The witching hour - By Anne Rice Page 0,498

curious. They were fearful. There were secrets they wanted to confide, or warnings perhaps which they wanted to offer. Or questions they wanted to ask. And maybe they were testing her powers, because they indeed had powers of their own. Never had she been around people so loving and so skilled at concealing their negative emotions. It was a curious thing.

But maybe this would be the day when something unusual would happen.

So many of the old ones were here, and the liquor was flowing, and after a series of cool October days the weather was pleasantly warm again. The sky was a perfect china blue, and the great curling clouds were moving swiftly by, like graceful galleons in the thrust of a trade wind.

She took another deep drink of the bourbon, loving the burning sensation in her chest, and looked around for Michael.

There he was, still trapped as he’d been for an hour by the overwhelming Beatrice, and the strikingly handsome Gifford, whose mother had been descended from Lestan Mayfair, and whose father had been descended from Clay Mayfair, and who had married, of course, Cortland’s grandson, Ryan. Seems there were some other Mayfair lines tangled up in it, too, but Rowan had been drawn away from them at that point in the conversation, her blood simmering at the sight of Gifford’s pale fingers wound—for no good reason—around Michael’s arm.

So what did they find so fascinating about her heartthrob that they wouldn’t let him out of their clutches? And why was Gifford such a nervous woman, to begin with? Poor Michael. He didn’t know what was going on. He sat there with his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, nodding and smiling at their little jokes. He didn’t detect the flirtatious edge to their gestures, the flaming light in their eyes, the high seductive ring to their laughter.

Get used to it. The son of a bitch is irresistible to refined women. They’re all on to him now, that he’s the bodyguard who reads Dickens.

Yesterday, he’d climbed the long thin ladder up the side of the house like a pirate climbing the rope ladder of a ship. And then, the sight of him, bare-chested, with his foot on the parapet, his hair blowing, one hand raised to wave as if he had no idea in the world that this series of unself-conscious gestures was driving her slowly out of her mind. Cecilia had looked up and said, “My, but he is a good-looking man, you know.”

“Yes, I do,” Rowan had mumbled.

Her desire for him at such moments was excruciating. And he was all the more enticing in his new three-piece white linen suit (“You mean dress like an ice-cream man?”), which Beatrice had dragged him to Perlis to buy. “Darling, you’re a southern gentleman now!”

Porn, that’s what he was. Walking porn. Take the times when he rolled up his sleeves and tucked his Camel cigarettes in the right-arm fold, and put a pencil behind his ear, and stood arguing with one of the carpenters or painters, and then put one foot forward and raised his hand sharply like he was, going to push the guy’s chin through the top of his head.

And then there were the skinny dips in the pool after everybody was off the property (no ghosts since the first time), and the one weekend they’d gotten away to Florida to claim the new house, and the sight of him sleeping naked on the deck, with nothing on but the gold wristwatch, and that little chain around his neck. Pure nakedness couldn’t have been more enticing.

And he was so supremely happy! He was the only one in this world perhaps who loved that house more than the Mayfairs did. He was obsessed with it. He took every opportunity to pitch in on the job with his men. And he was stuffing the gloves away more and more often. Seems he could drain an object of the images if he really tried, and after that he’d keep it out of other hands, and it would be safe, so to speak, and now he had a whole chest of such tools which he used, barehanded, with regularity.

Thank God, the ghosts and the spooks were leaving them both alone. And she had to stop worrying about him over there with his harem.

Better to concentrate on the group gathering around her—stately old Felice had just pulled up a chair, and the pretty garrulous Margaret Ann was settling on the grass, and the dour