Wizard's Daughter (Sherbrooke Brides 10)

"Fact is, I think when the old fellow saw I'd figured out who he really was, he knew it was time to direct me to his journals."

He touched her cheek with a dirty finger. "Sorry." And he pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped her cheek.

"Perhaps you will believe me when I say I knew, I simply knew. From one moment to the next, I knew there would be something in a corner room on the third floor in the east wing, and so I went up there. Sure enough there was this an­cient trunk tucked snug under a window beneath a pile of equally ancient draperies, so moth-eaten they fell to pieces when I lifted them off the trunk. Nothing else in the room, just that old trunk. Inside the trunk was a mound of clothes, and at the bottom of the trunk, wrapped in a tattered yel­lowed petticoat, were these three volumes." He grinned. "What's wonderful is they aren't in code. I can actually read them."

Rosalind was frowning at him. "I don't understand, Nicholas. As a boy, you must have explored every inch of Wyverly. Why didn't you find the trunk?"

He fr

owned, stared toward the library door he'd firmly closed and locked when they'd come in here. Now it was the tiniest bit open. He hadn't heard a key turning in the lock, he hadn't heard a thing. How had Captain Jared managed to un­lock it? He walked over and closed it again, and once again turned the huge old key in the lock, saying over his shoulder to her, "Yes, I did explore every inch of this place during the seven years I lived here. So did my grandfather—he would brag that he knew where every splinter was, where every creaky stair step was. But even though he knew about Cap­tain Jared's journals, he didn't know where they were." He stared down at the key a moment, then pulled it from the lock. He looked around the room as he waved the key about. "Come and get it, you old sea dog," he said, and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

"So the trunk with the journals just somehow appears? This is getting rather alarming, Nicholas."

He shrugged. "Who knows? I think I shall wrap the jour­nals in cheesecloth and take them on our picnic. We can study them in private, with no ghost or servants to peer over our shoulders."

36

An hour later, Nicholas helped her down from Old Velvet's back in a maple copse set at the back of the Wyverly prop­erty. Rosalind was carrying the cheesecloth-wrapped jour­nals as tenderly as she would a baby.

Old Velvet, he'd told her when he'd introduced her to the bay mare with lovely white socks, had been intended to mate with Beltane. Unfortunately, Beltane wasn't interested, a blow to Nicholas and to Velvet, who proceeded to eat every oat she could find and became quite fat. "They still ignore each other," he said, and patted the old mare's nose.

After they tethered the horses, Nicholas carried the pic­nic basket and a large tartan blanket, the plaid of Scottish Highland cousins many times removed, and led her deeper into the maple copse.

The air was as soft as Old Velvet's nose, soft like silk lightly touching her cheek. The scent of wild roses and star jasmine filled the air. Was that lilac she smelled? There were animals rustling about in the woods around them. A lone nightingale sang from the top branch of a maple tree.

Rosalind looked around her, touched the leaves of a wild rosebush. "What a wonderful place. It is perfect."

He nodded. He was standing very still, his eyes closed. "When I was a boy I always thought something good and fine lived here a very long time ago. Whatever it was, or whoever it was, it left an echo of sweetness behind. And joy," he added, then flushed.

This hard tough man, she thought, who'd carved himself an empire with his brain and his back, and he thought of an echo of sweetness. And joy. And he was flushing because surely a man shouldn't speak so poetically.

He'd seen her and wanted her. Only her. He hadn't cared that she could very well be less than a nobody.

She watched him fail to his knees and spread out the tar­tan, and arrange the food atop it. She stood there, the jour­nals still clasped protectively to her chest, and marveled at him. At Fate. At a two-hundred-year-old ghost and the jour­nals he'd led Nicholas to find.

He smiled up at her, patted the plaid. "Come, sit down."

"I must be very careful not to hurt the journals."

He said with absolute conviction, "They're not about to disintegrate on us now, since I—we—were meant to find them. Hand them to me, Rosalind ."

He laid them on the tartan. "Let's eat first, I'm starving to death, unless—"

"Unless what?"

He shrugged, all indifferent, picked up a leg of baked chicken, and bit into it.

She said, "Unless perhaps you would care to kiss me first?"

He chewed on the chicken and looked at that mouth of hers, and slowly smiled. "A very nice idea."

She laughed aloud and leapt on him. He fell onto his back, tossed the chicken leg over his head, heard a small an­imal scurry to pinch it, and brought her over him.

He would never tire of kissing her, he thought, never, and when his hands touched her bare flesh, he trembled. She didn't know what to do—until she felt the earth suddenly tilt and all her embarrassment fell out of her head. She grabbed his hair to yank him down to her.

When she lay quietly, her head on his shoulder, her breathing finally smoothing out again, he sighed. "I am a selfless man, a man so noble he ignores his own needs, con­tent to bask in the pleasure he gives his wife. Ah, if I feed you, Rosalind , will you have the energy to perform your marital duties?"

"But, you—" She reared up and grinned down at him. She struck a pose. "Ah, I understand. You want more than one marital duty from me. Do you know, I have some ideas about that." She remembered one drawing in the haok her aunts had reluctantly given her that showed a woman on her knees in front of a standing man and he had his hands clenched in her hair while she was pressing her face against his belly. At least at the time she'd thought it was his belly, and hadn't understood why that was of enough interest to merit a page in the book, but now she knew the truth. She gave him a look to cramp his guts.