Daughter of the Spellcaster

She gave him a quizzical look, like a puppy who’d just heard an odd noise.

“Maybe I’ll stay awhile,” he said, leaning in to kiss her.

She dodged his mouth with an elegant dip and a bob, and wound up standing a foot away. She looked scared. “I said you could be in our child’s life, Ryan. Not in mine.” Turning, she headed for the exit. “She’s due in February. You can come and visit then, if you want.”

4

Lena didn’t know what she was expecting when she made her exit. Maybe for him to come chasing after her, begging her not to go. Maybe at least an apology. But he did nothing, said nothing, just let her leave. So she sat amid the masses of humanity on the bus ride home, hiding behind a pair of very large, very dark sunglasses. She’d picked them up for three times their worth at Port Authority when she’d realized she was teetering on the brink of tears for the twelfth time since she’d jumped into the taxi.

Stupid to cry over him. So freaking stupid. Stupid to keep remembering that last night, the awful things he’d said. Stupid.

She leaned back in the seat, closed her eyes and thought about it anyway.

She’d decided she was going to tell him she was pregnant that night. It was time, she’d thought. She’d cooked dinner at his place, and she hadn’t thought of it as trying to show him how domestic she could be or anything, although she could see where someone else might have thought so. She roasted a small chicken with lots of veggies and dollops of sour cream. It was nice.

He wasn’t.

Oh, they were getting along great at first. And then, after they’d eaten, when they were all snuggled up on his sofa and surfing through the pay-per-view channels, she sort of took the cowardly way in. She told him a friend of hers was pregnant, and that she was wondering what the guy she’d been dating was going to say about it, and what did he think about that?

And it went zoom, right over his head. “If the guy has any brains, he’ll run screaming in the other direction,” he said, and he was dead serious.

Lena felt like he’d slapped her. “Why’s that?” she managed to ask through her rapidly closing windpipe.

He was manning the remote, pausing to read the info on anything that looked interesting to him, not looking at her. “Isn’t it obvious? She’s trying to get him to marry her.”

“That’s not true! She doesn’t want to marry the guy. She just thinks he has a right to know he’s going to be a father.”

“Right. She doesn’t want to marry him.” There was more sarcasm in his tone than there had been sour cream on their roasted veggies. “Tell me this, does he have money?”

“Well, yes. Quite a lot of it, actually. But that doesn’t mean—”

“Yeah, it does.” He set the remote down and looked at her. “No one gets pregnant by accident in this day and age, Lena. And believe me, before I met you, every woman I dated was after one thing and one thing only—my father’s fortune. They’d have done anything. Some of them even tried, but I was too smart. I was careful. I protected myself.”

“Did you, now?” She focused on her hands in her lap, thinking she needed a manicure, unable to meet his eyes. Mainly because there were hot, angry tears surfacing in her own.

“I did.” He shook his head. “I pity the guy, but it was his own stupidity. Guys with money need to be more careful than anyone about shit like this. He should have known better. Now he’s doomed.”

“Doomed?” That brought her head up, and the anger burning a path up the middle of her chest rose with it. “Marrying her would be his doom?”

“Marrying a woman who tricked him into it, yeah. Doom.” He smiled at her, still completely oblivious. “You know, this is something I wanted to talk to you about right at the beginning, and I kept getting distracted. Totally your fault, by the way.” His eyes softened, and he pushed her hair behind her ear and kissed the lobe, sending a warm shiver down her spine, despite how pissed off she was at him. She wished she could grab that warm shiver by its neck and choke it to death.

“Talk to me about it now, then,” she said. She didn’t think she was going to like this discussion, but she figured she needed to hear it.

“Well, I just… you know… have no intention of… you know…”

“No, I don’t know. I’m a witch, not a psychic. You have no intention of what?”

He sat back, and the lightbulb finally went on in his eyes. “Whoa. You’re pissed.”

She crossed her arms over her chest. “No, I’m not.” She sighed, then shook her head hard. “Yes, dammit, I am. I thought we had something wonderful happening between us, Ryan.”

“We do,” he said quickly. “We really do. I mean, it’s been great. I’m enjoying the hell out of being with you.”

“But you don’t want anything… more?”

“No.” He looked away. “I mean, certainly not now, anyway. It’s been eight weeks, Lena. Don’t you think it’s way too soon for this particular conversation?”

“Oh. You think I should wait until I’ve put in eight months and then find out I’ve been wasting my time?”

He was hurt. She saw it in his face. She was being completely irrational. Under any other circumstances it would be too soon to be having this conversation. But she was carrying his child. Not that he would ever believe she hadn’t planned it. She realized that now, and it was crushing her heart slowly. Like a vise with some big guy gradually turning the screw.

“You think that unless we’re heading for marriage, you’re wasting your time?” he asked, handsome and dense and so out of touch with his feelings that it was beyond belief.

Or was he just out of touch with her feelings? With who she wanted him to be? Her dream prince. The one who would have died for her.

She lowered her eyes, knowing she’d hit on the truth. “No. Of course I don’t think that. Our time together has been…” She tried to swallow and couldn’t. “It’s been the best time of my life, really.” Her tears were audible that time, her voice tight and strained and an octave deeper than usual.

He tried to look at her eyes, but she turned her face away. “Are you crying?” he asked.

“I have to go.” She got up, went to the door, needing to escape. Now.

“Hey. Wait a minute.” He followed. “What the hell just happened here?”

She turned slowly and forced herself to look up at him. To let him see her tears. It was the honest thing to do, though it made her feel like a fool. She saw him through her swimming eyes and knew beyond doubt that if she told him she was carrying his child, he would believe she had planned it that way, intending to trick him into marrying her so she could get her hands on his dad’s billions.

Which was a joke. Ernst adored her. If she’d wanted money, she probably could have just asked him for it. But she didn’t want his money. She wanted his son. She had allowed herself to fall—had fallen willingly, knowingly—into her own childish fantasies, where he had been her exotic desert prince and she had been his beloved slave girl.

“Lena?” he asked. And he sounded genuinely puzzled.

“I think we want very different things, Ryan.” It was hard to talk, hurt to force the words through her spasming larynx. “I think my feelings for you are getting close to the point of no return. If you’re not heading in the same direction, then…” She let the sentence just hang there.

He stared at her as if she’d grown a second head. “It’s good between us. Why fix what isn’t broken?”

“Because if I stay, it’ll be my heart that gets broken.” She blinked as fresh tears flooded, and then she stood on tiptoe and pressed her mouth against his, drinking in the taste of him one last time, promising herself to remember it forever. “I don’t regret a day of it, though.”

And then she turned and she left. She knew his head was spinning, and that he must think she’d lost her mind. But he’d made himself clear. Which meant she didn’t have a choice.

Lena snapped herself out of the memory, realizing it was doing her no good. She was more eager than ever to return to the rural community she now called home, the low-key people there, the easy, laid-back pace. The peace and serenity of it. That old vineyard had healed her since she’d been living there with her mom. She’d just reopened an old wound, that was all. Maybe she had to let out a little of the poison that had been festering there. She would heal again. Just as soon as she returned to Havenwood, her little piece of heaven.

Ryan sat in the den, doing what he supposed could be described as brooding, until it hit him that his father’s mansion was emanating a feeling of emptiness. The post-funeral gathering must have ended. No one had come in to bother him. No one had come in to say goodbye. He doubted anyone even knew he was in there, other than Bahru, and God knew there was no love lost between the two of them.

The funeral and the attendant gathering were over. It was all over. Lena was gone, and she’d taken his baby with her.

Sighing, he got up out of the chair where he’d been sitting like a tranced-out zombie for the past two hours. He had to get home.

Why? What’s the hurry?

Shut up.