"And that's their special angel, forever and ever," she went on, pressing her cheek to Morgana's belly in the hope that she could hear something from inside. "If you turn around really quick, you maybe could get just a tiny glimpse of your angel. I try sometimes, but I'm not fast enough." She peered up at Morgana. "Angels are shy, you know."
"So I've heard."
"I'm not." She pressed a kiss to Morgana's belly before she danced away. "There's not a shy bone in my body. That's what Grandma Sawyer always says."
"An observant woman, Grandma Sawyer," Ana commented while wrestling Daisy into her arms to prevent her from disturbing Quigley's afternoon nap.
Both women enjoyed the energetic company as they walked among the flowers-or rather as they walked and Jessie skipped, hopped, ran and tumbled.
Jessie reached for Ana's hand as they started toward the front of the house and Morgana's car. "I don't have any cousins. Is it nice?"
"Yes, it's very nice. Morgana and Sebastian and I practically grew up together, kind of like brothers and sisters do."
"I know how to get brothers and sisters, 'cause my daddy told me. How do you get cousins?"
"Well, if your mother or father have brothers or sisters, and they have children, those children are your cousins."
Jessie digested this information with a frown of concentration. "Which are you?"
"It's complicated," Morgana said with a laugh, opting to rest against her car for a moment before getting in. "Ana's and Sebastian's and my father are all brothers. And our mothers are sisters. So we're kind of double cousins."
"That's neat. If I can't have cousins, maybe I can have a brother or sister. But my daddy says I'm a handful all by myself."
"I'm sure he's right," Morgana agreed as Ana chuckled. Brushing her hair back, Morgana glanced up. There, framed in one of the wide windows on the second floor of the house next door, was a man. Undoubtedly Jessie's father.
Ana had described him well enough, Morgana mused. Though he was more attractive, and certainly sexier, than her cousin had let on. That very simple omission made her smile. Morgana lifted a hand in a friendly wave. After a moment's hesitation, Boone returned the salute.
"That's my daddy." Jessie pinwheeled her arms in greeting. "He works up there, but we haven't unpacked all the boxes
"What does he do?" Morgana asked, since it was clear Ana wasn't going to.
"Oh, he tells stories. Really good stories, about witches and fairy princesses and dragons and magic fountains. I get to help sometimes. I have to go because tomorrow's my first day of school and he said I wasn't supposed to stay too long. Did I?"
"No." Ana bent down to kiss her cheek. "You can come back anytime."
"Bye!" And she was off, gamboling across the lawn, with the dog racing behind her.
"I've never been more charmed, or more worn out," Morgana said as she climbed into her car. "The girl's a delightful whirlwind." Smiling out at Ana, she jiggled her keys. "And the father is certainly no slouch."
"I imagine it's difficult, a man raising a little girl alone."
"From the one glimpse I had, he looked up to it." She gunned the engine. "Interesting that he writes stories. About witches and dragons and such. Sawyer, you said?"
"Yes." Ana blew tousled hair out of her eyes. "I guess he must be Boone Sawyer."
"It might intrigue him to know you're Bryna Donovan's niece-seeing as they're in the same line of work. That is, if you wanted to intrigue him."
"I don't," Ana said firmly.
"Ah, well, perhaps you already have." Morgana put the car in reverse. "Blessed be, cousin."
Ana struggled with a frown as Morgana backed out of the drive.
After driving to Sebastian's to give his horses their morning feeding and grooming, Ana spent most of the next morning delivering her potpourris, her scented oils, her medicinal herbs and potions. Others were boxed and packaged for shipping. Though she had several local customers for her wares, including Morgana's shop, Wicca, a great portion of her clientele was outside the area.
Anastasia's was successful enough to suit her. The business she'd started six years before satisfied her needs and ambitions and allowed her the luxury of working at home. It wasn't for money. The Donovan fortune, and the Donovan legacy, kept both her and her family comfortably off. But, like Morgana with her shop and Sebastian with his many businesses, Ana needed to be productive.
She was a healer. But it was impossible to heal everyone. Long ago she had learned it was destructive to attempt to take on the ills and pains of the world. Part of the price of her power was knowing there was pain she could not alleviate. She did not reject her gift. She used it as she thought best.
Herbalism had always fascinated her, and she accepted the fact that she had the touch. Centuries before, she might have been the village wise woman-and that never failed to amuse her. In today's world, she was a businesswoman who could mix a bath oil or an elixir with equal skill.
If she added a touch of magic, it was hers to add.
And she was happy, happy with the destiny that had been thrust on her and with the life she had made from it.
Even if she'd been miserable, she thought, this day would have lifted her spirits. The beckoning sun, the caressing breeze, the faintest taste of rain in the air, rain that would not fall for hours-and then would fall gently.
Wanting to take advantage of the day, she decided to work outside, starting some herbs from seed.
He was watching her again. Bad habit, Boone thought with a grimace as he glanced down at the cigarette between his fingers. He wasn't having much luck with breaking bad habits. Nor was he getting a hell of a lot of work done since he'd looked out of the window and had seen her outside.
She always looked so- elegant, he decided. A kind of inner elegance that wasn't the least diminished by the grass-stained cutoffs and short-sleeved T-shirt she wore.
It was in the way she moved, as if the air were wine that she drank lightly from as she passed through it.
Getting lyrical, he mused, and reminded himself to save it for his books.
Maybe it was because she was the fairy-princess type he so often wrote about. There was that ethereal, otherworldly air about her. And the quiet strength in her eyes. Boone had never believed that fairy princesses were pushovers.
But there was still this delicacy about her body-a body he sincerely wished he hadn't begun to dwell upon. Not a frailty, but a serene kind of femininity that he imagined would baffle and allure any male who was still breathing.
Boone Sawyer was definitely breathing.
Now what was she doing? he wondered, crushing out his cigarette impatiently and moving closer to the window. She'd gone into the garden shed and had come out again with her arms piled high with pots.
Wasn't it just like a woman to try to carry more than she should?
Even as he was thinking it, and indulging in a spot of male superiority, he saw Daisy streak across her lawn, chasing the sleek gray cat.
He had a hand on the window, prepared to shoot it up and call off the dog. Before he could make the move, he saw it was already too late.
In slow motion, it might have been an interesting and well-choreographed dance. The cat streaked like gray smoke between Ana's legs. She swayed. The clay pots in her arms teetered. Boone swore, then let out a sigh of relief when she righted them, and herself, again. Before the breath was out, Daisy plowed through, destroying the temporary balance. This time Ana's feet were knocked completely out from under her. She went down, and the pots went up.
Though he was already swearing, Boone heard the crash as he leapt through the terrace doors and down the steps to the lower deck.
She was muttering what sounded to him like exotic curses when he reached her. And he could hardly blame her. Her cat was up a tree, spitting down on the yipping dog. The pots she'd been carrying were little more than shards scattered over the grass and the edge of the patio where the impact had taken place. Boone winced, cleared his throat. "Ah
, are you all right?" She was on her hands and knees, and her hair was over her eyes. But she tossed it back and shot him a long look through the blond wisps. "Dandy."
"I was at the window." This certainly wasn't the time to admit he'd been watching her. "Passing by the window," he corrected. "I saw the chase and collision." Crouching down, he began to help her pick up the pieces. "I'm really sorry about Daisy. We've only had her a few days, and we haven't had any luck with training."
"She's a baby yet. No point in blaming a dog for doing what comes naturally."
"I'll replace the pots," he said, feeling miserably awkward. "I have more." Because the barking and spitting were getting desperate, Ana sat back on her heels. "Daisy!" The command was quiet but firm, and it was answered instantly. Tail wagging furiously, the pup scrambled over to lick at her face and arms. Refusing to be charmed, Ana cupped the dog's face in her hands. "Sit," she ordered, and the puppy plopped her rump down obligingly. "Now behave yourself." With a little whine of repentance, Daisy settled down with her head on her paws.
Almost as impressed as he was baffled, Boone shook his head. "How'd you do that?"
"Magic," she said shortly, then relented with a faint smile.
"You could say I've always had a way with animals. She's just happy and excited and roaring to play. You have to make her understand that some activities are inappropriate." Ana patted
Daisy's head and earned an adoring canine glance.
"I've been trying bribery."
"That's good, too." She stretched out under a trellis of scarlet clematis, looking for more broken crockery. It was then that
Boone noticed the long scratch on her arm.
"You're bleeding."
She glanced down. There were nicks on her thighs, too. "Hard to avoid, with pots raining down on me."
He was on his feet in a blink and hauling Ana to hers. "Damn it, I asked you if you were all right."
"Well, really, I-"
"We'll have to clean it up." He saw there was more blood trickling down her legs, and he reacted exactly as he would if it were Jessie. He panicked. "Oh, Lord." He scooped an amazed Ana into his arms and hurried toward the closest door. "Honestly, there's absolutely no need-"
"It's going to be fine, baby. We'll take care of it." Half amused, half annoyed, Ana huffed out a breath as he pushed his way into the kitchen. "In that case, I'll cancel the ambulance. If you'd just put me-" He dropped her into one of the padded ice-cream chairs at her kitchen table. "Down." Nerves jittering, Boone raced to the sink for a cloth. Efficiency, speed and cheer were the watchwords in such cases, he knew. As he dampened the cloth and squirted it with soap, he took several long breaths to calm himself.
"It won't look so bad when we get it cleaned up. You'll see." After pasting a smile on his face, he walked back to kneel in front of her. "I'm not going to hurt you." Gently he began to dab at the thin line of blood that had dripped down her calf. "We're going to fix it right up. Just close your eyes and relax." He took another long breath. "I knew this man once," he began, improvising a story as he always did for his daughter. "He lived in a place called Briarwood, where there was an enchanted castle behind a high stone wall."
Ana, who had been on the point of firmly telling him she could tend to herself, stopped and did indeed relax.
"Growing over the wall were thick vines with big, razor-sharp thorns. No one had been to the castle in more than a hundred years, because no one was brave enough to climb that wall and risk being scraped and pricked. But the man, who was very poor and lived alone, was curious, and day after day he would walk from his house to the wall and stand on the tips of his toes to see the sun gleam on the topmost towers and turrets of the castle."
Boone turned the cloth over and dabbed at the cuts. "He couldn't explain to anyone what he felt inside his heart whenever he stood there. He wanted desperately to climb over. Sometimes at night in his bed he would imagine it. Fear of those thick, sharp thorns stopped him, until one day in high summer, when the scent of flowers was so strong you couldn't take a breath without drinking it in, that glimpse of the topmost towers wasn't enough. Something in his heart told him that what he wanted most in the world lay just beyond that thorn-covered wall. So he began to climb it. Again and again he fell to the ground, with his hands and arms pricked and bleeding. And again and again he pushed himself up."
His voice was soothing, and his touch-his touch was anything but. As gentle as he was with the cool cloth, an ache began to spread, slow and warm, from the center of her body outward. He was stroking her thighs now, where the sharp edge of a shard had nicked the flesh. Ana closed her hand into a fist, the twin of which clenched in her stomach.
She needed him to stop. She wanted him to go on. And on.
"It took all of that day," Boone continued in that rich, mesmerizing storyteller's voice. "And the heat mixed sweat with the blood, but he didn't give up. Couldn't give up, because he knew, as he'd never known anything before, that his heart's desire, his future and his destiny, lay on the other side. So, with his hands raw and bleeding, he used those thorny vines and dragged himself to the top. Exhausted, filled with pain, he stumbled and fell down and down, to the thick, soft grass that flowed from the wall to the enchanted castle.
"The moon was up when he awoke, dazed and disoriented. With the last of his strength, he limped across the lawn, over the drawbridge and into the great hall of the castle that had haunted his dreams since childhood. When he crossed the threshold, the lights of a thousand torches flared. In that same instant, all his cuts and scrapes and bruises vanished. In that circle of flame that cast shadow and light up the white marble walls stood the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her hair was like sunlight, and her eyes like smoke. Even before she spoke, even before her lovely mouth curved in a welcoming smile, he knew that it was she he had risked his life to find. She stepped forward, offered her hand to him, and said only, 'I have been waiting for you.'"
As he spoke the last words, Boone lifted his gaze to Ana's. He was as dazed and disoriented as the man in the story he had conjured up. When had his heart begun to pound like this? he wondered. How could he think when the blood was swimming in his head and throbbing in his loins? While he struggled for balance, he stared at her.
Hair like sunlight. Eyes like smoke.
And he realized he was kneeling between her legs, one hand resting intimately high on her thigh, and the other on the verge of reaching out to touch that sunlight hair.
Boone rose so quickly that he nearly overbalanced the table. "I beg your pardon," he said, for lack of anything better. When she only continued to stare at him, the pulse in her throat beating visibly, he tried again. "I got carried away when I saw you were bleeding. I've never been able to take Jessie's cuts and scrapes in stride." Struggling not to babble, he thrust the cloth at her. "I imagine you'd rather handle it yourself."
She accepted the cloth. She needed a moment before she dared speak. How was it possible that a man could stir her so desperately with doctoring and a fairy tale, then leave her fighting to find a slippery hold on her composure when he apologized?
Her own fault, Ana thought as she scrubbed-with more force than was really necessary-at the scrape on her arm. It was her gift and her curse that she would feel too much.
"You look like you should be the one sitting down," she told him briskly, then rose to go to the cupboard for one of her own medications. "Would you like something cold to drink?"
"No- Yes, actually." Though he doubted that a gallon of ice water would dampen the fire in his gut. "Blood always makes me panic."
"Panicked or not, you were certainly efficient." She poured him a glass of lemonade from the fat pitcher she fetched from the refrigerator. "And it was a very nice story." She was smiling now, more at ease.
"A story usually serves to calm both Jessie and me during a session with iodine and bandages."
"Iodine stings." She expertly dabbed a tobacco-brown liquid from a small apothecary jar onto her cleaned
cuts. "I can give you something that won't, if you like. For your next emergency."
"What is it?" Suspicious, he sniffed at the jar. "Smells like flowers." And so did she.
"For the most part it is. Herbs, flowers, a dash of this and that." She set the bottle aside, capped it. "It's what you might call a natural antiseptic. I'm an herbalist."
"Oh."
She laughed at the skeptical look on his face. "That's all right. The majority of people only trust healing aids they can buy at the drugstore. They forget that people healed themselves quite well through nature for hundreds of years."
"They also died of lockjaw from a nick from a rusty nail."
"True enough," she agreed. "If they didn't have access to a reputable healer.'' Since she had no intention of trying to convert him, Ana changed the subject. "Did Jessie get off for her first day of school?"
"Yeah, she was raring to go. I was the one with the nervous stomach." His smile came and went. "I want to thank you for being so tolerant of her. I know she has a tendency to latch on to people. It doesn't cross her mind that they might not want to entertain her."
"Oh, but she entertains me." In an automatic gesture of courtesy, she took out a plate and lined it with cookies. "She's very welcome here. She's very sweet, unaffected and bright, and she doesn't forget her manners. You're doing a marvelous job raising her."
He accepted a cookie, watching her warily. "Jessie makes it easy."
"As delightful as she is, it can't be easy raising a child on your own. I doubt it's a snap even with two parents when the child is as energetic as Jessie. And as bright." Ana selected a cookie for herself and missed the narrowing of his eyes. "She must get her imagination from you. It must be delightful for her to have a father who writes such lovely stories."
His eyes sharpened. "How do you know what I do?"
The suspicion surprised her, but she smiled again. "I'm a fan-actually, an avid fan-of Boone Sawyer's."
"I don't recall telling you my first name."
"No, I don't believe you did," Ana said agreeably. "Are you always so suspicious of a compliment, Mr. Sawyer?"
Books by Nora Roberts Page 274
