Mistress of Magic (17 page)

“You all right?”

She nodded, nuzzling the back of her head against his chest.

“Wes?”

“Hmm?”

“I really do want you to sleep with me again.”

He was quiet for a second. She heard him swallow a sip of his coffee.

Then his whisper touched her ear. Sexy. Provocative.

“I wasn’t about to miss another night beside you. No matter what you said.”

“You would have come to me if I hadn’t groveled?”

“I don’t think you’ve exactly groveled.”

“That’s a relief.”

His face, with a hint of five o’clock shadow, nuzzled hers. “I would have come for you. Words or no words, I would have had you back in my arms. Beneath me. I would have loved you, tasted you.…”

Tremors swept through her. Exotic, exciting. “Please!” she whispered.

“You’re right. I’m not making myself very comfortable. And even though I want Max to know about us, I really didn’t mean for it to be a complete show and tell!”

She smiled, her hand resting over his where it lay against her midriff.

“I think Max is watching.”

“Is he?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’m getting better, don’t you think?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll be warning us both about each other again tomorrow,” Reggie said.

“That will be fine,” Wes told her. He leaned closer, his whisper warm and stirring against her ear. “Just so long as he goes home pretty soon tonight.”

Reggie laughed softly. The moon was beautiful, high above her. The breeze was beautiful, gentle and cool.

And his touch …

Was warm, comforting and exciting. Intimate. With so very much promise.

In a way, she didn’t want to stir. She wanted the moment to last for a long, long time. She closed her eyes.

But Max and Diana came back. Yet even with her brother by the table, Reggie didn’t move. She opened her eyes and felt his gaze upon her, then realized that he was concealing a smile.

Let him.

“We’re going to go,” he told Wes.

“I hate to leave you with this mess,” Diana said. “You should really get some sleep.”

“I am going to get some sleep. Mrs. Martin comes every day,” Reggie said. “She’ll be glad to have a little more to do.”

Wes was behind her, his hands on her hips, while they stood in the doorway and politely waved goodbye.

She felt his lips just above her nape, brushing her flesh. Tiny bursts of warm, liquid desire began to dance their way down her spine and take root somewhere in the center of her being, then stretch out the length of her thighs and between.

“I think your brother knows we’re sleeping together.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s all right?”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. It was all right. It even seemed to be all right with Max. He had been the one telling her to get a life.

Wes lifted the damp length of her hair. His lips brushed her earlobe. Nibbled there.

“Damn!” he whispered. “But you do taste delicious.” Then she was swinging around in his arms. “But you do need sleep,” he told her gravely. His hazel eyes burned a slow-fused fire that had very little to do with rest.

She nodded solemnly in return. “But I do sleep so much better after a little exercise.”

“Oh?” He arched a brow. “How do you sleep after a lot of it?”

She grinned broadly. “Just like a baby.”

He swept her up into his arms. “Lots of exercise coming right up,” he said huskily.

To seal the promise, he set his lips, hungry, hot on hers.

And so fused, he started up the stairs with her.

Her days were long.

Her nights were growing even longer.

He had her up the stairs quickly. So quickly. His words at the picnic table had left them both aching. She landed a bit heavily on the bed, and he was beside her. He released the hook on her bikini top and tossed the damp fabric aside, as if it had been an awful nuisance. Then his fingers were on her hips, peeling away the bikini bottom.

He stood, dropping his damp trunks. The air was cool. Her naked flesh felt very vulnerable.

And his … looked very powerful. Exciting. Hard and aroused.

Reggie reached out her arms to him, wanting to hold him, wanting to have him.

But he didn’t come to her. Not right away. To her surprise, he caught her by her ankles and pulled her down to him. And his hot searing kiss landed against her midriff, and moved lower and lower.

She called his name, stunned, excited. She couldn’t want him more than she did.

Yes … she could.

She was nearly sobbing, trembling, writhing, volcanic, when he rose over her at last. And when he entered her. And when she met his eyes.

And when they began to move.

And it was, indeed, a soaring height of ecstasy that they reached, one that came quickly, for they had both come to such a point of hunger. They reached a climax nearly simultaneously, shuddering, shivering, drifting downward together, damp, deliciously sated.

And a moment later, as the air cooled her feverish flesh, Reggie curled against him, holding him tight. His hand was around her. It was a wonderful feeling. One of being cherished.

He could make her so angry.

That didn’t matter.

She was falling in love.

She smiled. It was a nice feeling.

Perhaps he didn’t love her. Perhaps he demanded a lot from a woman even if his relationship with her remained a casual one.

It didn’t matter, she thought sleepily. It felt too good to have him here. To sleep with her face against his chest. To feel the absolute comfort of his arm around her. To be naked here with him, to see the rugged texture of his fingers where his hand lay over her.

Yes …

It had been a long, long time since she had known so much. It had been a long, long time since she had known these sensations.

But it was true, she was falling in love. And she was falling in love because he was an extraordinary person.

And sometimes, to fall in love meant taking chances.

He was nearly asleep, she thought. She curled his fingers in her own and brought them to her lips, just teasing his knuckles with her lips.

“Wes?”

“Hmm?”

She breathed deeply. The hurt was still there, a pain that ran very, very deep.

“I didn’t marry Caleb because my family doctor told me years ago he seriously doubted my ability to have children. And Caleb kept saying that he didn’t care.”

He stiffened. He had been drowsing. He was wide awake now.

“You didn’t believe Caleb? He probably meant it.”

She shook her head. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. Tears were stinging her eyes. “No. Children are wonderful. And a man like Caleb should have had children. His own children. Children are the most important thing.”

He pushed up from the bed, looking down at her. “Reggie, the world is already filled with children who need parents,” he said.

“So people say. But adoption is hard. People sit there and wait and wait on lists. I couldn’t be sure Caleb really wanted to do that. I wanted to—to be sure. And so—I waited.”

“And he died,” Wes murmured softly.

“Yes. And he died.”

Wes came down beside her, wrapping his arms around her once again.

“You’re wrong, Reggie.”

“About what?”

“Children aren’t the most important thing,” he told her. His lips moved against her temple. Soft, gentle. He spoke again.

“Love is. Love is always the most important thing.”

Chapter 11

I
n the days that followed, the tension seemed to subside a little bit.

Nothing happened. Reggie’s house was left alone, and there were no wild occurrences at the park.

Reggie settled into a startling domesticity.

She was still busy, with days that lasted well over twelve hours.

But she was in love, and the feeling was wonderful. It gave her energy where she might have had none left.

Wes seemed to have a wonderful instinct about her. He disappeared on his own during the day, but he never let her go home alone. Once, he and Max both appeared beside her as dinosaurs, playing with the children for the opening of the park. They were waiting for her outside the Dino Gals changing room, ready to take her to brunch in the park. And one night when he brought her home she was certain that a warm bath and a glass of wine would ease her tension and give her a new life for the evening. But after the warm bath he massaged her shoulders and she fell sound asleep and when he carried her up to bed, she was dead weight rather than a temptress. But in the morning she awoke to find him nibbling her ear, and she was instantly, searingly as awake and alive as anyone could possibly want her to be. And laying against his chest for the few idle moments that they had remaining, she talked about the accident, how Caleb had been hit, how he didn’t die right away, how he had gone into a coma, and how she had sat by his bedside every day for months until they had told her that his brain was dead and that they should take him off the machines. She had never talked about it. To anyone. Max had been with her most of the time, and she hadn’t needed to talk to him. But she had never forgotten any of it, nor Caleb. Nor how it had felt to know that she was holding his hand in life for the last time, or to believe in her heart until the very end that what was irreversible could be reversed.

Wes didn’t say much. Nothing could make something like what had happened to Caleb be all right—it never would. You just learned to live around it, Wes told her. And you didn’t try to forget, because you couldn’t forget. You just remembered everything that had been before. She did need to let the pictures of the end fade, and remember the days when they had laughed together, remember the Caleb who had been young and confident, who had loved her.

Later on that night she’d learned why he could speak so knowledgeably about forgetting the past. His ten-year marriage to Shelley had ended painfully, with the two of them fighting the cancer that had seized her.

“She must have been really wonderful,” Reggie told him. “Max was a little bit in love with her.”

Wes smiled. “Yeah, everyone was. She was beautiful, to the very end. The chemotherapy had stolen her hair, but nothing could touch her face, or her smile.”

Reggie lay against him with nothing more to say. They were not divided by any of their memories. The memories were good. And Reggie told him that she was grateful for him, no matter what happened in the future, because she hadn’t been able to go out with—

“Become intimate with?” he interrupted with humor.

Anyone since Caleb. She had put her nose in the air; Wes had pulled her close. People handled things in different ways. She had closed herself into a shell. Wes had looked for anything to ease the pain.

A week passed. Wes was still careful. He didn’t want her to be alone. Usually, Max was with her, or Wes was with her, and sometimes she and Diana just stuck together like glue. Time was going by quickly enough, so it seemed, but nothing had been cleared up. Daphne remained missing. Wiler didn’t say so, but when he passed by the house late one night to check with her, Reggie was certain that he was convinced Daphne was dead.

Her body hadn’t appeared as yet.

“Well, if she is dead,” Reggie told Wiler, “my brother didn’t do it. Someone else did. The someone running around trying to scare me to death in the costume shop.”

“What if that someone was your brother?” Wiler said softly.

“He was with Wes!” she exclaimed.

Wes was looking at her. He didn’t say anything until Wiler left, but then she pushed him, certain that he was hiding something from her. Eventually he admitted that he and Max hadn’t been together, not until they had run into one another at the costume shop.

“So you weren’t together. What does that mean?” she asked. But she knew what it meant.

“It doesn’t mean anything, and that’s why I didn’t tell Wiler.”

Wiler would think it meant something.

He would think it meant Max might have been dressing up and trying to scare her.

If it could have been Max …

Then it could have been Wes, just as well.

She shivered. Wiler would surely think that the people pretending to protect her were the very ones who were threatening her.

No. Wes had been with her the night someone had been in the house.

But Wes was convinced that there had to be more than one person involved in this. He was spending day after day at the police department, tediously going through records and using his military contacts to expedite some of his searches. Or so he was telling her.

Max was innocent; Wes was innocent.

Almost a week to the day after she had been frightened by the curious robotronic figure turned live, Reggie was at the saloon show. She had stopped to talk to a number of the guests after the show, then Bob had stopped her, asking how Max was hanging in and promising his loyalty again. By the time she went in to change, Alise had gone home for the night. And when she had hung up her red dress and black fishnet stockings, it was well past seven. She came through the main theater and started out through the audience doors.

To her surprise, she found them locked. They were never locked until the cleanup crew came through, but they wouldn’t be here until eight—until the guests would most certainly be gone.

“What in the world …?” she murmured.

Then it settled over her. The awful feeling of being alone. And of being watched.

And of waiting for something to happen to her. Something evil.

She heard a series of loud clicking sounds.

It was the stage lights, all of them being turned off.

The overhead lights, made to look like gasoliers from the 1800s, began fading.

The light that remained was gray and misty. Fear raced along Reggie’s spine. It seized her and froze her. She fought for sanity. She told herself that it was just someone trying to scare her. Someone trying to ruin the park. She would not be afraid.

But she was.

And almost in darkness.

Then she heard the laughter. Uncanny, chilling. It came bursting from the darkness and swept around her. An eerie light appeared before her, coming between the tables where the performers walked to play with their audience.