Gift of the Realm Read Free Page A

knocked him flat. Colin Quinn, the Don Juan of
Dunhaven, had been all but KO’d by a kid.
    He’d
reacted badly. Grabbing Keely’s shoulders and shaking her. He had accused her
of playing games.
    The
moment he’d relaxed his hold and taken a step back, she’d fled into the darkness
as though the demons of hell were at her heels. Nora had followed right behind
her. Dazed, he’d barely noticed their leaving, and the fear in Keely’s eyes
hadn’t registered until Nora pointed it out sometime much later.
    That
kind of thing tended to happen when faced with your own personal haunting.
    Not
that the tall figure stretched out on the gazebo’s stone railing and invisible
to all but Colin, was a ghost. Oh, no. Colin couldn’t have been that lucky. There
was nothing so mundane about his personal apparition. No, the figure who’d
watched the happenings with amused interest claimed to be none other than Owein
the Fine, King of the Fairies.
    For
as long as Colin could remember, the fairie had appeared without warning,
pestering him for the purpose of breaking a three hundred year-old curse. And
though Colin would have loved to write off Owein’s visits as some sort of
psychological disorder, he couldn’t. His life had been too full of strange and
mystical experiences to dismiss their frequent conversations as psychosomatic
illusions.
    With
his booted feet crossed at the ankles, Owein had appeared as he always did.
Shiny black trousers covered his long legs, and the royal blue tunic stretched
across his wide chest and even wider shoulders seemed to glow. Strongly muscled
arms crossed beneath his head, cradling it, while wisps of his shoulder length,
gilded blond hair danced in the breeze.
    He
had looked pleased with himself, whistling a tune through his teeth.
    “Why
are you here?” Colin had demanded.
    “As
if you don’t know. The very air in my realm quivered with purpose the moment
you touched her. And though you won’t be admitting it, you felt it too. I knew
the time had finally come since the moment she arrived in Dunhaven. Haven’t I
been telling you she is the one?”
    “You
have,” Colin had agreed reluctantly. “But now she’s gone. And the way she was
running, she won’t be back.”
    “Ha!
She’s your destiny, boy. She won’t be run off by a bit o’ temper.”
    Colin
had ignored his grinning prediction, snarling, “And I’ve told you, I
don’t believe in destiny.”
    “Oh,
you believe in it, young Quinn. You just don’t want to, stubborn fool that you
are. Ancient blood flows in your veins, calling you to do your duty. ’Tis your
unreasonable fear of ending up like your da that has you digging in your
heels.”
    “Now
there, you’re wrong,” Colin had insisted, anger blooming in his head. “I’m
nothing like the bastard and never will be. Destiny and duty can only ruin your
life if you bow to them. I won’t.”
    His
stubborn denial cracked the fairie king’s air of confident humor. A lightning
bolt lit the sky, zigzagging across the heavens like a crazed meteor before
striking the ground with a thunderous crack.
    He’d
reared up to face Colin. “You’d let Michael Sterling’s selfish mistakes rob you
of all fate has in store for you? What difference be there, I ask, to be ruled
by your destiny or to be ruled by your effort to avoid it?”
    With
a nimble twist, he had leapt from the rail. His booted feet hit the stone floor
without a sound. “Bah! You’re a fool, Colin Quinn! Destiny is never wrong.
There’s a simple joy to be found in that.”
    “This
from a man—fairie,” Colin corrected, seeing the sparks of energy begin to
crackle around Owein’s clenched fists, “who married the human woman, Saraid,
only to lose her to the jealous fury of one of your own kind?”
    By
his own admission, Owein’s human wife wasn’t the only thing the fairie king had
lost to Princess Fiona’s rage. With all of his attention focused on finding a
way to break Fiona’s curse, he’d turned