Again the Magic (Wallflowers 0.5)(14)

“Yes, I know what he told you,” Aline interrupted softly. “You’re leaving Stony Cross Park. And it’s for the best, really.”

McKenna gave a slow, confused shake of his head. “I need to hold you,” he whispered, and for the first time ever he stepped into her room. He was stayed, however, as Aline raised her hand in a gesture of restraint.

“Don’t,” she said, and her breath caught before she could continue. “It’s all over, McKenna. The only thing to do now is say your goodbyes and disappear.”

“I’ll find a way to come back,” he said thickly, his gaze haunted. “I’ll do whatever you ask—”

“That wouldn’t be wise. I…” Self-loathing twisted through her as she forced herself to go on. “I don’t want you to come back. I don’t want to see you ever again.”

Staring at her blankly, McKenna took a step back from her. “Don’t say that,” he murmured huskily. “No matter where I go, I’ll never stop loving you. Tell me you feel the same, Aline. God…I can’t live without some shred of hope.”

It was precisely that hope that would prove his eventual ruin. If he had hope, he would come back to her, and then her father would destroy him. The only way to save McKenna was to drive him away for good…to extinguish all faith in her love. If she didn’t accomplish that, then no power on earth would be enough to keep him from her.

“I apologized to my father, of course,” Aline said in a light, brittle voice. “I asked him to get rid of you, to spare me the embarrassment. He was angry, of course—he said that I should have at least looked somewhere higher than the stables. He was right. Next time I’ll choose with more discrimination.”

“Next time?” McKenna looked as if he had been struck.

“You’ve amused me for a while, but I’m bored with you now. I suppose we should try to part as friends, only…you are just a servant, after all. So let us end it cleanly. It’s best for both of us if you go before I am forced to say things that will make us both even more uncomfortable. Go, McKenna. I don’t want you anymore.”

“Aline…you love me…”

“I was playing with you. I’ve learned all I can from you. Now I need to find a gentleman to practice with.”

McKenna was silent, staring at her with the gaze of a fatally wounded animal. Desperately Aline wondered how long she could continue before she broke.

“How could I love someone like you?” she asked, each mocking word causing a stab of agony in her throat. “You’re a bastard, McKenna…you have no family, no blood, no means…what could you offer me that I couldn’t get from any man of low breed? Go, please.” Her nails left bloody crescents in her own palms. “Go.”

As the silence unraveled, Aline lowered her head and waited, trembling, praying to a merciless God that McKenna would not come to her. If he touched her, spoke to her once more, she would crumble in anguish. She made herself breathe in and out, forcing her lungs to work, willing her heart to keep beating. After a long time she opened her eyes and looked at the empty doorway.

He was gone.

Rising from the bed, she managed to reach the wash-stand, and she clutched her arms around the porcelain bowl. Nausea erupted in punishing spasms, and she gave in to it with a wretched gasp, until her stomach was empty and her knees had lost all ability to function. Stumbling and crawling to the balcony, she huddled against the railing and gripped the iron bars.

She saw McKenna’s distant figure walking along the drive that led from the manor house…the drive that connected to the village road. His head was bowed as he left without a backward glance.

Aline watched him hungrily through the painted bars, knowing that she would never see him again. “McKenna,” she whispered. She watched through the painted bars until he disappeared, following a bend in the road that would lead him far away from her. And then she pressed her icy, sweating face to the sleeve of her gown, and wept.

Four

Mrs. Faircloth came to the doorway of Aline’s cabinet, a small antechamber of her bedroom. The tiny room had originally come from a chateau built in the early seventeenth century. Years ago the earl and countess had bought the vaulted cabinet while traveling abroad. It had been packed into crates—paneling, painting, ceiling, and floor—and completely reconstructed at Stony Cross Park. Such rooms were rare in England but common in France, where the upper class used such places daydreaming, studying and writing, and conversing intimately with a friend.

Aline huddled in the corner of a chaise that had been lodged against the age-rippled glass window, staring at nothing. The narrow sill beneath the windowpanes was lined with small objects…a tiny painted-metal horse…a pair of tin soldiers, one of them missing an arm…a cheap wooden button from a man’s shirt…a small folding knife with a handle carved from a stag’s horn. All the items were bits and pieces of McKenna’s past that Aline had collected. Her fingers were curled around the spine of a pocket-sized book of verse, the nonsensical kind used to teach children the rules of grammar and spelling. Mrs. Faircloth remembered more than one occasion on which she had seen Aline and McKenna reading the primer together as children, their heads close together as Aline doggedly tried to teach him his lessons. And McKenna had listened reluctantly, though it had been clear that he would have much preferred to be running through the woods like an uncivilized creature.