Again the Magic (16 page)

Heaving a sigh, her brother went to find his valet, who was laden with rifles and leather bags.

More of the shooting party came to Aline’s table to exchange pleasantries, and she smiled and chatted pleasantly, always aware of McKenna’s dark figure in the background. Only when the guests began to descend en masse down the terrace steps, led by Marcus, did McKenna come to her.

“Good morning,” Aline said, while her heartbeat rapidly outpaced her ability to think. She offered him her hand, and her breath caught at the gentle clasp of his fingers. Somehow she managed to find a calm social voice. “Did you rest well last night?”

“No.” His eyes glinted as he retained her hand a moment longer than was acceptable.

“I do hope that your room is not uncomfortable,” Aline managed to say, tugging free of him.

“What would you do if I said it was?”

“Offer you another room, of course.”

“Don’t bother — unless it’s yours.”

His boldness nearly startled a laugh from her — she couldn’t remember when, if ever, a man had spoken to her with such a stunning lack of respect. And it reminded her so much of the comfortable ease they had once shared that she actually found herself relaxing in his presence.
“That
obliging a hostess, I’m not,” she informed him.

McKenna leaned over the table, resting his hands lightly on the glossy surface. His dark head hovered over hers, his stance reminding her of a cat poised to strike its prey. A flicker of predatory interest lightened the turquoise depths of his eyes. “What’s the verdict, my lady?”

She pretended not to understand. “Verdict?”

“Am I to leave the estate, or shall I stay?”

Idly Aline drew an invisible circle on the table with a well-manicured fingertip, while her heart thumped in her chest. “Stay, if you wish.”

His voice was very soft. “And you understand what will happen if I do?”

Aline had never thought that McKenna could be so arrogant — or that she would enjoy it so much. A sense of challenge, male against female, rippled between them. When she replied, her voice matched his for softness. “I don’t wish to disappoint you, McKenna, but I have complete faith in my ability to resist your advances.”

He seemed mesmerized by whatever he saw in her face. “Do you?”

“Yes. Yours wasn’t the first proposition I’ve ever received. And at the risk of sounding rather conceited, it probably won’t be the last.” Aline finally let herself smile at him as she wanted to, full and provocative and gently mocking. “Therefore, you may stay and do your worst. I fully expect to enjoy your efforts. And you should know that I do appreciate a certain amount of finesse.”

His gaze fell to her smiling lips. Although he showed no reaction to her impudence, Aline sensed how greatly she had astonished him. She felt a bit like a damned soul who had gone right up to Lucifer and chucked him playfully beneath the chin.

“Finesse,” he repeated, looking back into her eyes.

“Well, yes. Serenades, and flowers, and poetry.”

“What kind of poetry?”

“The kind that you write yourself, of course.”

His sudden lazy smile caused soft prickles of pleasure to course through her. “Does Sandridge write poetry for you?”

“I daresay he would.” Adam was clever with words — no doubt he would perform such a task with great style and wit.

“But you haven’t asked him to,” McKenna murmured.

She shook her head slowly.

“I’ve never given much thought to finesse,” he told her.

Aline arched her brows. “Even when it comes to seduction?”

“The women I take to bed don’t usually require seduction.”

She rested her chin on her hand, staring at him intently. “They’re simply yours for the taking, you mean?”

“That’s right.” He gave her an inscrutable glance. “And most of them are ladies of the upper class.” With a perfunctory bow, he turned and left with the shooting party.

Aline worked to keep her breath even, and sat until her pulse had steadied.

It was now clear to both of them that the game had two fully committed players… a game with no rules and no clear outcome, and potentially heavy losses on both sides. And as much as Aline feared for herself, she feared even more for McKenna, whose knowledge of the past was riddled with significant and hazardous gaps. She must let him go on thinking the worst of her… to take what he wanted of her, and to eventually leave Stony Cross with his sense of vengeance appeased.

Now that she had seen the shooting party off, she had time to relax with a cup of tea in the breakfast room. Preoccupied with thoughts of McKenna, she nearly bumped into someone who was leaving the manor at the same time.

The man reached out to steady her, grasping her elbows until he was assured of her balance. “Forgive me. I was in a bit of a hurry to join the others.”

“They’ve only just left,” Aline said. “Good morning, Mr. Shaw.”

With his sunstruck hair, lightly tanned complexion and sapphire eyes, Gideon Shaw was dazzling. He possessed an elegant insouciance that could only have come from being born to limitless wealth. The faint lines that cynicism had carved around his eyes and mouth only enhanced his looks, weathering his golden handsomeness agreeably. He was a tall and
well formed man, though his proportions did not approach McKenna’s warrior like build.

“If you descend the stairs on the left and follow the path to the forest, you will catch up to them,” Aline told him.

Shaw’s smile was like a ray of sunshine piercing a cloud bank. “Thank you, my lady. It is my particular torment to enjoy sports that can only take place early in the morning.”

“I assume you also like to fish, then?”

“Oh yes.”

“Some morning you must go with my brother to our trout stream.”

“Perhaps I will — although I may not be up to the challenge. English trout are far more wily than American ones.”

“Can the same be said for English businessmen?” Aline asked, her eyes twinkling.

“Much to my relief, no.” Shaw made a slight bow in preparation to leave, then paused as a thought occurred to him. “My lady, I have a question…”

Somehow Aline knew exactly what he was going to ask. It took considerable acting ability to maintain an ingenuous expression. “Yes, Mr. Shaw?”

“Last night, as I took a stroll through the back gardens, I happened to make the acquaintance of a young woman…” He paused, obviously considering how much of the encounter he should describe.

“She did not give you her name?” Aline asked innocently.

“No.”

“Was she one of the guests? No? Well, then, she was probably a servant.”

“I don’t believe so.” His brow was hemmed with a slight frown of concentration as he continued. “She has light brown hair and green eyes… at least, I think they are green… and she is small of stature, perhaps only an inch taller than you.”

Aline shrugged apologetically. Although she would have liked to oblige him by giving him her sister’s name, she wasn’t certain that Livia wanted him to know her identity yet. “At the moment, Mr. Shaw, I can think of no one on the estate who matches that description. Are you certain that she wasn’t a figment of your imagination?”

He shook his head, his dark lashes lowering over rich blue eyes as he seemed to contemplate a problem of great magnitude. “She was real. And I need — that is, I would very much like — to find her.”

“This woman seems to have made quite an impression on you.”

A self-mocking smile deepened the corners of Shaw’s lips, and he dragged a hand through the gleaming layers of his hair, carelessly disheveling the amber-shaded locks. “Meeting her was like taking a deep breath for the first time in years,” he replied, not quite meeting her gaze.

“Yes, I understand.”

The unmistakable sincerity in her voice seemed to snare his attention. He smiled suddenly, and murmured, “I see that you do.”

Feeling a rush of liking for the man, Aline gestured in the direction of the departing sportsmen. “You can still catch the shooting party if you run.”

Shaw laughed briefly. “My lady, there is nothing in this life I want badly enough to chase after it.”

“Good,” she said, pleased. “Then you may take an early breakfast with me instead. I’ll have it served out here.”

With her companion seeming more than agreeable at the prospect, Aline directed a servant to set out breakfast for two at the table. A steaming basket of scones and sweetened buns was brought to them quickly, along with plates of broiled eggs, baked mushrooms, and thin slices of roast partridge. Although Shaw seemed to enjoy the breakfast offering, he seemed far more interested in a carafe of strongly brewed coffee, drinking it as if it were the antidote to some recently ingested poison.

Settling back in her chair, Aline popped a morsel of buttered scone into her mouth, and slid him a glance of flirtatious inquiry — the look that never failed to elicit the information that she wanted from a man. “Mr. Shaw,” she asked, following the scone with a sip of well-sugared tea, “how many years have you known McKenna?”

The question did not seem to surprise Shaw. After having downed two cups of coffee with barely a pause for breath, he now applied himself to drinking a third at a more leisurely pace. “About eight,” he replied.

“McKenna told me that the two of you met while he was still a ferryman — that you were a passenger on his boat.”

A peculiar smile curved his lips. “Is that what he told you?”

She tilted her head to the side as she regarded him closely. “Is it not the truth?”

“McKenna tends to shade certain details in the interest of shielding my reputation. In fact, he’s far more concerned about my reputation than I am.”

Carefully Aline stirred more sugar in her tea. “Why did you strike up a partnership with a mere ferryman?” she asked in a deliberately relaxed tone.

Gideon Shaw took a long time to answer. He set down his half-empty cup and stared at her steadily. “McKenna saved my life, to start with.”

Aline did not move or speak as he continued.

“I was wandering along the waterfront, blind drunk. Even now I can’t remember how I got there, or why. On occasion I have some memory loss while drinking, and I can’t account for hours or even days.” His bleak smile chilled her to the marrow. “I stumbled and fell into the water, far enough along the docks that no one saw me, especially as the weather was inclement. But McKenna happened to be ferrying back from Staten Island, and he jumped into that damned freezing ocean — in the midst of a brewing storm, no less — and fished me out.”

“How fortunate for you.” Aline’s throat tightened at the thought of the risk that McKenna had taken for a complete stranger.

“Since McKenna had no means of identifying me,” Shaw continued, “and I was out cold, he took me to the tenement room he rented. A day and a half later I found myself in a rat hole of a room, being slapped awake by a giant, irate ferryman.” A reminiscent smile touched his lips. “As you can imagine, I was much the worse for wear. My head felt like it had been split open. After McKenna brought me some food and drink, I was lucid enough to tell him my name. As we talked, I became aware that despite his rough appearance, my rescuer was surprisingly well informed. He’d learned a great deal from all the passengers he’d ferried back and forth, much of it concerning Manhattan real estate. He even knew about a parcel of land that my family had bought on a long-term lease, and had never developed, and then he had the b — pardon me, the audacity… to propose a deal.”

Aline smiled at that. “What was the deal, Mr. Shaw?”

“He wanted to subdivide the land into a series of lots and sell them as short-term leases. And of course he wanted ten percent of whatever he could get for them.” Leaning back, Shaw rested his interlaced fingers on his midriff. “And I thought,
Why not?
No one in my family had bothered doing anything with the land — we third-generation Shaws are accurately known as a bunch of idle pleasure-seeking good-for-naughts. And here was this stranger, reeking of ambition and primal intensity, obviously willing to do anything to make a profit. So I gave him all the cash in my wallet — about fifty dollars — and told him to buy himself a new suit of clothes, cut his hair and shave his beard, and come to my offices the following day.”

“And McKenna did well for you,” Aline said rather than asked.

Shaw nodded. “Within six months he had leased every square inch of that land. Then, without asking permission, he used the profits to buy up acres of submerged shoreline property from the city, in the area below Canal Street. That made me rather nervous, especially when I began to hear the jokes circulating about the Shaw and McKenna ‘underwater lots’ for sale…” A gentle reminiscent laugh escaped his lips. “Naturally I questioned his sanity. But at that point, there was nothing I could do but stand aside as McKenna arranged for the submerged acreage to be filled in with rocks and soil. Then he built tenements and a string of warehouses, transforming it into valuable commercial property. Eventually McKenna turned an investment of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars into a development that yields approximately a million dollars annually.”

The numbers, so casually spoken, stunned Aline.

Seeing her wide eyes, Shaw laughed softly. “Not surprisingly, McKenna has become a sought-after guest in New York, not to mention one of the city’s most eligible bachelors.”

“I suppose his attentions are encouraged by many women,” Aline said, trying to keep her tone offhand.

“He has to beat them off,” Shaw replied with a sly grin. “I would not claim, however, that McKenna is known as a ladies’ man. There have been women — but to my knowledge, none that he has ever taken a serious interest in. Most of his energies have been directed toward his work.”

“What about you, Mr. Shaw?” she asked. “Are your affections engaged by someone back home?”

He shook his head at once. “I’m afraid that I share McKenna’s rather skeptical view of the benefits of marriage.”

“I think you will fall in love someday.”

“Doubtful. I’m afraid that particular emotion is unknown to me…” Suddenly his voice faded into silence. He set his cup down as he stared off into the distance with sudden alertness.