Again the Magic (Wallflowers 0.5)(4)

“I’ll stay for as long as I can,” he said gruffly.

Anxiety flashed in the dark depths of her eyes. “And tomorrow?” she reminded him. “You’ll meet me tomorrow?”

“The river at sunset,” McKenna said, suddenly weary from the endless inner struggle of wanting and never having.

Aline seemed to read his mind. “I’m sorry.” Her anguished whisper descended through the air as gently as falling flower petals as he climbed down from the balcony.

After McKenna had disappeared into the shadows, Aline padded back into her room and touched her lips. Her fingertips rubbed the kiss deeper into the tender skin. His mouth had been unexpectedly hot, and his taste was sweet and exquisite, flavored with apples that he must have purloined from the orchard. She had imagined his kiss thousands of times, but nothing could have prepared her for the sensual reality of it.

She had wanted to make McKenna acknowledge her as a woman, and she had finally succeeded. But there was no triumph in the moment, only a despair that was as incisive as a knife blade. She knew that McKenna thought she didn’t understand the complexity of the situation, when in truth she knew it better than he.

It had been relentlessly instilled in her since the cradle that people did not venture out of their classes. Young men like McKenna would forever be forbidden to her. Everyone from the top of society to the bottom understood and accepted such stratification—it caused universal discomfort to suggest that it could ever be any other way. She and McKenna might as well have been different species, she thought with black humor.

But somehow Aline could not see McKenna as everyone else did. He was no aristocrat, but neither was he a mere stable boy. Had he been born to a family of noble pedigree, he would have been the pride of the peerage. It was monstrously unfair that he had started life with such disadvantages. He was smart, handsome, hardworking, and yet he could never overcome the social limitations that he had been born with.

She remembered the day he had first come to Stony Cross Park, a small boy with unevenly cropped black hair and eyes that were neither blue nor green, but some magical shade in-between. According to the servants’ gossip, the boy was the bastard of a village girl who had run off to London, gotten herself in a predicament, and died in childbirth. The unfortunate baby had been sent back to Stony Cross, where his grandparents had cared for him until they became infirm. When McKenna reached the age of eight, he was sent to Stony Cross Park, where he was employed as a hall boy. His duties had been to clean the upper servants’ shoes, help the maids carry heavy cans of hot water up and down the stairs, and wash the silver coins that had come from town, so as to prevent the earl and countess from encountering any traces of dirt that might have come from a tradesman’s hands.

His full name was John McKenna, but there had already been three servants on the estate named John. It had been decided that the boy would be referred to by his last name until a new one was chosen for him…but somehow that had been forgotten about, and he had been simply McKenna ever since. At first most of the servants had taken little notice of him, except for the housekeeper, Mrs. Faircloth. She was a broad-faced, rosy-cheeked, kindhearted woman who was the closest thing to a parent that McKenna had ever known. In fact, even Aline and her younger sister, Livia, were far more apt to go to Mrs. Faircloth than they were to approach their own mother. No matter how busy the housekeeper was, she always seemed to have a moment to spare for a child, to bandage a hurt finger, to admire an empty bird’s nest that had been found outside, or to glue the broken part of a toy back into place.

It had been Mrs. Faircloth who had sometimes dismissed McKenna from his duties so that he could run and play with Aline. Those afternoons had been the boy’s only escape from the unnaturally restrained existence of a child servant.

“You must be kind to McKenna,” Mrs. Faircloth had admonished Aline, when she had run to her with a tale of how he had broken her doll’s painted wicker perambulator. “He has no family at all now, nor does he have nice clothes to wear, nor good things to eat for his supper, as you do. Much of the time while you are playing, he is working for his keep. And if he makes too many mistakes, or he is ever thought to be a bad boy, he may be sent away from here, and we will never see him again.”

The words had sunk into Aline’s marrow. From then on she had sought to protect McKenna, taking the blame for his occasional acts of mischief, sharing the sweets that her older brother sometimes brought from town, and even making him study the lessons that her governess gave her to read. And in return McKenna had taught her how to swim, how to skip pebbles across a pond, how to ride a horse, and how to make a whistle from a blade of grass stretched between her thumbs.

Contrary to what everyone, even Mrs. Faircloth, believed, Aline had never thought of McKenna as a brother. The familial affection she felt for Marcus bore no resemblance to her relationship to McKenna. McKenna was her counterpart, her compass, her sanctuary.

It had been only natural that as she developed into a young woman, she would become physically attracted to him. Certainly every other female in Hampshire was. McKenna had grown into a tall, big-boned male with striking looks, his features strong if not precisely chiseled, his nose long and bold, his mouth wide. His black hair hung over his forehead in a perpetual spill, while those singular turquoise eyes were shadowed by extravagant dark lashes. To compound his appeal, he possessed a relaxed charm and a sly sense of humor that had made him a favorite on the estate and in the village beyond.