Again the Magic Read Free

touch the outward tips of her dark brows, and drew his thumbs over the warm velvet of her cheeks. And because he couldn’t manage to disguise the reverence of his touch, he spoke with cold bluntness. “You think you want me now. But you’ll change. Someday you’ll find it damned easy to forget about me. I’m a bastard. A servant, and not even an upper servant at that—”
    “You’re the other half of me.”
    Shocked into silence, McKenna closed his eyes. He hated his own instinctive response to the words, the leap of primitive joy. “Bloody hell. You’re making it impossible for me to stay at Stony Cross.”
    Aline backed away from him at once, the color draining from her face. “No. Don’t go. I’m sorry. I won’t say anything else. Please, McKenna — you’ll stay, won’t you?”
    He had a sudden taste of the inevitable pain that he would experience someday, the lethal wounds that would result from the simple act of leaving her. Aline was nineteen… he had another year with her, perhaps not even that long. Then the world would open up to her, and McKenna would become a dangerous liability. Or worse, an embarrassment. She would make herself forget this night. She would not want to remember what she had said to a stable boy on the moonlit balcony outside her bedroom. But until then…
    “I’ll stay for as long as I can,” he said gruffly.
    Anxiety flashed in the dark depths of her eyes. “And tomorrow?” she reminded him. “You’ll meet me tomorrow?”
    “The river at sunset,” McKenna said, suddenly weary from the endless inner struggle of wanting and never having.
    Aline seemed to read his mind. “I’m sorry.” Her anguished whisper descended through the air as gently as falling flower petals as he climbed down from the balcony.
     
     
    After McKenna had disappeared into the shadows, Aline padded back into her room and touched her lips. Her fingertips rubbed the kiss deeper into the tender skin. His mouth had been unexpectedly hot, and his taste was sweet and exquisite, flavored with apples that he must have purloined from the orchard. She had imagined his kiss thousands of times, but nothing could have prepared her for the sensual reality of it.
    She had wanted to make McKenna acknowledge her as a woman, and she had finally succeeded. But there was no triumph in the moment, only a despair that was as incisive as a knife blade. She knew that McKenna thought she didn’t understand the complexity of the situation, when in truth she knew it better than he.
    It had been relentlessly instilled in her since the cradle that people did not venture out of their classes. Young men like McKenna would forever be forbidden to her. Everyone from the top of society to the bottom understood and accepted such stratification — it caused universal discomfort to suggest that it could ever be any other way. She and McKenna might as well have been different species, she thought with black humor.
    But somehow Aline could not see McKenna as everyone else did. He was no aristocrat, but neither was he a mere stable boy. Had he been born to a family of noble pedigree, he would have been the pride of the peerage. It was monstrously unfair that he had started life with such disadvantages. He was smart, handsome, hardworking, and yet he could never overcome the social limitations that he had been born with.
    She remembered the day he had first come to Stony Cross Park, a small boy with unevenly cropped black hair and eyes that were neither blue nor green, but some magical shade in-between. According to the servants’ gossip, the boy was the bastard of a village girl who had run off to London, gotten herself in a predicament, and died in childbirth. The unfortunate baby had been sent back to Stony Cross, where his grandparents had cared for him until they became infirm. When McKenna reached the age of eight, he was sent to Stony Cross Park, where he was employed as a hall boy. His duties had been to clean the upper