When You Wish

by Jane Feather

  “Say thank you,” prompted Dare, standing by his sister’s side.

  “Thank you,” Jane echoed. Then, with much more sincerity, she threw her arms around Delilah’s neck and hugged her. “I love you, Lady Moon.”

  “I love you too, sweetie. Now, since all the presents have been opened, we—”

  “Not quite all the presents.”

  The comment came from Christian as he strode across the room. “Good afternoon, Lady Moon,” he said, bowing his head, before including the others in his greeting. “Good afternoon, everyone.” He smiled at Jane. “Happy birthday, Jane. This is for you.”

  Delilah looked on in surprise as he presented Jane with the small green bottle.

  “But it’s not wrapped,” Jane announced.

  Dare elbowed her. “Jane, don’t—”

  “It’s all right,” Christian assured him with a smile. “You see it is wrapped, Jane. The bottle is the wrapping and my gift to you is inside it.”

  Pleased with that arrangement, Jane uncorked the bottle and withdrew the scrap of leather. Dare read the words written on it to her and she wrinkled her nose in bewilderment.

  “Do you remember our conversation yesterday?” Christian asked her. When she responded with a nod, he bent and whispered in her ear so that only Jane could hear.

  Whatever he said tickled the little girl’s fancy, thought Delilah, observing Jane’s gleeful expression.

  “Truly? All six of them at once?” she asked him.

  Christian straightened and nodded. “All six. If you want it enough.”

  “I do,” Jane said. She carefully replaced the scrap of leather in the bottle and held on to it tightly. “I’m going to put it under my pillow right away, just like you said.”

  “You watch, she’ll lose it,” Dare predicted as she ran from the room, his look of superiority unique to big brothers. “Whatever it is, she’ll lose it.”

  Christian clapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, Dare. This is something that can never be lost, no more than it can be bought or sold,” he added, finding Delilah’s gaze and holding it. “It can only be found, and only then if you are willing to open your eyes and look for it.” He circled Jane’s empty chair. “A word alone with you, Lady Moon?”

  Delilah smiled.

  THE BRIGHT sunroom that overlooked the back gardens was as different from the dark, quiet office as it was from the elegant drawing room. Each of the rooms represented a different aspect of Delilah and Christian loved them all, the sophisticated noblewoman, the resourceful entrepreneur, and the girl who’d picked daisies and run barefoot through the grass with him. With all the reasons she had to mistrust him, he only hoped he could convince her of that love.

  He did not sit in one of the overstuffed chintz-covered chairs and she did not offer. It was obvious this was not the sort of conversation you conducted with your feet up.

  “On the way here,” he began, pacing back and forth among the baskets of ferns, “I thought of at least a dozen ways to say what I have to say to you. I could flatter you and try to sweep you off your feet. I could invoke the past or play the penitent lover and appeal to your soft, generous heart. Instead I’m just going to say it outright and you can deal with it as you will.”

  He stopped and faced her. “I love you, Delilah. I love you with every breath I take and with every fiber of my being. I don’t know when it started, only that it’s burning me up and that it will never, ever stop. I love you.”

  “I know,” she said.

  He drew back. “How can you know when I only realized it fully myself an hour ago?”

  “I didn’t say I’d known long,” she confessed, a smile tugging at her lips.

  “How long?”

  “Since I looked up and saw you standing in the doorway.”

  Christian ran his fingers through his hair in exasperation. “How did that prove to you that I loved you?”

  “Because you came back,” she explained, her small smile becoming a beam of satisfaction. “Even after we made love and after I hurt you and sent you away. The fact that you came back proved that I wasn’t merely a conquest or a whim or, worse, a chance to get revenge for that night in the summerhouse. It proved that you loved me enough to try again.”

  “And again and again … as many times as it takes until I get it right,” he told her in a smoky tone, pulling her into his arms and kissing her. She kissed him back with wild, indescribable sweetness and he fell a little more in love with her.

  “There is something else,” he said, drawing a steadying breath. “Something I have to ask you.”

  “All right,” she said, anticipation flaring in her green eyes. “Ask me.”

  “Delilah, will you please teach me to juggle?”

  He felt the shock that rippled through her and suppressed the urge to laugh.

  “juggle?” she echoed.

  He nodded with the utmost sincerity. “Yes. Dare told me what you said about juggling being good practice for life. I want my life to be filled with bright balls in the air … us, your work, my responsibilities and, eventually, a few children of our own.”

  “That’s a lot of balls, Blackmoor.”

  “Not too many for four hands—and two hearts—to handle, do you think?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Not too many.”

  “Are you willing to try?”

  “Yes,” she said, grinning. “Again and again and again, until we get it right.”

  This time she initiated the kiss, winding her arms around his neck and tugging his head down, running her tongue over his lips and in-between. Christian’s heart slammed against his ribs and the blood roared in his ears. He still had no trouble hearing the sunroom door being slammed off its hinges.

  With Delilah arching against him, he lifted his head to see Roger bearing down on them. It looked, Christian observed, as if he hadn’t combed his hair since the last time they met.

  “Brace yourself, sweetheart,” he murmured to Delilah, who had stiffened in his arms. “Afternoon, Rog.”

  “So, it’s true,” Roger shouted, his voice like thunder in the glass-walled room. “I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes. I warned you once before to stay away from my sister, Blackmoor. This time you won’t walk away from your obligation.”

  “Believe me, Roger, walking away is the last thing on my mind.”

  “By God, you’ll marry her.”

  “I will. Today, if possible.”

  His conciliation was lost on Roger, who was shaking with anger. He turned to his sister. “And you, you’ll marry this time and I won’t hear anything else.”

  “I will,” said Delilah, smiling happily.

  Roger’s red face puckered in confusion. “You mean you’re willing to marry him?”

  “Yes. Today, if possible.”

  That seemed to drain all the anger from her brother. His chest flattened and his shoulders sagged. “Well then,” he muttered, looking from one of them to the other. “Well and good. All I can say is you deserve each other.”

  They managed to hold their laughter until Roger had stalked from the room, kicking the broken door on his way past. The way, Christian surmised, the man would dearly like to be kicking his future brother-in-law.

  He took Delilah’s hands in his. “I had hoped to imbue the request with a bit more romance than Roger managed, but it’s done now. Did you mean it, Delilah, will you marry me?”

  “Yes, Christian, I will marry you. I love you. Part of me always has. All of me always will.”

  Delilah felt giddy, as if it were champagne bubbling in her veins, as he claimed her mouth with a kiss that was slow and deep. At the same time she felt safer than she had in a long time, believing in Christian, and in the power of love.

  When he lifted his head, she ran her hands over his chest, aware of his racing heart. She laughed softly.

  “What’s so funny?” he murmured, his lips in her hair.

  “I was just wondering if marrying you wil
l make me Lady Blackmoor Devil?”

  “A singular title, to be sure,” he responded dryly. “If it pleases you, it is yours, my love, along with everything else that is mine to give. I only know what this makes me—the luckiest man alive.”

  PATRICIA COUGHLIN

  PATRICIA COUGHLIN is the award-winning author of over twenty-five novels. Her first historical romance. Lord Savage, was chosen by Publishers Weekly as a Notable Book of 1996 and was praised by Romantic Times as “an utterly engrossing, fast-paced debut historical romance by a skilled storyteller.”

  For Kathleen Peterson Blakslee

  Miss you, Mom

  Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

  —OVID

  CHAPTER ONE

  London, 1818

  IT BEGAN THE afternoon she went with the Justice Society (Or Club) to Human Bone Creek to fish and plan a kidnapping. In fact, it began while the Society members were arguing about whether or not they ought to call it a kidnapping.

  As a group, they were the essence of democracy. They argued constantly.

  Lucy had settled on the gently humped grass bank, propped her back against the ragged bark of a crack willow tree, and cast a baited line into the brook rilling sweetly through a cluster of warm, flat stones. When the sun’s dipping angle cast a glare into her eyes, Elf had wordlessly handed her his dusty tricorne, which she pulled over her eyes. She was this far from falling asleep.

  She had been meeting here with the others for ten years, since the summer she’d turned seven when the group of them had met one another at a street riot.

  Just to her left, juggling seashells and oranges, Elf was saying, “You can’t introduce a Subsidiary Motion to change the wording from ‘kidnapping Lord Kendal’ to ‘taking action to bring Lord Kendal to a sense of his responsibilities.’ Once a Principal Question has been acted on, you can’t bring it up again in the same session unless you enter a Motion to Reconsider. And once you’ve acted on a Motion to Reconsider, you can’t renew the question unless the question was amended when it was previously reconsidered.”

  Although George Pennington, fifth earl of Rydal (currently seated with his thin, hairy legs sunk to the knees in the muddy creek bed), was not, nor ever would be, the parliamentarian that Elf was, he said, “All right, I make a Motion to Rescind the original motion.”

  Charlotte regarded him with fond exasperation. “George, you can’t introduce a Motion to Rescind because I’ve already made a Motion to Adjourn and an unamended Motion to Adjourn takes precedence over all other motions.”

  “Except a motion to fix the time to which to adjourn,” Elf amended.

  Which was not very helpful, as it turned out, because it prompted George to say, “I make a motion that when the assembly adjourns, it adjourns to meet again immediately after the time of adjournment.”

  In the gloomy silence that followed this pronouncement, Lucy could hear a linnet sing on a branch far above her head. Water trickled in the brook. A breeze feathered the willow catkins. A cloud moved and she felt sunlight spatter heat through the leaf dapples, warming her legs and stomach.

  London, dirty, noisy London, was just beyond the park gates but it seemed mute and distant. And she thought, I want my life to stay like this forever. There’s nothing that could make me want to grow up to be a woman. A fleeting vision of Henry Lamb’s astonishing smile—never, of course, directed at her—appeared in her mind, and was swiftly, firmly banished.

  Rupa, the last of their band, said, “Fast, vee motta smell see eff vee goda nuf boats to add yarn.” Because everyone in the Society had spent years learning to understand her Gypsy accent, they knew what she had said was, in fact, “First we might as well see if we’ve got enough votes to adjourn.”

  The earl gave a snort of cheerful contempt. “You know you don’t have the votes to adjourn. Lucy’s your swing vote and she never wants to adjourn until she catches some verminous minnow to make into fish-head soup.”

  An orange-scented breeze fanned Lucy’s cheeks. Elf had tipped a corner of the tricorne to peer down at her. He said, “How about it, Luce? D’you want to adjourn?”

  Elf had turned out to be the best-looking of them. Even with the eye patch. You wouldn’t have guessed it, given the nastiness of his childhood. He had a good smile with a tease to it, clean chestnut hair worn too long for fashion, graceful features, and quick hands. He was a cheapjack’s son who looked like an aristocrat while George, born into the peerage, looked like—well, like sort of a clerk.

  The earl had been a narrow, blond, hawk-nosed boy and nothing about that had changed as he grew except that his hair had darkened in color and the whole package had gotten more stretched out. George had the look of a scholar and the soul of a scamp. Which, all his life, had proved handy.

  Charlotte, a delicate, tidy brunette, was peering down through her spectacles at the record book of Minutes, spread open on her lap, no doubt sorting through the maze of resolutions, motions, amendments, reports, points of order, and votes produced in today’s meeting.

  Rupa had seized the pause to intercept one of Elf’s oranges, which she was eating unpeeled. Orange juice trailed down her chin and into her handsome bodice. George was staring at this.

  Charlotte looked up. “You going to vote, Luce, or lay there like a boiled kidney?”

  “She’s making up her mind,” Elf said, “whether she’d get more satisfaction from confounding George’s prediction or from curried fish soup.”

  Rupa said something, and Lucy no sooner figured out that it was, “If it’s her pride or her fish, know you she’ll want her fish. I’ll put a little magic in her bait so she’ll catch a fish so big it’ll take four people to carry it home. Then we can adjourn,” when Lucy felt a tug on her fishing rod.

  She tightened her hand on it.

  The rod tugged so hard it half dislocated her shoulder.

  Holding tightly, her heart pounding like a war drum, she scrambled to her knees.

  Before she had time to analyze what was happening, she was yanked forward, landed hard on her elbows, and lay there, winded, prone, astonished, with a tree root gouged in her ribs and a mouthful of turf. Spitting grass, she gasped, “It’s a big one, all right!”

  So big it required the joint effort of all five of them to subdue and land him. So big they had to haul him to her cottage slung in Rupa’s shawl. The fish was longer than the shawl. The shawl was two meters long.

  Seven cats followed them home and sat, yowling, outside the cottage door until Lucy’s tomcat, Roger, leaped from the parlor window to claw the males, molest the females, and spray scent marker wildly across the green-painted cottage door.

  CHAPTER TWO

  THEIR KITCHEN WAS a modest one, cluttered with baskets of onions, grain, and potatoes, shelves of preserves, the low ceiling strung with rows of dried garden herbs that made gentle tapping sounds in the window breeze. Once they’d got into the kitchen and deposited the fish on her mother’s worktable, they were cramped in like nestlings, and breathless, having argued their way back to the cottage without benefit of parliamentary rules, after their hasty adjournment.

  Rupa puffed out what everyone was able to translate as, “What do you think? This is marvelous! Marvelous! A magic fish! You know what we’ve got here?”

  “A sturgeon. And a poached one at that.” George had been inspecting the fish’s snout and head. “This is a royal fish. If you catch it, the law is you have to turn it over to the Crown. You know, the king shall have the wreck of the sea throughout the realm, whales and great sturgeons.”

  “The king can have whatever wrecks of the sea he wants,” Lucy said. “But I couldn’t drag this thing another step and I’m certainly not going to lug it to the palace. If the king wants some, he can come to supper. Elf, can you reach my whetstone?”

  Simultaneously, Rupa was saying, “No sturgeon! No! Magic fish!” and George was saying, “They swim from the North Sea into fresh water to breed and tha
t’s why sometimes one finds them in the Trent.”

  “George, Lucy didn’t find this fish in the Trent. She found it in a brook! This is magic!” Rupa gingerly plucked at the tail fin. “Inside, Lucy’s gonna find a magic gift, just for her!.”

  “Inside,” Charlotte said firmly, “what she’s going to find are intestines.”

  Inside, there was a vilely soiled glass bottle with a silver ornament.

  “Holy Mother,” Rupa said, “this is a spell bottle. A real spell bottle. Look at this. Lucy, you can make a wish on this! A real magic wish.”

  Lucy’s mother, who had merely glanced up from her strawberry bed with friendly disinterest as they’d dragged an enormous fish into her kitchen, took this unfortunate moment to stick her head in the diamond-paned window. “I see the fishing was successful.”

  “A big success,” said Rupa. “And inside there’s a spell bottle that will give Lucy her one true wish.”

  Lucy’s mother frowned. “Oh, no. No wishing. Certainly not. What we need from God, we pray for. What are wishes but desires we are too ashamed to ask of God! No good can come of a wish.” Then, smiling all around, “So, who’s staying for dinner?”

  RUPA WASHED the bottle, studied it narrowly, and tucked it on the sash bar of the window, where it glowed brightly in the afternoon sunlight, ignored until Lucy’s mother decided it would be the perfect vessel to root an ivy cutting.

  Elf, put to the task of prying off the stopper, said, “Will you look at this! There’s some sort of note in here.”

  “Let’s have it out, then.” George arrived quickly at his side. “A message in a bottle! It could be anything!”

  Lucy’s mother offered dryly, “A foot-powder advertisement, for example.”

  George was not easy to dampen. “It could be from a mariner. A shipwrecked mariner!”

  “Yes, indeed.” Charlotte didn’t look up from the minutes she was recopying. “A fleet might have been dashed to shreds on the pebbles farther up the creek and its company marooned, say, in Hyde Park.”