by Nora Roberts
hoisted her makeshift flag on the topmost tower. "Now that's a sand castle."
She plucked up the bottle of wine and poured for both of them. "To
Dolman Castle." A dream, she thought, they'd made together.
After clinking her glass to his, she drew up her knees and looked out to sea. "It's a beautiful night. So many stars. You can't see sky like this in New York, just slices of it, pieces between buildings, so you forget how big it is."
"When I was a boy, I used to come out at night and sit here."
She turned her head, rested her cheek on her knee. "What else did you do when you were a boy?"
"Climbed the cliffs, played with my friends in the village, worked very hard to get out of chores that would have taken less time and less effort than the eluding of them took. Fished with my father."
He fell into silence, and the depth of it had Allena reaching out to take his hand. "You miss him."
"I left him, alone. I didn't know he was ill that last year. He never told me, never once asked me to come back and tend to him. He died by himself rather than ask me for that."
"He knew you'd come back."
"He should have told me. I could've brought him to Dublin, gotten him to hospital, for treatments, specialists."
"It's always so much harder on the ones who're left behind," she murmured. "He wanted to be here, Conal. To die here."
"Oh, aye, to die here, that was his choice. And knowing he was ill, and frail, he climbed the cliffs. And there at the stone dance is where his heart gave out. That was his choice."
"It makes you angry."
"It makes me helpless, which is the same thing to me. So I miss him, and I regret the time and distance that was between us the time and distance I put between us. I sent him money instead of myself. And he left me all he had. The cottage, and Hugh."
He turned to her then and pulled the chain at her neck until the pendant slid clear. "And this. He left this for me in that small wood box you see on the dresser in the bedroom."
The shiver raced over her skin, chill and damp. "I don't understand."
"His mother had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday, as it had been given to her. And he gave it to my mother on the day he asked her to marry him, at the stone circle, as is the O'Neil tradition. She wore it always. And gave it back to him, to hold for me, on the night she died."
Cured in Dagda's Cauldron. Carved by the finger of Merlin. "It's yours," she murmured.
"No. No longer mine, never mine as I refused it. The day I buried my father, I came here and I threw this into the sea. That, I told myself, was the end of things."
There's only one, the old woman had told her. It belonged to her. She had found it, or it had found her. And led her, Allena thought, to him. How could she feel anything but joy at knowing it? And how, being who he was, could
Conal feel anything but anger?
For her it was a key. For him a lock.
Allena touched his cheek. "I don't know how to comfort you."
"Neither do I." He rose, pulled her to her feet. "No more of this tonight. No more castles and stars. I want what's real. My need is real enough." He swept her up. "And so are you."
Chapter 9
She couldn't sleep. No matter how short the night, she couldn't bear to waste it in dreams. So she lay quiet, and wakeful, reliving every moment of the day that had passed.
They'd ended it, she thought now, with love. Not the slow and tender sort they'd brought each other the first time. There'd been a desperation in Conal when he carried her into bed from the beach. A kind of fierce urgency that had streaked from him and into her so that her hands had been as impatient as his, her mouth as hungry.
And her body, she thought, oh, her body had been so very alive.
That kind of craving was another sort of beauty, wasn't it? A need that deep, that strong, that willful could dig deep and lasting roots.
Why wouldn't he let himself love her?
She turned to him, and in sleep he drew her against him. I'm here, she wanted to say. I belong here. I know it.
But she kept the words inside her, and simply took his mouth with hers.
Soft, seductive, drawing what she needed and giving back. Slow and silky, a mating of lips and tongues. The heat from bodies wrapped close weighing heavy on the limbs.
He drifted into desire as a man drifts through mists. The air was thick, and sweet, and she was there for him. Warm and willing. And real.
He heard her breath catch and sigh out, felt her heart beat to match the rhythm of his own. And she moved against him, under him, bewitching in the dark.
When he slid into her, she took him in with a welcome that was home.
Together they lifted and fell, steady and smooth. Mouths met again as he felt her rise up to peak, as he lost himself, gave himself. And emptied.
"Allena." He said her name, only her name as he once more gathered her against him. Comforted, settled, he slipped back into sleep never knowing that she wept.
Before dawn she rose, afraid that if she stayed beside him any longer in the dark she would ask more afraid that if he offered some pale substitute for love and lifetimes, she would snatch at it, pitifully.
She dressed in silence and went out to wait for the dawn of the longest day.
There was no moon now, and no stars, nothing to break that endless, spreading dark. She could see the fall of land, the rise of sea, and to the west the powerful shadows of the jagged cliffs where the stone circle stood, and waited.
The pendant weighed heavy on her neck.
Only hours left, she thought. She wouldn't lose hope, though it was hard in this dark and lonely hour to cling to it. She'd been sent here, brought here, it didn't matter. What mattered was that she was here, and here she had found all the answers she needed.
She had to believe that Conal would find his in the day that was left to them.
She watched dawn break, a slow, almost sly shifting of light that gave the sky a polish. Mists slipped and slid over the ground, rose into the air like a damp curtain. And there, in the east, it flamed, gold, then spread to red over sky and water, brighter, and brighter still, until the world woke.
The air went from gray to the shimmer of a pearl.
On the beach, the castle had been swamped by the tide. And seeing what could be so easily washed away broke her heart a little.
She turned away from it and went back inside.
She needed to keep her hands busy, her mind busy. She could do nothing about the state of her heart, but she wouldn't mope, today of all days.
When Hugh came padding out, she opened the door so he could race through.
She put on the kettle for tea. She already knew how Conal liked his, almost viciously strong with no sugar or cream to dilute the punch.
While it steeped, she got a small pot from a cupboard. Conal had mentioned there were berries ripening this time of year. If she could find them, and there were enough, they'd have fresh fruit for breakfast.
She went out the back, past the herb garden and a huge shrub covered with dozens of conical purple blossoms that smelled like potpourri. She wondered how they would look dried and spearing out of a big copper urn.
Ground fog played around her ankles as she walked and made her think it was something like wading in a shallow river. The wind didn't reach it, but fluttered at her hair as she climbed the gentle rise behind the cottage. Far off was the sound of Hugh's deep-throated bark, and somewhere nearer, the liquid trill of a bird. Over it all was the forever sound of the sea.
On impulse, she slipped off her shoes to walk barefoot over the cool, wet grass.
The hill dipped, then rose again. Steeper now, with the mist thickening like layers of filmy curtain. She glanced back once, saw the cottage was merely a silhouette behind the fog. A prickle over her skin had her pausing, nearly turning back. Then she heard the dog bark again, just up ahead.
She called out to him, turned in the direction of his bark, and kept
climbing. On the top of the next rise was a scattering of trees sculpted by wind, and with them the bushes, brambles, and berries she hunted.
Pleased with her find, she set down her shoes and began to pick. And taste.
And climb still higher to where the ripest grew. She would make pancakes, she thought, and mix the berries in the batter.
Her pot was half full when she scrambled up on a rock to reach a solitary bush pregnant with fat fruit of rich and deep purple.
"The most tempting are always the ones just out of reach."
Allena's breath caught, and she nearly overturned her pot when she saw the woman standing on the rough track on the other side of the bush.
Her hair was dark and hung past her waist. Her eyes were the moody green of the ocean at dawn. She smiled and rested her hand on Hugh's head as he sat patiently beside her.
"I didn't know anyone was here." Could be here, she thought.
"I_" She looked back now, with some alarm, and couldn't see the cottage. "I walked farther than I realized."
"It's a good morning for a walk, and for berry picking. Those you have there'd make a fine mixed jam."
"I've picked too many. I wasn't paying attention."
The woman's face softened. "Sure, you can never pick too many as long as someone eats them. Don't fret," she said quietly. "He's sleeping still. His mind's quiet when he sleeps."
Allena let out a long breath. "Who are you?"
"Whoever you need me to be. An old woman in a shop, a young boy in a boat."
"Oh." Surrendering to shaky legs, she sat on the rock.
"God."
"It shouldn't worry you. There's no harm meant. Not to you, or to him.
He's part of me."