Prologue

LONDON
WINTER, 1872

The new governess leaned down from what seemed to the child a great height, smiling her brash American smile. The woman was pretty enough, with her auburn hair and shining green eyes, and smart, too, or Mummy wouldn’t have engaged her in the first place. Still, a stranger was a stranger.

“Kristina Tremayne Holbrook, is it?” Miss Phillips inquired in a non-objectionable tone of voice. “Such a big name for so small a girl.”

Kristina came out of the voluminous folds of her nanny’s skirts to correct an apparent misconception on the part of the newcomer. “I am not so very little,” she said. “I’m five—six next April—and I can already read and count to a hundred. You may be on your way now—we won’t be needing you because I shall learn all I need to know from Mama and Papa and Valerian.”

Mrs. Eldridge, the plump nurse with whom Kristina spent the majority of her time, laid a fond and encouraging hand atop her charge’s head. “Hush now, child,” she scolded benignly. Then, to the governess she confided, “You mustn’t mind our Kristina. She’s too bright by half, she is, and sometimes it makes her a mite saucy, but she’s good through and through.” She paused to emit a heartfelt sigh. “Now, come right in and settle yourself next to the drawing room fire, Miss Phillips, and welcome to you. It’s a blustery day out, isn’t it, and I daresay a nice cup of tea would go well with you just now.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Eldridge,” Miss Phillips said, removing her dowdy bonnet and cloak, both of which were dappled with snow, and handing them off to Delia, the handsome downstairs maid, whose duty it was to greet and announce guests and look after their belongings while they were being entertained. Delia collected Miss Phillips’s battered carpet satchel—it was dripping on the Persian rug—and bore that away as well.

Kristina lagged behind as Mrs. Eldridge and Miss Phillips hurried into the drawing room, arms linked, whispering to each other. She lingered just inside the double doors, half hidden behind the marble pedestal that supported a bust of Socrates, while Miss Phillips was made comfortable beside the coal fire.

When Mrs. Eldridge went out to arrange for tea to be served, Miss Phillips put her small feet in their scuffed black boots on the chrome rail edging the hearth, and sighed contentedly.

“I do like to toast my toes on a winter’s day,” she said cheerfully. “Don’t you, Kristina?”

Kristina had believed herself invisible, dwarfed as she was by Socrates and his pillar, and was both disgruntled and pleased that her new teacher had taken notice of her. Mama and Papa were loving and attentive, but they were never about during the daylight hours, and both of them were very busy—Papa worked in his laboratory belowstairs, and Mama was the queen of something, though Kristina didn’t know exactly what.

“Yes,” she said tentatively, drawn to the young woman with bright hair and shabby clothes and a gentle voice.

“Won’t you join me by the fire? I feel a little lonely, sitting here all by myself.”

Kristina understood loneliness well, though she was but five. It was a mysterious ache in one small corner of her heart, and always with her, even when Mama or Papa or Valerian or Mrs. Eldridge was nearby. Most of the time she felt as though she were lost from someone she did not yet know, and must find that person to be truly happy. Given her age and size, and the fact that she was not allowed to go farther than the wall at the rear of the garden by herself, the objective seemed very daunting indeed.

She stepped nearer to the hearth, leaning on the arm of Papa’s wing-back chair. Miss Phillips sat smiling in the matching seat, which was Mama’s. The approach was concession enough, for the moment—Kristina did not speak.

Miss Phillips smoothed her skirts, which were clean but frayed at the hem and mended in at least two places. “I do not think you are really so shy as you pretend to be,” she said. “Are you afraid of me, Kristina?”

“No,” Kristina said in a sturdy voice. “Not now. I was for a few moments, though.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know you,” Kristina responded reasonably. “I’ve been told never to speak to strangers.”

“Good advice,” Miss Phillips agreed. “We shall be fast friends, you and I, as well as student and tutor. I think you like to learn, and there is much I can teach you. I would like to begin our association by taking you to St. Regent’s Lecture Hall tomorrow afternoon. The topic is the mythology of ancient Greece.”

Kristina felt her eyes widen. She rarely left the house, except with Mrs. Eldridge for carriage rides through the park in good weather, and she loved the sights and sounds and smells and people—so many people—that made up the great city of London.

“I don’t know anything at all about Greece,” she confessed solemnly. “Or mythology, either.”

“All the more reason to attend a lecture,” replied Miss Phillips, tucking away a smile.

That night, after Mrs. Eldridge and Miss Phillips and Kristina had taken their supper by the nursery fire, the nanny and the governess went off to their own quarters, and Mama came to help Kristina get ready for bed.

It was her favorite time of the day, for Mama was beautiful, and full of stories, and she could do all sorts of marvelous tricks, like making dolls dance with each other, or causing real snow to drift down from the ceiling. She never entered or left the room in the customary fashion, either, but simply appeared and disappeared. Kristina wondered, when she took the time to ponder such questions, why Mrs. Eldridge and the maids didn’t move from place to place the way Mama did, instead of bothering with stairs and doors and other such ordinary things.

“I’m going to hear a lecture on ancient Greece tomorrow with Miss Phillips!” Kristina blurted, so excited that she bounced on her feather bed and wheeled her arms.

Mama laughed as she wrestled Kristina’s warm flannel nightgown over her small head, which was dark like her own. “Well, now,” she said. “I shall want to hear all about that adventure.” She paused to smooth Kristina’s silken hair. “Do you like Miss Phillips, darling?”

“Oh, yes. She’s wonderful.” Kristina’s happiness faded a little as she considered a possibility that had not occurred to her before. “Will Mrs. Eldridge be going away, now that I’m big enough to have a governess?”

Mama kissed her forehead, her blue eyes shining with love, and embraced her daughter tightly. “No, sweetheart—she’ll stay. Since Papa and I can’t be with you in the daytime, it’s important that Mrs. Eldridge be here.”

Kristina was relieved, for the nanny had been her constant companion for as long as she could remember, and it would be terrible indeed if she ever went away. “Why is that, Mama?” she ventured to ask. “Why are you and Papa never at home before dark?”

Mama hesitated, then answered in a soft and somewhat wistful voice, “I’ll explain that soon, when you’re just a little older. In the meantime, you must be patient.”

After a grave nod, Kristina sat down on the bed and pulled the warm covers up to her chest. “All right,” she said. “But I want to know the instant I’m old enough.” Her mother laughed again, and Kristina was struck anew by her loveliness; she was a magical creature, with her pale, flawless skin, her flowing ebony hair, her exquisitely fitted white gown. “I promise to tell you all the family secrets as soon as I think you’re ready to hear them,” she said.

Kristina snuggled deeper into the bedclothes, already fighting sleep but determined to make the time with Mama last. “Make the puppets tell a story,” she whispered. “Please?”

Mama drew a chair up beside Kristina’s bed, sat down, and gestured grandly toward the ornate toy puppet theater, a gift from Kristina’s Uncle Valerian, which stood on the window seat. Instantly the tiny stage was flooded with light, and the small, colorful figures rattled to loose-jointed life and began to perform.

Kristina was asleep before the end of the first act.

The lecture was fascinating, full of gods and goddesses, minotaurs and mazes. Kristina perched on the edge of her chair throughout, and even though she did not understand much of what was said, she left the public hall with a storm of bright, strange images raging in her mind.

She and Miss Phillips rode home together in the carriage, with a heavy quilt over their laps and warm bricks tucked beneath their feet, chattering excitedly about all they’d heard.

It was that night after supper, and after Papa had come to the nursery to read a chapter from a novel by Mr. Mark Twain in his deep and somehow reassuring voice, that Kristina first realized that she was different from other children.

She’d been sleeping, and dreaming of Athens, the city that had figured so prominently in the lecture, when the warmth of her bed was suddenly gone, replaced by a chill that seemed to wrap itself around her very bones. She opened her eyes and found herself standing in the middle of a vast marble pavilion, an eerie place, splashed with cold silver moonlight and utterly silent.

This, Kristina knew, was no dream. The cool stone beneath her bare feet was solid and real, and so were the chipped columns and fractured statues looming all around her. This was certainly not London, and she did not know how to get home.

She cried out in fear.

Instantly Mama appeared and knelt to draw a trembling Kristina into her arms. “It’s all right, darling,” she whispered. “Don’t be afraid.”

Kristina clung tightly to her mother. “How did I get here?” she pleaded. “What is this place?”

Mama cupped Kristina’s face in her cool, soft fingers and looked into her eyes. “This is Greece, my love. You were dreaming about it, weren’t you? And your thoughts brought you here.”

“My thoughts?”

Mama smiled and gave Kristina a tight hug before rising to her full height again and taking her daughter’s hand. “Yes. Come, let’s go home—think hard about your room and your toys, sweetheart, and we’ll be there in a trice.” It happened just as Mama said; in a twinkling the two of them were safe in the nursery, and Greece was far away, where it belonged.

“The time to speak of magic and mysteries came sooner than I expected,” Mama began, sitting down by the dying fire and lifting Kristina onto her lap. They rocked together, Kristina’s head resting against her mother’s shoulder. “A long time ago there were two small children, your uncle Aidan and me. One day our mother took us to see a gypsy, and we had our fortunes told….”

Chapter 1 SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
PRESENT DAY

Kristina found the packet of letters tucked inside a small cedar box, in a far corner of her attic, while searching for a ceramic jack-o’-lantern to set out on the front porch in honor of Halloween. In an instant the witches’ holiday was forgotten; the mere sight of those heavy vellum envelopes, with their faded, curling stamps, struck her a bittersweet blow to the heart. She had not thought of her beloved governess, Miss Eudocia Phillips, in at least fifty years.

Now, in that cramped and dusty chamber where bits and fragments of the past were stored, memories nearly overwhelmed Kristina. She sat down on the arched lid of an old steamer trunk, heedless of potential damage to her white silk slacks, and was only mildly surprised to find the ribbon-bound stack of letters clasped with fevered gentleness in her hands. She did not recall reaching for it.

For a long time she simply sat there, holding the letters, remembering. There was no real need to read the words, some penned in her own handwriting, some in Miss Phillips’s ornate Victorian script. Just touching the paper evoked those vibrant, colorful, and often painful days with breathtaking clarity, bringing tears to Kristina’s eyes and stealing her breath.

Presently Kristina looked up, blinked several times, and saw her reflection in the murky surface of the large antique mirror she’d purchased in Hong Kong. She looked just as she had for upwards of a hundred years, except that she’d worn her dark hair long before the nineteen-twenties, like everyone else. Her skin was still unwrinkled, and her figure remained slender and supple.

Pretty good, she thought, with a slight and rueful smile, for a woman of my maturity.

Kristina shifted her attention from her image to the ornately ugly contours of the mirror itself, pressing the back of one hand to her face. She’d gone traveling after her husband Michael’s death in the 1890s, roaming the world like a restless wind, never staying in one place for long. One bleak and rainy afternoon she’d found the piece in a seedy back-street shop and bought it.

To this day Kristina had no idea why she’d wanted the monstrosity. She’d done a number of strange things after Michael was killed—and many of her experiences and emotions were recorded, in great detail, in the letters she held. Miss Phillips’s private nurse, engaged by Kristina, had returned her letters after the old woman succumbed to pneumonia in 1934.

A distracted thought flitted through Kristina’s mind: She ought to clean the mirror and have it moved to her exclusive and suitably snobbish little antiques and fine art shop on Western Avenue. One woman’s junk invariably proved to be another’s treasure, as the success of Kristina’s business proved.

The correspondence resting in her fingers reclaimed her attention, and with uncommonly awkward fingers she opened the first envelope. The fragile paper was turning to dust, and Kristina held it carefully. Reverently.

The faintest scent of lemon verbena, the fragrance she’d favored then, rose delicately from the vellum, arousing other remembrances, effectively carrying Kristina back to a time that no longer existed for her…

Cheltingham Castle

Somerset

June 14, 1897

My very dear Phillie,

By now, I know you will have heard of Michael’s death, hut I find I must recount all of it, as I could to no one else, in order to lay down some of the burden. A mortal’s death is a mere trifle to my parents, though they have respected my pain and grief and done what they could to lend me comfort, but their kindness does not reach deep enough to soothe the bruises upon my spirit. As for Valerian, who is, as you are well aware, my confidante and friend—well, suffice it to say I believe he secretly thinks me better off without Michael. He always believed my husband was weak, and thus utterly unworthy of my affections. He would, of course, have had that same opinion of virtually anyone, for such is his devotion to me.

Valerian could never understand, as you always have, beloved Phillie, that one need not be especially worthy to be cherished by another. So often love simply occurs, all on its own, like an earthquake or a case of the grippe, and to seek rhyme or reason in such an event is to seek in vain. That, of course, is how it was with Michael and me.

But I must start at the beginning, if I am to tell the tale properly….

My memories spin so beautifully in my mind just now, Phillie, bright-hued and vivid, brimming with sorrow and joy and all the emotions in between. Life is, as you always asserted, rife with paradoxes.

I was already twenty-two the day I met Michael Bradford, an old maid by anyone’s standards. You had long since gone to live with your sister, far away in Boston, and I had completed my formal education in Switzerland and London. I visited you sometimes, though I was careful not to draw your notice, out of fear that I might frighten you. I had not yet learned to trust my magic in those days, and there are times when I doubt it still.

But I digress.

I was alone at Refuge, my parents’ cottage near Cheltingham Castle, except for the servants, and it had been raining all that morning. The house, spacious as it was, seemed close and dark, and I was fitful, with the beginnings of a headache throbbing in my temples. Just after lunch the blessed sun came out at last, and I asked a groom to saddle my pony. Pan, thinking a ride would clear my muddled brain.

Pan, you may recall, was a wretched beast, spawned no doubt in some comer of hell where the devil himself will not venture, and we hadn’t traveled a mile before he’d pitched me headlong into the ditch alongside the road. I was not injured, but my favorite riding habit, a lovely gray velvet with a divided skirt to match, was tom and muddied beyond repair.

I was livid and barely resisted the impulse to turn that odious creature into a tree stump teaming with termites as he raced back toward the stables at Refuge, where the stable hands would no doubt reward him for his villainy with grain and perhaps even a lump of sugar. It was the way of grooms, I supposed, standing there covered in wet dirt, my hair straggling and my hat still floating in the ditch, to care more for horses than for people.

I could have willed myself home, or exchanged my spoiled garments for fresh ones in a twinkling, of course, but even then I liked to do things in the ordinary human way, wherever possible. You taught me that, Phillie, that I was more mortal than monster, and may heaven bless you for it. (And for so many other kindnesses that I can’t begin to count them.)

Michael came round a bend in the track, mounted on a spectacular dapple gray gelding, just moments after I’d shouted a particularly ungracious malediction to the retreating Pan. I had known Michael to be a pest and a bully when we were children—he was the second son of the Duke of Cheltingham, and his resentment of his elder brother Gilbert’s splendid prospects had fostered a corresponding nastiness in his nature—but there could be no denying now that he had changed.

Or so I thought, at the time, in my naiveté. Even though I was unquestionably a woman grown by then, I had led a very sheltered life, as you are certainly aware, and there was so much I did not know.

Michael had grown into a spectacular man, with golden hair and eyes of the palest green—just the color of the tree-shaded pond behind our house. He sat his horse well, for he, like most young men of his social class, had spent virtually every free moment in the saddle from earliest childhood, and was an expert rider. I knew from the servants’ gossip that he won every race he entered, that he drank and gambled with a vengeance, and had been put out of several schools for unseemly behavior.

He had many shortcomings, my Michael—there is no denying that. Being apprised of these imperfections, I should have fled the scene with all haste and spared myself much suffering, but in that curious way of females, I was instantly and powerfully attracted to him instead. I am otherwise quite intelligent, as Valerian has since and often pointed out, always with a telling emphasis on the word otherwise.

Michael reined in his horse just short of trampling me and smiled indulgently at my dishabille. “Are you hurt?” he inquired with what I deemed an unnecessary note of delight in his voice. I did not think, from his tone and manner, that it would dampen his spirits in the slightest if I said I’d fractured every bone in my skeleton, and I was stung to flushing fury. A few weeks spent as a toad, I reflected uncharitably, might have a salutary effect upon his character.

“No,” I said, giving him one of my most quelling looks. “I’m fine, though it’s no credit to you that I wasn’t stomped to a bloody pulp in the mud! How dare you ride in so reckless a fashion?”

Michael laughed, and his steed danced beneath him, but he managed the beast with no more conscious effort than he would have ascribed to breathing or causing his heart to beat. “You were in no danger from me. Miss Holbrook. I am, after all, an accomplished rider.” He leaned down, the rich leather of his saddle creaking as he moved, to offer me his hand. “Come along, then, and I’ll see you safely home.”

“I can take myself home,” I insisted, still blushing. My heart pounded like the hooves of a great horse passing over hard ground, and I thought I’d be violently ill, right there in the road. For all of it, I knew a rash and heated pleasure at the prospect of pressing my person against his.

I gave him my hand, after wiping it hastily on my skirts—I can hear your voice now, Phillie dear, saying, Life is paradox, Kristina—and I confess I used just a smidgeon of magic to mount the horse behind Michael, thus allowing him to fancy that he’d raised me up by means of manly strength alone. Little is required, I have discovered, to surfeit the masculine ego, but once again I stray from my subject.

We rode back to Refuge, and my arms were round Michael’s lean waist, and that innocent contact stirred the most wondrously wicked feelings within me, desires that I had only read about and imagined until then. And alas, Phillie, knowing better all the while, I began to fall in love….

“Not one of your more salient moments,” a male voice intruded, wrenching Kristina out of her reverie and back to the dusty attic.

She looked up to see Valerian towering between her and the mirror, then glanced toward the fanlight set high in the outside wall. Sure enough, full darkness had come, without her noticing. Where had the time gone?

The vampire was majestic, as always, clad in his magician’s cape and impeccably tailored tuxedo and carrying a walking stick that doubled as a wand when he was onstage. His Las Vegas act was sold out for a full year in advance, and he obviously planned to perform that night. A mortal would have been justifiably concerned, being in Seattle with curtain time only minutes away, but for Valerian the commute was no more difficult than a blink of his sapphire eyes.

“Falling in love with Michael, I mean,” he clarified when Kristina failed to respond to his original remark. “I can’t think what happened to your judgment.”

“How fortunate,” Kristina said dryly, “that I did not require your approval then any more than I do now.”

The vampire smiled, his shaggy chestnut hair gleaming in the moonlight. “It is a relief to find you as insolent and willful as ever. I should not know how to react if you were the least bit sensible.”

Carefully Kristina folded the letter she had been holding and slipped it back into its envelope. She did not set the packet aside, but instead held it close against her middle, as if she feared her formidable friend would snatch it from her. “I have gotten by these many years,” she commented, “despite my ineptitude.”

“I did not say you were inept,” Valerian pointed out, twirling the wand idly between his long fingers, like a baton. “Never that. You know full well, Kristina, that I could not adore you more if you were my own child.”

She stood and felt an odd and unaccustomed ache in her knees. Was she beginning to age at last, like a normal woman? She dared not hope it was so; she hadn’t changed significantly, after all, since she was thirty.

Except to become lonelier.

“What brings you here?” she asked, making her way toward the stairs.

Behind her Valerian muttered and grumbled. He, like her mother—and even her more practical father, to some extent—could not comprehend why she so seldom used her powers to move from place to place. To want mortality was an enigma to them, she knew, though her uncle Aidan would certainly have been sympathetic.

“I sensed that you were in a melancholy mood,” he replied, “and I came to see what could be done about it. You’re very lonely, aren’t you, Kristina?”

She felt her shoulders slump a little, despite her effort to be strong. Valerian had recently found his soul mate, a mortal by the delightful name of Daisy Chandler, and the experience had turned him into something of a romantic. “What good would it do to deny it?” she asked, gaining the second floor landing and taking the rear stairway that led to the kitchen. “You know me better than I know myself. Tell me, O Guardian Vampire—what is your sage advice?”

Valerian loomed near the table, looking pensive, imperious, and vaguely annoyed, while Kristina took a pot from the cupboard and filled it with water for pasta. “Find yourself a nice mortal and settle down,” he said at length.

Kristina laughed, but she was painfully conscious of her heart, which felt cracked and brittle, and as fragile as translucent porcelain. “Don’t look now, but I am a nice mortal, and I have long since settled down. Look around you.” She gestured with a distracted wave of one hand. “I have a house filled with antiques and exquisite art. I have a successful business.”

“You are not a mortal,” Valerian insisted quietly, disregarding everything else she’d said.

Kristina felt fresh tears sting her eyes. “Then what am I, will you tell me that? Not a vampire, not a woman. Neither witch nor angel, fish nor fowl—”

The magician’s magician crossed the room in his faster-than-light fashion and enfolded her in his arms, and she wept disconsolately onto the white linen ruffles of his shirt. “You are unique, Kristina,” he told her tenderly. “There is no other like you.”

“But I want to be a woman!” Kristina wailed, tilting her head back to look up into the aristocratic face. “I want to love and be loved, to marry and have a baby and gain too much weight and get stretch marks. I want to grow old with someone special and die when it’s my turn and be mourned by my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren!”

“I know,” Valerian replied, and this time his voice was sorrowful. He was almost certainly thinking of Kristina’s uncle, Aidan Tremayne, whom he had loved with devotion and singular passion. Aidan, made a vampire against his will in the eighteenth century, had wanted nothing so much as to be a flesh-and-blood man again. His transformation had separated him forever from those who had known him as a fiend, for he had no memory of his original existence.

Kristina collected herself quickly, sniffling and turning from Valerian’s fatherly embrace. He could do nothing to change her situation, and it was not only wrong but unkind to burden him with her grief.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Valerian was silent for a long moment. Then he made the pretense of a sigh—being an immortal, he had no breath—and said, “You’re bound to meet someone—or something. Just be more careful this time, if you don’t mind. I will not tolerate another wenching wastrel like Michael Bradford.”

Kristina welcomed the anger that surged through her, knew Valerian had deliberately inspired it in an effort to give her a way out of her gloomy mood, if only for a little while. “You won’t be asked to tolerate anybody,” she said, dumping a handful of tortellini into the water boiling on the stove and slamming the lid onto the pot with a heartening, cymbal-like crash. “My love life, pitiful as it may be, is none of your damned business!”

The vampire shook an imperious finger under her nose, but she saw fond amusement in his eyes. “You only wish it were so,” he warned sternly. “And see that you don’t take up with that warlock Dathan, either!”

“Go to hell!” Kristina yelled, vastly cheered.

“I’ve been there!” Valerian retorted at equal volume, his nose within an inch of hers. “It’s overrated and they don’t take American Express. Good-bye!”

With that, he vanished.

As always, it was an impressive exit, smoky and sudden. Kristina smiled, shook her head, and turned back to her tortellini. Just this one night, she decided, she would indulge herself and have pesto with her pasta instead of marinara.

It was beyond a doubt the most ferociously hideous piece of furniture he’d ever seen, Max Kilcarragh reflected, circling the antique mirror once more. It would do nicely.

He reached for the price tag, turned it over, and winced.

A woman came into the main part of the shop from a back room, and Max caught his breath when he saw her image in the highly polished looking glass. She was truly lovely, with her short ebony hair and intelligent silver eyes, and he couldn’t help thinking that her reflection had transformed the awful mirror into a thing of beauty.

He smiled as she approached. Attractive she definitely was, but she wasn’t his type. He liked wholesome, athletic women, and this one exuded sophistication and class. She looked, he decided, sort of art deco, as though she’d just slinked out of an Erte print.

“May I help you?” she asked. Her voice reminded him of the tiny silver chimes Sandy had hung in a comer of the girls’ bedroom, just weeks before she died. Musical, delicate, somehow magical.

Max cleared his throat. Get a grip, he told himself. Even if she was your type, which she isn’t, a woman like this wouldn’t be attracted to a high school football coach.

“I think I may be beyond help,” he confided. “Anyone who would even consider buying this mirror definitely qualifies as a serious case.”

She raised one dark eyebrow, and he watched the hint of a smile tug at one comer of her heart-shaped mouth. “Oh? I bought it, a long time ago, and I hardly consider myself a lost cause.”

Max raked his brown hair with one hand, oddly nervous. It was just plain ridiculous, he thought impatiently, to be so damned edgy. After all, he’d never see this woman again after today.

“It’s a vengeance present,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?”

Max grinned, feeling awkward and even bigger than his six-foot, four-inch frame. “The mirror, I mean. I’m thinking of giving it to my sister Gweneth for her birthday. To pay her back for the moth-eaten moose head she gave me at Christmas.”

Now she didn’t suppress the smile, and Max felt as though he’d just run, at full speed and head down, into a goalpost. “I see. On gift-giving occasions each of you tries to present the other with a truly ugly object.”

Suddenly the tradition seemed slightly sophomoric, though the antiques dealer had not implied that in any way. “Yes,” Max said wretchedly, wishing he’d gone somewhere else to shop, like that store down the street, with the rubber snakes and the souvenirs and the mummy on display. A nice, tacky ashtray in the shape of Washington State would have been just the ticket, or maybe one of those floating plastic eyeballs.

She laughed, and the sound made something ache, deep down in Max’s gut. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Tell you what. It just so happens that I share your opinion of this particular piece, though it’s quite old and—mercifully, I think—rare. I’m willing to let you have it on a very slim profit margin.”

“How slim?” Max inquired. He wanted to ask her name, if she was married or otherwise involved, if she liked Chinese food and old movies and Christmas. But he didn’t. If there was one thing Max prided himself on, besides his daughters, it was self-control.

She named a price, and he agreed to it, producing a credit card.

While she was writing up the purchase and arranging for delivery, Max idly took a business card from a small brass holder on the counter and scanned it. Kristina’s, the raised script read. Antiques and Fine Art for the Discerning. Kristina Holbrook, Prop. This was followed by the shop’s address and a phone number, and Max tucked the information into the pocket of his brown sports jacket.

“Max Kilcarragh,” Ms. Holbrook read aloud from his Visa card. “That’s a very unusual last name. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it before.”

Was she trying to prolong the conversation?

He couldn’t be that lucky.

“It’s Irish,” he volunteered, and immediately felt stupid. Anybody with a brain in his head would know that, for God’s sake. He just hoped he wasn’t blushing, like some pimply second-stringer with a bad case.

She smiled. “Yes,” she said, handing back his card along with a receipt. “I’ll have the mirror delivered to your sister’s house this afternoon, if that’s suitable. Heaven help the poor woman.”

The wisecrack put Max at ease again, but he felt giddy, as if he’d just downed a six-pack of Corona in a few gulps. He grinned like a fool and leaned against the counter, his big linebacker’s hands leaving smudges on the gleaming glass.

“Was there something else?” Kristina Holbrook asked.

Max cleared his throat again and realized he was sweating. “No,” he said hoarsely and turned to leave the shop.

“Thank you,” Ms. Holbrook called after him, soft laughter playing like a chorus of distant harps in her voice. “Come back soon.”

Come back soon. The words were innocent, ordinary—merchants said them to departing customers every hour of every day. Especially the ones who were dense enough to pay good money for a mirror so ugly that even Sleeping Beauty’s stepmother wouldn’t have believed a word it said.

Max went to the door and pulled it open, feeling the late-October chill rush up from the busy sidewalk to turn his perspiration to ice. The little brass bell overhead tinkled merrily to indicate that the big, bad jock was leaving at last, but Max just stood there.

Kristina was at his side before he’d finished telling himself he was an idiot.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She really cared, really wanted to know, he could see that. And he was so touched by that one small sign of tenderness that the backs of his eyes began to burn.

“Yes,” he replied, closing the door. “No. I don’t really know.”

Kristina touched his arm, and he fancied that he could feel her warm fingertips even through the fabric and lining of his jacket and shirt. “Maybe you’d better sit down for a few minutes. Or I could call someone—your wife, perhaps?”

The word wife wounded Max like an arrow fired from a crossbow at close range. It had been two years, and he’d worked through his grief. When, he wondered, would he stop stepping into emotional booby traps?

“Sandy is dead,” he said, as though he were telling Kristina that it was about to rain.

“I’m sorry,” she replied.

“So am I,” he answered, and then he opened the door again, stepped over the threshold, and strode off down the sidewalk.

He hadn’t gone a block when he found himself turning around and retracing his steps to the door of Kristina’s shop. He hesitated for a moment, then stepped inside.

“I’m back,” he announced.

“Good,” Kristina said, with a smile that tugged at Max’s insides. “I rather expected you.”

He looked around, out of his element and yet wishing to be nowhere but exactly where he was. “Do you have a husband?” he asked bluntly, for it was not his nature to beat around the proverbial bush. “Or a boyfriend?”

“Neither,” Kristina responded, gesturing toward an elegant old wing-back chair upholstered in dark crimson velvet. “Sit down. I’ll make tea—or would you prefer coffee?”

Max had that bull-in-a-china-shop feeling again; he was a big man, broad in the shoulders and muscular, and he was afraid he’d smash the spindly legs of the chair. “I’ll stand, if you don’t mind,” he said.

Way to go, Max, he mocked himself silently. You’ve got all the style of a high school freshman trying to make time with a cheerleader.

“If you’re worried about breaking the chair,” Kristina said from the doorway that led into the rear of the store, “don’t be. They don’t make ’em like that anymore, as the saying goes. That thing would support a Sumo wrestler.”

Max figured he’d only imagined that she’d read his mind, and sank gingerly into the seat of an antique that probably cost more than he made in a month. He was pleasantly surprised when it withstood his weight without so much as a creak.

“I’ll take coffee,” he said belatedly in answer to her question. “Please.”

She smiled and left him alone with the paintings and chairs and breakfronts and figurines.

He felt clumsy, off balance, as if there should have been prom tickets in his pocket and a corsage wilting in his hands. It was crazy; even Sandy hadn’t affected him like this, and he’d loved her as much as any man had ever loved a woman. Even now, two long years after her death, he would have surrendered his own life gladly if that would bring her back.

Kristina returned, carrying a tray with two steaming cups on it, and sat down on a footstool with a fancy needlepoint cover. She handed Max his coffee and sipped from a mug of her own, surveying him with those remarkable silvery eyes of hers.

He tasted the brew and was startled to find that just the right amount of sugar had been added, along with a little milk. “How did you know how I take my coffee?” he asked.

She took her time answering, still watching him with that expression of gentle speculation. “I’m a good guesser,” she finally replied, and he had an odd and completely unfounded suspicion that she knew all his secrets. Right down to the fact that he wore his wedding band on a chain around his neck, tucked under his shirt.

“You’re very kind.” Max drank more coffee and was almost his old self again.

Kristina’s wide eyes twinkled. “It’s the least I could do, now that you’ve taken that dreadful mirror off my hands. Your sister can return it if she really hates it.”

Max beamed. “She will,” he said. “Hate it, I mean. But she won’t bring it back because that’s against the rules. The only legitimate way to unload a vengeance gift is to find somebody who really wants it and give it to them.”

“A tall order, in this case,” Kristina observed.

“I got rid of the moose head,” Max boasted with a shrug and spontaneous grin.

Kristina leaned forward slightly, and Max basked shamelessly in her warmth and her innate femininity, breathing in the faintly spicy scent of her hair and skin. “Who would want something like that?” she demanded, eyes narrowed, hair glistening like onyx in the muted light of the shop.

Max couldn’t remember for the life of him.

Contents

Letter to Readers

Dedication

Quote

Prologue

LONDON
WINTER, 1872

Chapter 1

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
PRESENT DAY

Contents

Letter to Readers

Dedication

Quote

Prologue

LONDONWINTER, 1872

Chapter 1

SEATTLE, WASHINGTONPRESENT DAY

LONDON
WINTER, 1872

SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
PRESENT DAY