"I'll never guess what?"
No, she thought, she couldn't tell him what had happened, whom she had seen.
Not when the shadows were in his eyes, and her heart was sinking because of them. "What I'm going to make for breakfast."
He dipped a hand into the pot. "Berries?"
"Watch," she told him and took her gatherings into the house.
"And learn."
He did watch, and it soothed him. He'd wakened reaching for her, and that had disturbed him. How could a man spend one night with a woman, then find his bed so cold, so empty when she wasn't in it? Then that panic, that drawing down in the gut, when he hadn't been able to find her. Now she was here, mixing her batter in a bowl, and the world was right again.
Was there a name for this other than love?
"You really need a griddle." She set the bowl aside to heat a skillet. "But we'll make do."
"Allena.''
"Hmm?" She glanced back. Something in his eyes made her dizzy.
"Yes?" When she turned, the pendant swung, and caught at the sunlight.
The star seemed to flash straight into his eyes, taunting him. Without moving, Conal took a deliberate step back. No, he would not speak of love.
"Where are your shoes?"
"My shoes?" He'd spoken with such gentle affection that her eyes stung as she looked down at her own bare feet. "I must have left them behind. Silly of me."
"So you wander barefoot through the dew, pretty Allena?"
Words strangled in her throat. She threw her arms around him, burying her face at his shoulder as emotions whirled inside her.
"Allena." He pressed his lips to her hair and wished, for both of them, he could break this last chain that held his heart. "What am I to do about you?"
Love me. Just love me. I can handle all of the rest. "I can make you happy. If only you'd let me, I can make you happy."
"And what of you? There are two of us here. How can you believe, and accept, all I've told you and be willing to change your life for it?" He drew her back, touched a fingertip to the pendant. "How can you, Allena, so easily accept this?"
"Because it belongs to me." She let out a shaky breath, then took one in, and her voice was stronger. "Until it belongs to another."
Steadier, she took a ladle from a drawer and spooned batter into the skillet. "You think I'm naive, and gullible, and so needy for love that
I'll believe anything that offers the possibility of it?"
"I think you have a soft heart."
"And a malleable one?" The cool gaze she sent him was a surprise, as was her nod. "You may be right. Trying to fit yourself into forms so that the people you love will love you back the way you want keeps the heart malleable. And while I hope to be done with that, while I'm going to try to be done with that, I prefer having a heart that accepts imprints from others."
A patient heart, she thought, but by God if it was a cowardly one.
Deftly, she flipped the pancakes. "What hardened yours, Conal?"
"You've good aim when you decide to notch the arrow."
"Maybe I haven't reached into the quiver often enough." But she would now. Movements smooth and unhurried, she turned the pancakes onto a platter, spooned more batter into the pan. "Why don't you ever speak of your mother?"
Bull's-eye, he thought, and said nothing as she set him a place at the table.
"I have a right to know."
"You do, yes."
She got out honey, cinnamon, poured the tea. "Sit down. Your breakfast will get cold."
With a half laugh, he did as she asked. She was a puzzle, and why had he believed he'd already solved her? He waited until she'd emptied the skillet, turned it off, and come to the table to join him.
"My mother was from the near village," he began. "Her father was a fisherman, and her mother died in childbirth when my own mother was a girl. The baby died as well, so my mother was the youngest and the only daughter and pampered, she told me, by her father and brothers."
"You have uncles in the village?"
"I do. Three, and their families. Though some of the younger have gone to the mainland or beyond. My father was an only child."
She drizzled honey on her pancakes, passed the bottle to Conal. He had family, she thought, and still kept so much alone. "So you have cousins here, too?"
"Some number of them. We played together when I was a boy. It was from them that I first heard of what runs in me. I thought it a story, like others you hear, like silkies and mermaids and faerie forts."
He ate because it was there and she'd gone to the trouble to make it.
"My mother liked to draw, to sketch, and she taught me how to see things.
How to make what you see come out in pencil and chalk. My father, he loved the sea, and thought I would follow him there. But she gave me clay for my eighth birthday. And I andquot;
He paused, lifted his hands, stared at them through narrowed eyes. They were very like his father's. Big, blunt, and with strength in them. But they had never been made for casting nets.
"The shaping of it, the finding what was inside it and I was compelled to see. And wood, carving away at it until you could show others what you'd seen in it. She understood that. She knew that."
"Your father was disappointed?"
"Puzzled more, I think." Conal moved his shoulders, picked up his fork again. "How could a man make a living, after all, whittling at wood or chipping at hunks of rock? But it pleased my mother, so he let it be. For her, and I learned later, because in his mind my fate was already set. So whether I sculpted or fished wouldn't matter in the end."
When he fell silent, looked back at the pendant, Allena slipped it under her sweater. And feeling the quiet heat of it against her heart, waited for him to continue.
Chapter 10
"After me, my parents tried for more children. Twice my mother miscarried, and the second, late in her term damaged her. I was young, but I remember her having to stay in bed a long time and how pale she was even when she could get up. My father set a chair out for her, so she could be outside and watch the sea. She was never well after that, but I didn't know."
"You were just a boy." When she touched a hand to his, he looked down, smiled a little.
"Soft heart, Allena." He turned his hand over, squeezed hers once, then released. "She was ill the summer I was twelve. Three times that spring, my father took her on the ferry, and I stayed with my cousins. She was dying, and no one could find a way to save her. Part of me knew that, but I pushed it out of my mind. Every time she came home again, I was certain it was all right."
"Poor little boy," Allena murmured.
"He doesn't deserve as much sympathy as you think. That summer, when I was twelve, she walked down to the sea with me. She should've been in bed, but she wouldn't go. She told me of the stone dance and the star and my place in it. She showed me the pendant you're wearing now, though I'd seen it countless times before. She closed my hand around it with her own, and I felt it breathe.
"I was so angry. I wasn't different from the other lads I knew, no different from my cousins and playmates. Why would she say so? She told me I was young to have it passed on to me, but she and my father had discussed it.
He'd agreed to let her do it, in her time and her own way. She wanted to give me the pendant before she left us."
"You didn't want it."
"No, by God, I didn't. I wanted her. I wanted things to be as they were. When she was well and I was nothing more than a lad running over the hills. I wanted her singing in the kitchen again, the way she did before she was ill."
Everything inside her ached for him, but when she reached out, Conal waved her off. "I shouted at her, and I ran from her. She called after me, and tried to come after me, but I was strong and healthy and she wasn't. Even when
I heard her weeping, I didn't look back. I went and hid in my uncle's boat shed. It wasn't till the next morning that my father found me.
"He didn't take a strap to me as
I might have expected, or drag me home by the ear as I deserved. He just sat down beside me, pulled me against him, and told me my mother had died in the night."
His eyes were vivid as they met Allena's. She wondered that the force of them didn't burn away the tears that swam in her own. "I loved her. And my last words to her were the bitter jabs of an angry child."
"Do you think_oh, Conal, can you possibly believe those words are what she took with her?"
"I left her alone."
"And you still blame a frightened and confused twelve-year-old boy for that? Shame on you for your lack of compassion."
Her words jolted him. He rose as she did. "Years later, when I was a man, I did the same with my father."
"That's self-indulgent and untrue." Briskly, she stacked plates, carried them to the sink. It wasn't sympathy he needed, she realized. But plain, hard truth. "You told me yourself you didn't know he was ill. He didn't tell you."
She ran the water hot, poured detergent into it, stared hard at the rising foam. "You curse the idea you have_what did you call it_elfin blood but you sure as hell appear to enjoy the notion of playing
God."
If she'd thrown the skillet at his head he'd have been less shocked.
"That's easy for you to say, when you can walk away from all of this tomorrow."
"That's right, I can." She turned the faucet off and turned to him. "I can, finally, do whatever I want to do. I can thank you for that, for helping me see what I was letting happen, for showing me that I have something of value to give. And I want to give it, Conal. I want to make a home and a family and a life for someone who values me, who understands me and who loves me. I won't take less ever again. But you will. You're still hiding in the boat shed, only now you call it a studio."
Vile and hateful words rose up in his throat. But he was no longer a young boy, and he rejected them for the sharper blade of ice. "I've told you what you asked to know. I understand what you want, but you have no understanding of what I need."
He walked out, letting the door slap shut behind him.
"You're wrong," she said quietly. "I do understand."
She kept herself busy through the morning. If she did indeed go away the next day, she would leave something of herself behind. He wouldn't be allowed to forget her.
She hung the curtains she'd mended, pleased when the sunlight filtered through the lace into patterns on the floor. In the laundry room she found tools and brushes and everything she needed. With a kind of defiance she hauled it all outside. She was going to scrape and paint the damn shutters.
The work calmed her, and that malleable heart she'd spoken of began to ache.
Now and then she glanced over at the studio. He was in there, she knew. Where else would he be? Though part of her wanted to give up, to go to him, she did understand his needs.
He needed time.
"But it's running out," she murmured. Stepping back, she studied the results of her labors. The paint gleamed wet and blue, and behind the windows the lace fluttered in the breeze.
Now that it was done and there was nothing else, her body seemed to cave in on itself with fatigue. Nearly stumbling with it, she went into the house. She would lie down for a little while, catch up on the sleep she'd lost the night before.
Just an hour, she told herself and, stretching out on the bed, went under fast and deep.
Conal stepped back from his own work. His hands were smeared with clay to the wrists, and his eyes half blind with concentration.
Allena of the Faeries. She stood tall, slim, her head cocked slyly over one shoulder, her eyes long and her mouth bowed with secrets. She wasn't beautiful, nor was she meant to be. But how could anyone look away?
How could he?
Her wings were spread as if she would fly off at any moment. Or fold them again and stay, if you asked her.
He wouldn't ask her. Not when she was bound by something that was beyond both of them.
God, she'd infuriated him. He went to the sink, began to scrub his hands and arms. Snipping and sniping at him that way, telling him what he thought and felt. He had a mind of his own and he'd made it up. He'd done nothing but tell her the truth of that, of everything, from the beginning.
He wanted peace and quiet and his work. And his pride, he thought, as his hands dripped water. The pride that refused to accept that his path was already cut. In the end, would he be left with only that?
The emptiness stretched out before him, staggeringly deep. Were these, then, after all, his choices? All or nothing? Acceptance or loneliness?
Hands unsteady, he picked up a towel, drying off as he turned and studied the clay figure. "You already know, don't you? You knew from the first."
He tossed the towel aside, strode to the door. The light shifted, dimmed even as he yanked it open. Storm clouds crept in, already shadowing the sea.
He turned for the cottage, and what he saw stopped him in his tracks. She'd painted the shutters, was all he could think. The curtains she'd hung danced gaily in the rising wind. She'd hung a basket beside the door and filled it with flowers.
How was a man to resist such a woman?
How could it be a trap when she'd left everything, even herself, unlocked and unguarded?
All or nothing? Why should he live with nothing?
He strode toward the cottage and three steps from the door found the way barred to him. "No." Denial, and a lick of fear, roughened his voice as he shoved uselessly at the air. "Damn you! You'd keep me from her now?"
He called out to her, but her name was whisked away by the rising wind, and the first drops of rain pelted down.
"All right, then. So be it." Panting, he stepped back. "We'll see what comes at the end of the day."
So he went through the storm to the place that called to his blood.
She woke with a start, the sound of her own name in her ears. And woke in the dark.
"Conal?" Disoriented, she climbed out of bed, reached for the lamp. But no light beamed when she turned the switch. A storm, she thought blearily. It was storming. She needed to close the windows.
She fumbled for the candle, then her hand jerked and knocked it off the little table.
Dark? How could it be dark?
Time. What time was it? Frantically she searched for the candle, found a match.
Before she could light it, lightning flashed and she saw the dial of the little wind-up clock.
Eleven o'clock.
No! It was impossible. She'd slept away all but the last hour of the longest day.
"Conal?" She rushed out of the room, out of the house, into the wind. Rain drenched her as she ran to his studio, fought to open the door.
Gone. He was gone. Struggling against despair, she felt along the wall for the shelves, and on the shelves for the flashlight she'd seen there.
The thin beam made her sigh with relief, then her breath caught again at what stood in the line of that light.
Her own face, her own body, made fanciful with wings. Did he see her that way? Clever and confident and lovely?
"I feel that way. For the first time in my life, I feel that way."
Slowly, she shut the light off, set it aside. She knew where he'd gone, and understood, somehow, that she was meant to find her own way there, as he had, in the dark.
The world went wild as she walked, as wild as the day she had come to this place. The ground shook, and the sky split, and the sea roared like a dragon.
Instead of fear, all she felt was the thrill of being part of it. This day wouldn't pass into night without her. Closing her hand over the star between her breasts, she followed the route that was clear as a map in her head.
Steep and rough was the path that cut through rock, and slippery with wet.
But she never hesitated, never faltered. The stones loomed above, giants dancing in the tempest. In its heart, the midsummer fire burned, bright and gold, despite the driving rain.
And facing it, the shadow that was a man.
Her heart, as she'd been told, knew.
"Conal."
He turned to her. His eyes were fierce as if whatever wild was in the night pranced in him as well. "Allena."
"No, I've something to say." She walked forward, unhurried though the air trembled. "There's always a choice, Conal, always another direction. Do you think I'd want you without your heart? Do you think I'd hold you with this?"
In a violent move she pulled the pendant from around her neck and threw it.
"No!" He grabbed for it, but the star only brushed his fingertips before it landed inside the circle. "Can you cast it off so easily? And me with it?"
"If I have to. I can go, make a life without you, and part of me will always grieve. Or I can stay, make a home with you, bear your children, and love you for everything you are. Those are my choices. You have yours."
She held out her arms. "There's nothing but me here to hold you. There never was."
Emotions tumbled through him, end over end. "Twice I've let the people
I loved go without telling them. Even when I came here tonight I thought I might do so again."
He pushed dripping hair away from his face. "I'm a moody man,
Allena."
"So you told me once before. I never would have known it otherwise."
His breath came out in a half laugh. "You'd slap at me at such a time?" He took a step toward her. "You painted the shutters."
"So what?"
"I'll make you pots in dark blue, to fill with your flowers."
"Why?"
"Because I love you."
She opened her mouth, closed it again, took a careful breath. "Because
I painted the shutters?"
"Yes. Because you would think to. Because you mended my mother's curtains. Because you pick berries. Because you swim naked in the sea. Because you look at me and see who I am. Whatever brought you here, brought us here, doesn't matter. What I feel for you is all there is. Please, God, don't leave me."
"Conal." The storm, inside her and around her, quieted. "You only have to ask."
"They say there's magic here, but it's you who brought it. Would you take me, Allena?" He reached for her hand, clasped it. "And give yourself to me. Make that home and that life and those children with me. I pledge to you I'll love you, and I'll treasure you, ever hour of every day." He lifted her hand, pressed his lips to it. "I'd lost something, and you brought it back to me. You've brought me my heart."
Books by Nora Roberts Page 315