Free Inamorata by Megan Chance Page B

think, Soph?”
    She gave a little shrug, taking up another piece of melon. “Whatever you like. You’ve the eye, not me.”
    “My God, it sounds beautiful,” Giles said. I thought I detected annoyance in her expression, but it could have been only that I was annoyed myself, despite the fact that by now I was used to Giles’s ardent attachments. He was never more foolish than when he was infatuated with some woman or another.
    But I understood it too. The spell of her closed the space between us, touching and then drawing back. Her smile, along with that small overbite, was so sensual one was led immediately to thoughts of lovemaking. It didn’t help that her brother found myriad ways to bring her to our attention—the rose had been only one of a dozen or more little gestures, as if he himself was so taken with her he couldn’t help himself.
    She leaned her chin upon her hand and gazed out toward the lagoon. “Such a beautiful day, isn’t it? It seems impossible to believe there could be anything but days such as this here.”
    “Thus far I haven’t seen a bad one,” I said. “But I’ve only been here the summer.”
    “The lagoon is magical,” Miss Hannigan went on dreamily. “Before we came, I read so much about it. Everyone spoke of the first sight of Venice from the lagoon. But that was before the train bridge was built. I suppose no one first comes upon it that way anymore.”
    “No, probably not,” I agreed. “But even coming from the train station, Venice has its charm. Especially after Mestre.”
    Joseph Hannigan laughed.
    Giles said, “Such a dismal, dusty town.”
    “It has its moments.” Hannigan turned to his sister. “Tell them, Soph. Tell them what we saw in Mestre.”
    She smiled, that dreaminess in her eyes becoming more pronounced, impossible to turn away from. “We had an hour wait, and we were sitting there on the bench outside the station when a train came in. One of the cars had a carriage strapped to it. It shone even in the dust. It had a gold emblem painted upon the door, and its windows glittered in the sun like diamonds.” Her voice took on a lovely vibrance, a storyteller’s opulence, transitioning us into a fairy tale before I’d realized it.
    “The train stopped so suddenly that the carriage jerked and the straps holding it broke. It rolled onto one wheel and hung there long enough that I thought it might stay that way, suspended. But then it crashed to the ground. The trunks on its roof broke open, and jars and bottles and wooden boxes rolled everywhere, cracking apart as if the violence of the world had been cast upon them, releasing butterflies and moths and bugs. The air shivered with shining, vibrant wings and the ground shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It was so beautiful we could not look away.
    “The man and woman whose carriage it was ran about, trying to gather them up again, desperate to keep them safe. Because you see, they weren’t really insects waiting to be dried and pinned to mats in museum exhibits, but fairies who had been transformed by a wicked demon and locked in a mummy’s tomb. They had spent hundreds of years in darkness, and that man and woman had rescued them, and meant to return them to the ancient gardens of Rome, where they belonged.
    “But now the fairies were bathed in sunlight, and laughing because they would never be in darkness again. They would not go back into those bottles and boxes. We could feel their joy and hear them singing. The man and the woman let them go—what else could they do? They could protect them no longer. They could only hope that the fairies would find their own way to the gardens. Some of them have made it there already, I know. And the rest will as soon as they find the path the others have left for them to follow. I shall never forget the magic of Mestre.”
    Her voice trailed off, but the vision she’d conjured for us lingered, impossible to forget. I had heard singers who could charm the