like a statue beneath the oaks, neither acknowledging this sudden desperate hug, nor trying to free herself from it. But something entirely different happened. Rowan held Mona tight, kissing Mona’s cheek and then smoothing her hair, and even laying her hand on Mona’s forehead.
“You’re going to be all right,” Rowan said. “But do everything that I’ve told you to do.”
Ryan followed Michael down the steps.
“I don’t know what to say except good luck,” Ryan said. “I wish you could tell me more about all this, what you’re really doing.”
“Tell Bea we had to go,” said Michael. “I wouldn’t tell the others any more than you have to.”
Ryan nodded, obviously full of suspicion and concern, but basically stymied.
Rowan was already in the car. Michael slipped in beside her. In seconds they were sliding away beneath the lowering tree branches, and Mona and Ryan made a little picture, standing together in the gate, both waving, Mona’s hair like a starburst, and Ryan clearly baffled as ever and highly uncertain.
“Seems he’s doomed,” said Rowan, “to run things for a coterie who will never tell him anything that’s really happening.”
“We tried once,” said Michael. “You should have been there. He doesn’t want to know. And he will do exactly what you tell him. Mona? Will she? I have no idea. But he will.”
“You’re still angry.”
“No,” he said. “I stopped being angry when you gave in.”
But this wasn’t true. He was still hurt to the quick that she had planned to leave without him, that she had seen him not as a companion on this trip, but as some keeper of the house, and of the baby inside Mona.
Well, hurt wasn’t anger, was it?
She’d turned away. She was looking forward, and so he felt maybe it was safe to look at her. She was too thin still, far too thin, but her face had never been more lovely to him. The black suit she wore, the pearls, the high heels—all of it had given her a deceptively wicked glamour. But she had not needed these things. Her beauty lay in her purity—in the bones of her face, in the dark straight eyebrows that so vividly determined her expression, and in her soft long mouth which he wanted to kiss now with a brutal male desire to waken her, part her lips, make her soften all over in his arms again, have her.
That was the only way, ever, to have her.
She lifted her hand and pressed the button for the leather privacy panel to go up behind the driver. Then she turned to Michael.
“I was wrong,” she said, without rancor or pleading. “You loved Aaron. You love me. You love Mona. I was wrong.”
“You don’t have to go into this,” he answered. It was hard for him to look her in the eye, but he was determined to do it, to calm himself inside, to stop being hurt or mad or whatever this was right now.
“But there’s something you have to understand,” she said. “I don’t plan to be kind and law-abiding with these people who killed Aaron. I don’t intend to answer to anyone about what I do—even to you, Michael.”
He laughed. He looked into her large, cold gray eyes. He wondered if this was what her patients had seen as they looked up, right before the anesthesia began to work on them.
“I know that, honey,” he said. “When we get there, when we meet Yuri, I want to know, that’s all, what he knows. I want to be there with you both. I’m not claiming to have your capabilities, or your nerve. But I want to be there.”
She nodded.
“Who knows, Rowan?” he asked. “Maybe you’ll find a purpose for me.” The wrath had come out. It was too late now to draw back in. He knew that his face had gone red. He looked away from her.
When she spoke this time, it was a secret voice he’d never heard her use except with him, and in the past months it had gained a new depth of feeling.
“Michael, I love you. But I know you’re a good man. I’m no longer a good woman.”
“Rowan, you don’t mean that.”
“Oh yes, I do. I’ve been with the goblins, Michael. I’ve been down into the inner circle.”
“And you’ve come back,” he said, looking at her again, trying to put the lid on these feelings that were about to explode out of him. “You’re Rowan again, and you’re here, and there are things to live for other than vengeance.”