Spellbinder: A Love Story With Magical Interruptions Read online

  “They’re two studs sniffing the mares,” Holly said crudely. “Neither can believe the other is even remotely attractive to women.”

  “Eli told me to apologize for him. I told him that the next time you come into the office, he can damned well apologize for himself.”

  “It’s not necessary. Really. Let’s not talk about them, okay?”

  “Fine with me,” Susannah told her. “But you do have to talk to Evan.”

  “What you mean is I should’ve said something to him long before this. It’s all my fault, Susannah.” She paused, then went on more vigorously, “No, it’s not. Am I supposed to apologize for being successful?”

  “Of course not. But maybe for lying to him.”

  “I didn’t lie to him!” Not about that, anyway. Not about anything.

  “Prevaricated a bit, maybe?” Susannah suggested. “Oh, get the fire out of your eyes, Holly, I’m getting scorched all the way from Brooklyn Heights! Look, Evan will come around. It’s just that filthy Irish temper of his.” There was a smile in her voice now. “The one he shares with you and half the rest of this city. It’s a miracle you didn’t all annihilate each other back in Ireland.”

  Holly rummaged in the breadbox for muffins. “We were too busy annihilating you bloody British.”

  “Give Evan a couple of days to think it over. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “Huh! If he’s so great, why didn’t you go after him?”

  “Me?” Susannah gasped, and Holly had to grin at the mock horror in her voice. “With that six-foot-four 240-pound lug? He’d crush poor little size-two me if he rolled over wrong in his sleep! All they’d find would be a pancake with pink toenails.”

  “Hey—he ain’t skinny, but he ain’t an ounce over 225 either.”

  “Mmm,” Susannah purred. “And just exactly how’d you find that out, girlfriend?”

  “Why, I looked at his driver’s license, of course,” Holly replied innocently. “Susannah Dolcebella Wingfield, what can you be suggesting?”

  “Holly Elizabeth McClure, you’d be a lousy lawyer. You can’t lie worth shit.”

  “I beg your pardon. When I’m being a novelist, I’m a professional liar—I tell lies for a living, on paper. Maybe we’re in the same racket after all, hmm?”

  “Stop trying to distract me from the subject.”

  “Which is?” The fridge was bare of butter, margarine, and jam. Not to mention eggs, milk, and cheese. Isabella must have done a search-and-destroy on it again; the housekeeper was way too impressed by expiration dates. Shrugging, Holly went to the pantry for peanut butter.

  “Evan Lachlan.”

  “Well, you have a point. He’d squish you, sure as shootin’. Leave the big brawny guys to the big brawny girls like me. Are we still on for lunch Monday?”

  “Holly—”

  “Susannah,” she said patiently, “just tell me if I have to get dressed in something other than jeans.”

  “I’ll have to let you know. Can’t we leave the alumni thing to somebody else?”

  She smeared peanut butter on the muffin. “Our number’s up, according to Jemima.”

  “God, fifteen years in June—I’m starting to feel old, Holly!”

  “My heart bleedeth not. You’re damned near three years younger than the rest of us, you little grade-skipping genius. Look, all we have to do is pick a Friday in April, corral the New York alums into a bar, and get ’em drinking and dancing.”

  “Do we bring dates?”

  “So you can show off your big-shot honey?” Holly teased.

  “Just like you want to show off your big hunky marshal!”

  “If we’re still speaking to each other. Which is up to him. If he wants to be weird about this, fine. There’s a lot of other men out there.”

  “But nobody like Evan Lachlan and you know it. I saw it the minute I introduced you, and I knew long before that. Which is exactly why I introduced you—after you fought me on it for months, you stubborn bitch.”

  “‘Introduced—?” she echoed indignantly. “You practically handed me over as his birthday present!”

  “I’m a sweet and thoughtful friend,” was the blithe, bland reply. “To both of you. And he hasn’t even thanked me yet. Susannah the Yankee Yenta,” she laughed. “As if you didn’t throw me at Elias on his birthday—”

  “As if you didn’t want to be thrown!” she scoffed. “You were such a pain in the ass—I acted out of pure self-preservation. I flatly refuse to supply tequila and sympathy more than five times over any one man in your life. You’d used up your quota, girl.”

  Susannah snorted. “Holly, you’re too good to me.”

  “I’m a sweet and thoughtful friend,” she teased. “By the way, I never did get around to asking how Elias liked his birthday present.”

  “Bet you gave Lachlan pretty much the same thing.”

  “Susannah!” She pretended shock. “I bought him brunch and a cigar.”

  “That’s definitely not what I gave Eli! And I know Evan—for brunch and a cigar, and whatever else went with it—”

  “Watch it, Wingfield!”

  “—he’ll be back,” she finished.

  “Well, ain’t that jes’ dandy,” she drawled in the broadest possible version of her native Virginian. “Ah can’t wait t‘be the next numbah in his li’l ol’ black book—” She dropped the accent and finished acidly, “—which probably runs into quadruple digits.”

  “Triple, maybe,” Susannah retorted, amused.

  “Terrific. Just what I lack—Casanova in ostrich-skin cowboy boots. Where did he get those awful things, anyway?”

  “Beats me. I’ve heard five different stories so far.”

  “Well, if any of ’em ever sound plausible, send me an e-mail. I’m not gonna be around to hear it.”

  “Nice try, McClure. You can’t fool me. I saw you two last night—”

  “Before your oh-so-adorable man spilled the beans? Sorry, I didn’t mean that. Tell Elias it’s okay. Evan had to find out sometime. It’s been unsaid too long.”

  Susannah was silent for a minute. Then, very seriously: “This one’s different, Holly.”

  “I was beginning to think so.”

  “I know so. See you Monday—if I can’t make it, I’ll e-mail you.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  She sighed and hung up the phone. Would he come around? She had no idea. Evan Lachlan was unpredictable—and she hated that in anything, especially a man. She was a writer, which meant she was a control freak who liked things her own way, at her own speed, in her own time. Evan was indeed different. For one thing, he’d gotten her into bed a mere week after their first real dinner date (the night she’d spent on his couch didn’t count), when her adamant rule was a month.

  The night after the triple homicide she’d taken him to a trendy bistro. He insisted on springing for an expensive merlot to apologize for the previous evening’s interruption, and was his usual self during dinner. But by nine he was starting to droop, overwork catching up with him. She asked the waiter for the check and a taxi, and in the cab Evan apologized ruefully—saying he hadn’t counted on drifting off to sleep and reversing their roles of the previous week.

  Holly looked him straight in the eye. “If you think I’m spending another night on your couch, Lachlan, think again.”

  Suddenly the cab couldn’t move fast enough. Neither could their hands or mouths. By the time the cab finally stopped, she couldn’t have formulated a single thought to save her own life.

  They took the stairs to the fourth floor, frantically undoing buttons and buckles as they climbed, cursing his knotted tie and her tight cuffs, stumbling, feet and ankles and knees tangling so that they nearly fell on a landing. At last his door was behind her back, and she propped herself gratefully against it, needing the support, while he kissed her and fumbled in a pocket for keys with pretty much equal urgency. She arched against him and he growled low in his throat. And dropped the keys.

  He crouche
d down to snag them up. When he wasn’t kissing her, when his hands weren’t all over her, she could think again. And she started to laugh.

  “What’s so goddamned funny?” he demanded, fingers still scrabbling for the keys on the tiled floor.

  “Us. We’re not a couple of teenagers who only have ten minutes until your parents get home.”

  “Ten minutes?” he exclaimed, outraged. “What d’you take me for, lady? Some kinda amateur?”

  “I’ll take you any way I can get you right now, you egotistical swine! And I do mean right now, Lachlan.”

  He laughed up at her through a tousle of dark hair. She buried both hands in its thickness, something she’d wanted to do forever, and his eyes closed and his lip parted as he luxuriated in the caress. Still crouching, he slipped his hands under her tweed jacket and pulled her blouse from her jeans so he could get his fingers onto her skin. His touch scorched her. He leaned forward and pressed his face to her abdomen, hot breath penetrating layers of denim and silk, lower and lower until the heat of his mouth found the matching heat between her thighs. She moaned, legs suddenly boneless, hands braced on his shoulders to hold herself upright.

  “Éimhín—” Her breathing was ragged ad the long, slow exhalations were replaced by gently biting teeth. “Oh, God—”

  “I could eat you alive—you been drivin’ me crazy since the first time I saw you—”

  She dug her fingers into the hard curves of his biceps, and with strength born of desperate craving she hauled him to his feet.

  “Get the fucking keys and open the fucking door,” she snarled.

  “And get on with the fucking?” he suggested, grinning like a madman.

  “Goddammit, get this door open or I’ll commit felony sexual assault right here in the hall!”

  His eyes had turned to molten emeralds. He opened them as wide as they would go and exclaimed, “Damn! You promise?”

  “Lachlan—!”

  “Takin’ a lot for granted, aren’t you? Maybe I’m not that easy.”

  For answer, she lowered her gaze to his inseam, grinning. “I’m betting you know how to use that—and that you’ve been practicing since you were fifteen.”

  “Fourteen-and-a-half.”

  “Well, then, you ought to be fairly good at it by now.”

  Her coffee was cold and her cheeks were burning.

  In retrospect, she was amazed that she’d held out for seven whole days.

  LACHLAN WENT TO HIS LOCAL Barnes & Noble on Saturday afternoon. The array of Holly’s books made his jaw drop. He bought a paperback, a thick biographical novel of a woman artist in Renaissance Italy who got raped by her father’s apprentice. Cheery stuff. Declining a bag for his purchase, he stuffed the book into his coat pocket, went down the block for a fistful of good cigars, and took himself home, where he drank decaf French roast and smoked cigars and read all afternoon.

  He liked the book. Not a boring word in it, and she had the knack of completely involving the reader in her characters. She made you feel you were there, that you knew the girl and the rapist and the sanctimonious jackasses who said she had it coming. The trial was a travesty, the aftermath a horror. But Artemisia stuck to her guns—good girl!—and got her revenge by becoming a truly great painter. A color reproduction of one of her canvases was on the cover; he walked back to the bookstore to find and buy a book of her work to add to his collection.

  As he waited in line to pay for the volume, he suddenly remembered a Sunday afternoon at the Metropolitan, the day he and Holly had walked in the Park and she’d sung to him for the first time. At the museum he’d let show a little too much of his interest in and knowledge of art. Holly had listened attentively, mostly silent, while he went on and on about Turner’s instinct for light and Sargent’s for capturing the true character of his portrait subject. His face burned with the memory: he could just see himself standing there lecturing about art to a woman who’d written a book about an artist.

  A damned good book, too, though he would’ve enjoyed it even more if it hadn’t been Holly’s, with International Bestseller! screaming across the back cover, right under a picture of her in a dark sweater, holding a big black-masked white cat.

  He hadn’t even known she had a cat.

  How much else didn’t he know about her?

  How much did writers make, anyway?

  He did a fairly rotten thing then. He went home and called a friend and had him run Holly’s name through the computer. Unlisted she might be to everyone else, but not to the New York Department of Motor Vehicles.

  Ten minutes of pacing his apartment later, the friend rang back. After some razzing about why he’d want information on a classy babe like this, he was given her address. And learned from it that a writer with a “loyal following and critical acclaim” made a shitload of money.

  THEY HADN’T BEEN SCHEDULED FOR anything on Sunday, and when he read the book review section of the paper (for the second time in his life) he found out why. She and five other authors were signing books at a Village store to benefit the families of 9/11 victims.

  At the door he paid his five-bucks-for-charity to get inside out of the rain. Oh, very chi-chi stuff, this. Brick walls, oak shelves, framed posters of dead white writers, espresso machines going full blast, and a crowd ranging from art mavens to nose-piercers, all with books ready to be signed. Holly sat at a long table next to a mildly balding professorial type—complete with leather elbow patches and battered unlit pipe—who leaned entirely too close and looked down her blouse while saying something witty. He obviously thought it was witty, anyway; Holly smiled politely, then turned once more to the girl who stood waiting for her autograph. Evan couldn’t hear their conversation from this far back in line, but obviously Holly was much more interested in talking to her readers than to her colleague. He wondered if he would have appreciated this quite as much if the colleague hadn’t been a bit reminiscent of Elias Bradshaw (with a lot less hair), one of those rumpled intellectuals that women seemed to like for no particular reason that Lachlan had ever been able to figure. The guy probably fucked in rhymed couplets.

  It got to be three o’clock, and the store manager elicited groans when she announced that the signing would be suspended to give the writers a break. Things would resume in ten minutes, at which time there would be small gatherings elsewhere in the store for readings. This brought cheers. A long, lean, poetic type vanished to prepare himself for his performance. The professor went to pee. Holly chatted with the two women writers who were left, then gratefully accepted a fresh cappuccino and made her way through the store. She was good at this, Lachlan thought as he watched her, his cop’s analytical eye watching her work the crowd. With some people she was sincere; with others, not very—but he knew they couldn’t tell the difference.

  She vanished down a side aisle. He pocketed her novel and sauntered along the next aisle over, wanting to hear without being seen.

  “Thanks for coming today. I know we’re all still pretty much in shock—and nobody’s likely to get over that very soon. If ever. But I guess we all have to try to do what we can.

  “I’m going to read from a work in progress—and very slow progress, I might add. It doesn’t know whether it’s going to be a novel or a short story. But that’s one of the dubious joys of writing. You can get suckered in by an idea that shows up, flirts with you for a while, and then leaves without so much as a kiss good-bye.”

  Evan winced. He took off his coat, folded it over his folded arms, and leaned against the bookshelves between Psychology/Freud and Psychology/Jung to listen. Her voice changed: more formal, the cadences deeper, the sexy throatiness and all traces of Virginia gone.

  They were so fair and fine a splendor, the young knights riding by. From her tower window she gazed down at their proud, unhelmed heads, their faces pure with devotion to God and dedication to Holy Crusade. Crimson crosses on unsullied white silk tabards burned like sacred fire, the same fire that lit their eyes. She saw all this, and wished
fiercely that she was a man so that she might join them. Surely their efforts here on Earth would be rewarded and their paths to Heaven would be smooth. They were so beautiful, each with God’s Hand on his shoulder and Christ’s Finger pointing the way.

  Each, but for one man who rode alone, apart from all the rest. He too wore the Cross, but there was nothing sacred about him. Tall, powerfully made, he sat his black destrier with the trained suppleness of a warrior and the easy grace of a born horseman. The wind rippled his dark hair, sunlight sparking red glints from its thickness as if flames lingered there still after a journey through Hell. That same fire burned golden in his eyed that were neither brown nor green, eyes that glowed with a light neither splendid nor holy.

  His gaze caught and held hers. Fire scorched her, and power such as she had never known existed. She averted her eyes. Though she knew nothing of him, not his name or rank or lineage, instinct stronger than reason told her to be wary. He was beautiful, yes—but not with the fervent grandeur of faith. His beauty of proud nose and strong bones and fine, fierce eyes unsettled her. She was young yet, but not so young that she could not recognize danger.

  Holly stopped reading, and there came the sound of pages rustling. Then she said in her usual voice, “This man is based on someone I know. My problem here has been to transfer a twenty-first-century New Yorker into a twelfth-century Crusader. Why, you might very well ask, would I even try? Well, the man I know is a cop.”

  Lachlan blinked. He’d figured, what with the hair (“journey through Hell”?) and the nose (I guess “proud” is a polite way of describing it) and the eyes (I always put down “hazel” on forms—do they really turn gold?), but to hear her say it out loud like this—

  “Beautiful”?

  A man’s voice asked, “So you’re saying that a cop’s attitude is the same as a knight’s—and the legal system is like a Holy War?”

  “First, that’s not what I’m saying at all. Second, I don’t mean to be rude, but if that’s your attitude toward law enforcement, you may want to reconsider.”