Fairytale by MAGGIE SHAYNE Page A

find out what she was after here.
    To do that, he realized, he’d have to spend
time with her, and do so without falling under her spell. Away from
her, he was sharp and objective and insightful. Near her, he became
a helpless puppet, incapable of thinking beyond the moment. The
beauty in her eyes. The shape of her mouth. The satin curls and
raven lights in the hair she kept bundled up tight, which was
    a crime in itself.
    Adam closed his eyes, grated his teeth, and
banished the apparition from his mind. God, he’d conjured her image
with no more than a thought. And there he’d been again, stricken
what felt like a mortal blow from the sheer force of her
presence.
    This kind of attraction just wasn’t natural.
But it was understandable. He rationalized that it was only because
of this longtime obsession. Only because he saw her as its center,
its essence. If she were a blue-eyed blond, he told himself, he’d
feel nothing for her. But he had to wonder if that were true.
    He stared for a long moment at the telephone
on the nightstand. And finally, with a sigh, he gave up trying to
untangle the reality of the conspirator in the next bedroom, and
the fantasy woman who’d haunted his soul for nearly all his life.
He needed to stop thinking about all of this, just let it go. His
head throbbed and his nerves stood on their quivering ends. He
wasn’t thinking about newly translated texts, or tomorrow’s class,
or his tenure, or his finances. He wasn’t thinking about the
approaching winter and the need to have the heating system
replaced, or the ominous clunk in the Porsche’s transmission. He
was only thinking about Brigit Malone.
    Impulsively, he turned to the French doors.
With the darkness outside and the lights on within, their smooth
glass became a mirror. He could see nothing outside. Only the
perfect reflection of his own, gloomy bedroom. And the image of a
man in abject—if inexplicable—misery.
    As if in an act of defiance, he cranked both
handles and slammed the doors open wide. The autumn chill had taken
a respite today. Tonight, even the breeze had died away. The
night’s air laid oppressive and silent over the world, heavy as a
woolen blanket. Heat surrounded him, smothered him as he stepped
out onto the wrought-iron deck he’d had built along the entire
length of the house’s back side. From here, he could look out over
the lake. Usually there would be a refreshing breeze waiting to
greet him.
    Tonight there was only a humid, sweaty hand.
Invisible. Holding him in its fist until he could barely draw a
breath. Holding him prisoner the way his obsession did.
    Adam stared out at the dark water, seeing no
movement. Only able to make out the crooked-finger shape of Cayuga
by the darker shade of the water compared to the land around it. He
turned toward the south, so he faced the forested hillside. Its
shape swelled toward the sky, and he remembered playing there as a
child. He remembered what he’d seen there, where he’d gone.
    Someplace that had shaken his world to its
fragile core. Someplace that had twisted his in-sides up so much he
hadn’t dared go back. Not in almost thirty years. And part of him,
way down deep, knew that he hadn’t stayed away out of fear of his
father’s brutal reprisals. Because he could have explored those
woods again, after the bastard had abandoned them. There had been
time before the new owners had tossed Adam and his mother out of
their home. And more time after Adam had bought the place back
again. But he hadn’t. Because he knew, somewhere inside him, that
he was terrified of what he might find out there. He’d never been
sure whether his mind could handle going into that forest again,
and seeing the magical doorway that led to an enchanted realm. And
he was equally unsure he could handle not seeing it, as little
sense as that made. That, perhaps, was the basis for his obsession
to find the source of his fantasy. The fact that he’d never been
able to fully convince