He would never forget the look in Roxanne's eyes. They'd held a terrible expression of hurt and betrayal, and he had been the cause of it.

Not that he'd been given any choice. He'd been forced to say the words. He'd have given anything to have avoided them.

"Roxanne... this is my wife."

When, to hide her tears, Roxanne had rushed from the room, Angelique's angry retort had cloven his last hope of concealing his feelings.

"So," she had said with an undisguised edge of contempt, "she is the one."

His denials had been useless.

She'd wasted no time imposing conditions. He knew, when Roxanne fell ill, that Angelique was to blame. He knew he would be forced to meet some demand in order to save Roxanne's life. And he knew that Angelique would insist upon his total compliance with whatever

Devil's bargain she concocted. How easily she still manipulated him. And how much he still despised her.

She had laughed at his pleas for Roxanne's life. Laughed and turned his words against him, toying with his emotions with that indifference that was so maddeningly typical of her.

"Why do you want her to live?" she had taunted. "Why don't you want her to die? Then you can spend eternity together!"

His response had been tainted with the sickness he was feeling. "No more."

"You love her that much?"

When to that queried accusation he had given no reply, Angelique had taken an answer from the silence.

"Then her fate lies entirely in your hands."

At last, he had thought, the condition. The price for Roxanne's life. Weakly, he'd asked, "What must I do?"

Despite how well he knew her; despite having expected the worst, her answer still surprised him.

"Come and live with me -- as man and wife -- because that is what we are and because that is what I want!"

Want. Now there was a subject Angelique knew only too well. He had never known her to fail in getting whatever she might want.

He approached the Old House now with growing trepidation. She would be there waiting for him, perhaps unpacking her things or preparing tea or making some other pretense of domesticity. He had no idea how he would endure the charade of a happy marriage she intended to convey to the family at Collinwood. Maybe, somehow, he would simply avoid coming home. Somehow.

He stepped into the candle-lit foyer and, in silence, placed his cane and cloak on the coatrack. She was not in the drawing room. But the fire had been kindled, the candles lit, and he could sense her presence in the house, just as surely as he sensed the dreaded rays of sunlight approaching every morning. Angelique was like the sunlight. So beautiful, so deadly. He loathed them both: the sun for denying him its company; Angelique for insisting on giving him hers.

Could it be he had cared for her once? Had he really stood here all those years ago, in this very room, and taken her to wife with the vows he had thought to give only to Josette? How foolishly blind he had been. But she... She had been so deceptively loving. So incredibly beautiful...

He gazed into the fire and suddenly, inexplicably, was overcome with another memory -- one of Angelique as he had once seen her on a sultry Summer's night on Martinique. Angelique; willing, desirous and wanton. With invitation implicit in her eyes she had led him to his room, and quite oblivious to the protestations of the bond servant assigned to warm the bed, had followed him inside. She had first trapped him in that moment. Though he had had numerous trysts with the barmaids and trollops of Collinsport, he had never, till that night, been recipient to the time-honored art of seduction.

Angrily, he forced the memories to submerge. But they left behind a long-dormant thing now awakened -- a need that simultaneously aroused both anticipation and outrage; a remnant of his lost humanity and a bitter reminder of the power she still held over him. Struggle though he did to suppress it, however, it persisted, as did images of Angelique and the nights they had spent together...

Were these memories evoked by her design? Was she upstairs right now, willing him to see and remember these things by practicing her art on him as she had done so many times before? Enraged, he headed back to the door, intending to leave this house and never return. But he found he could not make his hand come to rest upon the door latch. Was that her doing as well? A part of his mind -- subdued until now -- argued that it made no difference. A teasing subconscious made the desire well in him and its voice created inarguable reasons for setting aside his hatred. Whatever else he might have become, he was still a man. And however much he loathed her, was Angelique not, after all, his lawful wife?

He wanted to refute this annoying voice of seeming reason, but discovered he could no longer find the arguments to do so. His defenses dissolving, he mounted the stairs, yielding to an increasing want of his own. It had begun to crowd all other thoughts from his mind.

He'd expected to find her awaiting him in the bedroom, and the anxiety eased somewhat when he found the room unoccupied. In the shifting light of the hearth fire, he crossed to the tall bay window and looked out at the star-laden night. Like the nights in Martinique. His anger returned, shoving that thought aside and reminding him that he must still find a way to legitimize this mockery of a marriage to those at Collinwood... and to Roxanne.

The door clicked.

He did not turn around. There was no need. He could see her reflected in one pane of the window, her figure rendered surrealistic by the firelight and the distortion of the glass. She moved until she stood mere inches behind him, and her hands reached out to softly touch him. The faint, dusky scent of her perfume began to perform its enticing function. He turned, and involuntarily gasped at the vision the window had not clearly shown him.

She was wearing a lace-edged peignoir, a french blue frill that flowed to her mid-calf in soft rivulets, clinging to her form in places, wafting out from it in others. The fabric was transparent.

"Hold me, Barnabas."

Was it a plea or a command? He didn't know -- or care. Either way, he was helpless to refuse it, perhaps would not have wanted to if he'd been able. He took her in his arms and kissed her, finding a familiar, wanton satisfaction in that touch that he had long ago forgotten. There were many things he had forgotten -- until now.

His hands found the single fabric-covered eyelet that clasped the laced garment at her throat and clumsily unfastened it. In one swift, fluid motion, the peignoir slithered to the floor.

His mind dismissed the last dim flicker of warning that this woman was a witch, a sorceress, a thing of uncompromising evil. The voice of passion told him only that she was beautiful, and that he was her own. Her consort. Her lover.

Her husband.

Her hands were inside his clothing, soft, probing messengers of her desire. Somehow they carried away his ability to reason. They made his need the only thing of which he was aware... his need and her eagerness to fulfill it. He was not even aware that she had guided him, as one might lead a blind man, to the bed. But he was divinely conscious of the arts she proceeded to practice there.

Long years may have divided them, but his wife had lost none of her exceptional talents...

* * *

Angelique had not intended to sleep. She awoke alone, wondering in a moment of near-panic if she had slept past the dawn. If she'd allowed him to leave the house without completing the spell she had begun last night he might never return. He would find again all his reasons for hating her and even her threat against Roxanne might then not be enough to make him return.

Relieved, she realized the room was still dark. A setting moon was franed in the window. The fire had died down. She called upon the Art then, and immediately felt his presence in the drawing room downstairs. So he had not left the house after all. Could some part of her spell still be holding him? But she had fallen asleep... had lost control of it in the night. By now he must surely have begun to regain his senses; to realize what she had done to him.

Rapidly, she dressed and descended the stairs. She found him at the fireside, absently stoking its waning embers. When he looked at her, some of the old resentment had indeed crept back into his eyes. She sensed that his ardor had given way to humiliation; to wounded masculine pride at the strength of her domination.

His hand gripped the iron poker with the force of surfacing rage, and she feared for an instant that he might intend to make a weapon of it, but he turned, breaking their gaze, and placed the instrument back between the iron teeth of its holder.

"Surely you know," he said wearily, "that no spell you may weave, no act of deception you devise, nor any of your threats against my loved ones... none of these will ever change the truth. I will never love you."

In spite of their cruelty, she was pleased at his words -- they would enable her to regain control of the situation. "That," she said, "remains to be seen. In the meantime, I will not be entirely dissatisfied with what we had tonight."

He looked at her, and the bitterness in his tone was cutting. "Does it bother you at all that I despise you?"

"Not particularly," she parried.

His eyes said that he knew otherwise. She met them, and allowed them to evoke in her a rare admission of the truth. "All right," she conceded. "That was a lie. I would give anything in my power, just once to hear you say you loved me." Unintended tears had begun to interfere with her words. "There. I've said it. What more would you have me do?"

For a moment, she thought she saw a trace of sympathy in his gaze, but it was quickly vanquished by the cold, unfeeling veneer of his hatred.

"Nothing," he answered tersely. "I think you've done more than enough."

He made a deliberately wide path around her on his way to the door, where he gathered hls came and cloak and opened the door to a grey pre-dawn. She came as far as the stair, not content that he should leave without one last reminder.

"I have never wanted anything but your love, Barnabas. I cannot force you to give it to me. But I _can_ stop you from giving it to another."

The implied threat found its mark. She sensed his hatred melting into despair; into a morass of defeat as dense as the fog outside the door. He looked at her for one brief moment with the wary eyes of an animal regarding its captor, then he turned and disappeared into the mist, dissolving -- along with her fears. She eased the redwood door shut after him, and a smile curled the corners of her lips.

He would be back.
 

- End -