actually far apart. He hadn’t told Kirsty how he sometimes reached for her in the night, and awoke expecting to find her in his arms.

  “Ye’re troubled.” She held her soapy hands out of the water and twisted to see him.

  He smiled, easy enough to do when he looked into her startlingly blue eyes. “Not a bit of it, Miss Mercer. Not troubled at all. Only puzzled. Why would a sensible girl of sixteen be playing with a bowl of water for no reason at all?”

  She grew a little pink and used a forearm to push strands of hair away from her face. “There’s a reason for everythin’, Mr. Rossmara. Why, if ye’d eyes t’see, ye’d know I was about an important creation.”

  Her voice, a trifle husky, sounded as if laughter couldn’t be far away. “I would, would I?” he said, going to her side and bending low over the water. “Are there kelpies in there? Are you bathing kelpies?”

  “Noo,” she told him, giggling. “I’m makin’ bubbles. An’ dinna laugh, or ye’ll have me cryin’.”

  Max straightened slowly and studied her face. Intelligence shone there, and how well he knew it. He was the older by years, yet she’d badgered him to teach h
er to read well, to learn her numbers, to study whatever he studied— and between the two of them she’d often been the quicker to comprehend. She’d attended the village school but never been satisfied with what little there was to be learned there.

  He had never kissed her. He’d wanted to often enough, but her innocence and her trust in him gave him the strength to resist—so far. Would they never kiss? Never know even that small intimacy?

  “Whist?” she said, frowning a little. “Ye’re thinkin’ if ye’ll laugh at me?”

  He inclined his head and allowed himself the pleasure of staring at each of her features. “I’ll never laugh at you,” he said. He looked at her mouth and knew he must not kiss her, for if he did he’d surely lose all power to make the decisions, take the actions he must pursue for both of them.

  Her gaze didn’t waver from his, but she lifted her right hand, the tips of her thumb and first finger touching, and blew softly until a bubble trembled between them. Sunlight stroked its rainbow colors.

  Her generous mouth remained pushed out in a soft, “ooh.”

  He felt his own lips part.

  “Make a wish,” she whispered. “Go on, Max, make a wish and blow t’bubble away.”

  “A wish?”

  “Aye. We should always have somethin’ t’wish for. Haste ye, before it pops.”

  He closed his eyes and blew, and felt minute droplets scatter his face.

  “What did ye wish for?”

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to tell.”

  Her smile wobbled a little. “Mayhap it’d be all right for the two o’ us t’know? If we kept t’secret between us, d’ye think?”

  He thought that being twenty-two and in love with sixteen-year-old Kirsty was the sweetest, yet the most painful thing in the world. “I think it would be all right.”

  “Tell me, then.” The top of her head reached his chin. She’d inherited her mother’s light skin and freckles. The end of her nose tipped up just a little. “Tell me,” she begged.

  “I wished for time to stand still. Right now. I wished to be standing here with you—looking at you—forever.”

  Her smile fled, and her throat jerked as she swallowed. “I see.”

  She knew.

  “Ye’ve come t’say ye’re leavin’ again.”

  “For a few months. My father and Uncle Arran want me to study crop rotation on the Yorkshire properties. The yields are higher there, and we want to improve them here.”

  “Yes.” Nodding, she bowed until he couldn’t see her face anymore.

  He ought to say something about it being time for them to see less of each other, about how she should think about looking for a husband, but he said, “You’ll read those books I brought for you? So that we can talk about them when I get back?” And he thought he would die if he ever had to see her with another man and know that man was her husband.

  “I’ll read them,” she said.

  He heard tears in her voice now, and said, “Will you make a wish before I go?”

  Silently she dipped her hand into the water again, swished it around, and raised her joined finger and thumb to blow. Then she closed her eyes tightly, and he saw her lips move.

  The bubble separated from her fingers and floated toward the roof.

  “And what did you wish for, Kirsty?”

  Her arms fell to her sides. She pressed her lips tightly together and stood quite still. Her eyes glittered.

  “Oh, Kirsty.” Not caring who might come, who might see— or that he must find a way to let her go—Max enfolded her in his arms and held her close. “My Kirsty. Please don’t cry.”

  She shuddered, but slowly returned his hug. “I wished for t’same as ye. I want too t’stay here like this. I never want it t’end.”

  “Sounds as if we’ve one mind, then,” he told her. “We ought to form a club for people who think alike.”

  “Aye, a club o’ two.” She nudged her sharp chin into his chest. “A club for wishin’.”

  His smile, the smile she couldn’t see, was bitter. A man and a girl could have their wishes, couldn’t they? At least they could keep those.

  Max said, “A wish club.”

  Chapter One

  Scotland, Summer, 1842.

  What manner of man conspired to be daily in the company of a woman he wanted, but should not, could not, would not have?

  Max Rossmara. He was just such a man—a man who loved without hope, had loved without hope for more than eight years.

  And the damnable part of it all was that, although she’d learned to guard her feelings well, he was almost certain she loved him, too.

  Kirkcaldy lands were beautiful in summer. He’d all but forgotten just how beautiful. Or perhaps, since he’d been denied Kirsty’s company, he’d stopped seeing them as they were. He noticed them again now, now as he waited to see her. Beyond the windows of his spacious study in the castle’s Eve Tower, the undulating hills were soft green-gold, dusted with wildflowers, the precise fields separated by hedgerows where bright vines entwined with scrubby bushes. He didn’t have to walk through the grass to smell its warm fragrance, or lift his face to the sky to feel the late-afternoon sun’s warmth. He had only to remember walking just so, and lifting his face just so, as he had with Kirsty when they’d wandered those hills too long ago—yet not so long that the poignant memories failed to stab at his heart.

  In the name of opportunity—hers—he would try to bring Kirsty Mercer here, to his very side, to install her at Kirkcaldy permanently. That was his motive, wasn’t it? To better Kirsty Mercer’s position by exposing her to a situation where she might once more use her excellent mind? It had to be the motive. After all, there could be no benefit to himself.

  She would be here, in this study, every day, in this study and close to him rather than engaged as an underling to the young Stonehavens’ tutor.

  She would sleep within the castle walls at night, rather than trudge home to sleep beneath her father’s poor roof.

  And she would advance herself considerably.

  These were chances she would be foolish to refuse. Kirsty wouldn’t refuse them because she was levelheaded and would see how . . .

  Damn it all, but he could at least be honest within the secrecy of his own conscience, couldn’t he? Hah, but the question of how honest he could be with himself was a thorny one, and no doubt one that festered at the root of all that plagued him in the dark hours of his too-private nights.

  He knew what was said of him, how there were those who feared his temper and avoided him. And he knew his own family worried about him, but at least they had the wit to leave him be when he was unfit company. A man had a right to his anger, and the manner in which he dealt with that anger.

  Even in summer the rooms within the castle were cold. A fire crackled in the fireplace. Max vaguely acknowledged the sound but found no comfort in it.

  The anger was evil, and he knew as much. It had not always been so, this blackness that descended. Rage. That was the name of his affliction. He raged within himself, and, on blessedly rare occasions, without. That was when he knew he must keep his own company.

  Anger was his affliction. Deprivation had infected him with such an ill, being deprived of the love of the only woman he would ever truly desire.

  Forgetting her had proven impossible. Years of following his father’s instructions to avoid her had only led him to malignant desperation. If he could do nothing more than look upon her as often as he might, then so be it. That much he would grab for a salve to his pathetic soul, the soul he had not the courage to heed because to do so could mean severance from everything else that was part of the life that had become his.

  A thousand glimpses of her had not helped put her from his mind. True, she was almost always at some distance and engrossed in her work. But there had been those moments when their eyes had met. No, his feelings for her had not dimmed. In those minute visual exchanges there were fleeting messages which burned inside him: Only think of what migh
t have been. Think of what we have lost. I hold your heart within me, Kirsty. And in her eyes he imagined he read: You turned away from what we had. You promised you would come for me, but when you came, you ignored me. Now we must be as strangers.

  At this very moment she was on her way to see him. Timing the delivery of his message with care, he’d made sure she would be preparing to depart the castle for the day when she received his summons. Currently the tutor and her pupils were away, would be away for some weeks, and Kirsty would be filling her days with mending and other tasks set by for such times. With the exception of his uncle, Arran, the family was visiting relations in Cornwall. They’d gone together with Max’s own parents and his brother and sister by adoption. His father, Struan, would make sure everyone was settled at Franchot Castle, home of their old friends, the Duke and Duchess of Franchot; then he would also return to Kirkcaldy, where he and Max’s mother made their home a few miles from the castle, in the extraordinary, whimsical building that had once been the hunting lodge. Arran would go to Cornwall to bring the women and children back. Max was to have made the journey south with the rest but had excused himself, pleading the need to tend to pressing estate matters.

  He’d lied.

  Arran knew as much, and Max suspected his father had guessed, too. The onus of proving there was nothing for anyone to fear from his plan for Kirsty would be on his own head. Father thought her an exemplary young woman—as long as she lived within her station. Arran was very fond of the Mercers, but Max didn’t know how his uncle viewed any prospect of a friendship between his nephew and a crofter’s daughter.

  Shaking his head, resting an elbow on a high windowsill and massaging the back of his neck, Max congratulated himself on the ability to laugh at himself, even if that laugh was derisive. The truth was that he’d finally given in to his own weakness. The rest of the truth, that which he would continue to fight, was that he needed more from Kirsty Mercer than to look at her, to hear her voice, perhaps to feel the accidental brush of her hand against his.

  The devil take him, for he was a bounder.