Blue Moon Enchantment (Once In A Blue Moon Series)

by Jeanne Van Arsdall

  Blue Moon Enchantment

  Book Two of the Once In

  a Blue Moon Series

  Highland Press Publishing

  Florida

  Blue Moon Enchantment

  An Original Anthology Publication of

  Highland Press Publishing 2006

  Cover copyright © 2006 Deborah MacGillivray

  Each story copyrighted to the individual author

  All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names, save actual historical figures. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

  Print ISBN: 0-9746249-7-7

  Highland Press Publishing

  A Wee Dram Book

  Our Authors

  Gerri Bowen

  Ann Marie Bradley

  Leanne Burroughs

  Candace Gold

  Victoria Houseman

  Patty Howell

  Jill and Julia

  Deborah MacGillivray

  Michelle Scaplen

  Dawn Thompson

  Jeanne Van Arsdall

  Contents

  Under the Faery Blue Moon……Dawn Thompson

  The Anti-Kissing League……….Leanne Burroughs

  Leap of Faith……………………Jill and Julia

  The Star Traveler……………….Victoria Houseman

  A Blue Vacation…………..……Michelle Scaplen

  Blue Moon Magic………………Ann Marie Bradley

  Muses in the Moonlight.………..Patty Howell

  Blue Moon Reunion…………….Gerri Bowen

  A Wish Times Three..…………..Jeanne Van Arsdall

  Beneath the Velvet Blue Moon…Candace Gold

  Devil in Spurs……………………Deborah MacGillivray

  Under a Faery Blue Moon

  Dawn Thompson

  Tatiana traveled the length of the portal between the physical plane and the land of the fey. She had paced there beside the abyss so long she’d worn a trench in the sweet myrtle, and totally trampled the meadowsweet to pollen spores. What was keeping Puck and Oberon? They should have returned long ago. It could only mean trouble. It always meant trouble when those two went off together.

  She should have gone with them, of course. But there were good reasons why she hadn’t. For one thing, somebody had to keep an eye upon the forest. The mist faeries, dryads, red-caps, and tree spirits were the worst to control under a normal full moon, they were impossible when the blue moon wove its magic. For another thing, Oberon always behaved like a lovesick satyr under a blue moon—or any other kind of moon, for that matter. She was looking forward to a breather, until he took Robin Goodfellow, the inimitable Puck, along. That alone flagged danger. All they had to do was unite two soulmates, just as they had hundreds of times. Now they were behindhand. It did not bode well.

  Should she go, or should she stay? Should she tell the others she was leaving or simply slip away letting them think she was hiding somewhere watching them? It was hard work being Queen of the Faeries, without all this drama. There was nothing for it. She would definitely go, and she would most definitely slip away. To announce her departure for however a brief length of time would only give the forest folk license to run amok engaging in all manner of mischief. That decided, she cast a quick glance over her shoulder, took a deep breath, and stepped into the abyss that folded a pleat in time to align the parallel worlds for thru traffic.

  Tatiana appeared in the place Puck and Oberon had come to ground, the sculptured gardens of the Dowager Lady Raintree’s Mayfair townhouse. Although there were plenty of people milling about, none could see her. Humans couldn’t see the fey, unless, of course the fey wanted them to. These humans seemed drunk on something; men and women alike in their cups. While that would not have been amiss at a Blue Moon Ball, their behavior under the influence was quite shocking. Distinguished gentlemen were chasing chambermaids. Countesses and ladies young and old, were reveling with counts and earls and dukes whom Tatiana surmised were not their spouses. With unabashed abandon, the entire congregation—the Dowager Lady Raintree included—ran helter-skelter over the property rooting out the rhododendrons, and trampling primrose beds. It was passing strange, reminding Tatiana of the faery ring revels at home. The handiwork of Puck and Oberon, she had no doubt. She craned her neck in search of the mischievous pair, but there was no sign of them. Had they caused this chaos and fled? What other explanation could there be? She hadn’t come a minute too soon.

  Tatiana peeked in through the ballroom terrace doors. Aside from a rotund reveler, who had hefted the punchbowl and was draining it to the dregs, the room seemed empty, everyone having fled to the garden for their debauch pursuits. All except one, Tatiana discovered at a second glance, a pretty young thing with a cap of strawberry-blonde curls, hunched over hugging her knees on the second step of the sweeping ballroom staircase. She couldn’t see the girl’s face, but she appeared to be crying by the way her shoulders were shaking.

  Across the way, the clang of the silver punch bowl hitting the banquet table turned Tatiana’s head in time to see the fat man stagger out onto the terrace and reel off into the crowd of milling revelers. Padding toward the discarded bowl, for she was barefoot, Tatiana bent down and sniffed it. It couldn’t be! But it was, she took a drop on her finger and tasted it...heart’s ease!

  Tatiana slapped the skirt of her gossamer spider silk gown with hands balled into fists. “Wild pansy in the claret cup and the humans have drunk from it!” she seethed under her breath, although no one would hear. Faery speech passed as naught but the sighing of the wind to mortal ears. “I knew it! What have those two halfwits done?”

  The ideal thing would be to eavesdrop on a conversation amongst humans in order to get the drift of the situation. The girl in tears had been abandoned, and one glance toward the ninnyhammers—a literal blur of guests and servants alike—cavorting in the garden scotched that possibility also. Not one of them was sober, if that was the correct word for it. Tatiana only hoped Puck and Oberon had concocted a mild dose. Whatever possessed them to put the heart’s ease nectar in the punch in the first place, she couldn’t imagine. A scant drop in the eyes of the subject was enough to make a body fall hopelessly in love with the first person they sighted. There was no need to infect the whole population. But then, people hardly slept at a ball.

  “Oh, pother!” she cried. “There is no sense to be made of it. The damage is done, and it’s up to me to undo it...again!”

  Floating to the crying girl’s side, Tatiana hesitated. It wasn’t usual for faeries, no matter the species, to show themselves in their faery form to mortals; it simply wasn’t done. Spinning in place like a prima ballerina, she emerged in the form she always took when dealing directly with humans and tapped the girl on the shoulder.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she said.

  The girl looked up and took her measure. A pretty little thing if her eyes weren’t nearly swollen shut from crying. They were blue, when they weren’t red, Tatiana surmised, the most striking feature in a very pleasant countenance.

  “Everything’s ruined,” the girl wailed. “My aunt brought me here to introduce me to the Dowager Lady Raintree’s grandson, Viscount Barnaby Critchton, and now look!” She waved her hand toward the gardens.

  “Umm,” Tatiana hum
med. Were there naught but desperate spinsters at the Blue Moon Ball? “My name is Tatiana, what are you called, child?”

  “Lady Penelope Abbot,” the girl said.

  The name didn’t ring a bell. It certainly wasn’t the young lady Puck and Oberon had come to champion. “Well, Lady Penelope, which one is your aunt?”

  “The one in bottle green, with the rose in her teeth riding on the footman’s back,” the girl wailed.

  “Oh, dear,” Tatiana said, observing the rather large woman with pendulous breasts perched precariously upon the spindly-legged servant’s shoulders. “I see what you mean... Is the viscount among those...eh out there?”

  The girl shook her head. “No, he hasn’t come down yet. Who is to introduce us now? This ball was my last hope of escaping spinsterhood. Half the ladies here are in the same situation. That is why the Dowager Lady Raintree hosts the ball each year. Now, someone will surely introduce him to another. I can’t very well introduce myself, can I?” She looked up then, her eyes flitting over Tatiana’s attire. Her jaw dropped, and she gasped. “Was this supposed to be a costume ball?” she cried.

  Tatiana glanced down at her whisper-thin frock. Syl on his throne! She’d changed incarnations so quickly she’d neglected to change her costume. Her form-fitting gossamer green gown of spider silk did little to conceal her charms. She rolled her eyes and sighed. Evoking the name of the great god Syl in vain would surely cause reprisals, but by the way things were going she was sure that had already begun.

  “Oh...no,” she gushed. “I’ve just come from another affair...a masked ball,” she said, proud of her quick thinking.

  “What are you supposed to be?” the girl asked her.

  “A faery,” Tatiana said, with not a little pride. Expanding her posture, she fluffed her long golden hair and preened before the girl.

  “Oh no,” Penelope said. “Faeries don’t look like that.”

  “They don’t? And what do they look like? Have you ever seen one?”

  “Well, no, but everyone knows faeries have wings, and wands, and...well, I can see right through that dress.” She said the last in a stage whisper. She giggled. “Why, you look more like a Whitechapel doxy in that rig than a faery.”

  Tatiana backed up apace. Astonishment ruled her posture, and she was about to defend herself when a tall, impeccably dressed gentleman outfitted in Beau Brummel black and white came jogging down the stairs tugging on his spotless white gloves.

  “It’s him!” Penelope squealed, surging to her feet.

  Tatiana stared. Never had she seen such a handsome figure of man from his dark wavy hair and smoldering blue eyes, to the tips of his fine leather dress shoes. Tight satin breeches left nothing to the imagination in the area of his well turned thighs, and the white silk hose accented perfectly formed calves. No padding needed here, or corset either, like so many of the men wore to mask their imperfections in view of the revealing fashions of the day.

  Her heart was palpitating—fairly leaping from her breast. No man—human or fey, including Oberon—had ever affected her in such a way, so totally drenched her in fire from her bare feet to the crown of cobweb silk and dew pearls upon her head. It was as if her heart beat only for him. Longing overcame her. She was ablaze with a voluptuous swell of passion for him—a man she hadn’t set eyes upon until a heartbeat ago. Madness!

  But he looked right through her and passed by as though he hadn’t even seen her standing there in her all-but-naked glory. Tatiana’s heart sank. Well, why wouldn’t he pass her by? He couldn’t see her, could he? She hadn’t made herself visible to anyone but Penelope, had she?

  The viscount gave a polite albeit banal nod in Penelope’s direction and strode to the banquet table. Tatiana followed him. What was wrong with her? She was acting like a peapod pixie foxed upon honeysuckle nectar, but she couldn’t help herself. All she could think of was tearing off that tailcoat, then the white on white brocade waistcoat, Egyptian cotton shirt, and neckcloth. She wanted him naked in her arms that very moment. Nothing else would slake her insatiable hunger for him.

  The rotund reveler earlier hadn’t drained the claret cup after all. The viscount took up the ladle, tilted the bowl, and filled a punch cup. Turning, he raised it to his lips, but hesitated, his gaze meeting Penelope’s across the way.

  “Forgive me my want of conduct. Would you like a cup, my lady?”

  “No!” Tatiana cried, bobbing up and down between them. “You don’t want to give her a cup of that!” He couldn’t hear her, of course, just as he couldn’t see her.

  Tatiana spun, and spun again in frantic circles, but nothing happened. Why couldn’t she make herself visible to him? Horrors! He lifted the cup and drank, eyes riveted to Penelope’s, and in the hazy stupor of enchantment, Tatiana knew. Heart’s ease had strange effects upon the fey; all were susceptible; the higher their rank, the more severely, and she was Queen of the Fey. She had tasted the contents of the punch bowl. The only thing needed for the spell to work was one drop! The knowledge came and went in the space of time it takes to burst a bubble.

  Viscount Barnaby Critchton, meanwhile, had eyes for no one but Lady Penelope Abbot, whose eyes were blue again and saw no one but him, although she hadn’t touched a drop of the claret cup. Arm in arm, the two waltzed out into the garden; so much for formal introductions. What would the ton say? What did it matter? Half the ton was foxed on wild pansy, and had run amok in Mayfair, of all places!

  Screaming like a banshee, Tatiana fled.

  ***

  “We’re in for it now,” Oberon said from behind the potted palm in an alcove under the staircase where he and Puck had taken refuge. “She will never forgive us for this. If you’d caught a ride on that moonbeam instead of trying to shake that dryad out of the willow in the park down the lane, we would have been home in the forest by now, and Tatiana would never have come.”

  “You didn’t have to stay with me, you know,” Puck said. “You could have climbed right up that moonbeam and accessed the portal on your own. Why didn’t you?”

  Oberon scowled, taking his gossamer redingote back from the palm frond that had snagged it. “Let go, you miscreant reject from the tropics!” he railed at the plant, as he yanked it free. “Is everything in this god-awful place hostile to the fey?”

  Puck leaked a lightheaded twitter. “You’re just miffed because that dryad wouldn’t give you a tumble,” he said, patting the palm on its highest frond, as if he was soothing a child.

  “That dryad had crossed over on the sly,” Oberon grumbled. “She had no business being here.”

  “They all do it.”

  “Yes, well, that one won’t do it again, I promise you.”

  Puck sighed. “You haven’t been any fun for eons—not since you joined with Tatiana. Monogamy is boring. That’s why you’re so sour. Perhaps you ought to drink some of that punch. Methinks a little nip of heart’s ease would do you a world of good.”

  “Never you mind about me,” Oberon snapped. “What are we going to do about Tatiana?”

  “It doesn’t bother you that she is lusting after a total stranger—a mortal stranger at that—and if she could command her powers and materialize before him she’d cock a leg over that jumped-up popinjay faster than you could say Will-o-the-wisp?”

  “That isn’t her fault, it’s your fault,” Oberon sallied. “I don’t know why I let you talk me into these escapades of yours. I do know you had better figure a way out of this one, or by Syl Almighty, you will rue the day you first laid eyes upon the King of the Fey, my goatish little meddler!”

  “Oh, pish-posh, old friend,” Puck scoffed. “Take ease. I have a plan, and you know plans are what I do best.”

  Oberon rolled his eyes. “Well, you need to be about it then,” he said, pointing. “Do you see Tatiana making a total ass of herself out there? You had best set your ‘plan’ in motion before it is too late.”

  ***

  “My lord, you are too bold,” Lady Penelope said, retrieving he
r hand from the viscount’s amorous possession. It was stinging from his kisses. What had gotten into the man? His gaze all but froze her direct coming off that staircase. What turned him so quickly, she couldn’t imagine. It quite took her breath away. And why was Tatiana bobbing about like that, waving her arms in the air. Why did he pay her no notice?

  “I am foxed by your beauty,” the viscount said, capturing her hand again. “Merely a taste of those luscious lips...”

  “Remember yourself, my lord!” Penelope cried, ranging herself out of his reach on the stone bench they occupied beside the bower. “We haven’t even been properly introduced, sir.”

  “A minor technicality,” he chortled, waving his hand toward the cavorting guests. “Even Grandmama seems to have caught blue moon madness, and she did intend to introduce us, after all...”

  “No! No kisses!” Tatiana twittered, forcing herself between them. “You’re compromised as it is. Not one of these is a fit chaperon. You’ll be ruined—you will!”

  Penelope stared at her. Why was Tatiana pawing him like that? She had twined herself around him like a climbing vine. The viscount didn’t seem to notice. How could he not? She was all over him. Why couldn’t he feel her shocking advances upon his person? It was as if she were invisible to him.

  Penelope scrunched back into the viscount’s orbit. “Stop that!” she snapped, attempting to pry the faery’s arms free. “Let go!”

  “Well now,” the viscount said, as Penelope’s arms slipped around him accidentally in her attempt to loosen Tatiana’s hold. “That is more like it!”

  Penelope let him go and shoved him away as if she’d touched live coals. “You are mistaken, my lord,” she said loftily. “You are most persuasive, but even though this lot has apparently run mad, I am still a lady. I would thank you to remember that, sir.”