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  relaxed. “I feel as though I’ve waited years to hear you say that.”

  She brushed the wet hair away from his brow. “You only had to ask.”

  He caught her hands in his. “You don’t.” Because she was beginning to shiver, he drew her out of the stall to wrap her in a towel. He caught it close around her, then wrapped his arms tight for more warmth. “Anastasia.” Tenderness swelled inside him as he touched his lips to her hair, her cheek, her mouth. “You don’t have to ask. I love you. You brought something I thought I’d never have again, never want again, back into my life.”

  On a broken sigh, she pressed her face to his chest. This was real, she thought. This was hers. She would find a way to keep it. “You’re everything I’ve ever wanted. Don’t stop loving me, Boone. Don’t stop.”

  “I couldn’t.” He drew her away. “Don’t cry.”

  “I don’t.” The tears shimmered, but didn’t spill over. “I don’t cry.”

  Anastasia sheds no tears, but she’ll shed them for you.

  Sebastian’s words rang uncomfortably in Boone’s head. Resolutely he blocked them out. It was ridiculous. He’d do nothing to hurt her. He opened his mouth, then closed it again. A steamy bathroom was no place for the proposal he wanted to make. And there were things he needed to tell her first.

  “Let’s get you another shirt. We need to talk.”

  She was much too happy to pay any heed to the curl of uneasiness. She laughed when he took her back to the bedroom and tugged another of his shirts over her head. Dreamily she poured two more glasses of wine while he pulled on a pair of jeans.

  “Will you come with me?” He held out a hand, and she took it willingly.

  “Where are we going?”

  “I want to show you something.” He took her down the shadowy hall into his office. Delighted, Ana turned in a circle.

  “This is where you work.”

  There were wide, uncurtained windows framed with curving cherrywood. A couple of worn, faded scatter rugs had been tossed on the hardwood floor. Starshine sprinkled through the twin skylights. An industrious-looking computer, reams of paper and shelves of books announced that this was a workplace. But he’d added charm with framed illustrations, a collection of dragons and knights that intrigued her. The winged fairy he’d bought from Morgana had a prominent place on a high, carved stool.

  “You need some plants,” she said, having decided instantly, thinking of the narcissus and daffodils she was forcing in her greenhouse. “I imagine you spend hours in this room every day.” She glanced down at the empty ashtray beside his machine.

  Following her gaze, he frowned. Odd, he thought, he hadn’t had a cigarette in days—had forgotten about them completely. He’d have to congratulate himself later.

  “Sometimes I watch out the window when you’re in your garden. It makes it difficult to concentrate.”

  She laughed and sat on the corner of his desk. “We’ll get you some shades.”

  “Not a chance.” He smiled, but his hands went nervously to his pockets. “Ana, I need to tell you about Alice.”

  “Boone.” Compassion had her rising again to reach out. “I understand. I know it’s painful. There’s no need to explain anything to me.”

  “There is for me.” With her hand in his, he turned to gesture at a sketch on the wall. A lovely young girl was kneeling by a stream, dipping a golden pail into the silver water. “She drew that, before Jessie was born. Gave it to me for our first anniversary.”

  “It’s beautiful. She was very talented.”

  “Yeah. Very talented, very special.” He sipped his wine in an unconscious toast to a lost love. “I knew her most of my life. Pretty Alice Reeder.”

  He needed to talk, Ana thought. She would listen. “You were high school sweethearts?”

  “No.” He laughed at that. “Not even close. Alice was a cheerleader, student body president, all-around nice girl who always made the honor roll. We ran in different crowds, and she was a couple of years behind me. I was going through my obligatory rebellious period and kind of hulked around school, looking tough.”

  She smiled, touched his cheek where the stubble was rough. “I’d like to have seen that.”

  “I snuck cigarettes in the bathroom, and Alice painted scenery for school plays. We knew each other, but that was about it. I went off to college, ended up in New York. It seemed necessary, since I was going to write, that I get myself a loft and starve a little.”

  She slipped an arm around him, instinctively offering comfort, waiting while he gathered his thoughts.

  “One morning I was in the bakery around the corner from where I was living, and I looked up from the crullers and there she was, buying coffee and a croissant. We started talking. You know … what are you doing here, the old neighborhood, what had happened to whom. That kind of thing. It was comforting, and exciting. Here we were, two small-town kids taking on big bad New York.”

  And fate had tossed them together, Ana thought, in a city of millions.

  “She was in art school,” Boone continued, “sharing an apartment only a couple of blocks away with some other girls. I walked her to the subway. We just sort of drifted together, sitting in the park, comparing sketches, talking for hours. Alice was so full of life, energy, ideas. We didn’t fall in love so much as we slid into it.” His eyes softened as he studied the sketch. “Very slowly, very sweetly. We got married just before I sold my first book. She was still in college.”

  He had to stop again as the memories swam back in force. Instinctively his hand closed over Ana’s. She opened herself, giving what strength and support she could.

  “Anyway, everything seemed so perfect. We were young, happy, in love. She’d already been commissioned to do a painting. We found out she was pregnant. So we decided to move back home, raise the child in a nice suburban atmosphere close to family. Then Jessie came, and it seemed as though nothing could ever go wrong. Except that Alice never seemed to really get her energy back after the birth. Everyone said it was natural, she was bound to be tired with a new baby and her work. She lost weight. I used to joke that she was going to fade away.” He closed his eyes for a minute. “That’s just what she did. She faded away. When it had gone on long enough for us to worry, she had tests, but there was a mess-up in the lab and they didn’t detect it soon enough. By the time we found out she had cancer, it was too late to stop it.”

  “Oh, Boone. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “She suffered. That was the worst. She suffered and there was nothing I could do. I watched her die, degree by degree. And I thought I would die, too. But there was Jessie. Alice was only twenty-five when I buried her. Jessie had just turned two.” He took a long breath before he turned to Ana. “I loved Alice. I always will.”

  “I know. When someone touches your life that way, you never lose it.”

  “When I lost her, I stopped believing in happy-ever-after, except in books. I didn’t want to fall in love again, risk that kind of pain—for myself or for Jessie. But I have fallen in love again. What I feel for you is so strong, it makes me believe again. It’s not the same as I felt before. It’s not less. It’s just … us.”

  She touched his cheek. She thought she understood. “Boone, did you think I would ask you to forget her? That I could resent or be jealous of what you had with her? It only makes me love you more. She made you happy. She gave you Jessie. I only wish I had known her.”

  Impossibly moved, he lowered his brow to hers. “Marry me, Ana.”

  Chapter 11

  She froze. The hands that had reached up to bring him close stopped in midair. Her breath seemed to stall in her lungs. Even as her heart leapt with hope, her mind warned her to wait.

  Very slowly, she eased out of his arms. “Boone, I think—”

  “Don’t tell me I’m rushing things.” He was amazingly calm now that he’d taken the step—the step he realized he’d already taken in his head weeks before. “I don’t care if I’m moving too fast. I
need you in my life, Ana.”

  “I’m already in your life.” She smiled, trying to keep it light. “I told you that.”

  “It was hard enough when I only wanted you, harder still when I started to care. But it’s impossible now that I’m in love with you. I don’t want to live next door to you.” He took a firm grip on her shoulders to keep her still. “I don’t want to have to send my child away so I can spend the night with you. You said you loved me.”

  “I do.” She gave in to desperate need and pressed herself against him. “You know I do, more than I thought I could. More than I wanted to. But marriage is—”

  “Right.” He stroked a hand down her damp hair. “Right for us. Ana, I told you once I don’t take intimacy lightly, and I wasn’t just talking about sex.” He drew her back, wanting to see her face, wanting her to see his. “I’m talking about what’s inside me every time I look at you. Before I met you, I was content to keep my life the way it was. But that’s no good anymore. I’m not going to keep running through the hedges to be with you. I want you with me, with us.”

  “Boone, if it could be so simple.” She turned away, struggling to find the right answer.

  “It can be.” He fought against a quick flutter of panic. “When I walked in this morning and saw you in bed, with your arms around Jessie—I can’t tell you what went through me at that moment. I realized that was what I wanted. For you to be there. Just to be there. To know I could share her with you, because you’d love her. That there could be other children. A future.”

  She shut her eyes, because the image was so sweet, so perfect. And she was denying them both a chance to make the image reality, because she was afraid. “If I said yes now, before you understand me, before you know me, it wouldn’t be fair.”

  “I do know you.” He swept her around again. “I know you have passion, and compassion, that you’re loyal and generous and openhearted. That you have strong feelings for family, that you like romantic music and apple wine. I know the way your laugh sounds, the way you smell. And I know that I could make you happy, if you’d let me.”

  “You do make me happy. It’s because I don’t want to do any less for you that I don’t know what to do.” She broke away to walk off the tension. “I didn’t know this was going to happen so quickly, before I was sure. I swear, if I’d known you were thinking of marriage …”

  To be his wife, she thought. Bound to him by handfast. She could think of nothing more precious than that kind of belonging.

  She had to tell him, so that he would have the choice of accepting or backing away. “You’ve been much more honest with me than I with you.”

  “About?”

  “About what you are.” Her eyes closed on a sigh. “I’m a coward. So easily devastated by bad feelings, afraid, pathetically afraid, of pain—physical and emotional. So hatefully vulnerable to what others can be indifferent to.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ana.”

  “No, you don’t.” She pressed her lips together. “Can you understand that there are some who are more sensitive than others to strong feelings? Some who have to develop a defense against absorbing too much of the swirl of emotion that goes on around them? Who have to, Boone, because they couldn’t survive otherwise?”

  He pushed back his impatience and tried to smile. “Are you getting mystical on me?”

  She laughed, pressing a hand to her eyes. “You don’t know the half of it. I need to explain, and don’t know how. If I could—” She started to turn back, determined to tell him everything, and the sketch pad on his desk slid off at the movement. Automatically she bent to pick it up.

  Perhaps it was fate that it had fallen faceup, showing a recently completed sketch. An excellent one, Ana thought on a long breath as she studied it. The fierce and wicked lines of the black-caped witch glared up at her. Evil, she thought. He had captured evil perfectly.

  “Don’t worry about that.” He started to take it from her, but she shook her head.

  “Is this for your story?”

  “The Silver Castle, yes. Let’s not change the subject.”

  “Not as much as you think,” she murmured. “Indulge me a minute,” she said with a careful smile. “Tell me about the sketch.”

  “Damn it, Ana.”

  “Please.”

  Frustrated, he dragged a hand through his hair. “It’s just what it looks like. The evil witch who put the spell on the princess and the castle. I had to figure there was a spell that kept anyone from getting in or out.”

  “So you chose a witch.”

  “I know it’s obvious. But the story seemed to call for it. The vindictive, jealous witch, furious with the princess’s goodness and beauty, casts the spell, so the princess stays trapped inside, cut off from love and life and happiness. Then, when true love conquers, the spell’s broken and the witch is vanquished. And they live happily ever after.”

  “I suppose witches are, to you, evil and calculating.” Calculating, she remembered. It was one of the words Robert had tossed at her. That, and much, much worse.

  “Goes with the territory. Power corrupts, right?”

  She set the sketch aside. “There are those who think it.” It was only a drawing, she told herself. Only part of a story he’d created. Yet it served to remind her how large a span they needed to cross. “Boone, I’ll ask you for something tonight.”

  “I guess you could ask me for anything tonight.”

  “Time,” she said. “And faith. I love you, Boone, and there’s no one else I’d want to spend my life with. But I need time, and so do you. A week,” she said before he could protest. “Only a week. Until the full moon. Then there are things I’ll tell you. After I do, I hope you’ll ask me again to be your wife. If you do, if you can, then I’ll say yes.”

  “Say yes now.” He caught her close, capturing her mouth, hoping he could persuade her by his will alone. “What difference will a week make?”

  “All,” she whispered, clinging tight. “Or none.”

  * * *

  He didn’t care to wait. It made him nervous and impatient that the days seemed to crawl by. One, then two, finally three. To comfort himself, he thought about the turn his life would take once the interminable week was over.

  No more nights alone. Soon, when he turned restlessly in the dark, she would be there. The house would be full of her, her scent, the fragrances of her herbs and oils. On those long, quiet evenings, they could sit together on the deck and talk about the day, about tomorrows.

  Or perhaps she would want them to move into her house. It wouldn’t matter. They could walk through her gardens, under her arbors, and she could try to teach him the names of all of her flowers.

  They could take a trip to Ireland, and she could show him all the important places of her childhood. There would be stories she could tell him, like the one about the witch and the frog, and he could write about them.

  One day there would be more children, and he would see her holding their baby the way she had held Morgana and Nash’s.

  More children. That thought brought him up short and had him staring at the framed picture of Jessie smiling out at him from his desktop.

  His baby. Only his, and his only, for so long now. He did want more children. He’d never realized until now how much he wanted more. How much he enjoyed being a father. It was simply something he was, something he did.

  Now, as his mind began to play with the idea, he could see himself soothing an infant in the night as he had once soothed Jessie. Holding out his arms as a toddler took those first shaky steps. Tossing a ball in the yard, holding on to the back of an unsteady bike.

  A son. Wouldn’t it be incredible to have a son? Or another daughter. Brothers and sisters for Jessie. She’d love that, he thought, and found himself grinning like an idiot. He’d love it.

  Of course, he hadn’t even asked Ana how she felt about adding to the family. That was certainly something they’d have to discuss. Maybe it would be rushing her
again to bring it up now.

  Then he remembered how she’d looked with her arm cuddling Jessie in his bed. The way her face had glowed when she held two tiny infants up so that his daughter could see and touch.

  No, he decided. He knew her. She would be as anxious as he to turn their love into life.

  By the end of the week, he thought, they would start making plans for their future together.

  * * *

  For Ana, the days passed much too quickly. She spent hours going over the right way to tell Boone everything. Then she would change her mind and struggle to think of another way.

  There was the brash way.

  She imagined herself sitting him down in her kitchen with a pot of tea between them. “Boone,” she would say, “I’m a witch. If that doesn’t bother you, we can start planning the wedding.”

  There was the subtle way.

  They would sit out on her patio, near the arbor of morning glories. While they sipped wine and watched the sunset, they would talk about their childhoods.

  “Growing up in Ireland is a little different than growing up in Indiana, I suppose,” she would tell him. “But the Irish usually take having witches in the neighborhood pretty much for granted.” Then she’d smile. “More wine, love?”

  Or the intellectual way.

  “I’m sure you’d agree most legends have some basis in fact.” This conversation would take place on the beach, with the sound of the surf and the cry of gulls. “Your books show a great depth of understanding and respect for what most consider myth or folklore. Being a witch myself, I appreciate your positive slant on fairies and magic. Particularly the way you handled the enchantress in A Third Wish for Miranda.”

  Ana only wished she had enough humor left to laugh at each pitiful scenario. She was certainly going to have to think of something, now that she had less than twenty-four hours to go.

  Boone had already been more patient than she had a right to ask. There was no excuse for keeping him waiting any longer.

  At least she would have some moral support this evening. Morgana and Sebastian and their spouses were on their way over for the monthly Friday-night cookout. If that didn’t buck her up for her confrontation with Boone the following day, nothing would. As she stepped onto the patio, she fingered the diamond-clear zircon she wore around her neck.

  Obviously Jessie had been keeping an eagle eye out, for she zipped through the hedge, with Daisy yipping behind her. To show his indifference to the pup, Quigley sat down and began to wash his hindquarters.

  “We’re coming to your house for a cookout,” Jessie announced. “The babies are coming, too, and maybe I can hold one. If I’m really, really careful.”

  “I think that could be arranged.” Automatically Ana scanned the neighboring yard for signs of Boone. “How was school today, sunshine?”

  “It was pretty neat. I can write my name, and Daddy’s and yours. Yours is easiest. I can write Daisy’s, but I don’t know how to spell Quigley’s, so I just wrote cat. Then I had my whole family, just like the teacher told us.” She stopped, scuffed her shoes, and for the first time since Ana had known her, looked shy. “Was it okay if I said you were my family?”

  “It’s more than okay.” Crouching down, Ana gave Jessie a huge hug. Oh, yes, she thought, squeezing her eyes tight. This is what I want, what I need. I could be a wife to him, a mother to the child. Please, please, let me find the way to have it all. “I love you, Jessie.”

  “You won’t go away, will you?”

  Because they were close, because she couldn’t prevent it, Ana touched the child’s heart and understood that Jessie was thinking of her mother. “No, baby.” She drew back, choosing her words with care. “I would never want to go away. But if I had to, if I couldn’t help it, I’d still be close.”

  “How can you go away and still be close?”

  “Because I’d keep you in my heart. Here.” Ana took the thin braided gold chain with the square of zircon and slipped it over Jessie’s neck.

  “Ooh! It shines!”

  “It’s very special. When you feel lonely or sad, you hold on to this and think of me. I’ll know, and I’ll send you happiness.”

  Dazzled, Jessie turned the crystal, and it exploded with light and color. “Is it magic?”

  “Yes.”

  Jessie accepted the answer with a child’s faith. “I want to show Daddy.” She started to dash off, then remembered her manners. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Is— Ah, is Boone inside?”

  “Uh-uh, he’s on the roof.”

  “The roof?”

  “’Cause next month is Christmas, and he’s starting to put up the lights so we know how many we have to buy. The whole house is going to be lit up. Daddy says this is going to be the most special Christmas ever.”

  “I hope so.” Ana shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand and looked up. There he was, sitting on top of the house, looking back at her. Her heart gave that quick, improbable leap it always did when she saw him. Despite nerves, she