"Hurry," she urged, leading him through the shadows toward the house. "We can creep in the garden entrance. I always leave it unlocked when I go out wandering. That way, no one will see us."
"Your brother almost did."
Fallon stiffened. "I wasn't worried for a moment," she lied. "Hugh never sees anything that isn't glued to the end of his nose."
They wound through the gardens, redolent with the scent of hawthorn blossoms, holly hedges and boxwood greening. Every shrub and flower was shaped and molded and civilized by the gardener's shears. Yet as Fallon glanced back at the half-naked man shadowing her steps, the trimmed perfection of their surroundings only made him look all the more untamed, as primitive and unpredictable, compelling and perilous as a lion being led about on a blue satin leash.
And as likely to bolt at any moment.
Her brow furrowed, and she cast a nervous glance at Ciaran. The man had been on the verge of running off from the time they were at the castle, in some misguided notion of honor, to preserve her safety. After seeing Hugh and overhearing their conversation, weren't the odds far greater that Ciaran would charge off for the woods the instant he got a chance?
She grabbed his hand, realizing how futile the gesture was. If Ciaran decided to bolt, she'd no more be able to hold him than she could turn the tide. And there was something about feeling that callused palm abrading hers, those long fingers encircling hers that was intimate, stirring heat beneath her skin. A low buzz of tension passed from his hand to hers, tightening her already strained nerves, leaving them humming with discomfort.
At the door, Fallon signaled him to silence then pushed the panel open. The way her luck had been running, she half expected to find the downstairs maids industriously scrubbing this corridor despite the late hour. But it was empty.
Fallon turned to beckon Ciaran inside. She glimpsed his features, so handsome, so still. His gaze was unreadable.
Cautiously, Fallon slipped along the back stairways, astonished at how silently Ciaran traveled along behind her with the stealth of a cat, or was it the hush of a ghost? An odd chill prickled her nape, but she quelled her unease.
Of course he moved quietly. He was barefoot—there were no bootheels to click against the floor. Yet there was something almost unearthly about the way he moved. And something disturbing about his eyes searching as she guided him through corridors with doorways locked shut. Whole wings of the once-elegant manor house were closed up, as quiet and solitary as her mother's grave.
What was he thinking? She felt oddly vulnerable, as if he could draw impressions from the walls, could feel the unease she had felt as she crept into the chambers as a small girl, certain they were haunted—the Holland covers that draped the unused furniture turning into ghosts in her imagination. But not ghosts that rattled chains and delighted in terrorizing little girls. No, just shapeless forms that waited as the whole house seemed to wait for Fallon's mother to return and breathe life into them again.
Blast, this was all Hugh's fault. Their rare arguments always made the stillness of the house louder, the emptiness more suffocating, the loss she tried so hard to forget more real.
She bumped into a small table to her left, her nerves leaping at the rattle of china. For pity's sake, she upbraided herself. She had to keep her wits about her. What if they ran afoul of a servant while she was woolgathering?
At that instant, she heard a sharp hiss of breath behind her, felt the tension crackling from Ciaran in waves hot as lightning. Panic jolted through her as she wheeled toward him, all but dropping the candle.
She expected to see him surrounded by an army of servants—vigilant footmen with the sights of their pistols trained at his heart, ready to shoot them both as housebreakers.
But the hallway was empty except for her and Ciaran, the glow of the candle, and their reflections doubled in the floor length mirror.
Fist raised as if ready to strike out at some attacker, Ciaran stood frozen, staring at the image of himself—a pale, black-haired stranger glaring back at him from the mirror.
In those astonishing moments at the castle, she'd seen all there was of Ciaran MacCailte—every sinew, every bone, every sleek bit of skin—naked, in all his masculine glory. Yet somehow, the sight of him now made her feel as if she'd intruded, torn back some sacred veil.
She'd seen him angry, seen him confused, filled with pain. But as he stared at his reflection, his long fingers ghosting over the planes of his own face, his eyes raw and searching and hopeless, his very soul seemed laid bare.
The blade-straight nose, cheekbones slashed high like those of a pagan king, square jaw so stubborn, and a mouth that was full and sensitive, sensual and compelling—all might have been carved upon a statue he'd never seen before.
He was a prisoner within that mirror, his very identity held just beyond his reach. And she wondered if he'd looked just so when he'd awakened from eating the enchanted cherries to find himself captive in Tir na nOg.
"Ciaran," she breathed his name, drifting one hand down on his rigid arm. "It's just you—you in the mirror."
His gaze flashed to hers, drowning in hopelessness. "I don't... don't remember." The words tore, ragged-edged, from his chest.
Fallon slipped her hand into his, astonished at how cold he'd suddenly grown. "You will remember. Soon. I'm certain of it. Now, we have to hurry before someone hears us."
It was fortunate they didn't see another soul on their trek to her bedchamber, they were both so shaken by what had just happened.
No maid, no footman, not even a stray mouse stirred anywhere in this wing of the house. She should have been relieved, but the silence only brought home to her how barren the place was. How dead.
At last, she pushed open the door to her room, and Ciaran followed her in, the dim shadows broken only by the glow of a cheery fire in the hearth.
Fallon locked the door then fumbled to light a branch of candles, setting the chamber aglow. But the instant the wicks blazed with light, she felt an unreasonable urge to douse them.
It seemed to be a night for stripping the soul bare.
Still ashen, every sinew tense as a whiplash, Ciaran prowled before the silk-papered walls like a feral beast scenting its prey or, more disturbing, a promising mate. He paused to run his fingertips over the dull silver of her mother's hairbrushes, blew softly against the breath of lace at the window.
Edgy, Fallon caught her lip between her teeth, seeing her chamber as if for the first time. The suite of rooms had been little altered since she was a child. There had been no mother to wistfully tuck away abandoned playthings into brass-nailed trunks, no one to guide Fallon through the rites of passage as she became a young woman.
Ciaran's probing gaze skated to where a bedraggled doll, with one arm missing and a badly mended crack in her china face, lay beneath the canopy of Fallon's bed, the plaything resting where it had for seventeen years because the maid had never been given orders to place the doll anywhere else.
Even the bed itself seemed small as Fallon imagined it through this towering man's eyes, the mattress fashioned for a child's length instead of a woman's. What would Ciaran say if he knew the truth—that Fallon could never bear to be parted from it? It had been a gift from her mother, testimony to how well Margaret Delaney had understood her little girl's love of the wild lands beyond her window.
Bedposts, carved to look as if they were saplings, had guarded Fallon's sleep, the canopy draped in clouds of white bed curtains so that she could sleep in a sea of mist. Coverlets the color of heather were crowned with lace-trimmed pillows stuffed with herbs and dried flowers to carry the scent of the hills. Why did the sight of that innocent bed make her cheeks heat with something akin to embarrassment?
Worse still, Ciaran stopped beside a window seat, its cushions littered with books worn almost beyond repair. Legends and myths, ancient histories and epic poems, they had fed her soul.
Never, in the years since her mother's death, had anyone except the servants ent
ered her room. Not even Hugh. It felt so strange, to have this towering man prowling about, reaching out to touch the gold-embossed cover of The Ulster Cycle, an epic tale, one of the oldest poems in the Irish language.
Ciaran had sprung from those pages, alive and vital in her imagination. A man powerful and vulnerable, gloriously handsome. But she'd never suspected he would be imperfect as well, flawed in a way that only made him more appealing.
Fallon winced, almost regretting her decision to bring him here to her room, feeling as if the very walls were whispering her secrets to him, secrets Hugh had begun to spill in the moonlit stable yard.
She set the candleholder on a piecrust table littered with an army of Gaelic heroes one of the cottagers had carved for her. Suddenly she was eager to distract Ciaran, and herself, from the whisperings of her room.
"I'll just get you settled, then summon up food and a hot bath—" Fallon started to say then stopped, aware of how intently Ciaran's green eyes were regarding her, his lips curved into a deep frown. She was still stinging from her encounter with Hugh. The last thing she needed was to be pinned by another man's condemning glare.
"What's amiss? You don't care for the color of my room?"
He withdrew his fingertips from the gilt lettering on the book's cover and shrugged. "I hadn't even noticed it."
No. He'd been too busy prying into everything else that belonged to her, touching, examining, sorting her things and her into some kind of order in his mind.
"Then what is it? You look sour as a green apple."
Ciaran's gaze darted to her face, and she wished she'd kept her mouth shut.
"He's right," Ciaran said.
"Wh-what?"
He turned to her, crossing thickly muscled arms over the breadth of his naked chest. "Your brother. He is right. You have no business wandering around alone at night."
It hurt Fallon in ways she hadn't imagined, Ciaran taking up sides against her. She'd summoned him back. Wasn't he supposed to have some sense of loyalty to his summoner?
She tossed her head. "I didn't see anyone objecting to the darkness when Hugh decided to go riding."
"That's different."
Her chin bumped up a notch. "Because I'm a woman?"
"No. Because you're a reckless little fool. For all you know, I could be a thief, a murderer just waiting for my chance to strike. Anything could have happened in the time it took us to ride down from that castle. You could be dead. Your brother was worried enough. If he really knew what mischief you've been up to—"
"He'd lock me in a convent school until I was ninety? Don't be fooled by Hugh's illusion of concern. I'm sure it's like an attack of biliousness. It'll be gone soon enough."
"He feels responsible for you. It was obvious."
"One more burden on the stalwart Hugh's shoulders, another cross to be borne. Bah! I can take care of myself. I've been doing it since I was six years old!"
Unexpected tears stung her eyes. Blinking fiercely, she stalked over to where the secret door was, wanting nothing more than to shove Ciaran inside the priest hole and lock the door. Her fingers trembled with irritation as she worked the hidden latch.
She slid the panel aside with more force than care, the jarring of the door setting the pictures on the wall rattling. "I didn't call you back from Tir na nOg the fairy kingdom to meddle in my private affairs."
"Maybe you should have. It's obvious you're not doing a very good job of managing them yourself."
"I'm not going to discuss my family relationships with you or anyone else, so leave it alone. Just stay in here until I get back."
Yet, as the candle shine poked its fingers into the priest hole, Fallon was tempted to slam the door shut, blocking it from Ciaran's view. If her bedchamber had whispered secret pain, the quiet longings of an abandoned little girl, this hidden chamber fairly screamed them.
Swords made long ago out of sticks stood in one corner, a silver gauze highwayman's mask dangling from the hilts. A crudely fashioned longbow and arrows were cast on the bed beside a dozen crumpled drawings—each portraying the likeness of a rugged warrior holding the hand of a little red-headed girl.
A caricature of the loathsome Misses Alberdale was irreverently tacked to the wall beneath the crucifix, their curls thrusting out as if struck by lightning, their smirks vile, their teeth blacked out by Fallon's pen. An army of bugs brandishing lethal-looking pincers had been sketched trooping up Felicity's arms, while a sly toad peeped out of the tea cake Charity was about to take a bite of.
The bodices of their frilly gowns showed evidence of having been pierced countless times with sharpened- stick arrows, one of which still hung where Fallon had shot it so many years ago.
Even the layer of dust couldn't soften the pain captured in this tiny chamber, pain she'd never allowed another living person to see. The prospect of anyone, especially Ciaran MacCailte, witnessing it was unthinkable.
She was excruciatingly aware of the sudden stillness in Ciaran, and felt his gaze on her. What was he thinking?
She steeled her face into careless lines. "I'll have to lock you in here until I have everything arranged," she said. "The maids will ready a bath."
"Would you mind bringing up something to eat as well? I'm not choosy. Anything that doesn't include a toad would be fine."
It was an attempt at humor. She should have been grateful, and might have been, except that he crossed to the small cot tucked against the outer wall and picked up one of the homemade arrows. He ran his fingers across it, probing as carefully, as insistently as he had to check Maeve McGinty's bones to see if they were broken.
As she slid the secret door shut, Fallon wondered if it was possible to feel the pieces of a little girl's broken heart.
Chapter 5
Ciaran paced the narrow confines of the windowless room, his nerves still stinging from the confrontation with Fallon. He didn't know who he was, but in the short time since he'd ridden up to Misthaven House behind a defiant Irish beauty, he'd unearthed more impressions about Mary Fallon Delaney than he'd ever wished to.
A yawning chasm of hurt and loneliness between brother and sister, a young woman lashing out to conceal how badly she needed someone's arms about her, needed to be loved, to belong. A child who had grown into a woman while no one was looking, brave and independent, idealistic and filled with imagination. A stubborn dreamer, determined to grasp her world in her own hands and fight for what she believed in. And she believed in Ciaran of the Mist.
Ciaran closed his eyes, picturing her as she had been when he'd first seen her, surrounded by the shadowy castle walls, almost unearthly in her loveliness, her hair liquid sunset about a heart-shaped face. Her eyes had glowed with passion for life, her lips parted in astonishment, joy—in welcome—as if she'd been waiting her whole life for him.
She was the kind of woman who needed a hero, not to take her fate out of her grasp, to rescue her from her own helplessness, but rather, to stand at her side as she faced whatever had brought that haunted light to her eyes.
And sometime, during the long ride through the countryside, the encounter with her brother, and the revelations whispered by her chamber—confessions she'd never make aloud—Ciaran had made an incredible discovery of his own.
He'd realized that some part of him, buried deep, wished that he could be that hero for her.
It was a sobering discovery, an unwelcome one. Was it possible that Fallon's fantasies were contagious? That was the only possible explanation for his conflicting emotions.
His thoughts scattered at the sudden sound of the bedchamber door opening, the giggling of two women who must be maids echoing in the room beyond as they busied themselves sloshing what must be hot water into a tub. Ciaran stilled lest they hear him, every sense alert.
"It was a lovely day off work altogether," a rollicking feminine voice observed in a brogue thick enough to spread like sweet cream butter. "In town, I heard the most amusing thing. 'Twas all they're talking of."
"Tel
l, Sorcha! Tell!" the other maid chimed in.
"Have ye ever heard of old Barrister Fyfe?"
Ciaran rubbed at his temple, his head giving a throb of protest. His brains were muddled enough; the last thing he needed was to be trapped in here listening to servants gossip.
"Who hasn't heard o' the barrister? What a scandal 'twas when he off and married that wife o' his—Vanessa, her name is. Young enough to be his daughter, an' altogether gorgeous she is."
"Not to mention picked fresh out o' a brothel," Sorcha sneered. "Well, Emer, seems after a taste o' respectability, she missed having company after all those years samplin' men like sweets. She's been availin' herself of any gentleman with breeches that unfasten—even tumbled the Barneses' stable lad, an' he but fifteen years old."
Ciaran's lip curled in disgust, an instinctive recoiling. What kind of woman would dally with a mere boy? Had he known any women like the barrister's wife? If so, he must have felt nothing but revulsion for them.
"Seems Fyfe tired o' being the laughingstock o' Glenceo. Made it known from one end o' the town to the other that the next time he caught a man takin' what was lawfully his, he'd shoot him dead."
"Hope he bought a whole raft o' bullets," Emer chortled. "He'd have t' cut down half the men in town."
"Arrived home early this afternoon, an' sure enough, heard a commotion. They say she howls like a bitch in heat when she's got 'er legs 'round a handsome man's hips."
Blast, Ciaran thought, would the women never make an end of it and leave the infernal room? Years' accumulation of dust tickled his nose, and he fought to stifle a sneeze. If he didn't, it would be a calamity damned hard to explain. Of course, in a household where legendary heroes could be summoned at a snap of the fingers, a sneezing wall might draw no comment at all.
"Did Fyfe shoot her lover?" Emer demanded with bloodthirsty eagerness.
Her Magic Touch (Celtic Rogues Book 3) Page 8