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of them, was one matter. And he was told he had his grandfather’s hands, and his mind for business. But how did a memory pass down through the blood?
He toyed with the idea as he continued to scan the room. It didn’t occur to him that he looked more the local than the tourist as he sat there in his work clothes, his dark blond hair tousled from the morning’s labor. He had a narrow, rawboned face that would put most in mind of a warrior, or perhaps a scholar, rather than a businessman. The woman he’d nearly married had said it looked to be honed and sculpted by some wild genius. The faintest of scars marred his chin, a result of a storm of flying glass during a tornado in Houston, and added to the overall impression of toughness.
It was a face that rarely gave anything away. Unless it was to Trevor Magee’s advantage.
At the moment it held a cool and remote expression, but it shifted into easy friendliness when Brenna came back toward the table with Jude. Brenna, he noted, carried the tray.
“I’ve asked Jude to take a few moments to sit and tell you about Lady Gwen,” Brenna began and was already unloading the order. “She’s a seanachais .”
At Trevor’s raised eyebrow, Jude shook her head. “It’s Gaelic for storyteller. I’m not really, I’m just—”
“And who has a book being published, and another she’s writing. Jude’s book’ll be out at the end of this very summer,” Brenna went on. “It’ll make a lovely gift, so I’d keep it in mind when you’re out shopping.”
“Brenna.” Jude rolled her eyes.
“I’ll look for it. Some of Shawn’s song lyrics are stories. It’s an old and honored tradition.”
“Oh, he’ll like that one.” Beaming now, Brenna scooped up the tray. “I’ll deal with this, Jude, and give Sinead a bit of a goose for you. Go ahead and get started. I’ve heard it often enough before.”
“She has enough energy for twenty people.” A little tired now, Jude picked up her cup of tea.
“I’m glad I found her for this project. Or that she found me.”
“I’d say it was a bit of both, since you’re both operators.” She caught herself, winced. “I didn’t mean that in a negative way.”
“Wasn’t taken in one. Baby kicking? It puts a look in your eye,” Trevor explained. “My sister just had her third.”
“Third?” Jude blew out a breath. “There are moments I wonder how I’m going to manage the one. He’s active. But he’s just going to have to wait another couple of months.” She ran a hand in slow circles over the mound of her belly, soothing as she sipped. “You may not know it, but I lived in Chicago until just over a year ago.”
He made a noncommittal sound. Of course he knew, he had extensive reports.
“My plan was to come here for six months, to live in the cottage where my grandmother lived after she lost her parents. She’d inherited it from her cousin Maude, who’d died shortly before I came here.”
“The woman my great-uncle was engaged to.”
“Yes. The day I arrived, it was raining. I thought I was lost. I had been lost, and not just geographically. Everything unnerved me.”
“You came alone, to another country?” Trevor cocked his head. “That doesn’t sound like a woman easily unnerved.”
“That’s something Aidan would say.” And because it was, she found herself very comfortable. “I suppose it’s more that I didn’t know my own nerve at that point. In any case, I pulled into the street, the driveway actually, of this little thatched-roof cottage. And in the upstairs window I saw a woman. She had a lovely, sad face and pale blond hair that fell around her shoulders. She looked at me, our eyes connected. Then Brenna drove up. It seemed I’d stumbled across my own cottage, and the woman I’d seen in the window was Lady Gwen.”
“The ghost?”
“That’s right, yes. It sounds impossible, doesn’t it? Or certainly unreasonable. But I can tell you exactly what she looked like. I’ve sketched her. And I knew no more of the legend when I came here than you appear to know now.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
“Then I’ll tell you.” Jude paused as Brenna came back, sat, and tucked into her meal.
She had an easy way with a story, Trevor noted. A smooth and natural rhythm that put the listener into the tale. She told him of a young maid who’d lived in the cottage on the faerie hill. A woman who cared for her father, as her mother had been lost in childbirth, who tended the cottage and its gardens and who carried herself with pride.
Beneath the green slope of the hill was the silver glory of the faerie raft, the palace where Carrick ruled as prince. He was also proud, and he was handsome, with a flowing mane of raven-black hair and eyes of burning blue. Those eyes fell upon the maid Gwen, and hers upon him.
They plunged into love, faerie and mortal, and at night when others slept, he would take her flying on his great winged horse. Never did they speak of that love, for pride blocked the words. One night Gwen’s father woke to see her with Carrick as they dismounted from his horse. And in fear for her, he betrothed her to another and ordered her to marry without delay.
Carrick flew on his horse to the sun, and gathered its burning sparks in his silver pouch. When Gwen came out of the cottage to meet him before her wedding, he opened the bag and poured diamonds, jewels of the sun, at her feet. “Take them and me,” he said, “for they are my passion for you.” He promised her immortality, and a life of riches and glory. But never once did he speak, even then, of love.
So she refused him, and turned from him. The diamonds that lay on the grass became flowers.
Twice more he came to her, the next time when she carried her first child in her womb. From his silver pouch he poured pearls, tears of the moon that he’d gathered for her. And these, he told her, were his longing for her. But longing is not love, and she had pledged herself to another.
When she turned away, the pearls became flowers.
Many years passed before he came the last time, years during which Gwen raised her children, nursed her husband through his illness, and buried him when she was an old woman. Years during which Carrick brooded in his palace and swept through the sky on his horse.
He dived into the sea to wring from its heart the last of his gifts to her. These he poured at her feet, shimmering sapphires that blazed in the grass. His constancy for her. When now, finally, he spoke of love, she could only weep bitter tears, for her life was over. She told him it was too late, that she had never needed riches or promises of glory, but only to know that he loved her, loved her enough that she could have set aside her fear of giving up her world for his. And as she turned to leave him this time, as the sapphires bloomed into flowers in the grass, his hurt and his temper lashed out in the spell he cast. She would find no peace without him, nor would they see each other again until three times lovers met and, accepting each other, risking hearts, dared to choose love over all else.
Three hundred years, Trevor thought later as he let himself into the house where Gwen had lived and died. A long time to wait. He’d listened to Jude tell the tale in her quiet, storyteller’s voice, without interrupting. Not even to tell her that he knew parts of the story. Somehow he knew. He’d dreamed them.
He hadn’t told her that he, too, could have described Gwen, down to the sea green of her eyes and the curve of her cheek. He’d dreamed her as well.
And had, he realized, nearly married Sylvia because she’d reminded him of that dream image. A soft woman with simple ways. It should have been right between them, he thought as he headed upstairs to shower off the day’s dirt. It still irritated him that it hadn’t been. In the end, it just hadn’t been right.
She’d known it first, and had gently let him go before he’d admitted he already had his eye on the door. Maybe that was what bothered him most of all. He hadn’t had the courtesy to do the ending. Though she’d forgiven him for it, he’d yet to forgive himself.
He caught the scent the minute he stepped into the bedroom. Delicate, female, like rose petals freshly
fallen onto dewy grass.
“A ghost who wears perfume,” he murmured, oddly amused. “Well, if you’re modest turn your back.” So saying, he stripped where he stood, then walked into the bath.
He spent the rest of his evening alone, catching up on paperwork, scanning the faxes that had come in on the machine he’d brought with him, shooting off replies. He treated himself to a beer and stood outside with it in the last of the dying light listening to the aching silence and watching stars pulse to life.
Tim Riley, whoever the hell he was, looked to be right. There was no rain coming yet. The foundation he was building would set clean.
As he turned to go back in, a streak of movement overhead caught his eye. A blur of white and silver across the darkening sky. But when he looked back for it, narrowing his eyes to scan, he saw nothing but stars and the rise of the quarter moon.
A falling star, he decided. A ghost was one thing, but a flying horse ridden by the prince of the faeries was another entirely.
But he thought he heard the cheerful lilt of pipes and flutes dance across the silence as he shut the door of the cottage for the night.
TWO
DARCY GALLAGHER DREAMED of Paris. Strolling along the Left Bank on a perfect spring afternoon with the scent of flowers ripe in the air and the cloudless blue sky soaring overhead.
And perhaps best of all, the weight of shopping bags heavy in her hands.
In her dreams she owned Paris, not for a brief week’s holiday, but for as long as it contented her. She could stop to while away an hour or two at a sidewalk cafeÉ, sipping lovely wine and watching the world—for it seemed the whole of the world—wander by.
Long-legged women in smart dresses, and the darkeyed men who watched them. The old woman on her red bicycle with her baguettes spearing up out of her bakery sack, and the tidy children in their straight rows marching along in their prim school uniforms.
They belonged to her, just as the wild and noisy traffic was hers, and the cart on the corner bursting with flowers. She didn’t need to ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower to have Paris at her feet.
As she sat sampling wine and cheese that had been aged to perfection, she listened to the city that was hers for the taking. There was music all around her, in the cooing of the ubiquitous pigeons and the swirling whoosh when they took wing, in the steady beep of horns, the click of high, thin heels on sidewalks, the laughter of lovers.
Even as she sighed, blissfully happy, the thunder rolled in. At the rumble of it, she glanced skyward. Clouds spewed in from the west, dark and thick. The brilliant sunlight fell into that false twilight that precedes a storm. The rumble became a roar that had her leaping to her feet even while those around her continued to sit, to chat, to stroll as if they heard or saw nothing amiss.
Snatching up her bags, she started to dash away, to safety, to shelter. And a bolt of lightning, sizzling blue at the edges, lanced into the ground at her feet.
She woke with a start, the blood pounding in her ears and her own gasp echoing.
She was in her own rooms over the pub, not in some freakish thunderstorm in Paris. She found some comfort in that, in the familiar walls and quiet light. Found more comfort when she sat up and saw the clothes and trinkets she’d treated herself to in Paris strewn around the room.
