Norah regarded the fifteen-year-old, her heart aching with the image of the accustomed myriad of childhood illnesses that must have trooped through Rathcannon, dulling Cassandra’s eyes, making her fretful, restless.
It was all too easy to picture Aidan standing sentry beside her sickbed, plying her with tales and pretty toys, tenderness and treats, until the bloom returned to her cheeks. His daughter’s earnest desire to stay with him now was silent testimony to the special relationship the two of them shared. One Norah envied. One whose rarity she understood enough to treasure.
But the thought of this innocent, impressionable girl remaining here while his fever raged was unthinkable. The thought of Cassandra overhearing the incoherent cries Norah had just listened to was appalling.
Norah was certain that would be the last thing Aidan Kane would want. And, Norah thought with a painful tug, sparing Cassandra his anguish might be the only gift she could give this man who lay even now fighting for his life.
“Cassandra, I know that your father loves you with all his heart,” Norah began, groping for some logical reason she could bar the girl from the bedchamber. Something beside the feverish words that could cripple this sheltered, headstrong girl as deeply as they had her father. With fierce gratitude toward the quarrelsome valet, Norah latched on to another excuse. “Your father would be the first to tell you that a gentleman’s sickroom isn’t a proper place for a young lady.”
“Not proper?” The fair brow creased. “Don’t be silly. Papa and I have always… I mean, he’s my papa, and he’s sick, and—”
“I know how difficult this is for you, sweeting. But try to understand. You need to be quite grown up and do as your father would wish you to. What he needs you to do.”
Resentment simmered in the girl’s blue eyes. “He needs me here! He needs me beside him!”
“No, he needs to be able to work through this—this illness without sensing that you are hovering over him, all white-faced and half sick yourself.”
Norah saw the girl gape at her, hurt and a fierce stubbornness firing in her eyes. “How do you know what he needs? You’re barely acquainted. You don’t even like each other.”
“Cassandra—”
“You’re supposed to be leaving Rathcannon altogether, Papa said. So don’t trouble yourself to tarry here. Papa and I have been getting along on our own ever since my mother died. We will work through this… this disaster as well.”
The proprietary tone left no doubt that young Cassandra Kane was setting up boundaries, building some enchanted circle around parent and child, banishing Norah from that special place.
Cassandra tipped her chin up in regal dismissal. “I am quite certain you’re anxious to be on your way.”
Norah realized, with a tug in her chest, that it was now Cassandra who was eager to see her leave. But Norah remembered all too clearly Sir Aidan’s broken pleas, his desperate need to know she would not leave his daughter alone. “I intend to stay here until your father is well again,” she said, gently but firmly.
“Well, I’m staying too.”
A groan tore from Aidan’s chest, muttered words falling from his taut lips. Words barely intelligible, for now. Words that could become brutally clear in a heartbeat, rending Cassandra even more savagely than they had Norah minutes before.
“Cassandra, you have to leave. Now,” Norah said as Cadagon returned through the doorway.
“No! You can’t make me leave!” the girl cried, outraged. Her piercing voice drove Aidan to claw at the coverlets with increasing restlessness.
“Mr. Cadagon! Tell her she’s not in charge here! Make her leave!”
“You’re the one who needs to be leavin’, sweeting,” the old groom said quietly. “Come along with old Gibbon here, an’ I’ll take you down to the cottage where you can play wi’ the little ones.”
“The cottage? You can’t mean you’d take her side!” Betrayal filled the girl’s tear-reddened eyes and paled her cheeks.
“Miss Norah is goin’ t’ take care o’ things, just as your da asked her to. Now don’t get yourself all blathered, sweetheart, just come along, an’ ’twill all come right in the end.”
“No! You can’t make me leave him!” A sob broke from Cassandra, and she bolted over to her father’s side, clambering onto the bed as if she were small. She clutched at Aidan’s restless hand. “Papa, wake up! Tell them not to make me leave you! Papa!”
“Hurts…” Aidan groaned, groping for something he couldn’t see. “Delia… for the love of… don’t—”
The child’s face was stricken and pale. “Why is he—he talking to Mama?”
“Mr. Cadagon, we have to get her out of here now,” Norah insisted. But Aidan’s garbled words had been enough to galvanize Cadagon into action. He grasped Cassandra by the shoulders, pulling her into his arms despite the girl’s struggles.
“Don’t! Please, you can’t do this!”
“Come along, girl,” the old groom crooned, as Cassandra broke into shuddering sobs.
“When my papa awakes, you’ll be sorry for this,” the girl cried, casting Norah a glare filled with loathing and searing hurt. “He—he’ll make you sorry!”
Fighting back her own tears, Norah smoothed her hands across Aidan’s brow in a desperate effort to soothe him, to quiet him.
At the doorway, Cassandra almost broke free. She clung for a heartbeat to the wooden frame. “The blanket!” she choked out. “It’s the one he always uses in my room, when he comes to sit.”
“I’ll lay it over him.” Norah took up the blanket, battling to keep her own voice steady. “I’m certain it will comfort him.”
“More than I could?” the girl demanded, tears brimming over her lashes.
Norah was certain she’d never forget the look on Cassandra Kane’s face as Cadagon shut the door, barring the girl from her beloved father.
Darkness clawed at Aidan as he desperately clung to his horse’s mane, plunging deeper into a nightmarish world of wind and rain and the sinister laughter of death.
Death. He held his old enemy at bay with a wild resolve as the demons peeled the skin from his body, a knife’s width at a time, flaying away sanity, hope, leaving him stripped bare of everything save the pulsing need to reach her, to save her.
Cassandra.
His child. His baby. She was somewhere in this hell, lost without him.
Aidan roared out his rage, tearing at the wild trees that seemed alive, in league with the witch who had stolen Cassandra away. With every beat of his horse’s hooves, every breath Aidan sucked into the torturous cavities that were his lungs, he felt his strength fading, felt his life ebbing away.
Let go! the demons whispered in his ears. You can’t go on!
But Aidan dashed them away, saying her name again and again, in a litany of love and guilt and madness.
Cassandra…
Why hadn’t he seen? Why hadn’t he realized what was afoot? She must be terrified—terrified—unless in her innocence his angel had no idea she was stumbling closer, ever closer to the abyss.
No, he would find her, had to find her. And when he did, he’d kill the one who had tried to hurt her. Crush that lying throat with his bare hands.
Flames were licking his skin, hellish laughter echoing as he searched with night-blinded eyes. His hand reached out, brushed the cool silk of Cassandra’s hair, his senses filled with the scent of sweet milk and innocence that was his daughter.
Papa! Cassandra screamed as the demons snatched her away. Papa, help me! Frightened! I’m frightened!
An animal cry tore from Aidan’s throat, and he flung himself into the darkness where he had touched her so briefly, hurtling through emptiness, eternal emptiness.
Cass! Where are you?
His cries were lost in that hideous jeering laugh.
Take me! he raged at the demons. Take me instead of her!
But the laughter went on and on.
I’ll see her dead before I leave her to you, the voice sne
ered, gloating over his anguish. She’s mine… mine… forever!
Aidan struggled after that voice, his daughter’s fading screams, even as he felt the demons snap white-hot manacles about his wrists and his ankles, chaining him.
He battled with the last strength inside him, felt it sucked away and drained. But as he sobbed out his rage, his terror, his love for the child he had lost, he suddenly felt coolness touch his brow, heard another voice, soft and gentle, reaching through the madness of his pain.
Don’t be afraid.
Tenderness? In this prison of eternal pain? No, it must be a dream, the delusion of a man driven mad.
Then why did he feel the velvety touch on his face, why did the slightest wisp of peace find its way into his battered soul, as if one of the fairy folk Cassandra so loved to dream of had suddenly reached out for him with one ethereal hand?
I’ll take care of her, that magical voice whispered in the accents of England. English fairies? Aidan puzzled as the worst of his torment drained away.
She’ll take care of her. Aidan clung to that certainty, surrendering himself to oblivion.
He was resting at last. Whether out of sheer exhaustion or because God had granted him some sliver of peace, Norah could not guess.
She whispered a prayer of thanks, stroking a cool cloth over features so changed, it didn’t seem possible they belonged to the same man who had kissed her in the ruins of Caislean Alainn. For five days she had kept her vigil by Sir Aidan’s bedside, knowing that the only way she could help his daughter was to make certain this man would not die—a quest even the doctor had doubted would be successful.
The gypsy women had vanished into the Irish mists from whence they’d come, and the purgatives the doctor had forced down Sir Aidan’s throat had done nothing to assuage the madness that held the knight in its brutal grasp.
In desperation, the physician had begun administering remedy after remedy, trying to guess at what the potions might have contained, until Norah began to believe that if the gypsy possets didn’t kill Sir Aidan, the doctor’s cures most definitely would.
In the end, the medical man had merely shaken his head and said that Sir Aidan’s fate was in God’s hands. That he could only hope the Creator would not decide to take his vengeance now for the Irish knight’s myriad sins.
The words had infuriated Norah, and she’d raged at the doctor, saying that if his God could be so cruel as to destroy such a wonderful father, to shatter an innocent girl with guilt over his death, then she’d save Sir Aidan herself.
She had never left Sir Aidan’s bedside. She had slept in the chair beside him, let him crush her fingers in his desperate grip when the pain came, listened to his wild ramblings, his tortured cries, until her tears mingled with his own.
She had been racked with regret but had resolutely tightened the silk cords that bound his wrists and ankles, tying him to the bed in an effort to keep him from hurting himself during the worst of his torment. And when he’d finally slipped into unconsciousness, exhausted from fighting enemies that seemed to cluster about him like malevolent phantoms, Norah had loosed the bindings, smoothing healing salves upon the raw marks he’d torn in his own skin, stunning herself by raising those limp fingers to her lips.
What was making him suffer so horribly? His barely intelligible words hinted at unspeakable acts and nightmares Norah feared had once been all too real. Threats of murder, whisperings of poison, and always his desperate struggle to find the little girl who was now almost a woman.
The woebegone waif who had sobbed herself sick. The girl who had raged at Norah, hated her when Norah had given the order that Cassandra be barred from her father’s room unless she had express permission to be there. Mrs. Brindle, her wise eyes holding the same fright as Norah’s own, had seen to it that the order was obeyed.
Yet Norah saw the consequences of her actions every time Cassandra was allowed to come to her father’s side. She heard the confusion, the pain in the girl’s voice, as she told her father again and again, Papa, she won’t let me stay. She makes me leave you, or I would never, never go. Papa, I’m so sorry I ever brought her here.
As Norah watched Cassandra, her heart ached for the girl. And as she washed the sweat of agony from Sir Aidan’s muscled body, and stroked his tumbled hair, she wished she could have found a way to spare both father and daughter their pain. And to spare herself the pain of knowing that, whatever the outcome of Sir Aidan’s ordeal, she would still have to leave Rathcannon.
It had been inevitable from the first, and yet, with each passing day, the knowledge weighed more heavily upon her. With each moonlit night, it was more difficult to deny the truth. That she didn’t want to leave anymore. She wanted to reach into the vulnerable places Sir Aidan had revealed during this grueling siege. She wanted to heal those wounds she’d heard in his half-crazed cries, his broken pleas, his wild, desperate rages.
She wanted to discover the truth about what had wounded him so deeply, to solve the enigma of how he could seem to be two men so different from each other. To find out which was the real Aidan Kane.
Exhausted, Norah stroked that harsh, pale face, assuring herself that he was resting, for however brief a time. With gentle fingers, she tugged the sleeves of his nightshirt down to conceal the bruises on his wrists from the times she’d had to bind him to keep him from hurting himself as he thrashed in the grip of the fever.
Then she dragged herself wearily to her feet, smoothing her rumpled skirts with her palms. At the doorway, she found Calvy Sipes, the young footman who had risen to her defense what seemed an eternity before. The loyal youth was stationed there, always at her disposal.
“You may tell Miss Cassandra that she can see her father now,” Norah said softly.
“She’s been leading Mrs. Brindle a merry chase today. Looked ready to throttle her.” With that, the footman hurried off. Norah leaned against the wall, letting the coolness of it seep into the knotted ache that was her back.
It seemed barely a moment had passed before she heard slippered feet running down the hall and saw Cassandra, her eyes filled with worry and hurt and anger, racing toward the room in which her father lay. Norah knew instinctively she didn’t want to waste one precious second.
The girl who had fought so valiantly to keep Norah at Rathcannon only cast her one scathing look as she brushed past into the chamber.
“When my papa wakes up, I’m going to tell him what you’ve done,” Cassandra vowed.
“I’m so sorry that you’re hurting, Cassandra,” Norah said, wishing for the thousandth time that she could reach out to the girl and hold her while Cassandra sobbed out her guilt and fear. But she had surrendered that right the moment she had made the decision to shield her from her father’s nightmares.
“I hate you,” Cassandra snapped. “I wish you’d never come to Rathcannon.”
“I know,” Norah said wearily, watching with burning eyes as Cassandra went to catch up her beloved papa’s hand.
Norah felt old and totally drained as she stood in the doorway. She didn’t even realize the footman had returned until she heard his voice, low, for her ears alone.
“The little missy, she doesn’t understand,” he said with such gentleness and respect it astonished her. “Sir Aidan will bless you a hundred thousand times for what you’ve done. Even if he does so from his grave.”
“He’s not going to die,” Norah vowed to the servant. “I won’t let him die.”
How many times had she sworn to herself she wouldn’t allow Aidan to die and leave his daughter to suffer? How many times had she sworn she wouldn’t let Sir Aidan Kane destroy himself? But now, as she stared into her reflection in the looking glass that hung in Rathcannon’s hallway, she saw the truth in the bruised hollows of her eyes.
She couldn’t let him die because somehow, in that bleak chamber, she had lost her heart to a man who didn’t want her. A man who would never let her—let anyone—see the demons that drove him, the past that haunted him.
Norah raised one hand to her face, wondering why the fates had brought her to Rathcannon.
It seemed as if they’d lured her here to break her heart.
How long she had stood there, she didn’t know. But her body stiffened as she heard the first signs of restlessness emanating from the bed.
Her stomach churned with the knowledge that Sir Aidan was falling into the demon claws again, and that Cassandra would have to leave him.
Still, she turned to confront the girl who was even now trying desperately to calm Sir Aidan, to hide the plucking of his fingers at the coverlets, the jerky movements of his long legs beneath the bedclothes.
“You have to leave,” Norah said, her gaze taking in the telltale signs that another nightmare was coming: the crinkling at the corners of his eyes, the twisting of that mouth carved with such carnal beauty.
“No! It’s too soon!” Cassandra cried. “Let me stay with him! He needs me!”
Norah’s eyes stung with tears as the footman gently led his mistress away.
Steeling herself, Norah walked back into Sir Aidan’s chamber, and she wondered if the only thing she would carry away from Rathcannon would be her own nightmares. Nightmares filled with Sir Aidan’s secret agony, Cassandra’s anguished cries, and her desperate need to reach them both.
Warmth. Light. They tantalized Aidan with silken fingers, whispered to him from tranquil glades in his own imagination. He drank them into his parched spirit, reached for them with what little strength remained inside him. Soft, silken strands wove about his fingers. Something warm and moist stirred against his arm. Something that made him feel safe for the first time in an eternity.
He marveled at it, like a man who had been adrift in raging seas but had finally reached a sheltered cove.
Not reached it, Aidan realized with a sudden insight, been drawn there. Inexorably drawn there by something… someone.
He dragged his eyelids open, his bleary gaze fixing on pale brown hair tangled over a face gray with exhaustion, dark lashes only accenting the circles worry had painted on the fragile skin beneath a woman’s eyes.
Lords of Ireland II Page 90