“Just a blasted minute,” he said, pausing to scowl down at his daughter in confusion. “Why this sudden concern on Norah’s behalf when you had decided to hate her?”
Cassandra squirmed, flushed. “I suppose I saw the sadness in her eyes. The loneliness, as if she were pressed up against the window of a shop filled with wonderful treasures but no one had ever invited her inside.”
The insight wrenched at Aidan’s gut.
“In her letters and when she first arrived, she was so kind and funny and so—so good. Angry as I was at the way she acted while you were sick, well, I just couldn’t believe she could be the lady in the letters and a tyrant at the same time. I don’t know why I acted the way I did.”
“Blast, you’re a confusing little baggage. I think you females conspire to drive men mad.”
“I don’t want you to be mad, Papa. I want you to go find Norah. Dance with her.”
“I’ll find her.”
With that, he stalked away, winding through the assemblage, ignoring greetings and queries, ignoring everything except the wild clamoring in his veins, the throbbing in his temples, the hot, aching hole that had once been his heart.
The garden was lit with paper lanterns that glowed in pinks and lavenders and greens. Stone benches gleamed, silvery in the moonlight, while statues born of myth and legend reared up in the uncertain light, as if enchanted by some strange magic that had made them shiver to life.
Aidan swallowed hard, the echoing of his boot heels upon the path seeming like cannon fire, his fists clenched at his sides, as if their grasp on nothingness could somehow contain his emotions.
When he heard the soft murmur of voices in a tiny arbor, hidden from the eyes of any who would stray down the pathways, he was tempted to call out. But to what purpose? To warn Norah so she could spring out of her lover’s arms? Aidan grimaced, disgusted with himself. Norah was not Delia. They were as different as a dove from a peregrine with a thirst for blood.
Trying to get his jealousy under control, Aidan strode around the corner. What he saw all but drove him to his knees.
A lithe feminine figure was clasped in a man’s embrace, her rosy arms twined about his neck in ecstasy. Laughter, silvery, ethereal, echoed from lips that Aidan had kissed the night before.
“Philip! Oh, Philip, you are the most wonderful man in the world! I knew I could depend upon you to help me! How can I ever, ever thank you?”
“Shall I tell you, Norah? Shall I show you?” That noble head lowered, capturing her mouth in a kiss.
“Philip!” she gasped, a vision of maidenly protest—exactly the kind men could never resist. Montgomery tangled his hands in her hair.
“You cannot love that beast you call a husband!” he grated. “No one could blame you for seeking comfort from a better man. Norah, let me love you.”
The words coiled whip cords of madness around Aidan’s throat, blinding him with a red haze of fury and betrayal.
“Philip, I—I don’t know what to say.” She sounded so shaken. Hadn’t he heard such tones a dozen times before? Women tempting their suitors to greater lengths, more grandiose vows of adoration. “I am wed to Sir Aidan.”
Aidan strode into the pool of light, his voice steel sheathed in ice. “Oh, please, don’t let such minuscule concerns as wedding vows interfere in your pleasure, madam.”
Norah gave a tiny cry as she wrenched out of Montgomery’s embrace.
“Kane, you sneaking bastard!” the nobleman snarled. “I should have known you’d be skulking in the bushes, following us.”
“On the contrary, I was merely coming to claim my bride for a dance. I had not fulfilled my husbandly duty to do so, as my daughter none too gently pointed out. As for any attempt to… skulk, you are mistaken. I made a great deal of noise when I approached, my lord, but I doubt either of you would have heard the blast of a cannon if it were fired from this hedge. You were… otherwise occupied.”
Norah pressed one hand to her chest, those delicate, gloved fingers silhouetted against the breasts Aidan had lavished with kisses the night before. He was fired with the need to drag her into his arms, force her down into the hidden bower of the arbor, and take her again, hard and fast and furious, until Philip Montgomery’s kiss was nothing but a crumbling ash of memory.
“Aidan, please.” Her voice trembled, so soft and musical, so uncertain. Aidan clenched his jaw against its dangerous persuasion. “This is not what it appears.”
“You forget I have had some experience in such matters. It has always been a Kane family tradition to dismiss wedding vows as soon as they become inconvenient. However, I must say, I cannot recall any bride doing so quite this soon—a mere day after her wedding.”
“You are the one who said our vows were meaningless. I never did.”
“Don’t bother scrambling to explain,” he said, cutting her off with a wave of his hand. “You were the picture of maidenly protestations, my sweet. I suppose that you flung your arms about this man’s neck because—what? He’d taken a troublesome speck of dust out of your eye? I’m quite certain that would qualify him as—how did you say it? The most wonderful man in the world.”
He echoed her words of moments before, amazed at the hole they tore in his chest. He expected her to wince, to flush, readily trapped in a snare of her own words. But instead of growing teary eyed, or letting that wounded-doe expression of hurt fill her eyes, the dark depths filled with outrage.
“Why don’t you be honest for once, Aidan?” she said. “Say, Don’t bother to explain because I don’t want to hear the truth. I’d much rather leap to brainless conclusions about things I don’t understand.”
“A man with his hands all over you, begging you to let him love you, doesn’t need much translation, in my experience.”
“Why should it bother you if she did let me love her?” Montgomery raged. “Before a fortnight, you’ll be in some other woman’s bed. Or will you have a pair of them, Kane? A brace of pretty harlots playing bed games with you? From what I hear, you have carnal appetites that could scarce be fulfilled by a decent woman. Or do you plan to debase Norah by teaching her your lecherous tricks?”
Aidan felt the blood drain from his face. Scenes flashed before his eyes: the bed littered with playing cards, the wildly sensual wagers that had fired his blood driving him to heights of desire he’d never reached before. He could see Norah, her lips glossy, parted in a breathy gasp, as he unfastened her nightgown one button at a time, daring to touch her, taste her, tease her.
Lecherous tricks…
There were those who would claim it was so—the game he had played with her in their bridal bed. But it had shifted into something so powerful, so beautiful, it still awed him, terrified him.
The idea that Norah might have confided such happenings to Montgomery poured acid on his nerves.
His hard gaze flashed to Norah’s face. “Did you follow through on your threat, my lady?” he asked in silky menace. “Did you tell your hero what transpired between us on our bridal night?”
“No! Of course I—I did not!”
“You didn’t tell him about our diverting little game of wagers, then?”
“Aidan, please—”
“Montgomery, this I can tell you: You are wrong in your judgment of my bride. Norah may appear the gentle virgin, the quintessential lady, but I assure you, last night she was most—ahem—eager to place herself in my jaded hands.”
“You bastard!” Montgomery raged. “I will do everything I can to rescue her from your clutches!”
“Philip, stop!”
“Montgomery.” Aidan’s voice was deadly steel. “If you ever come near my wife again, I vow you will regret it.”
“Brave words, Kane. You didn’t turn a hair the entire time your first wife was whoring her way through half the king’s regiments! You think it will be long before Norah rejects you just as the Lady Delia did?”
Years of rage, beaten down by force of will, suddenly burst their dam. Aidan drove his
fist into Philip Montgomery’s patrician face. Fire shot through Aidan’s right hand at the impact, but he barely felt it, the sensation lost in the surging satisfaction of Montgomery roaring in pain.
The nobleman staggered backward with the force of the blow. One hand covered his face as a crimson stain spread beneath his impeccable glove.
“Stop this! Both of you!” Norah glared at them. The face Aidan had seen wreathed in wonder was now sick with horror.
“Norah, you see what he’s capable of!” Montgomery warned. “Violence. Lechery! Surely you cannot want to chain yourself to such an animal.”
“She’s already chained, Montgomery.”
“Chained?” Norah blustered. “What do you plan to do? Keep me locked in a tower like you have Cassandra?”
“You’re mine, Norah.” He snarled an icy warning.
Norah wheeled on him. “I’m not your property, you stubborn, brainless fool! Was that what this madness was about? Jealousy?”
“The bastard had his hands all over you!”
“And you just assumed I was welcoming his advances.”
His fury stumbled in the wake of her outrage. “You were embracing him.”
“I embraced him because he’d agreed to petition his grandmother, the duchess of Ware, to ease Cassandra’s way into society.”
“But he wanted you to run away with him. I heard him!”
“But you didn’t wait to see if I would go, did you? No, you were so certain I’d betray you. Why do you think I wed you?”
“You had nowhere else to go.”
“I wouldn’t sell myself so cheaply!”
“Norah!” Montgomery cut in. “You don’t owe this bastard any explanation.”
She paid no notice to the nobleman. “Aidan, there is a whole wide world out there beyond the Irish coast! I’m certain I could find a corner of it for myself if I desire to. I wed you for one reason.” Her chin tipped upward. “One reason only.”
“What the devil is that?” Aidan demanded, hands planted on lean hips, as if daring her… daring her to what? Tell him things that could never be?
“I married you because I—” She stopped as her eyes shimmered with unshed tears, her whole body trembling. “No. Only a fool would cast out her heart to be trampled over yet again!”
He stood frozen as she spun away and ran down the path, away from Montgomery, away from the arbor, away from the ballroom. But most certainly of all, away from him.
“Norah…” He breathed her name, his head reeling with memories of how she’d offered herself to him last night, her eyes huge and wanting, her voice breathless with little cries, shy and innocent, and yet eager, generous, opening herself to his lovemaking with a tender ferocity that had astonished him.
What could it possibly mean?
Only a fool would cast her heart out to be trampled over again. Her heart… her heart…
Was it possible that Norah had given him a treasure more precious than mere vows within the old stone church?
That she…
Aidan couldn’t even form the thought, couldn’t fathom anything so astonishing, so terrifyingly wonderful.
Too stunned to follow as Norah melted into the darkness, Aidan stared after his bride, wary and disbelieving, bewildered and more shaken than he’d ever been in his life.
Chapter Seventeen
Mists swirled around Norah as she stumbled blindly through the maze of hillocks and gorse, guided by the intrepid rays of moonlight that managed to pierce the haze.
She wasn’t certain where she was going, she only knew she had to escape the ballroom filled with gawking gossip mongers, Philip Montgomery’s pleas, and most of all Sir Aidan Kane’s fallen-angel eyes, eyes still haunted with anger and betrayal, worlds away from love—the emotion Norah would have given anything to see in their emerald depths.
She had almost told him she loved him.
The knowledge made her cheeks burn, her eyes sting. She had flung out words in fury and hurt and pain, and had all but bared her heart to him, there in Rathcannon’s garden, with Philip, bleeding from the blow from Aidan’s fist, and the harsh words of Aidan’s jealous rage still reverberating in her ears.
But she had caught herself just in time, cut off the admission that would have made her completely vulnerable to this man who had already won far too much of her. He had stared at her as if she had run mad, her unfinished sentence pulsing between them, her pain and frustration doubtless branded in her face.
Madness… Hadn’t she been possessed by it since she’d first set foot on Irish shores? Since she’d nursed Aidan’s fever, let him slip his wedding ring upon her finger? Since she’d taken up playing cards upon her bridal bed, and let him seduce her with a passion that had branded the magic of his lovemaking in her heart?
He had taken not only her virginity in that tumbled, passion-hot bed. He had taken her heart. And then he had shown her exactly how little the night meant to him by making a bitter jest of what had happened between them.
He had warned her, the night she had arrived at his castle by the sea, that he had no heart to give any woman. No love to give anyone save his daughter. And she had seen the truth in his eyes. Yet, even knowing that, even knowing his trust had been so shattered by Delia, Norah had not been able to keep from making the most costly mistake of her life.
She’d been a fool. A romantic, dreamy-eyed fool when it came to Sir Aidan Kane, reaching for the most impossible hopes, believing—actually believing—they were almost within her reach.
But the truth was that only a fool would cast her heart into Aidan’s reckless hands. Only a woman fairly begging to be hurt would allow herself to love him. Delia Kane had made certain no other woman would ever gain entry into Sir Aidan’s battered heart. She had forced him to build that wall of recklessness and carelessness about the tender places inside him brick by brick, shutting out light, shutting out hope, leaving only a hard, brittle shell of cynicism.
Norah stumbled, catching a glimpse of something pale against the night sky: the mystery-shrouded ruins of Caislean Alainn. It seemed to be floating in the mist—a castle of enchantment, wreathed in a pearly glow, a fairy bower more mystically beautiful than anything Norah had seen before.
Awed, hurting, she sought haven there, wading through moonlight and a hundred dreams far too ephemeral to hold onto in the harsh light of day.
Her hair had tumbled from its pins, the gardenias she had woven in with such care still caught amongst her dark curls. The sea breeze chilled her arms, and the wet tears coursed down her cheeks as she stepped through the fairy ring of ancient stone, into the shadow of the castle ruins.
It sheltered her, as if the souls of those who had lived here, loved here, had reached out their hands to comfort her. But could there be any comfort in the truth that Aidan Kane could never love her?
She curled up on the ledge where he had lounged the day he had first kissed her and listened to the wind sigh, as if an echo of legendary Maire’s ten thousand tears. Slowly, the sounds reached inside Norah, ever so gently untangling the wild knots of her emotions, leaving only one—despair—in its place.
It was a night of fairy moons and dark enchantments, when souls of the unwary were stolen off and mortals were lured down to the Land of the Ever Young by kisses from the fey lips of the Tuatha de Daanan.
As long as Aidan could remember, he had heard the tales, spun out by the crofter folk by the light of peat fires, tidbits of wondrous stories that had fascinated the boy he had been, mesmerized him with a hundred possibilities until he’d grown to be a man.
A man who’d dismissed such wild imaginings, with the same scorn he’d cast away tales of knights and heroes. Yet as Aidan rode his stallion through the mist this night, he felt as if he were passing through a silken veil that separated the world of reason from the one that legends wove.
As if he were being drawn into some sweet madness he was powerless to deny.
Norah.
She was waiting for him somewhere
in the mist. He knew it, not with his mind, but in his heart.
For an hour after she’d fled the garden, he had tried to get a grip on the emotions racing through him. Had tried to sift through her words, her touch, her kisses, to discover whatever mysteries had whispered to him behind those dark-lashed eyes.
He had searched Rathcannon for her, tried to cling to rage, to crush sensations so strange, so new, they terrified him.
But as he wandered the hallways, the library, the tangled paths of the garden, all he could see was her face of soft ivory, like the finest cameo by the light of the paper lanterns, her eyes wide and soft and wondering as he made love to her last night.
He had heard the pleasure sounds of countless women he had bedded in the years since he’d shed his own virginity. He had made it his personal quest to bring his partners to shattering climaxes, as if by that skill alone he could rid himself of the self-doubt Delia had left to fester inside him.
Yet never, in the eager embraces of all his amours, had he ever known the excruciating sweetness that had been in Norah’s touch, the agonizing healing in her kiss. Never had he felt as if he hadn’t taken a woman’s body but had somehow cradled the very essence of her being in his hands, a treasure beyond imagining.
Dear God, what was happening to him? Aidan thought, leaning low over the neck of his stallion. It was as if he were being drawn to Norah, linked to her by some invisible thread. A thread that drew him over the hillock, where moonlight spilled over the ruins of another man’s dreams.
Caislean Alainn.
How many times had he heard the claim that the tragic castle was possessed by the Tuatha de Daanan? On certain nights, it was said, it could be found floating in a sea of mist, as if those ancient spirits were bearing it away to become a fairy bower.
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