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Jack flicked him a sardonic glance. “Which says what about this situation?”
Trapped, Aidan knew better than to answer.
Jack folded his arms across his chest, eying Aidan with a scolding big brother air that set his chattering teeth on edge. This was wrong. All wrong. Not only was his wastrel cousin younger by a full three weeks, but giving unwanted advice was Aidan’s job. Ignoring it was Jack’s. Anything else felt unnatural.
“Well?” Aidan growled. “Say whatever it is you want to say and be done with it. Or were you planning on simply glowering your displeasure?”
Jack huffed his annoyance. “You want me to say it? Fine. I’ll be quick and concise. Are you trying to get yourself lynched? What if a neighbor saw you casting spells out there?”
“Is that all?” Aidan lay back, wrapping himself deeper in his blankets in a vain attempt to get warm. “No one saw me, Jack. Give me credit for a bit of sense.”
“I would if I thought you hadn’t had every bit of it knocked out of you by those ruffians. That in itself should have warned you it’s not safe to be flaunting your powers.”
He was ill. He was exhausted. His wound hurt like the very devil. Did Jack have to pick now to rake him over the coals? “So I should have simply let them kill me?”
“No, but—” Jack ran a tired hand down his face. “All I’m saying is that times are uneasy. People are nervous and looking for a scapegoat. Don’t give them a reason to make it you.”
That caught Aidan’s attention. He gritted his teeth as he struggled to sit up. “Have you heard something?”
“Nothing specific, but rumors abound. An old woman in Kildare was burned out of her home after her daughter-in-law denounced her as a witch. A family living near Rathnure simply disappeared. Neighbors not saying a word, but the stories talk of strange doings by the son and daughter catching the attention of the village leaders. The devil’s work and all that.”
Almost Smith’s exact words. “Bloody hell,” he muttered.
“The Duinedon are nervous, Aidan, and the Other, at least those who understand the warning signs, are lying low. It’s well to watch your back under the circumstances.”
Rain smacked against the windows in a renewal of the earlier downpour. The room thrown into a gray half light. Cold. Gloomy. A sudden yearning for Belfoyle set him shuddering. It had been too long since he’d ridden his fields. Stood at the edge of the Burren’s rippling barrenness, feeling the pass of invisible Fey, hearing the chime of faery bells. A magical world just beyond the limits of his vision.
Aidan touched the tightly wrapped bandage round his ribs. “Do you think it will ever be easy between us, Jack? Other and Duinedon, I mean.”
His cousin dipped a shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “I’d not wager on it.”
And for Jack, that was saying something.
Cat sat at the drawing room window. The passing rain shower had been replaced by a pale, milky sun and a stiff breeze hurrying the people down Henry Street like a chivying hand.
She scoured their faces as they passed. No Smith among them. In fact, no one she recognized at all. As if in the three years she’d been gone, the world had moved on. Left her behind. The Miss Catriona O’Connell they knew expunged from the record. A fallen woman. A whispered warning for other young debs at their coming out. Be careful or you’ll end like her.
But had they truly known her?
Had she known herself?
Did she now?
She’d reinvented herself so often she didn’t know who Cat O’Connell was anymore. And now she was being asked to do it again. But could she? Or in slipping so casually from one form to the other had she finally lost her core? That part of her that remained unchanging and eternal? Was she as much a spirit as any wraith doomed to Annwn’s underworld?
Thoughts of death drove her to Geordie. Had Smith taken his frustrations out on the dwarf? Or did he live to question and worry over Cat’s survival? She hated not knowing. Dreaded certainty even more.
So many people important to her had come and gone in her life. Her father had been the first to vanish. Swallowed by the sea in a gale off Gibraltar. Then Jeremy with his silver tongue and laughing eyes, who chose duty to another over devotion to her. Her child, whose existence could be measured in days yet whose p
ale face haunted her dreams with unfailing regularity. Now Geordie. All lost to her as she tumbled from one life to another like some jumbled piece of flotsam.
Unable to sit any longer with naught but the tangle of her thoughts for company, Cat rose and left the room. Climbed the stairs, the upper corridors dimly lit and chilly. Paused in front of the first closed door, its brass knob a shining temptation. Her hand reached for it. Turned it. The door opening a crack. Wide enough for the warmth of a stoked fire to heat her face. For the faint tang of cheroot smoke and bay rum to tease her nose. For the slow, easy breathing of the man in the bed to assure her that despite her stupidity she’d not killed him. This man had yet to disappear.
Even swimming in a laudanum haze, Aidan sensed Cat’s presence. A quiver of the air. A pensive, weighted silence. Storms brooding on the horizon. He felt her stare in the prickling of his skin and a sweep of heat separate from the spiking fever. He pictured her flashing green eyes. The sleek polish of her hair. The flush of her pearl skin. He wanted to reassure her. Tell her everything would be all right. But his drugged mind had divorced itself from his body. He could only lie there. Feign sleep.
And even long after she withdrew, dreams plagued him with visions of Cat, not as the thief he’d hired, but as a woman brilliant and courageous and vivid as a queen. A woman to understand him. A woman to love.
Cat sat surrounded by parcels. Some opened for inspection. Others still wrapped in string and brown paper. Aidan’s barked sickroom command becoming reality within days. Apparently a perquisite of being an earl. Even one hanging to his wealth by his fingertips.
