Authors: Nora Roberts
“My grandson’s paying.” Mr. Riley laid a fragile hand on her shoulder. “He’s a good lad. You put your money away, darling.”
“Thank you.” She offered a hand to shake, then found herself charmed when the old man lifted it to his lips. “I enjoyed meeting you.” She slid off her stool, sent a smile to the younger Riley. “Both of you.”
Without Darcy to clear the path, getting to the door was a little more problematic than getting to the bar had been. When she got there, her face was flushed from the heat of bodies, and her blood dancing to the hot lick of the fiddle.
She considered it one of the most entertaining evenings of her life.
Then she stepped outside into the cool night air. And saw Aidan just as he ducked under the violent swing of an arm the width of a tree trunk.
“Now, Jack,” he said in reasonable tones as a giant of a man with shocking red hair bunched hamlike fists again. “You know you don’t want to hit me.”
“I’ll do it! I’ll break your interfering nose this time, by Jesus, Aidan Gallagher. Who are you to tell me I can’t have a fucking drink in the fucking pub when I’ve a fucking mind to?”
“You’re well and truly pissed, Jack, and you need to go home now and sleep it off.”
“Let’s see if you can sleep this off.”
He charged, and while Aidan prepared to pivot and easily avoid the bull rush, Jude let out a short scream of alarm. It took only that to distract Aidan enough to have Jack’s wild punch connect.
“Well, hell.” Aidan wiggled his jaw, blew out a breath
as Jack’s lumbering charge sent the man sprawling facedown on the sidewalk.
“Are you all right?” Terrified, Jude rushed over, skirting the sprawled form that was approximately the size of a capsized ocean liner. “Your mouth’s bleeding. Does it hurt? This is awful.” She fumbled in her bag for a tissue as she stuttered.
Aidan was irritated enough to tell her the blood was as much her fault for screaming as it was Jack’s for throwing the punch. But she looked so pretty and distressed, and was already dabbing at his painfully cut lip with the tissue.
He started to smile, and as that hurt like twice the devil, he winced.
“Oh, what a bully! We need to call the police.”
“For what?”
“To arrest him. He attacked you.”
Sincerely shocked, Aidan gaped at her. “Now, why would I want to have one of my oldest friends arrested just for bloodying my lip?”
“Friend?”
“Sure. He’s just nursing a broken heart with whiskey which is foolish but natural enough. The lass he thought he loved went off with a Dubliner, two weeks ago last Wednesday, so he’s taken to drinking out his sorrows the past few days, then causing a ruckus. He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“He hit you in the face.” Perhaps if she said it slowly, clearly, the meaning would get through. “He said he was going to break your nose.”
“That’s only because he’s tried to break it before and hasn’t found success. He’ll be sorry for it in the morning, nearly as sorry as he’ll be because his aching head won’t just roll off his shoulders and leave him in peace.”
Aidan did smile now, but cautiously. “Were you worried for me, darling?”
“Apparently I shouldn’t have been.” She said it primly and balled up the bloody tissue. “As you appear to enjoy brawling in the street with your friends.”
“Was a time I enjoyed brawling in the street with strangers, but with maturity I prefer my friends.” He reached out, as he’d been wanting to, and toyed with the ends of her bound-back hair. “And I thank you for having concern for me.”
He stepped forward. She stepped back.
And he sighed. “One day you won’t have quite so much room to back away. And I won’t have poor drunk Jack at me feet to deal with.”
Philosophically he bent down and, to Jude’s astonishment, picked up the enormous semiconscious man and swung him handily over his shoulder.
“Is that you, then, Aidan?”
“Aye, Jack.”
“Did I break your nose?”
“No, you didn’t, but you bloodied my lip a bit.”
“Fucking Gallagher luck.”
“There’s a lady present, you knothead.”
“Oh. Begging pardon.”
“You’re both ridiculous,” Jude decided and turned away to march to her car.
“Jude, my darling?” Aidan grinned, hissed as his lip split again. “I’ll see you tomorrow, say at half-one.” He only chuckled when she continued to walk, heels clicking briskly, then turned to give him a fulminating look as she got into her car.
“Is she gone now?” Jack wanted to know.
“She’s going. But not far,” Aidan murmured as she drove decorously down the street. “No, she won’t go far.”
• • •
Men were baboons. Obviously. Jude shook her head, tapped her finger on the wheel in a disapproving manner as she drove home. Drunken brawls on the street were not amusing pastimes, and anyone who thought they were was in dire need of therapy.
God, he’d made her feel like an idiot. Standing there grinning at her while she dabbed at the blood on his mouth and babbled. An indulgent grin, she thought now, from the big, strong man to the foolish, fluttery female.
Worse, she had been foolish and fluttery. When Aidan had tossed that enormous man over his shoulder as if he was a bag of feathers, her stomach had definitely fluttered. If she hadn’t tightened up that very instant and stalked away, she might well have whimpered in admiration.
Mortifying.
And had he been the least bit embarrassed at getting a fist planted in his face in front of her? No, indeed. Had he blushed to introduce the drunken fool at his feet as an old and close friend? No, he had not.
He was very likely behind the bar again right this minute, entertaining his customers with the story, making them laugh over her scream of alarm and trembling hands.
Bastard.
She sniffed once, and felt better for it.
By the time she pulled in the drive she’d convinced herself that she’d behaved in a scrupulously dignified and reasonable manner. It was Aidan Gallagher who’d been the fool.
Moonflowers, indeed. She slammed the door of her car sharply enough to send the echo ringing down to the valley.
After huffing out another breath and smoothing down her hair, she headed for the gate. And when her gaze was drawn up, she saw the woman in the window.
“Oh, God.”
The blood drained out of her head. She felt each individual drop of it flow out. Moonlight shimmered gently on the pale fall of hair, on the white cheeks, against the deep green eyes.
She was smiling, a beautiful, heart-wrenching smile that hooked Jude’s soul and all but ripped it out.
Gathering courage, she shoved the gate back and ran for the door. When she yanked it open it occurred to her that she’d neglected to lock it. Someone had gone in while she’d been in the pub, she told herself. That was all.
Her knees trembled as she dashed up the stairs.
The bedroom was empty, as was every other room when she hurried through the house. All that was left was the faint sighing scent of woman.
Uneasy, she locked the doors. And when she was in her bedroom again, she locked that as well from the inside.
After she undressed and huddled in bed, she left the light burning. It was a long time before she slept. And dreamed of jewels bursting out of the sun and tumbling through the sky to be caught in a silver bag by a man riding a winged horse white as snowfall.
They swooped out of the sky, over the fields and mountains, the lakes and rivers, the bogs and the moors that were Ireland. Across the battlements of castles and the humble thatched roofs of cottages, with the white wings of the horse singing against the wind.
They came to a flashing stop, hooves striking ground at the front of the cottage on the hill with its white walls and deep-green shutters and flowers spilling from the door.
She came out to him, her hair the palest of golds around her shoulders, her eyes green as the fields. And the man, with hair as dark as hers was light, wearing a silver ring centered with a stone no less brilliant than his eyes, leaped from the horse.
He walked to her and spilled the flood of jewels at her feet. Diamonds blazed in the grass.
“These are my passion for you,” he told her. “Take them and me, for I would give you all I have and more.”
“Passion isn’t enough, nor are your diamonds.” Her voice was quiet, contained, and her hands stayed folded at her waist. “I’m promised to another.”
“I’ll give you all. I’ll give you forever. Come away with me, Gwen, and a hundred lifetimes I’ll give you.”
“ ’Tisn’t fine jewels and lifetimes I want.” A single tear slipped down her cheek, as bright as the diamonds in the grass. “I can’t leave my home. Won’t change my world for yours. Not for all your diamonds, for all your lifetimes.”
Without a word, he turned from her and mounted his horse. And as they rose up into the sky, she walked away into the cottage, leaving the diamonds on the ground as if they were no more than flowers.
And so they became flowers and covered the ground with fragrance, humble and sweet.
J
UDE AWOKE TO
the soft, steady patter of rain and the vague memory of dreams full of color and motion. She was tempted to snuggle under the covers and slide back into sleep, to find those dreams again. But that seemed wrong. Overindulgent.
More productive, she decided, to create and maintain a routine. A rainy Sunday morning could be spent on basic housekeeping chores. After all, she didn’t have a cleaning service here in Ardmore as she had in Chicago.
On some secret level she actually looked forward to the dusting and mopping, the little tasks that would in some way make the cottage hers. She supposed it wasn’t very sensible of her, but she actually enjoyed rooting through the cleaning supplies, selecting her rags and cloths.
She spent a pleasant portion of the morning dusting and rearranging the knickknacks Old Maude had scattered all over the house. Pretty painted fairies, elegant sorcerers, intriguing chunks of crystal had homes on every tabletop and
shelf. Most of the books leaned toward Irish history and folklore, but there were a number of well-worn paperbacks tucked in.
Old Maude had liked to read romance novels, Jude discovered, and found the idea wonderfully sweet.
Rather than a vacuum, Jude unearthed an old-fashioned upright sweeper, and hummed along with its squeaky progress over rug and wood.
She scrubbed down the kitchen and found a surprising glow of satisfaction when chrome and porcelain gleamed. Gaining confidence as she went, she wielded her polishing cloth in the office next. She would get to the boxes in the tiny closet soon, she promised herself. Perhaps that evening. And she’d ship off to her grandmother anything that seemed worthwhile or sentimental enough to keep.
She stripped the bed in her room, gathered the rest of the laundry. She found it slightly embarrassing that she’d never done laundry before in her life. But surely it couldn’t be that complex a skill to learn. It occurred to her that she should have started the wash before she started the cleaning, but she’d remember that next time.
In the cramped room off the kitchen, she found the basket, which she realized she should have taken upstairs in the first place, and dumped the laundry in it.
She also discovered there was no dryer. If she wasn’t mistaken, that meant she had to hang clothes out on a line. And though watching Mollie O’Toole as she did so had been enjoyable, doing it herself, for herself, would be a little more problematic.
She’d just have to learn. She
would
learn, Jude assured herself. Then, clearing her throat, she took a hard look at the washing machine.
Hardly new, it had a spray of rust spots over the white surface. The controls were simple. You got cold water or
hot, and she assumed if you wanted something clean, you used hot and plenty of it. She read the instructions on the box of detergent and followed them meticulously. The sound of water pouring into the tub made her beam with accomplishment.
To celebrate she put on the kettle for tea and treated herself to a handful of cookies from the tin.
The cottage was tidy.
Her
cottage was tidy, she corrected. Everything was in place, the laundry was going so . . . Now there was no excuse not to think about what she’d seen the night before.
The woman at the window. Lady Gwen.
Her ghost.
There was no reasonable way to deny she’d seen that figure twice now. It had been too clear. So clear she knew she could, even with her rudimentary skills, sketch the face that had watched her from the window.
Ghosts. They weren’t something she’d been brought up to believe in, though part of her had always loved the fancy of her grandmother’s tales. But unless she had suddenly become prone to hallucinations, she’d seen a ghost twice now.
Could it be she’d tumbled off the edge of the breakdown that had been so worrying her when she left Chicago?
But she didn’t feel so unsteady now. She hadn’t had a tension headache or a queasy stomach or felt the smothering weight of oncoming depression in days.
Not since she’d stepped over the threshold of Faerie Hill Cottage for the first time.
She felt . . . good, she decided after a quick mental check. Alert, calm, healthy. Even happy.
So, she thought, either she’d seen a ghost and such things did exist, which meant readjusting her thinking to quite an extent . . .
Or she’d had a breakdown and the result of it was contentment.
She nibbled thoughtfully on another cookie and decided she could live with either situation.
At the knock on the front door she quickly brushed crumbs from her sweater and glanced at the clock. She had no idea where the morning had gone, and she had deliberately put Aidan’s promised visit out of her head.
Apparently he was here now. That was fine. They’d work in the kitchen, she decided, shoving pins back into her hair as she walked down the hall to the door. Despite her initial, well, chemical reaction to him, her interest in him was purely professional. A man who fought with drunks on the street and flirted so outrageously with women he barely knew had no appeal to her whatsoever.
She was a civilized woman who believed in using reason, diplomacy, and compromise to solve disputes. She could only pity someone who preferred using force and bunched fists.
Even if he did have a beautiful face and muscles that just
rippled
when put into use.
She was much too sensible to be blinded by the physical.
She would record his stories, thank him for his cooperation. And that would be that.
Then she opened the door, and he was standing in the rain, his hair gleaming with it, his smile warm as summer and just as lazy. And she felt about as sensible as a puppy.
“Good day to you, Jude.”
“Hello.” It was a testament to his effect on her that it took her a full ten seconds to so much as notice the enormous man beside him clutching flowers in his huge hand. He looked miserable, she noted, the rain dripping off the bill of his soaked cap, his wide face pale as moonlight, his truck-grill shoulders slumped.
He only sighed when Aidan rammed an elbow hard into his ribs.
“Ah, good day to you, Miss Murray. I’m Jack Brennan. Aidan here tells me I behaved badly last night, in your presence. I’m sorry for that and hope to beg your pardon.”
He shoved the flowers at her, with a pitiful look in his bloodshot eyes. “I’d had a bit too much of the drink,” he went on. “But that’s no excuse for using strong language in front of a lady—though I didn’t know you were there, did I?” He said that with a slide of his eyes toward Aidan and a mutinous set to his mouth.
“No.” She kept her voice stern, though the wet flowers were so pathetic they melted her heart. “You were too busy trying to hit your friend.”
“Oh, well, sure Aidan’s too fast for me to plant a good one on him when I’m under the influence, so to speak.” His lips curved, for just a moment, into a surprisingly sweet smile, then he hung his great head again. “But despite circumstances being what they were, it’s no excuse for behaving in such a manner in front of a lady. So I’m after begging your pardon and hoping you don’t think too poorly of me.”
“There now.” Aidan gave his friend a hearty slap on the back. “Well done, Jack. Miss Murray’s too kindhearted to hold a grudge after so pretty an apology.” He looked back at her, as if they were sharing a lovely little joke. “Aren’t you, Jude Frances?”
Actually she was, but it irritated her to be so well pegged. Ignoring Aidan, she nodded at Jack. “I don’t think poorly of you, Mr. Brennan. It was very considerate of you to come by and bring me flowers. Would you like to come in and have some tea?”
His face brightened. “That’s kind of you. I wouldn’t mind—”
“You’ve got places to go, Jack.”
Jack’s brows drew together. “I don’t. Particularly.”
“Aye, you do. This and the other. You take my car and be about it. You’ll remember I told you Miss Murray and I have business to tend to.”
“All right, then,” he muttered. “But I don’t see how one bloody cup of tea would matter. Good day, Miss Murray.” Shoulders hunched, cap dripping, he lumbered back to the car.
“You might have let him come in out of the rain,” Jude commented.
“You don’t seem to be in any great hurry to ask me in out of it.” Aidan angled his head as he studied her face. “Maybe you hold a grudge after all.”
“You didn’t bring me flowers.” But she stepped back to let him come inside and drip.
“I’ll see that I do next time. You’ve been cleaning. The house smells of lemon oil, a nice, homey scent. If you get me a rag, I’ll wipe up this wet I’m tracking in to your nice, clean house.”
“I’ll take care of it. I have to go up and get my tape recorder and so forth. We’ll work in the kitchen. You can just go ahead back.”
“All right, then.” His hand closed over hers, making her frown. Then he slipped the flowers out of her fingers. “I’ll put these in something for you so they don’t look quite so pitiful.”
“Thank you.” The stiffly polite tone was the only defense she could come up with against six feet of wet, charming male in her hallway. “I’ll only be a minute.”
She was barely longer than that, but when she walked into the kitchen he already had the flowers in one of Maude’s bottles and was handily brewing a pot of tea.
“I started a fire there in your hearth to take the chill off. That all right, then?”
“Of course.” And she tried not to be annoyed that every one of the tasks he’d done took her three times as long to accomplish. “Have a seat. I’ll pour the tea.”
“Ah, it needs to steep a bit yet.”
“I knew that.” She mumbled it as she opened a cupboard for cups and saucers. “We make tea in America, too.” She turned back, set the cups on the table, then hissed out a breath. “Stop staring at me.”
“Sorry, but you’re pretty when you’re all flustered and your hair’s falling down.”
Mutiny ripe in her eyes, she jammed pins back in violently enough to drill them into her scalp. “Perhaps I should make myself clear. This is an intellectual arrangement.”
“Intellectual.” Wisely he controlled the grin and kept his face sober. “Sure it’s a fine thing to have an interest in each other’s minds. You’ve a strong one, I suspect. Telling you you’re pretty doesn’t change that a bit, does it?”
“I’m not pretty and I don’t need to hear it. So if we can just get started?”
He took a seat because she did, then cocked his head again. “You believe that, don’t you? Well, now, that’s interesting, on an intellectual level.”
“We’re not here to talk about me. My impression was that you have a certain skill as a storyteller and are familiar with some of the myths and legends particular to this area.”
“I know some tales.” When her voice went prim that way it just made him want to lap at her, starting anywhere at all. So he leaned back in his chair. If it was intellectual she wanted, he figured they could begin with that . . . then move along.
“Some you may know already, in one form or another.
The oral history of a place may shift here and there from teller to teller, but the heart of it remains steady. The shape-shifter is told one way by the Native Americans, another by the villagers of Romania, and still another by the people of Ireland. But the same threads weave through.”
While she continued to frown, he lifted the pot to pour the tea himself. “You have Santa and Father Christmas and Kris Kringle—one may come down the chimney, another fills shoes with candy, but the basis of the legend has its roots in the same place. Because it does, time after time, country after country, the intellect comes to the conclusion that the myth has its core in fact.”
“You believe in Santa Claus.”
His eyes met hers as he set the pot down again. “I believe in magic, and that the best of it, the most true of it, is in the heart. You’ve been here some days now, Jude Frances. Have you felt no magic?”
“Atmosphere,” she began, and turned her recorder on. “The atmosphere in this country is certainly conducive to the forming of myths and the perpetuation of them, from paganism with its small shrines and sacrifices to the gods, Celtic folklore with its warnings and rewards and the addition of culture seeded in through the invasions of the Vikings, the Normans, and so on.”
“It’s the place,” Aidan disagreed. “Not the people who tried to conquer it. It’s the land, the hills and rock. It’s the air. And the blood that seeped into all of it in the fight to keep it. ’Tis the Irish who absorbed the Vikings, the Normans, and so on, not the other way around.”
There was pride there that she understood and respected. “The fact remains that these people came to this island, that they mated with the women here, passed down their seed, and brought with them their superstitions and beliefs. Ireland absorbed them, too.”
“Which came first, the tale or the teller? Is that part of your study then?”
He was quick, she thought. A sharp mind and a clever tongue. “You can’t study one without studying the other. Who tells and why, as much as what’s told.”
“All right, I’ll tell you a story that was told to me by my grandda, and to him by his father, and his by his for as far back as any knows, for there have been Gallaghers on this coast and in these hills for longer than time remembers.”
“The story came down paternally?” Jude interrupted and was met with that quirked brow. “Very often stories come down the generations through the mother.”
“True enough, but the bards and harpists of Ireland were traditionally male, and it’s said one was a Gallagher who wandered to this place singing his stories for coin and ale, that he saw some of what I’ll tell you with his own eyes, heard the rest from the lips of Carrick, prince of the faeries, and from that told the story himself to all who cared to listen.”
He paused, noting the amused interest in Jude’s eyes. Then began. “There was a maid known as Gwen. She was of humble birth but a lady in her heart and in her manner. She had hair as pale as winter sunlight, and eyes as green as moss. Her beauty was known throughout the land, and though she carried herself with pride, for she had a slim and pleasing form, she was a modest maid who, as her blessed mother had died in the birthing of her, kept the tidy cottage for her aging father. She did as she was bid and what was expected and was never heard to complain. Though she was seen, from time to time, walking on the cliffs of an evening and staring out over the sea as if she wished to grow wings and fly.”