by Nora Roberts
of them, was one matter. And he was told he had his grandfather’s hands, and his mind for business. But how did a memory pass down through the blood?
He toyed with the idea as he continued to scan the room. It didn’t occur to him that he looked more the local than the tourist as he sat there in his work clothes, his dark blond hair tousled from the morning’s labor. He had a narrow, rawboned face that would put most in mind of a warrior, or perhaps a scholar, rather than a businessman. The woman he’d nearly married had said it looked to be honed and sculpted by some wild genius. The faintest of scars marred his chin, a result of a storm of flying glass during a tornado in Houston, and added to the overall impression of toughness.
It was a face that rarely gave anything away. Unless it was to Trevor Magee’s advantage.
At the moment it held a cool and remote expression, but it shifted into easy friendliness when Brenna came back toward the table with Jude. Brenna, he noted, carried the tray.
“I’ve asked Jude to take a few moments to sit and tell you about Lady Gwen,” Brenna began and was already unloading the order. “She’s a seanachais .”
At Trevor’s raised eyebrow, Jude shook her head. “It’s Gaelic for storyteller. I’m not really, I’m just—”
“And who has a book being published, and another she’s writing. Jude’s book’ll be out at the end of this very summer,” Brenna went on. “It’ll make a lovely gift, so I’d keep it in mind when you’re out shopping.”
“Brenna.” Jude rolled her eyes.
“I’ll look for it. Some of Shawn’s song lyrics are stories. It’s an old and honored tradition.”
“Oh, he’ll like that one.” Beaming now, Brenna scooped up the tray. “I’ll deal with this, Jude, and give Sinead a bit of a goose for you. Go ahead and get started. I’ve heard it often enough before.”
“She has enough energy for twenty people.” A little tired now, Jude picked up her cup of tea.
“I’m glad I found her for this project. Or that she found me.”
“I’d say it was a bit of both, since you’re both operators.” She caught herself, winced. “I didn’t mean that in a negative way.”
“Wasn’t taken in one. Baby kicking? It puts a look in your eye,” Trevor explained. “My sister just had her third.”
“Third?” Jude blew out a breath. “There are moments I wonder how I’m going to manage the one. He’s active. But he’s just going to have to wait another couple of months.” She ran a hand in slow circles over the mound of her belly, soothing as she sipped. “You may not know it, but I lived in Chicago until just over a year ago.”
He made a noncommittal sound. Of course he knew, he had extensive reports.
“My plan was to come here for six months, to live in the cottage where my grandmother lived after she lost her parents. She’d inherited it from her cousin Maude, who’d died shortly before I came here.”
“The woman my great-uncle was engaged to.”
“Yes. The day I arrived, it was raining. I thought I was lost. I had been lost, and not just geographically. Everything unnerved me.”
“You came alone, to another country?” Trevor cocked his head. “That doesn’t sound like a woman easily unnerved.”
“That’s something Aidan would say.” And because it was, she found herself very comfortable. “I suppose it’s more that I didn’t know my own nerve at that point. In any case, I pulled into the street, the driveway actually, of this little thatched-roof cottage. And in the upstairs window I saw a woman. She had a lovely, sad face and pale blond hair that fell around her shoulders. She looked at me, our eyes connected. Then Brenna drove up. It seemed I’d stumbled across my own cottage, and the woman I’d seen in the window was Lady Gwen.”
“The ghost?”
“That’s right, yes. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Or certainly unreasonable. But I can tell you exactly what she looked like. I’ve sketched her. And I knew no more of the legend when I came here than you appear to know now.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“Then I’ll tell you.” Jude paused as Brenna came back, sat, and tucked into her meal.
She had an easy way with a story, Trevor noted. A smooth and natural rhythm that put the listener into the tale. She told him of a young maid who’d lived in the cottage on the faerie hill. A woman who cared for her father, as her mother had been lost in childbirth, who tended the cottage and its gardens and who carried herself with pride.
Beneath the green slope of the hill was the silver glory of the faerie raft, the palace where Carrick ruled as prince. He was also proud, and he was handsome, with a flowing mane of raven-black hair and eyes of burning blue. Those eyes fell upon the maid Gwen, and hers upon him.
They plunged into love, faerie and mortal, and at night when others slept, he would take her flying on his great winged horse. Never did they speak of that love, for pride blocked the words. One night Gwen’s father woke to see her with Carrick as they dismounted from his horse. And in fear for her, he betrothed her to another and ordered her to marry without delay.
Carrick flew on his horse to the sun, and gathered its burning sparks in his silver pouch. When Gwen came out of the cottage to meet him before her wedding, he opened the bag and poured diamonds, jewels of the sun, at her feet. “Take them and me,” he said, “for they are my passion for you.” He promised her immortality, and a life of riches and glory. But never once did he speak, even then, of love.
So she refused him, and turned from him. The diamonds that lay on the grass became flowers.
Twice more he came to her, the next time when she carried her first child in her womb. From his silver pouch he poured pearls, tears of the moon that he’d gathered for her. And these, he told her, were his longing for her. But longing is not love, and she had pledged herself to another.
When she turned away, the pearls became flowers.
Many years passed before he came the last time, years during which Gwen raised her children, nursed her husband through his illness, and buried him when she was an old woman. Years during which Carrick brooded in his palace and swept through the sky on his horse.
He dived into the sea to wring from its heart the last of his gifts to her. These he poured at her feet, shimmering sapphires that blazed in the grass. His constancy for her. When now, finally, he spoke of love, she could only weep bitter tears, for her life was over. She told him it was too late, that she had never needed riches or promises of glory, but only to know that he loved her, loved her enough that she could have set aside her fear of giving up her world for his. And as she turned to leave him this time, as the sapphires bloomed into flowers in the grass, his hurt and his temper lashed out in the spell he cast. She would find no peace without him, nor would they see each other again until three times lovers met and, accepting each other, risking hearts, dared to choose love over all else.
Three hundred years, Trevor thought later as he let himself into the house where Gwen had lived and died. A long time to wait. He’d listened to Jude tell the tale in her quiet, storyteller’s voice, without interrupting. Not even to tell her that he knew parts of the story. Somehow he knew. He’d dreamed them.
He hadn’t told her that he, too, could have described Gwen, down to the sea green of her eyes and the curve of her cheek. He’d dreamed her as well.
And had, he realized, nearly married Sylvia because she’d reminded him of that dream image. A soft woman with simple ways. It should have been right between them, he thought as he headed upstairs to shower off the day’s dirt. It still irritated him that it hadn’t been. In the end, it just hadn’t been right.
She’d known it first, and had gently let him go before he’d admitted he already had his eye on the door. Maybe that was what bothered him most of all. He hadn’t had the courtesy to do the ending. Though she’d forgiven him for it, he’d yet to forgive himself.
He caught the scent the minute he stepped into the bedroom. Delicate, female, like rose petals freshly
fallen onto dewy grass.
“A ghost who wears perfume,” he murmured, oddly amused. “Well, if you’re modest turn your back.” So saying, he stripped where he stood, then walked into the bath.
He spent the rest of his evening alone, catching up on paperwork, scanning the faxes that had come in on the machine he’d brought with him, shooting off replies. He treated himself to a beer and stood outside with it in the last of the dying light listening to the aching silence and watching stars pulse to life.
Tim Riley, whoever the hell he was, looked to be right. There was no rain coming yet. The foundation he was building would set clean.
As he turned to go back in, a streak of movement overhead caught his eye. A blur of white and silver across the darkening sky. But when he looked back for it, narrowing his eyes to scan, he saw nothing but stars and the rise of the quarter moon.
A falling star, he decided. A ghost was one thing, but a flying horse ridden by the prince of the faeries was another entirely.
But he thought he heard the cheerful lilt of pipes and flutes dance across the silence as he shut the door of the cottage for the night.
TWO
DARCY GALLAGHER DREAMED of Paris. Strolling along the Left Bank on a perfect spring afternoon with the scent of flowers ripe in the air and the cloudless blue sky soaring overhead.
And perhaps best of all, the weight of shopping bags heavy in her hands.
In her dreams she owned Paris, not for a brief week’s holiday, but for as long as it contented her. She could stop to while away an hour or two at a sidewalk cafeÉ, sipping lovely wine and watching the world—for it seemed the whole of the world—wander by.
Long-legged women in smart dresses, and the darkeyed men who watched them. The old woman on her red bicycle with her baguettes spearing up out of her bakery sack, and the tidy children in their straight rows marching along in their prim school uniforms.
They belonged to her, just as the wild and noisy traffic was hers, and the cart on the corner bursting with flowers. She didn’t need to ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower to have Paris at her feet.
As she sat sampling wine and cheese that had been aged to perfection, she listened to the city that was hers for the taking. There was music all around her, in the cooing of the ubiquitous pigeons and the swirling whoosh when they took wing, in the steady beep of horns, the click of high, thin heels on sidewalks, the laughter of lovers.
Even as she sighed, blissfully happy, the thunder rolled in. At the rumble of it, she glanced skyward. Clouds spewed in from the west, dark and thick. The brilliant sunlight fell into that false twilight that precedes a storm. The rumble became a roar that had her leaping to her feet even while those around her continued to sit, to chat, to stroll as if they heard or saw nothing amiss.
Snatching up her bags, she started to dash away, to safety, to shelter. And a bolt of lightning, sizzling blue at the edges, lanced into the ground at her feet.
She woke with a start, the blood pounding in her ears and her own gasp echoing.
She was in her own rooms over the pub, not in some freakish thunderstorm in Paris. She found some comfort in that, in the familiar walls and quiet light. Found more comfort when she sat up and saw the clothes and trinkets she’d treated herself to in Paris strewn around the room.
Well, she was back to reality, she thought, but at least she’d bagged a few trophies to bring home with her.
It had been a lovely week, the perfect birthday present to give herself. Indulgent, she admitted, taking such a big chunk of her savings that way. But what were savings for if a woman couldn’t use them to celebrate in a spectacular way her first quarter century of living.
She would earn it back. Now that she’d had her first good taste of real travel, she intended to experience it on a more regular basis. Next year, Rome, or Florence. Or perhaps New York City. Wherever it was, it would be someplace wonderful. She would start her Darcy Gallagher holiday fund this very day.
She’d been desperate to get away. To see something, almost anything that wasn’t what she saw every day of her life. Restlessness was a sensation she was accustomed to, even appreciated about herself. But this had been like a panther inside her, pacing and snarling and ready to claw its way out of her and leap on the people she loved best.
Going away had been the best thing she could have done for herself and, she was sure, for those closest to her. The restlessness was still there, would always stir a bit inside her. But that pacing and snarling had stopped.
The fact was, she was glad to be home, and looking forward to seeing her family, her friends, and all that was dear. And she looked forward to telling them all she’d seen and done during that glorious seven days to herself.
But now she’d best get up and put things back in order. She’d gotten in too late the night before to do more than throw open her bags and admire her new things. She needed to put them away proper, and stack up the gifts she’d bought, for she was a woman who couldn’t abide untidiness for long.
She’d missed her family. Even through the giddy rush of seeing, doing, just being in Paris, she’d missed having them around. She wondered if it was shameful of her not to have expected to.
She couldn’t say she missed the work, the hefting of trays and serving yet another pint. It had been gloriousto be served for a change. But she was eager to go down and see how the pub had fared without her. Even if it did mean spending the rest of the day on her feet.
She stretched, lifting her arms high, letting her head roll back, focusing on the pleasure the movement gave her body. She was a woman who didn’t believe in wasting her senses any more than she would waste her pounds.
It wasn’t until she’d climbed out of bed that she realized the constant rumble outside wasn’t thunder.
The construction, she remembered. Now wasn’t it going to be lovely hearing that din every blessed morning? Gathering up a robe, she walked to the window to see what progress had been made in her absence.
She didn’t know anything about the business of building, but what she saw out her window looked to be a terrible mess created by a team of half-wit pranksters. Piles of rubble, scars in the soil, a large concrete floor bottoming out a hole in the ground. Squat towers of cinder block were being erected at the corners with spears of metal poking out of the tops, and a great ugly truck was grinding away with an awful noise.
Most of the workmen, in their rough clothes and filthy boots, were going about the business of making a bigger mess altogether.
She spotted Brenna, her cap perched on her head, her boots mucked nearly to the knee. Seeing her, this forever friend who was now her sister, brought Darcy a warm flood of pure pleasure.
It had shamed her, and did still, to know that part of the reason she’d been wild to get away had been Brenna and Shawn’s wedding, as well as her older brother Aidan and his wife Jude’s happy planning for the baby they’d have by end of summer. Oh, she was thrilled for them all, couldn’t be more delighted with what they’d foundtogether. But the more content and settled they were, the more discontent and unsettled she found herself.
She’d wanted to ball her fists, shake them in the air, and demand, Where’s mine? When will I have mine?
It was selfish, she thought, and it was sinful, but she couldn’t help it.
Well, now she was back and, she hoped, better.
Darcy watched her friend stride around and give one of the laborers a hand with the blocks. She’s in her element here, Darcy mused. Pleased as a puppy with a teat all to herself. She considered opening the window, leaning out to call a hello, and further considered just what having a woman leaning out a window in her robe would do to the rhythm of the work crew.
Because the thought of causing a stir amused her, Darcy reached down. She had the window open the first inch when she spotted the man watching her watching.
He was a tall one, she noted. She’d always had a particular fondness for tall men. He was hatless, and his burnt-honey hair was tousled by
the breeze. He wore the rough clothes of a laborer and in her opinion wore them better than most. The long, lanky build had something to do with that, but she thought it was also a matter of confidence. Or arrogance, she mused as he coolly kept his eyes on her face.
She didn’t have a problem with arrogance, as she had plenty of her own.
Well, now, you might be an interesting diversion, she thought. A handsome face, a bold eye. If you can string words into a decent conversation, you might be worth a bit of my time. Providing you’re not married, of course.
Married or not, she decided, there was no harm in a bit of a flirt, since she intended to have no more than that with a man who likely lived from one payday to the next.
So she smiled at him. Slowly, warmly, deliberately. Then, touching a finger to her lips, she blew him a saucy kiss. She watched his teeth flash in appreciation, then eased out of sight.
It was always best, in Darcy’s opinion, to leave a man not only wanting more, but wondering.
Now there was a woman who packed a punch, Trevor thought. And he still felt the impact. If that was Darcy Gallagher, and he assumed it was, he had a good idea why the characteristically dour Finkle had become tongue-tied and bright-eyed whenever her name had come up. She was a stunner, all right, and he was going to appreciate a closer look. What she’d left him with now was the impression of sleepy beauty, of dark and tumbled hair, white skin, and delicate features. No false modesty there, he decided. She’d met his open stare equally, had taken his measure even as he took hers. The carelessly blown kiss had definitely scored a point.
He thought Darcy Gallagher would be a very interesting pastime while he was in Ardmore.
Casually he hefted some blocks, transferring them to Brenna’s work area. “The mix suit you?” he asked, nodding toward the trough that held fresh mortar.
“It does, yes. Good consistency. We’re going through it fairly quickly, but I think we’ve enough to do us.”
“If you see us running low, order what you think we need. I think your friend’s back from her vacation.”
“Hmm.” Distracted, she knocked loose mortar from her trowel, glanced up. “Darcy?” Pleased, Brenna looked toward the window.
“Lots of black hair, wicked smile. Gorgeous.”
“That would be Darcy.”
“I . . . caught a glimpse of her in the window there. If you want to go in and see her, you can take a break.”
“Well, I would.” But she scooped up more mortar. “Except that she’d take one look at me as I am at the moment and bolt the door. Darcy’s very particular about her living quarters. She wouldn’t appreciate me trailing in dirt. I’ll see her midday.”
Brenna spread her mortar with the quick efficiency of the experienced and hauled up the next block. “I can tell you this, Trevor, your men are about to have their hearts broken. It’s a rare one who brushes up near our Darcy and walks away unaffected.”
“As long as we stay on schedule, the crew’s hearts are their own concern.”
“Oh, I’ll keep them on schedule for you, and Darcy will give them happy, if impossible, dreams. Speaking of schedules, I’m thinking we could have the plumbing roughed in on this section by end of week. The pipe didn’t arrive this morning as expected. Do you want me or Dad to check on it when we’re done here?”
“No, I’ll deal with it now.”
“Then I hope you give them a good boot in the ass. You can use the phone in the pub’s kitchen. I unlocked the back when I got here this morning. I’ve the number in my book.”
“No, I have it. You’ll have the pipe today.”
“I’ve no doubt of that,” Brenna murmured as he strode toward the kitchen door.
The kitchen was spotless. It was one of the things Trevor noticed, and demanded, when it came to any business he had a part in. He imagined the Gallaghers wouldn’t think of him as having a part in their pub, but from his viewpoint their business was now very much his concern.
He dug his book out of his pocket. In New York his assistant would have located the number, made the call. She would have worked her way through the various steps until she’d reached the person in charge. Only then, if it was necessary, would the matter have passed into Trevor’s hands.
He had to admit, though that saved time and frustration, he rather enjoyed wading in at the bottom and administering that good boot in the ass.
In the five minutes it took him to reach the top level, he spied the biscuit tin. In the few days he’d been in and around Gallagher’s he’d come to know that when there were cookies, they were homemade. And they were spectacular.
He helped himself to a honey and oatmeal cookie as big as his fist as he annihilated the supply supervisor without ever raising his voice. He jotted down the name, in case retribution should become necessary, and was given a personal guarantee that the pipe in question would be delivered to the site by noon.
Satisfied with that, he broke the connection and was considering a second cookie when he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Selecting peanut butter this time, Trevor leaned back against the counter and prepared for his first real eyeful of Darcy Gallagher.
Like Shawn’s cookies, she was spectacular.
She stopped at the base of the stairs, lifted one slim eyebrow. Her eyes were blue, like her brothers’, a brilliant color against flawlessly white skin. She left her hair loose so that it waved beguilingly over her shoulders.
She was dressed with a tailored smartness that seemed more suited to Madison Avenue than Ardmore.
“Good morning to you. Having a tea break?”