The Magic Circle Katherine Neville (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📖

what I wanted Wolfgang to do right now—and what he certainly seemed to want as well.

I tried to be rational about it. What other man would bring me halfway around the world, and invite me home for the night to his very own castle? What other man would look at me, as Wolfgang was looking at me right now—in my dishevelled state, grubby and battered from my travels and travails—and even want me? What other man exuded that heady aroma of pine and citron and leather that made me want to drink him in and drown? What in God’s name was my problem, anyway?

But deep within, of course, I knew exactly what it was.

Wolfgang stood to face me without touching me. He looked at me with those X-ray eyes that affected me with the same results kryptonite had on Superman: weak knees and an empty mind. Our lips were inches apart.

Without another word, he folded me into his arms and buried his hands in my hair. My lips touched his; then his mouth was on mine as if he were drinking my soul, washing everything from my mind but the warmth of his lips moving down my throat. The robe slipped from my shoulders and fell in a pool around my bare feet. His teeth grazed my shoulder, his hands moved over my body where he’d slid my underthings away. I couldn’t breathe.

I pulled back. “I’m frightened,” I whispered.

Taking me by the wrist, Wolfgang kissed my palm. “And you think I’m not?” he asked, regarding me seriously. “But there’s only one thing we need to remember, Ariel: Don’t look back.”

Don’t look back—the single rule the gods gave Orpheus before he plunged into the underworld to rescue his great love, Eurydice, I thought with a chill.

“I’m not looking back at anything,” I lied. Then I lowered my eyes—too late.

“Oh, yes, you are, my love,” said Wolfgang, tilting my face up to his. “You’re looking at a shadow that has stood between us ever since the moment we met—the shadow of your late cousin, Sam. But after tonight is over, I hope you will never—not even once—look back again.”

Okay, call me crazy. Indeed, that night I myself thought I might’ve gone more than a little mad. Wolfgang had opened a different kind of wound from the one patched together by those stitches in my arm, a wound that ran deep and bled silently within, so I couldn’t be sure exactly how much damage had been done. This unhealed trauma, which I’d managed thus far to hide even from myself, was the fact that I might be more than a little in love with my cousin Sam. So what did the situation make me? A pretty confused girl nuke.

But those conflicting emotions playing war games in my chest were at least partially obliterated that night—along with everything else—by something Wolfgang unlocked that I’d never known or even imagined existed within me. When our two bodies met and melted together, in the heat of passion, there arose in me a mixture of pain and yearning and desire that worked in my veins like a drug, with each new taste only making my craving for him increase. We fed each other’s fires with a hungry obsession until every muscle in my body quivered in exhaustion.

At last Wolfgang stretched motionless across me where we lay on the soft Turkish rug before the fire, his face pressed against my stomach. Our skin was drenched in moisture, and the flickering glow of the coals burnished his tautly muscled body as if it had been dipped in bronze. I slid my hand along the curve of his back from his shoulders to his waist, and he shuddered.

“Please, Ariel!” He lifted his shaggy head to grin at me. “You’d better be sure what you’re doing, my dear, if you begin that again. You’re a sorceress who’s put some sort of spell over me.”

“You’re the one with the magic wand,” I said, laughing back.

Wolfgang sat up on his haunches and pulled me to an upright position. The fire had died down to embers. Despite our recent exertions, the room was growing cool.

“Someone has to use some sense for a moment,” Wolfgang told me, drawing the bathrobe around my shoulders again. “You need something to relax you.”

“Whatever you were just doing seemed to be working fine,” I assured him.

Wolfgang shook his head and smiled. He pulled me to my feet, scooped his arms beneath me, and carried me up to my room and through to the bathroom, where he set me down again and drew us a hot bath. He splashed in plenty of mineral salts, then he fetched us fresh clothes and laid them out near the tub. As we sank into the aromatic waters, Wolfgang soaked a thick sea sponge and drizzled warm water over my shoulders and breasts.

“You’re the most desirable thing I’ve ever seen,” he said, kissing my shoulder from behind. “But I think we should be practical. It’s only just after nine, right now. Are you very hungry?”

“Voracious,” I said, suddenly realizing it for the first time.

So after we bathed and toweled off, we threw on the warm clothes and walked down through the vineyards to the little restaurant he’d spoken of, overlooking the river. When we got there, another fire was cheerily burning in the hearth.

We had hot soup and a salad of fresh greens along with a raclette—that dish of melted cheese with its rich oaky flavor and steamed potatoes and tartly pickled gherkins. We dipped it from the plate with bits of crusty bread, licked the pickle juice from each other’s fingers, and washed everything down with an excellent dry Riesling.

When we hiked back up though the vineyards it was just after ten o’clock. Mist was rising from the river; snatches of it slipped, wraithlike, between the rows of clipped-back vinestocks that were just getting their new shoots. Though the air was tinged with a chill, the earth smelled fresh and new with