The Magic's in the Music (Magic Series Book 5) (44 page)

How could she say that with all the things they’d suffered, what they’d given up to fight the Clan? But Greta had to remember that Brina was trying to convince her to have faith in Lan, so she was putting the best face on things. “I don’t think Lan’s the problem.”

Brina looked surprised and a little concerned. She was about to say something, but then she shut her mouth. After a second, she tried again. “Sometimes chaos is a good thing, Greta. It can show you new ways, new beginnings. Just go see him for a minute. He needs you now.”

That was the last thing Greta wanted to do. But she couldn’t avoid him forever. She was stuck on the same estate as he was for the foreseeable future.

And then she saw just how it would go. She couldn’t ignore him. She lusted after him like she’d never lusted after another man. She loved him in the only pathetic way she could. She was stuck in the same compound with him. She’d give in. They’d get married, or at least be a couple. And she would never give herself to him wholly because she wasn’t built that way. And sooner or later he’d realize that she wasn’t really his, and it would eat at him. Hell, it would eat at her. She’d watch him try everything to make her happy because he was a good man. He’d waste his life, trying to get to the big submerged iceberg of herself that Greta was incapable of giving to anybody. He didn’t deserve that.

She hung her head. “Okay.” She pushed herself off the bench. Waiting wouldn’t change things. She trudged across the lawn, leaving Brina in the pergola. She saw the family still around the table through the French doors that gave onto the flagstone terrace. Only Tammy was outside, gazing out over the bluff toward Catalina.

Greta didn’t want to run the Tremaine gauntlet, so she slid around the side of the house to the door that lead directly up into the Bay of Pigs. She stopped outside the Lanyon’s door.

“I know you’re out there,” he said calmly. “You might as well come in.”

Yeah. Reminder of why she was doomed. She opened the door.

He was sitting up in bed, pale but alert looking. That was a surprise. He was as mouth-watering as ever. Her body responded. Another thing she had no choice about. His torso was bare except for the stark white of a bandage over the burn. Wait. He’d been practically dead when his brothers had carried him in.

She sucked in a little breath.
Brina.
“Your mother healed you, didn’t she?”

“Not all the way, but between her and the good doc and all the blood everybody donated, I’ll be up and about in no time.”

They stood there, staring at each other. Did she look as frightened as he did? Probably.

He was the one who got his courage up first. “I apologized to the Parents for being a grade A asshole for the last eighteen months.”

Not what she’d expected.

He cleared his throat. “Just thought you should know I am capable of pulling my head out of my ass every once in a while.”

She couldn’t help but smile. Just a little. “Good to know.”

“Mother says I was suffering from, uh, an inferiority complex, knowing I would never be the man Senior was,” he continued after a moment. He got a rueful twist to his mouth. “I always thought living with an Adapter was hell, but it was worse when he wasn’t the all-powerful father I’d known and there was nothing I could do to help. I guess the only thing I thought I could control was how much of an asshole I was.”

That hit close to home.

“Neither of us have much control of our lives now.”

“Yeah. I know. And that used to twist my gut. But it doesn’t so much anymore.”

Oh, no. Here it comes. He’s going to try to make this all right.

He rushed on, no doubt seeing her dismay. “I know the sexual attraction is just the genes. The magic wants to beget more magic, and we’re supposed to be the willing vessels.”

“That’s pretty Biblical.”

“You’re not helping here,” he accused, then cleared his throat. “I’m trying to say that what I feel for you has grown beyond that. I like you, Greta. I mean, I’m sure you’ve had men saying they love you all your life because you’re so beautiful and famous and rich. But I don’t need money. I don’t even want it. Being famous seems like a gigantic inconvenience, not a plus. And it’s nice that you’re beautiful, but what I really like is that you’re smart and strong and you like stars. So yeah, I’m going to say I love you, just like all those other guys, but I bet they never said they liked you, that they just want to spend time with you. I want to write music for you, Greta. I
did
write music for you, come to think of it, and you’ve never even heard it. Let me play music for you.”

Greta thought she was going to cry.

“Did I say something wrong?” he asked anxiously. “I’m asking you to marry me.”

“Oh, Lanyon. You’re not the problem.” She sat, rather suddenly, in the chair by the door, as far away from his bed as the room would allow. “It’s me.”

He went very still. “You might not love me now,” he said carefully, after a moment. “But we…we could give it some time. I won’t press.”

She wanted to scream, but all she could do was roll her head in distress and try to catch her breath. “It isn’t that I don’t love you. I’m not an idiot. Brave? Check. Honorable? Check. Brilliant? Check. Good man? Double check. Then there’s handsome and an incredible fuck. Of
course
I love you.” She hadn’t meant that to sound so flippant. Or so scolding. And she never called making love ‘fucking’. What was wrong with her? Now she had to crush the hope she saw welling up in his eyes. “It’s just that it will never work. And I need you to understand that before you do anything rash and give in to blind hope.”

He frowned. “Sounds pretty hopeful to me.”

“Oh, I’ll marry you all right. How could I not? But I’ll make us both unhappy.”

His eyes darted around for a second or two before he got his bearings. “The career…?” He sighed. “I know it’s a lot to give up, but with the Clan a movie set just isn’t—”

“I could give a rat’s ass about being an actress,” she snapped. God, could she tell him? Could she admit the truth about herself? Damn. “It’s the control.”

“Yeah.” He seemed to deflate. “This wasn’t your choice.”

She rubbed her hand through her short hair. He was killing her here.

But if she was going to ruin his life, one way or another, he had a right to know why.

“Look, I don’t really care that it wasn’t my choice. That’s not it at all. It’s just…” She blinked. Goddamnit, she was not going to cry here. She’d done more crying in the last twenty-four hours than she had since she was twelve. Why exactly she had never cried about what had happened with her mother, she didn’t know. But she hadn’t. Not a drop.

“Greta?” he whispered, leaning toward her on his bed. “You can tell me.”

Tears started to leak down her cheeks. She wiped them away angrily. “I’m not who you think I am. Why do you think I’m such a good actress? Because I can become someone else at the drop of a hat, but I never give up the core of who I am. Not to anyone. I don’t have friends, Lanyon. I’ve never had a man I even cared much about. I don’t have a frigging
cat
. I’ve never given enough of myself to truly love anybody. Not after my mother.”

He didn’t say anything.

“So I can say I love you, but deep down inside I don’t even know what that means. And when I say I’ll stay it’s because I really don’t have any choice, and that I’ll be with you…” She couldn’t say ‘marry you’ more than once in a day. “You have to know that I’ll never give all of me. I’ll never let you all the way in because that’s just too dangerous. People hurt you. I found that out the hard way. My mother didn’t just take my money, Lan. I didn’t begrudge her the money. At fifteen, she offered me to a director in exchange for a part, right in front of me, and made me strip for him. He got to touch the merchandize. Something inside me broke. I locked part of me away, and I don’t have the key anymore. I’m not true love material.” A raw sound that might have been a laugh jerked out of her chest. “I guess my mother’s still controlling me.”

She sat there, defiant, watching him watch her.

He swallowed. “You’re lying,” he finally said.

She felt her eyes widen. He thought she was lying about something like that?

He sat up. “Yep. Lying. Because you just let me in. All the way. Bared your soul, baby.”

Outrage. And yet…

She glanced around the room, not seeing anything. “I did, didn’t I?”

“Yep.” He got a sly look around his eyes. “Sure, you’re a little rusty. But I think it’ll get easier. Personally, I think lots of deviant sex would be a great lubricant for those rusty hinges.”

Lan was trying to be funny. At a time like this. She should be indignant. But she wasn’t. His lost sense of humor had just made an appearance. Not much of a joke, but something. Was his humor ever truly lost? She remembered him giving their sex a C plus. That was a kind of a joke too. Maybe it was just suppressed, like her ability to give herself to somebody.

The important thing was that he was making an effort. He’d made amends with his parents. He’d realized why he’d spun so far out of control. And he’d shown a tiny flash of what he’d once been. Lan was healing.

Tears started falling in earnest now. “Damn you, Lanyon Tremaine. Now I need a Kleenex.” She sniffed.

“Bathroom.” He pointed.

She needed the moment she took to stalk into the bathroom just to get herself in order.

And yet what kind of order was there in a world where you could discover you were magic and that true love could be genetic? She’d been trying to hold a finger in the dyke of chaos since she was fifteen. Look how well that had worked. What had Brina said? “Let chaos in.”

She stood in the doorway, snuffling into her Kleenex. “Some kind of proposal this is.”

“Come here,” he said softly, holding out one arm.

She went without hesitation, pulled like a magnet to his true north. And that was kind of comforting. Sometimes having no choice could be a good thing. She sat on the bed, and he took her in his arms. Nothing had ever felt so right.

“We might not have a choice about who to love,” he said into her hair, where he was planting small kisses. “But we have a choice about whether to embrace it and resolve to be happy or torture ourselves with negative possibilities.” He set her away from him, and in her heart she knew it was only for a moment. This was where she belonged. They both knew it. “What say we resolve to be happy in spite of everything?”

She smiled. All they could do was try. She would be Lanyon’s true love, the best she knew how. She was going to be part of a big and loving Tremaine family, the best she knew how. The chaos of magic and Destiny and the Clan be damned. Her mother be damned. She didn’t have to let her mother control her life now. The emancipation she thought she’d achieved had been an illusion. Emancipation had to come from her own heart.

New beginnings.

She leaned in and kissed Lanyon, lightly, tenderly. He let her control the kiss, responding in kind. “Okay,” she said. And it was more than okay. It would be chaotic. She’d make mistakes and so would he. She might hurt him sometimes, and he might hurt her. But with good will, she suddenly felt it just might all work out.

Chaos would set them both free.

Susan Squires is a
New York Times
bestselling author known for breaking the rules of romance writing. She has published five novels and a novella with Dorchester Publishing and nine and two novellas with St. Martin’s Press. Whatever her time period or subject, some element of the paranormal always creeps in. She has won multiple contests for published novels and reviewer’s choice awards.
Publisher’s Weekly
named
Body Electric
one of the most influential mass market books of 2003 and
One with the Shadows,
the fifth in her vampire Companion Series, a Best Book of 2007.
Time for Eternity,
the first in her Da Vinci time travel series, received a starred review from
Publisher’s Weekly.

Susan has a Masters in English literature from UCLA and once toiled as an executive for a Fortune 500 company. Now she lives at the beach in Southern California with her husband, Harry, a writer of supernatural thrillers, and three very active Belgian Sheepdogs, who like to help her write by putting their chins on the keyboarddddddddddddddddddddddd.

Follow Susan on Twitter, like her Facebook page at AuthorSusanSquires or check out her website at
www.susansquires.com

She didn’t want
to be here, but she had no choice. Even Drew agreed she was meant to be here. And if the sister who could tell the future said something, everybody listened. A feeling of inevitability had been growing in Tammy ever since her family began planning to rescue her brother and Greta. They thought to leave her behind, but she’d fooled them, even Jane, and Jane was hard to fool. So here she was with the rest of her family, on a loading dock behind the Luxor casino pyramid in Las Vegas, the sky lit with green and gold neon, the desert heat of September days cooling now.

Tammy knew she was in danger, and it wasn’t just danger from Morgan Le Fay, or a member of the Clan who followed her. They might kill Tammy, along with all the other Tremaines, but that didn’t seem like a big deal right at the moment. The danger here was to her soul. She tried to breathe, searching for calm. But the odor of the oil that stained the cement from countless delivery trucks, and rancid food from some broken wooden crates over near the metal roll-up doors, didn’t make for a soothing atmosphere.

She wasn’t surprised when a limousine pulled up about a hundred feet down from the linen delivery truck the family had stolen. Her brother tried to pull her behind the van as Morgan emerged. But everything started to slow down for Tammy. The air was taut with electric expectation. She slipped from her brother’s grasp and stood, waiting, dreading what would happen next.

The young guy got out of the back of the limo, dressed in jeans and boots and a long-sleeved work shirt or something. He had waving brown hair down to his shoulders and light eyes. She couldn’t tell what color. His face was broad and innocent, his skin pale. He looked about her age, maybe a little older. He gazed around at the crashing neon, the golden pyramid in the background, the green, lighted tower farther down, with an expression of wonder on his face, and maybe a little fear.