by Anne Stuart
She didn't react the way he expected her to. She blinked, and her face softened. "You think Fiona is the ghost of your sister?"
He hated hearing the name on her lips, so matter-of-fact. He pushed away from the chair, afraid that for once in his life his phenomenal self-control would shatter. "My sister, Fiona," he snapped. "Sixteen when she died, with long white-blond hair and a ring on her finger. She drowned, with my parents, fifteen years ago, and I was the only one to survive. My father, who like all Irish fathers was called Da, and my mother Maeve, who happened to be the spitting image of my ancestor, Lady Fiona. Leaving me behind."
He expected shock and sorrow, even guilt. He expected her beautiful blue eyes to fill with tears. She was shocked, all right, and troubled. But not repentant. "How could your mother look like Lady Fiona?" she asked in that infuriatingly practical voice of hers. "The woman in the portrait is your father's ancestor, not your mother's."
"My mother's maiden name was O'Neal as well. They were third cousins."
"I thought the Catholic Church frowned on that sort of thing."
"The Catholic Church…" He realized suddenly that she'd distracted him. "For God's sake we're not talking about theological canon here. What the hell business is it of yours, anyway?"
She smiled up at him with endearing sweetness. "Just trying to make conversation," she said serenely.
"You still haven't answered my question."
"What the hell business is it of mine?" she countered, her forehead wrinkled beneath her mop of red curls.
"No. Who told you about my family? Who gave you their names, who told you what they looked like, who sent you here to torment me?"
"No one," she said.
"I don't believe you."
"Trust is not one of your few virtues," she replied evenly. "Go about it the other way, then. Assuming I was fool enough to seek you out in a hurricane and almost drive off a cliff, assuming I arranged to have a tree fall on the car, knock me out and keep me a prisoner here, why don't you sit back and figure out who it was who could have sent me here? Who knows about your family, who would have filled me full of information?"
The rising frustration was almost worse than the pain he'd felt at her artless words. "No one," he said.
"'No one'?" she echoed.
"There's no one left alive who knew about my family. There's no one who could have told you those details."
He expected her full mouth to curve in triumph. Instead she looked disconcerted. "You mean I really saw them? Heard them?"
"It appears so."
"You mean there really are ghosts?" Her voice rose a bit, and outside the building winds howled in counterpoint.
"Haven't you been insisting on that ever since you got here?" he snapped in annoyance.
"I didn't…that is, I wasn't sure…" Her voice failed, and she looked absolutely stricken. And for some mad reason he wanted to comfort her, to tell her it was all right.
He was a fool and a half. He moved away from her, afraid that if he stayed too close he would touch her. Not in anger. He took a deep, calming breath, willing the anger, willing the desire to leave him. It wouldn't.
"We lived in Ireland," he said abruptly. "I was born over here, though, and we traveled a great deal. We'd planned to move to the States. My mother was second-generation American, and she missed her country. We were just waiting for the paperwork to go through when the four of us went out for a sail on a clear, bright day in October."
"I don't…"
"You don't want to hear the grim details?" he finished for her. "Too bad. You're the one who brought my family into this, you might at least learn why it's impossible for them to be here."
"Nothing's impossible," she said faintly.
He let out a bitter laugh. "You're younger than I thought," he said. "The storm came out of nowhere, and we were farther out than we realized. My father had lived all his life around the Irish Sea, but this storm was unnatural, fierce and demanding, and we knew we were all going to die. The waves came up and tossed the boat like it was a child's toy, and it sank without a trace, taking my sister and parents with it."
"And what happened to you? Were you a better swimmer?"
He could tell her the truth and watch disbelief and horror cloud her open face. Or he could give her a part of it, the part he told most people. "Somehow or other I made it to shore," he said.
"But you were way out at sea," she protested. "In a storm. How could you swim that far?
"Miles," he said softly. "Miles and miles out to sea, with the wind screaming and the waves rising up like the wrath of God. And I have no idea how I got back to land. Someone said they saw a seal down by the water just before they saw me, and they thought one of them might have helped me, but I have my doubts." They were more than doubts—he knew the truth. As the years had passed, memory, more memory than he had ever wanted, had returned.
"The seal," she said in a dreamy voice. "Maybe it's the same one I saw in the water today. Maybe he's some kind of guardian angel—"
His harsh laugh interrupted her. "If there even was a seal, he lived off the Irish coast. There's no way he would have made his way across the Atlantic Ocean. Unless you're suggesting he took a plane."
"I'm not suggesting anything." She managed to sound dignified.
"If a seal saved me, he's long dead on the other side of the sea. My family, as well. They died in Ireland, Katie Flynn, fifteen years ago. They wouldn't suddenly decide to cross the ocean and start haunting a perfect stranger when their own son would have given anything—" He stopped as his voice grew harsher, and he cursed her and his own unexpected vulnerability.
"Ghosts can't cross the sea any more than seals can?" Katie said gently. "Who wrote that down in the Official Handbook for Ghosts? I've never been in Ireland, never seen you before yesterday, and yet I've seen your family. Maybe you simply haven't had the eyes to see them?"
That was a possibility he refused to consider. "I don't believe in ghosts," he said in a voice as dead as his parents.
"What about a seal as your guardian angel? Would you consider that possibility?"
"No."
She frowned. "Then what do you believe in?"
He surveyed her for a long moment, willing to let her look into his eyes and see the depth of his pain and rage. He believed in the elegant curve of her high cheekbones, the soft tangle of red gold hair. He believed in sin and the possibility of redemption for everyone but him. He believed in desire and the wrath of God, and he believed in his own doom.
He wasn't about to tell her that—she knew too much about him already. He didn't want her knowing how much he wanted her. "Absolutely nothing at all," he said in his deep voice.
She rose, and he knew a moment's terror that she would touch him, put her warm, soft, human hands on him, and he wouldn't be able to resist her. "That would be tragic indeed," she said, and she sounded annoyingly practical. "If I believed you for one moment. Which I don't."
He stayed where he was, looking up at her as she approached him. It gave him a lazy kind of advantage, and he was willing to take any that he could. "Why not?"
"Because you don't look like a man who's given up hope. If you were, you'd be dead."
Little did she know how close he'd come to it. How many times he'd started swimming, arcing through the icy Atlantic, heading out and hoping to simply sink out there beneath the black, heartless depths.
He hadn't yet. And for some damnable reason Katie Flynn was making him feel alive again. It was probably something as simple as lust, but it was enough. He wasn't ready to let go yet.
"What do you believe in?" she said again.
"Annoying little interlopers with red hair."
He was unprepared for her response. Her smile was utterly dazzling, lighting the huge, gloom-laden room. Outside the rain lashed against the windows as the storm closed down around them, inside there was a sudden glow. "That's something," she said. "Maybe they brought me here for a reason. To irritate you into dealing
with life instead of hiding from it like a self-pitying hermit."
The words fell into the room like an ax cleaving through a fragile sapling. It took him a moment to speak, to be certain his voice would be steady and slightly mocking. "You must be a social worker in your real life," he said. "I suppose it's an ingrained habit, but I really don't need you analyzing me, telling me how to live my life. I do just fine on my own."
She looked stricken, but he suspected it wasn't his words that had wounded her. It was the unavoidable truth of her own.
"I'm sorry," she said. "That really was unforgivable of me. I do have a habit of interfering where I shouldn't."
He shrugged. "Some women are naturally controlling. They don't know how to leave well enough alone."
"I'm not a control freak," she protested hotly.
"Aren't you?"
"I just…have a habit of trying to make things better. I see a problem and I try to fix it."
"Not all problems can be fixed. Not all people can be fixed."
"I don't believe that."
He smiled grimly. "You're very young."
"Stop saying that! I'm twenty-eight. You can't be that much older than me."
"Not in years, perhaps," he said. "But in life experience I'm ancient."
"Living like a hermit for fifteen years doesn't provide a great deal of life experience."
"Do you always have to argue?" he demanded wearily.
"It runs in the blood. I'm Irish, you know."
"I know. So am I."
She grinned faintly. "Then we're well matched."
"No, we're not." The words had the finality of a death sentence, and for once she was silent, unable to come up with a bright response.
He wondered if she wanted him even half as much as he wanted her. He doubted it. The longer he was around her the thicker, deeper, more powerful his need for her. His hands shook with the need to touch her, and he knew that was the last thing he should, or could do. To touch her would be to doom her, as his family was doomed.
"No," she said finally. "I suppose not." She glanced around her, running a nervous hand through her rain-damp hair. "I should go up and change. I'm still wet from the rain. If you don't mind I'll just eat in my room tonight and keep out of your way. I've already been enough of an imposition."
"Mrs. Marvel doesn't need the inconvenience of serving two meals," he said, wondering why he wasn't taking the easy way out. Mrs. Marvel would do exactly what he told her to do, and he'd never been overly concerned with her well-being in the past. "You'll eat with me."
He half expected her to declaim something suitably dramatic like "I'd rather starve!" but she simply inclined her head. "Am I allowed to change out of these wet clothes? In the privacy of my room? Or would you rather I strip down right here?"
"I really don't care," he said, wondering if there was any way she could believe he was indifferent to her. She saw certain things much too clearly. In other areas she was blessedly, endearingly blind. She probably didn't have the faintest idea what kind of effect she was having on him. Apart from the irritation.
She smiled icily, heading for the door. "Then I'll be back in time for dinner," she said.
He didn't know what made him rise, move to the door ahead of her. His hand was already on the latch when she reached out for it, and she touched him, warmth against his icy cold, and it was like an electric shock coursing through his body.
She yanked her hand away, but it was too late, they were too close, and just for the moment he didn't want to fight it. He simply stood there, barring the door.
She took a deep, calming breath. "Look," she said. "I know you don't like me. You think I'm a mouthy, nosy American broad who won't leave you in peace, and you're right. It's not my nature to ignore it when people are in pain."
"I'm not in pain," he said tightly.
"Oh, yeah? Then you're the only one who doesn't realize it," she shot back. "But I'll leave you alone if you'd just let me. I'll disappear into my room and stay there until the storm passes, and then I'll be out of here, and you won't ever have to…" Her voice trailed off as he held the delicate gold chain in front of her eyes.
It was a stupid move on his part. He should have left it down in the bottom of the sea, trapped in the catch of the sodden purse that floated loosely in the submerged car. If he'd had any sense he wouldn't have gone after it in the first place, but he wanted to find out what made a cool, unsentimental creature like Katie Flynn cry.
It was a gold cross, very old, very Irish, bedecked with garnets. Its value was meager compared to some of the salvage he'd come up with over the years, but the gold chain had slipped around his sleek neck of its own accord, it seemed, and he'd brought it up from the depths of the sea with no real intention of handing it over to her.
And now it dangled between them, glinting in the firelight, and she stared at it in hypnotic wonder. "How did you get it?" she whispered.
"I'm a diver."
"In this weather?" She reached up her hand to touch it, almost as if it were a holy relic, and he placed it in her palm, closing her fingers over it, feeling the warmth of her.
"I'm used to the waters around here," he said.
When she looked up there were tears in her wide blue eyes, and they were almost his undoing. "It was my grandmother's," she said. "It was the only thing I really treasured."
In another moment she would have flung herself in his arms, and he couldn't have stood that. "It was nothing," he said brusquely, stepping back, opening the door for her. Waiting for her to leave him in dubious peace.
She had no choice but to accept her dismissal, he'd seen to that. But she stopped and reached her hand up to touch his face.
He jerked back before she could make contact, and bright color stained her cheeks as she fell back in embarrassment. "Thank you," she said.
He watched her disappear down the darkened halls as night grew deep around them. She must have known he stood there, staring after her, but she didn't pause, didn't look back.
He let out a deep, strangled breath. He was only making things worse. Katie Flynn was a nosy, interfering, overimaginative, absolutely infuriating creature. He was also obsessed by her, so obsessed that he couldn't even begin to guess what she thought of him. Whether she was the slightest bit attracted to him, when he'd tried so hard to be unpleasant. Whether she felt the same kind of longing he did.
That longing would disappear, to be replaced by disbelief and horror if she knew the truth. There was no guardian angel watching over him in the form of a seal. No sleek brown animal had helped him to shore after the accident—he'd gotten there under his own steam.
No seal watched over him as he swam through the dangerous tides at Seal Point.
There was only O'Neal. Who until fifteen years ago had had no idea that he was part of an ancient race, an ancient curse. The roan; half man, half seal, wholly cursed.
Cursed to watch his family die in front of him and be unable to save them. Cursed to live a half life, alone and embittered.
Cursed.
Chapter Nine
« ^ »
Someone had been in her room. Katie knew it with a passionate certainty, just as she knew it was no friendly specter. Whoever had come in while she was gone had left no trace, no sign of their trespass, and yet she knew. Someone had touched the bed where she lay, someone had run their all-too-human hands along her discarded clothing. Someone had been watching her.
It was absurd, she reminded herself. She'd imagined eyes following her from the moment she even neared this place. She'd seen the seal watching her, the faded eyes of ghosts that she didn't even believe in. Why should the sense that she was being spied on feel like anything new and disturbing?
Night had fallen, a thick dark blanket smothering the deep-set windows, and the sound of the rain was like a muffled thunder. Katie didn't even bother to try to look out. There would be nothing to see, just darkness, and maybe a ghostly face staring back at her.
She sat cross-le
gged on the bed, shivering in the cool dampness of the room. O'Neal was right, uncannily so. The ghosts and apparitions didn't frighten her in the least. It was something else, something cold and dark and evil that lived in the heart of this house, that unnerved her.
Did it live in O'Neal? It couldn't be Mrs. Marvel—her cozy warmth and welcome ruled out any unfriendly intent. Willie was another matter, an excruciatingly uncomfortable one. Katie had always accepted those around her without passing judgment, and Willie's limited abilities should have only made him pitiable.
But he frightened her. And why should she assume he was as devoid of evil as he was devoid of intellect?
She glanced through the murky light to the huge dresser. A pile of faded clothing lay folded neatly, and Katie breathed a sigh of relief. It had been Mrs. Marvel, bringing her fresh clothes. Not some evil intruder after all.
She changed, hurriedly, knowing she was being absurdly superstitious. No one could see her as she pulled off the damp clothes Mrs. Marvel had lent her, replacing them with an equally faded, loose dress that came down to her ankles. No one would want to see her. And yet she found herself looking over her shoulder, nervous, edgy. Looking for a human intruder, not a ghostly one.
There were fresh toiletries in the bathroom—a comb, toothbrush and toothpaste, and she did her best to make herself demure and presentable. It was little wonder O'Neal thought she was some sort of harpy, with her flyaway hair and her pale face. She pinched her cheeks to bring some color into them, then stared back. Demure was probably too much of a stretch, but at least she looked relatively ladylike if she was going to be forced to have dinner with O'Neal.
She couldn't imagine why he really wanted her company. He'd made it more than clear that she was an imposition, one he wanted gone. Maybe he was afraid she'd start exploring again. Maybe he didn't want her to see any more ghosts.
She would have preferred to do without them herself, she thought, pulling on a pair of kneesocks that had seen better days but were at least blessedly warm. But the ghosts seemed to have an affinity for her. Just her luck that they'd choose now to appear.