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The blood drained out of her head. She felt each individual drop of it flow out. Moonlight shimmered gently on the pale fall of hair, on the white cheeks, against the deep green eyes.
She was smiling, a beautiful, heart-wrenching smile that hooked Jude’s soul and all but ripped it out.
Gathering courage, she shoved the gate back and ran for the door. When she yanked it open it occurred to her that she’d neglected to lock it. Someone had gone in while she’d been in the pub, she told herself. That was all.
Her knees trembled as she dashed up the stairs.
The bedroom was empty, as was every other room when she hurried through the house. All that was left was the faint sighing scent of woman.
Uneasy, she locked the doors. And when she was in her bedroom again, she locked that as well from the inside.
After she undressed and huddled in bed, she left the light burning. It was a long time before she slept. And dreamed of jewels bursting out of the sun and tumbling through the sky to be caught in a silver bag by a man riding a winged horse white as snowfall.
They swooped out of the sky, over the fields and mountains, the lakes and rivers, the bogs and the moors that were Ireland. Across the battlements of castles and the humble thatched roofs of cottages, with the white wings of the horse singing against the wind.
They came to a flashing stop, hooves striking ground at the front of the cottage on the hill with its white walls and deep-green shutters and flowers spilling from the door.
She came out to him, her hair the palest of golds around her shoulders, her eyes green as the fields. And the man, with hair as dark as hers was light, wearing a silver ring centered with a stone no less brilliant than his eyes, leaped from the horse.
He walked to her and spilled the flood of jewels at her feet. Diamonds blazed in the grass.
“These are my passion for you,” he told her. “Take them and me, for I would give you all I have and more.”
“Passion isn’t enough, nor are your diamonds.” Her voice was quiet, contained, and her hands stayed folded at her waist. “I’m promised to another.”
“I’ll give you all. I’ll give you forever. Come away with me, Gwen, and a hundred lifetimes I’ll give you.”
“ ’Tisn’t fine jewels and lifetimes I want.” A single tear slipped down her cheek, as bright as the diamonds in the grass. “I can’t leave my home. Won’t change my world for yours. Not for all your diamonds, for all your lifetimes.”
Without a word, he turned from her and mounted his horse. And as they rose up into the sky, she walked away into the cottage, leaving the diamonds on the ground as if they were no more than flowers.
And so they became flowers and covered the ground with fragrance, humble and sweet.
SIX
JUDE AWOKE TO the soft, steady patter of rain and the vague memory of dreams full of color and motion. She was tempted to snuggle under the covers and slide back into sleep, to find those dreams again. But that seemed wrong. Overindulgent.
More productive, she decided, to create and maintain a routine. A rainy Sunday morning could be spent on basic housekeeping chores. After all, she didn’t have a cleaning service here in Ardmore as she had in Chicago.
On some secret level she actually looked forward to the dusting and mopping, the little tasks that would in some way make the cottage hers. She supposed it wasn’t very sensible of her, but she actually enjoyed rooting through the cleaning supplies, selecting her rags and cloths.
She spent a pleasant portion of the morning dusting and rearranging the knickknacks Old Maude had scattered all over the house. Pretty painted fairies, elegant sorcerers, intriguing chunks of crystal had homes on every tabletop and shelf. Most of the books leaned toward Irish history and folklore, but there were a number of well-worn paperbacks tucked in.
Old Maude had liked to read romance novels, Jude discovered, and found the idea wonderfully sweet.
Rather than a vacuum, Jude unearthed an old-fashioned upright sweeper, and hummed along with its squeaky progress over rug and wood.
She scrubbed down the kitchen and found a surprising glow of satisfaction when chrome and porcelain gleamed. Gaining confidence as she went, she wielded her polishing cloth in the office next. She would get to the boxes in the tiny closet soon, she promised herself. Perhaps that evening. And she’d ship off to her grandmother anything that seemed worthwhile or sentimental enough to keep.
She stripped the bed in her room, gathered the rest of the laundry. She found it slightly embarrassing that she’d never done laundry before in her life. But surely it couldn’t be that complex a skill to learn. It occurred to her that she should have started the wash before she started the cleaning, but she’d remember that next time.
In the cramped room off the kitchen, she found the basket, which she realized she should have taken upstairs in the first place, and dumped the laundry in it.
She also discovered there was no dryer. If she wasn’t mistaken, that meant she had to hang clothes out on a line. And though watching Mollie O’Toole as she did so had been enjoyable, doing it herself, for herself, would be a little more problematic.
She’d just have to learn. She would learn, Jude assured herself. Then, clearing her throat, she took a hard look at the washing machine.
Hardly new, it had a spray of rust spots over the white surface. The controls were simple. You got cold water or hot, and she assumed if you wanted something clean, you used hot and plenty of it. She read the instructions on the box of detergent and followed them meticulously. The sound of water pouring into the tub made her beam with accomplishment.
To celebrate she put on the kettle for tea and treated herself to a handful of cookies from the tin.
The cottage was tidy. Her cottage was tidy, she corrected. Everything was in place, the laundry was going so . . . Now there was no excuse not to think about what she’d seen the night before.
The woman at the window. Lady Gwen.
Her ghost.
There was no reasonable way to deny she’d seen that figure twice now. It had been too clear. So clear she knew she could, even with her rudimentary skills, sketch the face that had watched her from the window.
Ghosts. They weren’t something she’d been brought up to believe in, though part of her had always loved the fancy of her grandmother’s tales. But unless she had suddenly become prone to hallucinations, she’d seen a ghost twice now.
Could it be she’d tumbled off the edge of the breakdown that had been so worrying her when she left Chicago?
But she didn’t feel so unsteady now. She hadn’t had a tension headache or a queasy stomach or felt the smothering weight of oncoming depression in days.
Not since she’d stepped over the threshold of Faerie Hill Cottage for the first time.
She felt . . . good, she decided after a quick mental check. Alert, calm, healthy. Even happy.
So, she thought, either she’d seen a ghost and such things did exist, which meant readjusting her thinking to quite an extent . .
.
Or she’d had a breakdown and the result of it was contentment.
She nibbled thoughtfully on another cookie and decided she could live with either situation.
At the knock on the front door she quickly brushed crumbs from her sweater and glanced at the clock. She had no idea where the morning had gone, and she had deliberately put Aidan’s promised visit out of her head.
Apparently he was here now. That was fine. They’d work in the kitchen, she decided, shoving pins back into her hair as she walked down the hall to the door. Despite her initial, well, chemical reaction to him, her interest in him was purely professional. A man who fought with drunks on the street and flirted so outrageously with women he barely knew had no appeal to her whatsoever.
She was a civilized woman who believed in using reason, diplomacy, and compromise to solve disputes. She could only pity someone who preferred using force and bunched fists.
Even if he did have a beautiful face and muscles that just rippled when put into use.
She was much too sensible to be blinded by the physical.
She would record his stories, thank him for his cooperation. And that would be that.
Then she opened the door, and he was standing in the rain, his hair gleaming with it, his smile warm as summer and just as lazy. And she felt about as sensible as a puppy.
“Good day to you, Jude.”
“Hello.” It was a testament to his effect on her that it took her a full ten seconds to so much as notice the enormous man beside him clutching flowers in his huge hand. He looked miserable, she noted, the rain dripping off the bill of his soaked cap, his wide face pale as moonlight, his truck-grill shoulders slumped.
He only sighed when Aidan rammed an elbow hard into his ribs.
“Ah, good day to you, Miss Murray. I’m Jack Brennan. Aidan here tells me I behaved badly last night, in your presence. I’m sorry for that and hope to beg your pardon.”
He shoved the flowers at her, with a pitiful look in his bloodshot eyes. “I’d had a bit too much of the drink,” he went on. “But that’s no excuse for using strong language in front of a lady—though I didn’t know you were there, did I?” He said that with a slide of his eyes toward Aidan and a mutinous set to his mouth.
“No.” She kept her voice stern, though the wet flowers were so pathetic they melted her heart. “You were too busy trying to hit your friend.”
“Oh, well, sure Aidan’s too fast for me to plant a good one on him when I’m under the influence, so to speak.” His lips curved, for just a moment, into a surprisingly sweet smile, then he hung his great head again. “But despite circumstances being what they were, it’s no excuse for behaving in such a manner in front of a lady. So I’m after begging your pardon and hoping you don’t think too poorly of me.”
“There now.” Aidan gave his friend a hearty slap on the back. “Well done, Jack. Miss Murray’s too kindhearted to hold a grudge after so pretty an apology.” He looked back at her, as if they were sharing a lovely little joke. “Aren’t you, Jude Frances?”
Actually she was, but it irritated her to be so well pegged. Ignoring Aidan, she nodded at Jack. “I don’t think poorly of you, Mr. Brennan. It was very considerate of you to come by and bring me flowers. Would you like to come in and have some tea?”
His face brightened. “That’s kind of you. I wouldn’t mind—”
“You’ve got places to go, Jack.”
Jack’s brows drew together. “I don’t. Particularly.”
“Aye, you do. This and the other. You take my car and be about it. You’ll remember I told you Miss Murray and I have business to tend to.”
“All right, then,” he muttered. “But I don’t see how one bloody cup of tea would matter. Good day, Miss Murray.” Shoulders hunched, cap dripping, he lumbered back to the car.
“You might have let him come in out of the rain,” Jude commented.
“You don’t seem to be in any great hurry to ask me in out of it.” Aidan angled his head as he studied her face. “Maybe you hold a grudge after all.”
