A Sword in the Sun
Page 29
Never too busy for you, he answered at once.
I smiled. Rosemary and I would be pleased if you would come for a short visit.
I will be there in five minutes.
I was looking forward to seeing him again. I knew he hadn’t understood, not completely, my need to get away with the baby, to go away from everything for a little while. Even so, he had not given me any trouble at all about it. He was trying so hard, I knew that.
He was giving me all the space I needed, even as it must have pained him.
That, unlike anything else he could have done, was softening my heart.
Punctual as ever, I felt his presence approach my front door in just under five minutes. I gave a don’t worry about it wave to Petrana and headed over to answer it.
“Hi,” I said, grinning at him. “Please come in.”
He stepped inside and opened his arms, but waited for me to step into them. I did, and hugged him hard, appreciating how his body felt against mine.
“I’ve missed you,” he breathed into my hair. It moved a little, responding to his proximity. He brushed a strand out of my face.
It felt natural enough to lean up and kiss him. It wasn’t a passionate kiss, but it wasn’t rushed either. Sort of a tentative reaching-out kind of kiss.
He let me go, and I led him into the front parlor. Rosemary was just waking up, rolling her eyes around the room. I picked her up and handed her to Jeremy.
He took her with a gentle, awed smile. “Oh, she’s grown so much!”
“Has she? She looks the same to me.”
“Well, you see her every day. For me it’s been…a while.”
“I guess so.” I smiled, watching him with her. So natural, they looked. It was too bad…
My thought trailed off. What was too bad? Something was too bad, but everything was all right here. Wasn’t it?
Of course it was.
“Do you want something to drink?” I asked.
Jeremy wrested his reluctant gaze from the baby and looked up at me. Love was all over his face. “Er, yes, please. Anything is fine. May I keep holding her?”
“Of course.” It melted my heart even more, watching them together. And then I knew why I’d invited him here, what I needed to do. “And sit down, if you like.” I indicated the sofa, and took a seat next to him, close enough to feel his warmth.
“Bulgarian frog brandy?” Petrana asked him.
He looked up in surprise, probably at her taking initiative. My smart golem. “Yes, please, that would be delightful.”
“Coming right up.”
She went to the kitchen. Jeremy looked at me and shook his head, smiling. “Truly remarkable, that.”
I felt myself blushing. “Thank you. She was a great help on the trip.”
“I want to hear all about your trip, actually.”
I leaned forward, reaching out to take his hand. He shifted Rosemary so he could hold her one-handed, and looked back at me, a question in his eyes.
“I’ll tell you everything,” I said. “It was amazing—but there’s something I wanted to talk to you about first.”
“Yes?”
Petrana walked back in with a snifter of greenish-amber liquid and set it on the coffee table, then withdrew to the front hall.
I looked into Jeremy’s emerald eyes, shining with happiness, with love. “I’ve thought about everything we’ve talked about, and everything you’ve said to me over the past—well, almost a year now, I suppose. I care about you tremendously. I may even love you. I think we’ve been really good together; I love how you look at the baby; I appreciate more than you can possibly know how patiently you’ve given me space, to figure out how I feel.”
His eyes grew more serious and he squeezed my hand. “Calendula, it has been my greatest pleasure to come to know you over the past year. I have never met anyone like you, and I am honored to be in your life in any way you choose to let me.”
I took a deep breath, held his gaze, and said, “I’ve decided I do want to sign a contract with you.”
He broke into a relieved, delighted smile and squeezed my hand again, so hard I could almost feel the bones moving around. “You do? Calendula, that’s wonderful!”
I smiled painfully back at him, trying to extract my hand before he broke something. “Yes, I think it will be. Of course, I have a few conditions.”
Now his smile grew knowing, and even more charming. “I never doubted it. Lay them on me.”
I shook my head at his colloquialism; goodness, he was becoming practically American. “Some of them are rather…unusual.”
“I would expect no less from you.”
I grinned. This was going to be fun.
Has any witch ever been so lucky, in the whole history of witchkind?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shannon Page was born on Halloween night and spent her early years on a back-to-the-land commune in northern California. A childhood without television gave her a great love of the written word. At seven, she wrote her first book, an illustrated adventure starring her cat Cleo. Sadly, that story is out of print, but her work has appeared in Clarkesworld, Interzone, Fantasy, Black Static, Tor.com, the Proceedings of the 2002 International Oral History Association Congress, and many anthologies, including the Australian Shadows Award-winning Grants Pass, and The Mammoth Book of Dieselpunk. She also regularly publishes articles and personal essays on Medium.com, including the widely read “I Was a Trophy Wife.”
Books include The Queen and The Tower and A Sword in The Sun, the first two books in The Nightcraft Quartet; Eel River; the collection Eastlick and Other Stories; Orcas Intrigue, Orcas Intruder, and Orcas Investigation, the first three books in the cozy mystery series The Chameleon Chronicles, in collaboration with Karen G. Berry under the pen name Laura Gayle; and Our Lady of the Islands, co-written with the late Jay Lake. Our Lady received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2014, and was a finalist for the Endeavour Award. Forthcoming books include Nightcraft books three and four; a sequel to Our Lady; and more Orcas mysteries. Edited books include the anthology Witches, Stitches & Bitches and the essay collection The Usual Path to Publication.
Shannon is a longtime yoga practitioner, has no tattoos (but she did recently get a television), and lives on lovely, remote Orcas Island, Washington, with her husband, author and illustrator Mark Ferrari. Visit her at www.shannonpage.net.
ALSO BY SHANNON PAGE
NOVELS
Eel River
Our Lady of the Islands (with Jay Lake)
The Nightcraft Quartet:
The Queen and The Tower
A Sword in The Sun
The Lovers Three (forthcoming)
The Empress and The Moon (forthcoming)
The Chameleon Chronicles (with Karen G. Berry, writing as Laura Gayle)
Orcas Intrigue
Orcas Intruder
Orcas Investigation
Orcas Illusion (forthcoming)
COLLECTIONS
Eastlick and Other Stories
I Was a Trophy Wife and Other Essays (forthcoming)
EDITED BOOKS
Witches, Bitches & Stitches (anthology)
The Usual Path to Publication (collection)