by Nora Roberts
"See that you come back," he said when she got to her feet.
"I'm sure I will. Good night." She scanned the room, since it seemed polite to make it a blanket statement, then looked back at Aidan. "Thank you."
"Good night to you, Jude Frances."
He watched her leave, absently getting a glass as another beer was called for. A pretty thing, he thought again. And just prim enough, he decided, to make a man wonder what it would take to relax her.
He thought he might enjoy taking the time to find out. After all, he had a wealth of time.
"She must be rich," Darcy commented with a little sigh.
Aidan glanced over. "Why do you say that?"
"You can tell by her clothes, all simple and perfect. The little earrings she had on, the hoops, those were real gold, and the shoes were Italian or I'll marry a monkey."
He hadn't noticed the earrings or the shoes, just the overall package, that understated and neat femininity. And being a man, he had imagined loosening that band she'd wrapped around her hair and setting it free.
But his sister was pouting, so he turned and flicked a finger down her nose. "She may be rich, Darcy my darling, but she's alone and shy as you never are. Money won't buy her a friend."
Darcy pushed her hair back over her shoulder. "I'll go by the cottage and see her."
"You've a good heart."
She grinned and picked up her tray. "You were looking at her bum when she left." He grinned back. "I've good eyes."
After the last customer wandered his way home, and the glasses were washed, the floor mopped, and the doors locked, Aidan found himself too restless for sleep, or a book, or a glass of whiskey by his fire.
He didn't mind that last hour of the day spent alone in his rooms over the pub. Often he treasured it. But he treasured just as much the long walks he was prone to take on nights where the sky was thrown open with stars and the moon sailed white over the water.
Tonight he walked to the cliffs, as they were on his mind. It was true enough what his brother had said. Aidan had seen Lady Gwen, and more than once, standing high over the sea, with the wind blowing her pale hair behind her like the mane of a wild horse and her cloak billowing, white as the moon overhead.
The first time, he'd been a child and initially had been filled with excited terror. Then he'd been moved beyond measure by the wretched sound of her weeping and the despair in her face.
She'd never spoken, but she had looked at him, seen him. That he would swear on as many Bibles as you could stack under his hand.
Tonight he wasn't looking for ghosts, for the spirit memory of a woman who'd lost what she loved most before she'd recognized it.
He was only looking for a walk in the air made chilly by night and sea, in a land he'd come back to because nowhere else had ever been home.
When he climbed up the path he knew as well as the path from his own bed to his bath, he sensed nothing but the night, and the air, and the sea.
The water beat below, its endless war on rock. Light from the half moon spilled in a delicate line over black water that was never quite calm. Here he could breathe, and think the long thoughts he rarely had time for in the day-to-day doing of his work.
The pub was for him now. And though he'd never expected the full weight of it, it sat well enough on his shoulders. His parents' decision to stay in Boston rather than to remain only long enough to help his uncle open his own pub and get it over the first six months of business hadn't come as that much of a surprise.
His father had missed his brother sorely, and his mother had always been one for moving to a new place. They'd be back, not to live, perhaps, but they would be back to see friends, to hold their children. But Gallagher's Pub had been passed on from father to son once again.
Since it was his legacy, he meant to do right by it.
Darcy wouldn't wait tables and build sandwiches forever. He accepted that as well. She stored her money away like a squirrel its nuts. When she had enough to content her, she'd be off.
Shawn was happy enough for the moment to run the kitchen, to dream his dreams and to have every other female in the village pining over him. One day he would stumble over the right dream, and the right woman, and that would be that as well.
If Aidan intended Gallagher's to go on-and he did-he would have to think about finding himself a woman and going about the business of making a son-or a daughter, for that matter, as he wasn't so entrenched in tradition he couldn't see passing what he had on to a girl.
But there was time for that, thank Jesus. After all, he was only thirty-one, and he didn't intend to marry just for responsibility. There would be love, and passion, and the meeting of minds before there were vows.
One of the things he'd learned on his travels was what a man could settle for, and what he couldn't. You could settle for a lumpy bed if the alternative was the floor, and be grateful. But you couldn't settle for a woman who bored you or failed to stir your blood, no matter how fair her face.
As he was thinking that, he turned and looked out over the roll of land, over to the soft rise where the white cottage sat under the sky and stars. There was a thin haze of smoke rising from the chimney, a single light burning against the window.
Jude Frances Murray, he thought and found himself bringing her face into his mind. What are you doing in your little house on the faerie hill? Reading a good book perhaps, one with plenty of weight and profound messages. Or do you sneak into a story with fun and foolishness when no one's around to see?
It's image that worries you, he mused. That much he'd gotten from the hour or so she'd spent on one of his stools. What are people thinking? What do they see when they look at you?
And while she was thinking that, he mused, she was absorbing everything around her that she could see or hear. He doubted she knew it, but he'd seen it in her eyes.
He thought he would take some time to find out what he thought of her, what he saw in her, and what was real.
She'd already stirred his blood with those big sea goddess eyes of hers and that sternly bound hair. He liked her voice, the preciseness of it that seemed so intriguingly at odds with the shyness.
What would she do, pretty Jude, he wondered, if he was to ramble over now and rap on her door?
No point in frightening her to death, he decided, just because he was restless and something about her had made him want.
"Sleep well, then,'' he murmured, sliding his hands into his pockets as the wind whirled around him. "One night when I go walking it won't be to the cliffs, but to your door. Then we'll see what we see."
A shadow passed the window, and the curtain twitched aside. There she stood, almost as if she'd heard him. It was too far away for him to see more than the shape of her, outlined against the light.
He thought she might see him as well, just a shadow on the cliffs.
Then the curtain closed again, and moments later, the light went out.
CHAPTER Four
Reliability, Jude told herself, began with responsibility. And both were rooted in discipline. With this short lecture in her head, she rose the next morning, prepared a simple breakfast, then took a pot of tea up to her office to settle down and work.
She would not go outside and take a walk over the hills, though it was a perfectly gorgeous day. She would not wander out to dream over the flowers, no matter how pretty they looked out the window. And she certainly wasn't going to drive into the village and spend an hour or two roaming the beach, however compelling the idea.
Though many might consider her notion of exploring the legends handed down from generation to generation in Ireland a flighty idea at best, it was certainly viable work if approached properly and with clear thinking. The oral storytelling art, as well as the written word, was one of the cornerstones in the foundation of culture, after all.
She couldn't bring herself to acknowledge that her most hidden, most secret desire was to write. To write stories, books, to simply open that carefully locked chamber
in her heart and let the words and images rush out.
Whenever that lock rattled, she reminded herself it was an impractical, romantic, even foolish ambition. Ordinary people with average skills were better off contenting themselves with the sensible.
Researching, detailing, analyzing were sensible, things she'd been trained to do. Things, she thought with only a whisper of resentment, she'd been expected to do. The subject matter she'd selected was rebellion enough. So she would explore the psychological reason for the formation and perpetuation of the generational myths particular to the country of her ancestors.
Ireland was ripe with them.
Ghosts and banshees, pookas and faeries. What a rich and imaginative wonder was the Celtic mind! They said the cottage stood on a faerie hill, one of the magic spots that hid the gleaming raft below.
If memory served, she thought the legend went that a mortal could be lured, or even snatched, into the faerie world below the hill and kept there for a hundred years.
And wasn't that fascinating?
Seemingly rational, ordinary people on the cusp of the twenty-first century could actually make such a statement without guile.
That, she decided, was the power of the myth on the intellect, and the psyche.
And it was strong enough, powerful enough, that for a little while, when she'd been alone in the night, she'd almost-almost believed it. The music of the wind chimes and the wind had added to it, she thought now. Songs, she mused, played by the air were meant to set the mind dreaming.
Then that figure standing out on the cliffs. The shadow of a man etched against sky and sea had drawn her gaze and caused her heart to thunder. He might have been a man waiting for a lover, or mourning one. A faerie prince weaving magic into the sea.
Very romantic, she decided, very powerful.
And of course-obviously-whoever it had been, whoever would walk wind-whipped cliffs after midnight, was lunatic. But she hadn't thought of that until morning, for the punch of the image had her sighing and shivering over it into the night.
But the lunacy, for lack of a better word, was part of the charm of the people and their stories. So she would use it. Explore it. Immerse herself in it.
Revved, she turned to her machine, leaving the tapes and letters alone for the moment, and started her paper.
They say the cottage stands on a faerie hill, one of the many rises of land in Ireland under which the faeries live in their palaces and castles. It's said that if you approach a faerie hill, you may hear the music that plays in the great hall of the castle under the deep green grass. And if you walk over one, you take the risk of being snatched by the faeries themselves and becoming obliged to do their bidding.
She stopped, smiled. Of course that was all too lyrical and, well, Irish a beginning for a serious academic paper. In her first year of college, her papers had been marked down regularly for just that sort of thing. Rambling, not following the point of the theme, neglecting to adhere to her own outlines.
Knowing just how important grades were to her parents, she'd learned to stifle those colorful journeys.
Still, this wasn't for a grade, and it was just a draft. She'd clean it up later. For now, she decided, she would just get her thoughts down and lay the foundation for the analysis.
She knew enough, from her grandmother's stories, to give a brief outline of the most common mythical characters. It would be her task to find the proper stories and the structure that revolved around each character of legend and then explain its place in the psychology of the people who fostered it.
She worked through the morning on basic definitions, often adding a subtext that cross-referenced the figure to its counterpart in other cultures.
Intent on her work, she barely heard the knocking on the front door, and when it registered she blinked her way out of an explanation of the Pisogue, the Irish wise woman found in most villages in earlier times. Hooking her glasses in the neck of her sweater, she hurried downstairs. When she opened the door, Brenna O'Toole was already walking back to her truck.
"I'm sorry to disturb you," Brenna began.
"No, you're not." How could a woman wearing muddy work boots intimidate her? Jude wondered. "I was in the little room upstairs. I'm glad you stopped by. I didn't thank you properly the other day."
"Oh, it's not a problem. You were asleep on your feet." Brenna stepped away from the gate, walked back toward the stoop. "Are you settling in, then? You have all you need?"
"Yes, thanks." Jude noticed that the faded cap Brenna squashed down over her hair carried a small winged figure pinned just over the bill. More faeries, Jude thought, and found it fascinating that such an efficient woman would wear one as a charm.
"Ah, would you like to come in, have some tea?"
"That would be lovely, thanks, but I've work." Still,
Brenna seemed content to linger on the little garden path. "I only wanted to stop and see if you're finding your way about, or if there's anything you'd be needing. I'm back and forth on the road here a time or two a day."
"I can't think of anything. Well, actually, I wonder if you can tell me who I contact about getting a telephone jack put into the second bedroom. I'm using it as an office, and I'll need that for my modem."
"Modem, is it? Your computer?" Now her eyes gleamed with interest. "My sister Mary Kate has a computer as she's studying programming in school. You'd think she'd discovered the cure for stupidity with the thing, and she won't let me near it."
"Are you interested in computers?"
"I like knowing how things work, and she's afraid I'll take it apart-which of course I would, for how else can you figure out how a thing works, after all? She has a modem as well, and sends messages to some cousins of ours in New York and friends in Galway. It's a marvel."
"I suppose it is. And we tend to take it for granted until we can't use it."
"I can pass your need on to the right party," Brenna continued. "They'll have you hooked up sooner or later." She smiled again. "Sooner or later's how'tis, but shouldn't be more than a week or so. If it is, I can jury-rig something that'll do you."
"That's fine. I appreciate it. Oh, and I went into the village yesterday, but the shops were closed by the time I got there. I was hoping to find a bookstore so I could pick up some books on gardening."
"Books on it." Brenna pursed her lips. Imagine, she thought, needing to read about planting. "Well, I don't know where you'd find such a thing in Ardmore, but you could likely find what you're looking for over in Dungarvan or into Waterford City for certain. Still, if you want to know something about your flowers here, you've only to ask my mother. She's a keen gardener, Ma is."
Brenna glanced over her shoulder at the sound of a car. "Well, here's Mrs. Duffy and Betsy Clooney come 'round to say welcome. I'll move my lorry out of your street so they can pull in. Mrs. Duffy will have brought cakes," Brenna added. "She's famed for them." She waved cheerfully to the two women in the car. "Just give a shout down the hill if you've a need for something."
"Yes, I-" Oh, God, was all Jude could think, don't leave me alone with strangers. But Brenna was hopping back in her truck.
She zipped out with what Jude considered a reckless and dashing disregard for the narrow slot in the hedgerows or the possibility, however remote, of oncoming traffic, then squeezed fender to fender with the car to chat a moment with the new visitors.
Jude stood mentally wringing her hands as the truck bumped away down the road and the car pulled in.
"Good day to you, Miss Murray!" The woman behind the wheel had eyes bright as a robin's and light brown hair that had been beaten into submission. She wore it in a tight helmet of waves under a brutal layer of spray. It glinted like shellack in the sun.
She popped out of the car, ample breasts and hips plugged onto short legs and tiny feet.
Jude pasted a smile on her face and dragged herself toward the garden gate like a woman negotiating a walk down death row. As she rattled her brain for the proper greeting, t
he woman yanked open the rear door of the car, chattering away to Jude and to the second woman, who stepped out of the passenger side. And, it seemed, to the world in general.
"I'm Kathy Duffy from down to the village, and this is Betsy Clooney, my niece on my sister's side. Patty Mary, my sister, works at the food shop today or she'd've come to pay her respects as well. But I said to Betsy this morning, why if she could get her neighbor to mind the baby while the two older were in school, we'd just come on up to Faerie Hill Cottage and say good day to Old Maude's cousin from America."
She said most of this with her rather impressive bottom, currently covered by the eye-popping garden of red poppies rioting over her dress, facing Jude as she wiggled into the back of the car. She wiggled out again, face slightly flushed, with a covered cake dish and a beaming smile.
"You look a bit like your grandmother," Kathy went on, "as I remember her from when I was a girl. I hope she's well."
"Yes, very. Thank you. Ah, so nice of you to come by." She opened the gate. "Please come in."
"I hope we gave you time enough to settle." Betsy walked around the car, and Jude remembered her from the pub the night before. The woman with her family at one of the low tables. Somehow even that vague connection helped.
"I mentioned to Aunt Kathy that I saw you at the pub last night, at Gallagher's? And we thought you might be ready for a bit of a welcome."
"You were with your family. Your children were so well behaved."
"Oh, well." Betsy rolled eyes of clear glass green. "No need to disabuse you of such a notion so soon. You've none of your own, then?''
"No, I'm not married. I'll make some tea if you'd like," she began as they stepped inside the front door.
"That would be lovely." Kathy started down the hall, obviously comfortable in the cottage, "We'll have a nice visit in the kitchen."
To Jude's surprise, they did. She spent a pleasant hour with two women who had warm ways and easy laughs. It was simple enough to judge that Kathy Duffy was a chatterbox, and not a little opinionated, but she did it all with great good humor.