Author: Tammy Falkner
Category: Fantasy
Go to read content：https://readnovelfree.com/p/47688_14
Tossing the rest of the day’s business to the side, Finn started up the stairs toward his bedchamber. He was too tired to do any more.
He let Robin’s valet, Simmons, remove his clothing, and he slid into a silk dressing gown. The man bustled about the chamber long enough to be irritating, until Finn finally motioned for him to leave. With a quick bow, Simmons exited the chambers. Finn was quite certain Simmons didn’t want to be his valet, but the man needed employment while Robin was gone. He might as well make himself useful.
Finn poured a snifter of brandy and drank it in one healthy swallow, hissing as it made a fiery trail down his throat. He poured another. He slept better when he was foxed, if he had to sleep alone. He preferred to sleep sober with a warm, and preferably damp, body wrapped around his.
The brandy began to seep into the corners of his mind, and he relaxed in an overstuffed chair. When he was sufficiently numb, he stood up, shed his dressing gown, and sat down on the edge of the bed. The thought of a warm bed-partner stirred something within him, and he momentarily considered having Wilkins arrange for a visit, but it was just as well that he went to bed. Wilkins couldn’t bring him Claire Thorne, and she was the only woman he wanted.
He scrubbed at his eyes again and stared absently around the room that wasn’t his. The home that wasn’t his. The life that wasn’t his.
Movement against the far wall caught his attention, and he strained to see into the dimness. A small door appeared. Finn blinked, adjusting his brandy-hazed brain to see more clearly. Perhaps he was already asleep; he couldn’t be certain. But then the door flew open and fog rolled out in small waves, clouding the room until it was smoky and hazy. He swiped a hand in front of his face. A shimmer of lights sparked from the opening, and through it tumbled a tiny creature, no more than four inches in height.
Finn got up and bent at the waist—regretting the action immediately when the room rolled like the deck of a moving ship—and glared at what had to be a figment of his imagination. But then the little lady reached behind herself and fluffed her wing, which had gotten bent when she tumbled across the floor.
“What the devil?” he remarked to himself.
The faerie looked up, got to her feet, and placed her hands on her hips. She shook a finger at him and words tumbled from her lips, but he couldn’t hear a word of them.
“I can’t hear you,” he said, leaning closer.
Before his very eyes, the little faerie grew to human proportions. Fog and sparks covered some of her change, but the rest of it he saw. She grew. She grew from four inches tall to where the top of her head reached the bottom of his chin.
Her cheeks were flushed a rosy red, and she put a hand over her eyes. But with her free hand, she continued to shake her finger at him. In her fist she clutched a… paintbrush?
He heard not a word. Finn let his gaze wander from the bodice of her pink gown down to the odd little slippers she wore. He finally made his eyes move back up to her face. Her cheeks were still red and growing even redder, as were the edges of her wings. Wings. Dear God, the lady had wings. Her hair tumbled over the implements of flight, which looked like lace and ephemeral material, if that could be an apt description. Her strawberry blond hair fell in mad disarray over her shoulders and tangled around the edges of lace on her wings. He moved to disentangle her. She must have gotten mussed when she’d rolled into the room.
“My lord,” she cried, when he reached out to touch her. He knew that voice. It seeped into his brain slowly. Claire Thorne.
“Miss Thorne?” he asked. He’d never seen her in faerie form. He knew she was one. But he’d never seen it. Not with all the glimmer and shine, and the wings. He couldn’t stop looking at her. She looked everywhere else.
“My lord,” she began again. She looked down toward his feet. And then spun to face away. She hooked his dressing gown with her finger and held it out to him. “Perhaps you should dress.”
Nine
Finn took his dressing gown from her crooked finger and shrugged into it. “What brings you to London, Miss Thorne?” he asked casually. Like he was commenting about tea or her frock or some other nonsense, rather than the fact that she’d just appeared through a tiny door that wasn’t there anymore. What he really wanted to ask was where the devil she’d been for the past four months. And why she’d vanished without talking to him about what happened between them.
“That would be none of your concern, Lord Phineas.” She lifted her pert little nose higher in the air and started for the door.
“Miss Thorne, you just tumbled through a magical doorway right into my chambers.” He stopped and shook his head. That sounded ridiculous even to him. “A door that has disappeared, by the way.”
The lady pivoted on her heel and looked back at where the door should have been and then began to pace.
She raised a fingernail to her lips and began to nibble as she mumbled something to herself that sounded like, “The paintbrush usually leaves a way for me to get back.”
He didn’t even try to interpret it. “By God, are they always that big?” He reached out to tentatively touch the fine edges of her wings, which looked like lace, but now that he was closer, he realized they were edged with fine down, and they matched the color of her skin.
She looked down at herself and rolled her eyes at him. He found that social ineptitude a little endearing, actually.
“I could ask you the same,” she said, with one delicate golden brow arched at him. Her gaze roamed up and down his body, a body she’d just seen way too much of. She already knew it intimately.
“I was preparing for bed.” Heat crept up his cheeks. “You look very pretty in pink.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. She shook out the folds of the short skirt so that it swished around her knees. Finn had never seen a more erotic sight than that of her trim little silk-clad ankles. Good God, he was losing his mind. He picked up his empty glass and stared into it.
She closed her eyes tightly and her wings disappeared. They vanished. No popping, no cracking, no smoke. They just left. He reached out to touch the place where they’d been, but she dodged his hand. “Go to bed, my lord,” she said. “Tomorrow you will wake and this will all seem like a dream.”
His dreams of her involved her gasping and moaning beneath him, since he hadn’t been able to get the memories of her actually doing so out of his mind. His dreams would not involve her tumbling through a door into his room. He raised his foot and tapped his big toe against the wall where the door had been. “Where did it go?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea.”