Aura of Magic Read online

  Aura of Magic

  Unexpected Magic Book Four

  Patricia Rice

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Get A Free Patricia Rice Book

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chemistry of Magic

  Chemistry of Magic EXCERPT

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  About the Author

  About Book View Café

  Patricia Rice

  Copyright ©2017 Patricia Rice

  First Publication Book View Cafe, 2017

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portion thereof, in any form.

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Rice Enterprises, Dana Point, CA, an affiliate of Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  Cover design by Kim Killion

  Book View Café Publishing Cooperative

  P.O. Box 1624, Cedar Crest, NM 87008-1624

  http://bookviewcafe.com

  978-161138-661-5 ebook

  978-161138-662-2 POD

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

  Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Thank You.

  Author’s Note

  Virtual hugs and kisses to my faithful readers, without whom I wouldn’t be having so much fun writing this series!

  To my new readers: Don’t worry. You needn’t have read any of the other volumes to enjoy this one. Secondary characters may be recurring, but each story and couple stands alone. The only problem you might encounter is if you’re a stickler for title usage and don’t realize Lady Aster is the daughter of an earl and thus entitled to be called Lady Aster instead of Lady Theophilus.

  As in most of my Magic books, the Malcolm gifts I describe often have some scientific basis. In this book, I give my heroine the ability to see auras. I think most of us know that people with migraines often complain of seeing auras, so scientists have concluded they are a neurological flaw. But those of us who believe in the human spirit consider auras a reflection of what’s inside us. My intent isn’t to prove or disprove either theory. This is my story, and Brighid sees what she sees. The reader is free to reach their own conclusions.

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  Would you like to know when my next book is available? I occasionally send newsletters with details on new releases, special offers and other bits of news. If you sign up for the mailing list I’ll send you a free Patricia Rice novel.

  To download your free book, click here.

  Acknowledgments

  Even after all these years, I cannot give birth to a book without a tribe to push it out into the world. I am blessed by the circle of friends and amazing talent of Book View Café, a cooperative of authors who have survived the worst the publishing industry can fling at them, and who still emerged triumphant. In particular, I thank Mindy Klasky, Sherwood Smith, and Diana Pharaoh Francis for their words of wisdom on the sprawling draft they reined in and helped tame. The tech people behind the scenes deserve halos for their steadfast ability to make the internet perform like a tame beast instead of swallowing us alive.

  And as always, my love and appreciation to my husband, who has learned all the techie requirements of book production that I cannot fathom. But anyone who can learn to live with a writer can conquer whole new worlds!

  Without readers, my books would merely be megabytes in my computer. From me, from all authors everywhere, thank you for reading!

  Chapter 1

  Snarling in a fit of undignified temper, Pascoe Ives whacked his walking stick against an inoffensive hedge. A terrified rabbit leapt from its hiding place.

  Imagining swinging the ebony cane at His Majesty’s ministers, forcing them to leap like frightened conies, defused the worst of his frustration. Throwing back his shoulders, Pascoe relaxed his grip on the cane’s crested gold handle—a crest that didn’t belong to him, which was part of the whole problem. Without a title to wield, he was at the king’s mercy.

  As if to counter his foul mood, the gold knob reflected the fading rays of the sun on what would have been a beautiful day to escape to Brighton.

  He had promised the children and servants a visit to the shore, if only in vague hope of restoring sanity in a household where none existed. The meeting with the king’s cabinet shattered any illusion that he could escape the life he’d carved for himself—a life that hadn’t included family until he’d arrogantly acquired one under the assumption that a wife would tend the family hearth.

  As he approached his townhome, he noted a battered ostrich plume brushing the railing of his kitchen stairs. His heart stuttered and tripped. Lily always forgot her keys. She had used to sit on the step and read. . . . But this was not the modest cottage he’d once shared with his late wife.

  Even thinking of Lily at this moment was a denial of the dilemma sitting on his doorstep. With a sigh, Pascoe stopped at the rail. Wearing her best traveling costume, the young nanny he’d recently hired wept on his kitchen stairs. Her tears ground all pretense of normalcy into grains of sand, the sand he would not be seeing anytime soon.

  Did Brighton have sand? Traveling on official duties, he’d only seen the insides of inns, taverns, and cavernous palace chambers—never the coastline.

  “What is it the children have done now?” he asked in weariness. “Vanished from the nursery? You knew they would not speak when I hired you.”

  Startled, the nanny hastily wiped at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Oh sir, I tried. I truly did.”

  “Yes, yes, they all do.” He impatiently tapped his stick against the stone steps. “Did they leave snakes beneath your pillow? Climb up a chimney? Or simply find a way to the roof?” His adorably precocious toddlers had done all that and more in the past.

  More tears poured as she stood to face him. He towered uncomfortably over her and had to lean over to listen to her whispers. “They hate me, sir. They can hear me, I know they can, but they do nothing I say unless they wish to do so.”

  Nothing he hadn’t heard a hundred times before. Impatiently, he swung his stick against the step. “Dealing with bright children requires a backbone.”

  She stiffened said backbone. “Sir, I could not forgive myself it they truly vanished or got themselves in trouble, while I thought them safe and did nothing. I
have no way at all of knowing where they are or what they are doing. They are so silent.”

  “Until they’re not,” he added, knowing just exactly how loud they could be when they chose. “It’s a blamed inconvenient time to leave.”

  “They’ll be fine with you, sir,” she said bravely. “They are eager to go to Brighton. It’s just me they find offensive. I cannot teach them if they will not listen. They are not bad children, sir.”

  “They are undisciplined brats,” Pascoe growled. But there was no point in arguing. He’d tried that with the first few nursemaids, nannies, and governesses who had left, usually in tears. This one, at least, had lasted until he returned home.

  She visibly steeled herself and raised her chin. “What they need is a mother, sir, a mother who can be there when you are not, who can hug them if they are frightened, and read them stories until they sleep, someone they know will always be there for them.”

  They’d had a mother like that for two years. She’d died. Pascoe didn’t know when in hell he’d have time to hunt for another. If he couldn’t hire a reliable nanny, it wasn’t likely he could find a saint who would endure his absences and his children’s eccentricities, a sweet, maternal sort who would love and nurture instead of fleeing in fury and tears. Or become ill and die, he conceded blackly.

  “Did Mrs. Black give you the reference I left on my desk?” he asked in resignation. He’d had hopes for this nanny. She was highly experienced, educated, intelligent, and his nephew’s wife had said her astrological chart was propitious, whatever that meant.

  But he always prepared a reference for the servants working with the twins before he left town—which he would be doing shortly, again, and not for sunny Brighton but for the gray wilds of the north. He didn’t want to be responsible for women starving in the streets because his children drove them there.

  “Oh, yes, yes, she did, thank you so very much, sir.” She curtsied her relief.

  He left her waiting for whatever transportation she was expecting and stomped up the steps, letting himself in the unlatched front door. The footman was nowhere in sight.

  His beautiful—usually mute—four-year-old twins, however, bounced down the stairs crying, “Papa, Papa, see new mama now?”

  He nearly keeled over in shock—his nursemaid-terrorizing urchins had just miraculously learned to speak? And the first words out of their mouths were that they wanted a mother?

  How could he tell them that finding a saint did not fit into his schedule?

  Brighid Darrow, Countess of Carstairs, paced her dimly-lit chamber with angry taps of her heels against the stone. Her room in this medieval castle where she’d retired herself had only narrow slits for windows, but it was well paneled and appointed. The company was congenial. Her fury wasn’t at her newly-chosen home.

  She railed at the fates, at the stupidity of men—and her thick-skulled younger brother in particular. “If you incite rebellion, the king will send armies, just as he did to Wales a few weeks ago. Hundreds died! Homes and businesses were destroyed,” she cried in fear and exasperation.

  Bony hands clasped together, the dunderhead rested his elbows on his knees, all lanky limbs and angry youth. “Why would the king send armies to a solitary mine in the north country? He doesn’t even know we exist. We must establish our position now, before Carstairs becomes entrenched in his mismanagement.”

  Carstairs. She seethed at the title she bore. She had married too young to recognize that the whole wretched family was rotten to the core. Or more correctly, too mush-minded, whiskey-pickled stupid to rot.

  She had married thinking she would have children of her own, children who would become responsible earls and leaders. She had failed. She had failed in so many ways. . .

  She took a deep breath and tried to keep the tremor from her voice. “You are all I have, Fin. Please, do not do this, for my sake. It’s sedition.”

  He looked up, his big green eyes so like their grandfather’s that she nearly wept. “Sometimes, sis, the cause is greater than the individual. This is one of those times. If you cannot help, I will find other ways.”

  The pain of it was that she understood, from deep down inside her, in the core of integrity that their grandparents had molded. She knew the people of the village were more important than the new earl’s laziness.

  But the more recent memory of poor Meg and her babe and the appalling aftermath slammed her shields back in place. “The village drove me out,” she said, revealing the very large crack in her heart, the one that needed time to heal. “They called me witch. Witch! Can you imagine how it feels, after all these years of coming to their aid, that for no explicable reason, they call me names and reject me? How can I possibly help?”

  She wanted to weep, but her tears had frozen long ago.

  He nodded in resignation and stood up. “I don’t know what happened, Bridey, I’m sorry. I just assume they needed someone to blame, and you were closest. But they’re changing, Bridey, they have to. We’ll be shutting down the mine soon. People will go hungry. Hungrier.”

  “I fail to see what I can do,” she said, coldly drawing herself up straight and stiff as any board, arming herself with indifference. She might be lean, but she was as large-boned as her brother, and only a few inches shorter—a descendant of warriors just as he was. She’d never been the warm and cuddly sort. Intimidation came naturally to her. It had served her well as countess and even better in exile.

  “You could reason with Carstairs,” he argued. “You’re still a bloody countess. You have rights.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said emphatically. “Women have no rights whatsoever. It would break my heart,” she continued, “but I could find someone to help you go to the Americas if you wished. I can find someone to help you set up as an engineer anywhere. I will not help you get yourself killed.”

  “Power and wealth have made you as cold as all the Carstairs,” he said bitterly. “The warm-hearted sister I once knew would never have turned her back on the people who worshipped her, no matter what the circumstance.”

  “Aye, and I’m the cold-hearted witch they made of me,” she agreed callously. “I gave them my youth, my allegiance, my gifts. I provided for you and grandda. And now that I have no power or wealth, you turn your backs on me. So be it.”

  “I still love you, Bridey. I just don’t agree with you. I’ve left some of grandda’s carrier pigeons on the roof. Keep them fed, please.” Sadly, he took his hat in hand and let himself out.

  At least the pigeons meant that he wished to hear from her. Tears wet her eyes, but she didn’t allow them to fall. She’d cried herself to sleep that first year of her marriage at the tender age of sixteen. She’d cried when the babies of the village had died, and she’d been helpless to save them. She’d cried when she’d lost the only baby she’d ever conceived and nearly lost her life in the process.

  But she hadn’t wasted all her time weeping. She’d lived and learned and educated herself in all manner of subjects—specializing in female knowledge since every man she’d known except her grandfather had scorned the intelligence and abilities of women, and their needs.

  Men could have their weapons and wars and riots. They could have their alcohol and tobacco and kill themselves as they would and good riddance to them.

  She would start a school and teach women so they could save the children men so carelessly left behind. That was her future. She simply needed to start looking for funds.

  After Fin left and before she could send for tea to settle her rattled nerves, she heard a light tap at her door. Puzzled that it seemed to come from the lower part of the panel—since when had the household contained midgets?—she opened her senses just enough to be certain it was safe. She painfully remembered when she’d been rendered helpless through careless use of her gift. She didn’t use it so casually now. In this ancient castle full of spirits, she feared her own senses.

  Seeing nothing dreadful emanating through the panel, she opened the door a crack
and peered down.

  Surrounded in vibrant white light, two unfamiliar curly-haired toddlers with identical sky-blue eyes peered up at her. “Are you our new mama?”

  Before she could gasp, or study this fascinating apparition, a well-built city gentleman in polished boots and expensively-tailored riding attire raced up the stairs shouting “Emma, Edward, where the devil. . . ?” He halted abruptly at sight of the children—and her.

  Bridey stared. He stared back. The moment froze in time.

  He had the most terrifyingly dramatic aura she had ever seen in her life. Every shade of clear red pulsed around him, with almost no other color infringing on that dominant willpower. She staggered backward, nearly blinded, and slammed her inner vision shut to concentrate on his less-dangerous outward appearance.

  The affected monocle of a London dandy dangled from his lapel. A half dozen watch fobs hung at his waist, and he carried the kind of elaborate ebony walking stick exquisites of a prior generation once sported. Had he been less tall and muscled—or had she not seen his dangerous aura—she would have dismissed him as an absurd man-milliner.

  But a second glance revealed that his breeches conformed to brawny thighs, and his boots detailed the powerful calves of an experienced horseman. His sharply carved visage displayed all male arrogance, of course—and a strong look of Ives. Her cousin Aster had married into that family, although Aster’s husband, Lord Theo, was a fairly restrained specimen. This Ives. . . she ripped her gaze from the appreciative look in his dark eyes to study the toddlers at their feet.

  They eagerly awaited her answer to their puzzling question. Could it be connected to the faint violet streak she’d glimpsed in their auras? Blue hues often indicated intuition. Violet could mean a sensitivity almost as strong as most Malcolms possessed. Of course, it was said the current Ives family had descended from Lady Ninian Malcolm. . .