Dangerous Magic by Alix Rickloff Read Free Book Online

deny the draw between them, an attraction that, though kept under tight restraints, simmered beneath the surface. Why, she didn’t know. Attractive, he may be: tall and lean with eyes that reminded her of mist-covered hills or the froth of a swift-moving stream. But there had been men in the past more polished and more charming. Suitable he was not: captain of a smuggling vessel, a rogue and a criminal—and a gentleman. Despite his rough manners and coarse company, there was no mistaking his birth and his breeding. They branded him as surely as the lash marks scarring his back.
    Betsy returned. “The men are fretting for some food before they leave for the fields. Your sailor’s asking for you, Gwenyth. It’s getting on to morning.”
    Gwenyth broke her gaze from the baby, sighed and stretched. She patted Sarah’s hand. “She’s a fine girl.”
    Sarah caught Gwenyth’s hand, squeezing it. “You’ll have a daughter of your own soon, and it don’t take the gift of Sight to tell me that.”
     
     
    They walked side by side, not hurrying but in pleasant accord as they followed the road northwest to Kerrow. The lantern they carried was hardly needed as the sky paled and the first birds called in the hedges. Rafe drew in deep breaths of rain-sweet air, filling his lungs with the scents of good earth and growing things. It made him think of Bodliam and wish he were back in the southern countryside again. It made him yearn for home.
    Soon, he told himself. Soon he would round the gate-house lodge, the curve of Bodliam’s dome swimming in and out of view between the heavy stands of oak and walnut. Soon the screech and cackle of gull and chough would be replaced by the whirr and chirp of pheasant and woodcock. Soon he would top the last hill and see the dark surface of the grotto’s lake to the north of the house, a quiet brooding place—a spot to ponder loss and betrayal and to grieve.
    Would his family welcome him back, or had his disgrace placed him beyond the pale? He’d have his answer by month’s end.
    He’d see her again—Anabel Hillier. There’d be no avoiding it. Even married to Charles she’d be home often to visit her family. She’d be a constant reminder of his past. But things were different now. He was different now—older, wiser, wealthier. He’d make her regret her greed.
    He’d planned his homecoming over years. Imagined while curled in a Falmouth doorway, drunk and dreading the rough hand of the press-gang, the way he’d saunter nonchalantly into Bodliam’s main hall in his expensive tailored clothes. Pictured while he fished the pilchard shoals, his sour belly and splitting head making every pitch of the boat an agony, the astonishment then the respect in his family’s eyes once they realized he’d returned a wealthy nabob. And dreamed while he’d slid through a Revenue cutter’s shadow on a run between Cornwall and Brittany with a hold full of contraband and a mind full of secrets, of the day he’d have every hypocritical, self-serving Society matron yearning to catch him for a son-in-law.
    The long years of plotting ended here.
    His lips curled into a cold smile. Perhaps he’d toy with Anabel before he broke her. She’d be the one crushed and humiliated. Fitting for the woman who’d stripped him of so much.
    Only the Navy had taken more.
    Emerging from a stand of trees, they entered a wide, overgrown lawn. Grass stood waist-high. Brambles and runners of ivy and bindweed sought footholds among the high broken hedges and crept in tangled runners across the carriage drive. Gwenyth pushed on through the brush, but Rafe paused, looking about. At the head of the drive stood a house shaded by ash trees. Trailing vines sprouted from chimneys at either end of a slated roof. Creeper clung to the granite walls and weeds choked the entranceway, but the remnants of gravel paths and well-trimmed hedges were visible beneath the jungle of wilderness. It must have been a fair place once. The