Fascinated Read Online Free PDF

that kiss. As it was, his face had turned pale.
    “This is very serious.”
    “I would agree, yes,” Carstairs replied blandly.
    “Could she be a changeling?” The Fae, humanity’s powerful, inimical and profoundly magical enemies, had a fondness for human children and would abduct them when the chance arose. In most cases, they left behind one of their own in its place. Usually the changeling appeared to die quickly, but occasionally it remained in the home, causing mischief and misery. Sometimes, the changeling even had one human parent. These half-blood creatures had some Fae power and some human heart. The combination could be exceedingly dangerous. It was such a creature who had killed Carstairs’s older brother.
    Carstairs felt his eyes narrow as he cast his mind back over the evening. Before this, he had spent very little time with Alicia Hartwell. But they had met, and talked, and he had been her escort to several society affairs. He had held her hand as they danced, and sat with her at dinner. All this time, he’d noted she was fair and levelheaded and an intelligent if cool conversationalist. Nothing about her had stirred his Catalyst’s senses.
    “No, she’s not a changeling; neither is she half-blood. I’m sure of that.” If she were a Fae, or carried Fae blood, he would have felt it as clearly as if he’d put his hand too close to the fire. “But she is laboring under some enchantment.” It had been cold as death, that spell around her, but at the same time clear as crystal. He had thought unaccountably of the German folktale he’d read as a young man, in which a princess, thought to be dead, had been laid in a glass coffin.
    “Did she cast it for herself?” asked Rathe. “Could she be a Sorceress? One of the Fae’s allies?”
    Carstairs considered. “I think not. It seems to me far more likely she is the victim in this.”
    Rathe looked out the window at the passing streets in silence for a minute. The noises of hooves, wheels, carriage springs and the shouts of late-night revelers filled the dark space. “Carstairs, you’re sure about that?”
    They met each other’s gaze. Carstairs bit back a sharp retort at Rathe’s unspoken implications. Both men knew Carstairs had once failed in the face of Faery glamour. In his mind, Carstairs could clearly see Nick’s eyes open to darkness as the life left him. Rathe was right to ask.
    “I am sure,” Carstairs said. “But you should perhaps check.”
    Rathe grasped Carstairs’s wrist and held his palm over Carstairs’s heart. Carstairs, in turn, reached deep within his spirit to open the channel between himself and the current of power that was the very breath of the world. Focusing will and sense, he directed a small portion of that power toward Rathe. The Sorcerer drank the magic into himself, shaping it into a spell of detection. If an enchantment had been cast over Carstairs, Rathe would find it. Carstairs felt a tingling warmth as the re-formed power glided across his skin. It was an intimate sensation and Carstairs’s cock, restless from the events of earlier in the evening, stirred fitfully. An ordinary man might have balked at feeling such arousal while being touched by another man, but neither Carstairs nor Rathe had ever been ordinary men.
    At last, Rathe let him go, and sat back. “You’re clear,” he said. “The captain’s not going to be happy to find you’ve engaged yourself to a woman with an enchantment on her.”
    “It’s not something I’m entirely happy with, either.” In fact, Carstairs found himself deeply worried.
    In the brief private time they’d shared before he’d become aware of her enchantment, Alicia Hartwell had intrigued and attracted him in a way he never would have suspected possible for a mature, sequestered virgin to do. He had followed her retreat from the ballroom with no thought other than to soothe her bride’s nerves, if she had them. To be holding her while she spied on a most erotic