A Little Magic(78)

She drew up her knees, rested her forehead on them. The worst of it, she realized, was that even now—sad, angry, aching—she believed she was right.

It wasn’t a hell of a lot of comfort.





7




IT took him hours to work off his temper. He walked, he paced, he raged, he brooded. When temper had burned off he sulked, though if anyone had put this term on his condition, he’d have swung hard back into temper again.

She’d hurt him. When anger cleared away enough for that realization to surface, it came as a shock. The woman had cut him to the bone. She’d rejected his gift, questioned his morality, and criticized his powers. All in one lump.

In his day such a swipe from a mere woman would have…

He cursed and paced some more. It wasn’t his day, and if there was one thing he’d learned to adjust to, it was the changes in attitudes and sensibilities. Women stood toe-to-toe with men in this age, and in his readings and viewings over the years, he’d come to believe they had the right of it.

He was hardly steeped in the old ways. Hadn’t he embraced technology with each new development? Hadn’t he amused himself with the quirks of society and fashion and mores as they shifted and changed and became? And he’d taken from each of those shifts what appealed most, what sat best with him.

He was a well-read man, had been well read and well traveled even in his own time. And since that time, he’d studied. Science, history, electronics, engineering, art, music, literature, politics. He had hardly stopped using his mind over the last five hundred years.

The fact was, he rarely had the chance to use anything else.

So, he used it now and went over the argument in his head.

She didn’t understand, he decided. Magic wasn’t bound by the rules of her world, but by itself. It was, and that was all. No conscientious magician brought harm to another deliberately, that was certain. All he’d done was take a few examples of technology, of art and comfort, from various points in time. He could hardly be expected to live in a bloody cave, could he?

Stealing? Why, the very idea of it!

He sat on a chair in his workshop and indulged in more brooding.

It wasn’t meant to be stealing, he thought now. Magicians had moved matter from place to place since the beginning of things. And what were jewels but pretty bits of matter?

Then he sighed. He supposed they were considerably more, from her point of view. And he’d wanted her to see them as more. He’d wanted her to be dazzled and delighted, and dote on him for the gift of them.

Much as he had, he admitted, wanted to dazzle and delight the woman who’d betrayed him. Or, to be honest, the woman who’d tempted him to betray himself and his art. That woman had greedily gathered what he’d given, what he’d taken, and left him to hang.

What had Kayleen done? Had she been overpowered by the glitter and the richness? Seduced by them?

Not in the least. She’d tossed them back in his face.

Stood up for what she believed was right and just. Stood up to him. His lips began to curve with the image of that. He hadn’t expected her to, he could admit that. She’d looked him in the eye, said her piece, and stuck to it.

God, what a woman! His Kayleen was strong and true. Not a bauble to ride on a man’s arm but a partner to stand tall with him. That was a grand thing. For while a man might indulge himself in a pretty piece of fluff for a time, it was a woman he wanted for a lifetime.

He got to his feet, studied his workroom. Well, a woman was what he had. He’d best figure out how to make peace with her.



KAYLEEN considered having a good cry, but it just wasn’t like her. She settled instead for hunting up the kitchen which was no easy task. On the search she discovered Flynn had chosen to make his point with only that one empty room. The rest of the house was filled to brimming, and in his fascinatingly eclectic style.

She softened by the time she brewed tea in a kitchen equipped with a restaurant-style refrigerator, a microwave oven, and a stone fireplace in lieu of stove. It took her considerable time to get the fire going and to heat water in the copper pot. But it made her smile.

How could she blame him, really, for wanting things around him? Pretty things, interesting things. He was a man who needed to use his mind, amuse himself, challenge himself. Wasn’t that the man she’d fallen in love with?

She carried the tea into the library with its thousands of books, its scrolls, its manuscripts. And its deep-cushioned leather chairs and snappy personal computer.

She would light the fire, and enough candles to read by, then enjoy her tea and the quiet.

Kneeling at the hearth, she tried to light the kindling and managed to scorch the wood. She rearranged the logs, lodged a splinter painfully in her thumb, and tried again.