Legends Lake
Page 34
“Is something wrong?”
“I had plans for tonight. After we won, I was going to seduce you with candlelight and champagne, and music—”
“Haven’t I had enough alcohol for one day?” A nondrinker, just a few sips of the mint julep had left her head spinning. “As for candlelight and music, I wouldn’t be needing those things, Alec.”
“Maybe not. But I wanted to give them to you.” He reached into the pocket of his slacks and took out a small forest green velvet box. “Along with this.”
Kate caught her breath, almost afraid to hope. It could, she warned herself, be just another lovely piece of jewelry to commemorate the occasion, such as the Pegasus Derby pin he’d surprised her with this morning before the race. But she knew it was much, much more.
“Oh, Alec.” Her eyes welled up.
“Hey, don’t get all soft and mushy before you see what it is.”
“I already love it,” she insisted. “Oh!” She opened the velvet lid and drew in a breath. Rather than the traditional diamond she’d expected, the ring was made of three stones set in a gold woven Celtic band. The tiger eye represented dawn, the silver hematite, dusk, and the obsidian, midnight.
“I picked it up at the Beltane festival while you and Nora were checking out the weaving booths,” he revealed. “The craftsman who created it said the druids used those stones for divination.”
“That’s true.” She slipped the ring on her finger. It was a perfect fit. “They’re called Sky Stones, and I can’t think of a more perfect gift.”
“It’s a bit more than just a gift.” He swiped a hand through his hair. She’d never seen him this nervous, not in the beginning when they’d first begun working with Legends Lake, today at what could well have been the most important race of his life, or even when he’d been preparing to risk his own life to rescue her child.
“Look, I understand how much Ireland means to you. It’s your home, and you’ve got your family, and your business, and centuries of family history.”
“Aye, that’s true enough.”
“And I also realize that Kentucky might not have circles of standing stones, or faerie trees, and magic—”
“Magic can be found anywhere,” Kate interjected quietly. “If you keep your heart open to it.” As she’d opened her heart to him.
“That’s true.” He seemed encouraged by that idea. “Hell, I’m not any good at making speeches. So, I’m just going to say it straight out. You are going to marry me, aren’t you, Kate Fitzpatrick?”
Kate refused to be coy. “Aye, I will marry you, Alec MacKenna. And gladly. On one condition.”
“Name it and it’s yours. If you want me to try to move my training stables to Ireland so you can keep your stud—”
“That’s not necessary. I understand it’s important for your career to be based in the States, and I’ll love making a new home with you in your Kentucky. As for the stud, I have a few ideas about that.
“But what I’m speaking of is my love for my children. And I love Zoe, as well, as if she were my own dear girl. But I’ve discovered I’m a greedy woman. I want to have babies with you.”
“You’ve got it,” he said without hesitation. “How many?”
“Oh,” she said blithely, her ring catching the light and making the gold gleam as she waved her hand, “lots and lots.”
“Sounds like a plan.” He scooped her up and began walking toward the bedroom. Her full silk skirt flowed over his arms and one high heel dropped onto the lush cream carpet.
“Well now, aren’t you the one for sweeping a girl off her feet?”
“Get used to it.” She sank into a cloud of down as he dropped her onto the wide bed, then leaned over her, eyes warming her from the inside out. “Because if we’re going to meet that lofty family goal you’ve set for us, we’re going to be making a lot of love.”
Her laugh was light and merry as she twined her arms around his neck and drew his mouth down to hers. “’Tis quite a sacrifice you’ll be making.”
“Aye,” he agreed, feigning exaggerated exhaustion as he lay down beside Kate and gathered her, heart to heart, into his arms. “But it’s one I’ll be making for us. And gladly.”
* * *
From the Castlelough Chronicle’s “Around and About Our Village” page, nine months later:
The new Sister Bernadette Mercy Hospital was christened in grand style this weekend when Castlelough’s own Kate Fitzpatrick MacKenna gave birth to an eight-pound, six-ounce son, Connor Patrick MacKenna. Mrs. MacKenna had returned from her family’s Thoroughbred farm in America—where she and her family reside nine months of the year—to give birth to young Connor in the same village where her roots go back so many centuries.
Accompanying her were her husband, Mr. Alec MacKenna—whom loyal readers of the Chronicle will recall trained America’s most recent Triple Crown winner, Legends Lake, bred by his wife at the newly named Monohan & MacKenna Stud established with Devlin Monohan—as well as the infant’s brother, James, and sisters Brigid and Zoe.
Dr. Erin Joyce reports that mother and son are doing well.
The father is expected to recover.
Dear Reader,
When A Woman’s Heart was published, many of you wrote asking for Kate’s story. I’d always intended to tell her tale, but first she needed time to get her life in order. During the writing of Fair Haven, I watched her bloom like a Burren wildflower that had finally gotten water to its roots, and by the time I’d written THE END to that story, she was ready to embark on a future she’d never dared dream of.
Those who follow Thoroughbred racing may have noticed that I took a bit of literary license with the date of the Kentucky Derby. Well, as they say in Ireland, when God made time, he made plenty of it, so with that in mind, I borrowed two extra weeks to allow Kate and Alec their Beltane celebration.
I’ll probably be returning to Castlelough one of these days, but in the meantime, I hope you’ll come with me to the romantic Louisiana bayou, where fireflies twinkle like fairy lights in centuries-old oak trees, ancient ghosts hover like wisps of smoke over mossdraped cypress and still waters hide dark secrets. Destiny is about to grant Danielle Dupree and Jack Callahan a second chance at love. But first they must confront their past, then vanquish a new threat lurking in the shadows.
To write to me about any of my stories, or to subscribe to an electronic newsletter with contests and preview scenes from Blue Bayou, please visit my website at www.joannross.com
POCKET BOOKS
PROUDLY PRESENTS
BLUE BAYOU
JoAnn Ross
Available soon from
Pocket Books
Turn the page for a preview of
Blue Bayou….
By the time Dani finally escaped her depressing meeting with the fire marshal, the sky was darkening, the only visible light a band of purple clouds low on the western horizon. She’d forgotten how quickly night came to the bayou. As she steered the rented boat through the labyrinth of waterways, fireflies lit up the waning twilight while nutria and muskrats paddled along, furry shadows in waters as dark and murky as Cajun coffee.
Bullfrogs began to croak; blue herons glided among the ancient cypress which stood like silent, moss-bearded sentinels over their watery world. The boat’s light barely cut through the warm mist falling from low hanging clouds; when the ridged and knobby head of an alligator appeared in the stuttering glow, looking like a wet brown rock amidst the lily pads, Dani’s nerves, which were already as tattered as a Confederate soldier’s gray uniform, screeched.
“This is nuts.” If she had any sense at all, she’d cut her losses now and return to town. But she’d already come this far, and unless both her internal homing device and the boat’s GPS had gone entirely on the blink, she couldn’t be that far from Beau Soleil.
Dani checked her watch. Despite the way the isolation and deepening shadows had seemed to slow time, she’d been out on the water for less than half an hour.
A moment later she came around a bend, and there, right in front of her, was the Greek Revival antebellum mansion. Dani was glad she’d undertaken the nerve-racking trip tonight; as bad as the plantation house appeared, it would have been far worse to first see it again after all these years in the hard, unforgiving glare of southern sunlight.
The double front entrance harkened back to a time when if a suitor happened to catch a glimpse of a girl’s ankles, he was duty bound to marry her. In a typically southern blend of practicality and romance, the house had been designed with dual sets of front steps—one for hoopskirted belles, the other for their gentlemen escorts. The ladies’ staircase had crumbled nearly to dust; the other was scarcely better, held up as it was with a complex design of Erector set-style metal braces.
Beau Soleil had survived being set on fire by the British in the War of 1812, cannonballed, then occupied by Yankee soldiers—and their horses—during the War Between the States. It had also stood up stalwartly to numerous hurricanes over its more than two centuries. Seeing the once noble plantation house looking like an aging whore from some seedy South Louisiana brothel made Dani want to weep.
It had dawned on her belatedly, after she’d left town, that her plan to catch Jack unawares could backfire if she came all the way out here only to find the house dark and deserted. But she’d been so frustrated that she’d acted without really thinking things through. Which she’d been doing a lot lately, with admittedly mixed results.
The flickering lantern light from the upstairs windows of the once stately house was an encouraging sign as she eased the boat up to the dock that was still, thankfully, standing. It appeared to be the same dock her father had paid Jack to build the summer of her seventeenth birthday, the summer her carefree, youthful world had spun out of control.
She tied up the boat with a long ago learned skill some distant part of her mind had retained, and studied the house. Amazingly, most of the centuries-old oak trees had survived time and the ravages of storms; silvery Spanish moss draped over their limbs like discarded feather boas left behind by ghostly belles. She lifted her gaze to a darkened window on the second floor. The years spun away as she envisioned the reckless teenager she’d once been, climbing out that window to meet her lover. Her skin, beneath her white T-shirt, burned with the memory of Jack Callahan’s dark, work-roughened fingers encircling her waist to lift her down from that last low hanging limb.
“A smart fille like yourself should know better than to sneak up on someone at night in this part of the country,” a deep, painfully familiar voice offered from the blackness surrounding her.
Dani yelped. Then hated herself for displaying any weakness. Splaying a palm against her chest to slow her tripping heart, she turned slowly toward the gallery.
He was hidden in the night shadows, like a ghost from the past, with only the red flare of a cigarette revealing his location.
“You could have said something. Instead of scaring me half to death.”
“If I figured you and I had anything to say to one another, I would have returned your calls.” His voice was even huskier than Dani remembered. Huskier and decidedly uninviting.
“So you did get my messages.”
“Yeah. I got ’em.” Although night had dropped over the bayou, there was enough light shining from the windows of Beau Soleil for her to see him. He was wearing a gray Ragin’ Cajun T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, a pair of jeans worn nearly to the point of indecency and cowboy boots. He was rugged, rangy and, dammit, still as sexy as hell.
“But you chose to ignore them.”
He took a swig from a long neck bottle of Dixie beer. “Yeah.”
Well, this was going well. “I happen to know your mother taught you better manners.”
“I was never known for my manners. Drove Maman nuts.”
That was certainly true. He’d been known throughout the bayou as Bad Jack Callahan. A devil in blue jeans with the face of a fallen angel. “I was sorry when she died.”
Since Marie Callahan had been the closest thing to a mother Dani had ever known, sorry didn’t begin to describe it. Especially since the Dupree family housekeeper had only been in her late forties when breast cancer claimed her life. Dani had swallowed her pride and sent Jack a brief handwritten note of sympathy. He never responded. Nor did he return home for his mother’s funeral, something which surprised even his most stalwart detractors, who’d reluctantly admitted that despite his wild devilish ways, Jack Callahan had always been good to his maman.
“Yeah. I was damn sorry, too.” He sighed heavily as he flicked away the cigarette, which flared in a sparkling orange arc that sizzled, then snuffed out when it hit the water.
After polishing off the beer, he tossed the bottle aside, pushed himself to his feet and came down the stairs, crunching across the gleaming oyster shell walk on the loose-hipped, masculine stride that had always reminded Dani of a swamp panther. Now, as he loomed out of the blackened shadows, his tawny gold predator’s eyes gleaming, the resemblance was a bit too close for comfort.
He’d always been outrageously handsome and the years hadn’t changed that. But time had carved away whatever bit of softness he’d kept hidden away deep in his heart. His full sensual lips were drawn into a forbidding line and a savage slash of cheekbones cut their way across features far more harshly hewn than they’d been when he was younger.
His hair appeared nearly as long as hers and glistened darkly with moisture. It flowed back from his strong forehead and was tied at the nape of his neck in a way that made her think of the pirates who used to escape to Blue Bayou after raiding Spanish merchant ships in the Gulf. Taking in the surprising gold earring he hadn’t owned when she’d known him last, Dani decided that all he was missing was the cutlass.
Dangerous was the first word that sprang to mind. Maybe Bad Jack Callahan himself didn’t present any danger to her, but the unbidden feelings he’d always been able to stir in her certainly could be.
“You shouldn’t have come here, Danielle,” he said bluntly.
He’d said those same words to her once before. Warning her off. Dani hadn’t listened then, nor could she now. “You didn’t give me any choice, hiding away out here in the swamp like some mad hermit trapper.”
He didn’t respond to her accusation. Just gave her a long, deep look. Then grazed his knuckles up her cheek. “You’re bleeding.”
Her skin felt as if he’d skimmed a candle flame up it. Dani took a cautious step back, lifted her own fingers to the cheek she belatedly realized was stinging and had to remind herself how to breathe. In. “It’s undoubtedly just a scratch from a tree limb.” Out. “This isn’t the easiest place to get to, with the road gone.” In again.
“Flooding from last season’s hurricane wiped out the road. Since the place was already crumblin’, the parish commissioners didn’t see any reason to spend public funds to rebuild a road to make it easier to get to some place no one ever wanted to go anyway.”
“Which, from what I hear, suits you just fine. I suppose you would have been happier if I’d gotten lost coming out here.”
Jack shrugged his broad shoulders. Then gave her a censorious look and cursed. “Sa c’est fou.” He may have stayed away from the bayou for the past dozen years, but apparently he hadn’t completely abandoned the Cajun patois he’d learned from his Acadian mother.
A welcome flash of temper scorched away her nervousness. She lifted her chin. “I’ve done crazier things.”
He laughed at that. A rough, humorless sound that came rumbling out of his broad chest like distant thunder. “I sure as hell won’t be arguin’ with that, chérie.”
Dani was not foolish enough to take the endearment to heart. Hadn’t she heard him call his old bluetick hound, Evangeline, the very same thing?
“We were both damn crazy that summer,” he mused aloud, with something that sounded a
bit like regret.
But he was the one who’d deserted her. If he’d regretted his behavior, he could have called. Or written. Instead, he’d disappeared off the face of the earth.
“I’m not here to talk about that summer.”
His eyes, which had seemed to soften a bit with remembered affection, shuttered, like hurricane shutters slammed tight before a storm. “Then why are you here?”
Good question. If it’d been only herself, she would have slept on the street rather than come crawling to Jack Callahan for anything. But she had her children to think of. Innocent little boys who needed a roof over their heads. There was nothing Dani would not do for her two sons, including winding her way through inky black bayou waters risking gators and heaven knows how many different kinds of snakes to beg this man for help.
“You seem to have hired every available construction worker from here to Baton Rouge.”
“As impossible as it may be for you to fathom, sugar, this place is even worse structurally than it looks. It’s a smorgasbord for termites, half the roof blew away in the last storm, the plumbing’s flat rusted through, and what the inspector laughingly referred to as an electrical system is a bonfire waiting to happen. I could hire every damn construction worker from Lafayette to New Orleans and probably still not have a large enough crew to finish the work in this lifetime.”
“Perhaps you ought to just build a new house that won’t give you so many problems,” she suggested with openly false sweetness. She still hadn’t gotten used to the idea of Jack owning her family home. The home her father had recklessly risked, then lost.
“And let the bayou reclaim Beau Soleil? Not on your life.”
The force in his tone surprised Dani. “I never realized you felt so strongly about it.”
He rocked back on his heels as he looked up at the once magnificent house draped in deep purple shadows. For a fleeting second, his tawny eyes looked a hundred years old. “Neither did I.”
“Well.” That unexpected bit of honesty left Dani at a momentary loss for words. She reminded herself of her mission. “I need a carpenter, Jack. And I need him now.”