"I'm not going to discuss my family relationships with you or anyone else, so leave it alone. Just stay in here until I get back."
Yet, as the candle shine poked its fingers into the priest hole, Fallon was tempted to slam the door shut, blocking it from Ciaran's view. If her bedchamber had whispered secret pain, the quiet longings of an abandoned little girl, this hidden chamber fairly screamed them.
Swords made long ago out of sticks stood in one corner, a silver gauze highwayman's mask dangling from the hilts. A crudely fashioned longbow and arrows were cast on the bed beside a dozen crumpled drawings—each portraying the likeness of a rugged warrior holding the hand of a little red-headed girl.
A caricature of the loathsome Misses Alberdale was irreverently tacked to the wall beneath the crucifix, their curls thrusting out as if struck by lightning, their smirks vile, their teeth blacked out by Fallon's pen. An army of bugs brandishing lethal-looking pincers had been sketched trooping up Felicity's arms, while a sly toad peeped out of the tea cake Charity was about to take a bite of.
The bodices of their frilly gowns showed evidence of having been pierced countless times with sharpened- stick arrows, one of which still hung where Fallon had shot it so many years ago.
Even the layer of dust couldn't soften the pain captured in this tiny chamber, pain she'd never allowed another living person to see. The prospect of anyone, especially Ciaran MacCailte, witnessing it was unthinkable.
She was excruciatingly aware of the sudden stillness in Ciaran, and felt his gaze on her. What was he thinking?
She steeled her face into careless lines. "I'll have to lock you in here until I have everything arranged," she said. "The maids will ready a bath."
"Would you mind bringing up something to eat as well? I'm not choosy. Anything that doesn't include a toad would be fine."
It was an attempt at humor. She should have been grateful, and might have been, except that he crossed to the small cot tucked against the outer wall and picked up one of the homemade arrows. He ran his fingers across it, probing as carefully, as insistently as he had to check Maeve McGinty's bones to see if they were broken.
As she slid the secret door shut, Fallon wondered if it was possible to feel the pieces of a little girl's broken heart.
Chapter 5
Ciaran paced the narrow confines of the windowless room, his nerves still stinging from the confrontation with Fallon. He didn't know who he was, but in the short time since he'd ridden up to Misthaven House behind a defiant Irish beauty, he'd unearthed more impressions about Mary Fallon Delaney than he'd ever wished to.
A yawning chasm of hurt and loneliness between brother and sister, a young woman lashing out to conceal how badly she needed someone's arms about her, needed to be loved, to belong. A child who had grown into a woman while no one was looking, brave and independent, idealistic and filled with imagination. A stubborn dreamer, determined to grasp her world in her own hands and fight for what she believed in. And she believed in Ciaran of the Mist.
Ciaran closed his eyes, picturing her as she had been when he'd first seen her, surrounded by the shadowy castle walls, almost unearthly in her loveliness, her hair liquid sunset about a heart-shaped face. Her eyes had glowed with passion for life, her lips parted in astonishment, joy—in welcome—as if she'd been waiting her whole life for him.
She was the kind of woman who needed a hero, not to take her fate out of her grasp, to rescue her from her own helplessness, but rather, to stand at her side as she faced whatever had brought that haunted light to her eyes.
And sometime, during the long ride through the countryside, the encounter with her brother, and the revelations whispered by her chamber—confessions she'd never make aloud—Ciaran had made an incredible discovery of his own.
He'd realized that some part of him, buried deep, wished that he could be that hero for her.
It was a sobering discovery, an unwelcome one. Was it possible that Fallon's fantasies were contagious? That was the only possible explanation for his conflicting emotions.
His thoughts scattered at the sudden sound of the bedchamber door opening, the giggling of two women who must be maids echoing in the room beyond as they busied themselves sloshing what must be hot water into a tub. Ciaran stilled lest they hear him, every sense alert.
"It was a lovely day off work altogether," a rollicking feminine voice observed in a brogue thick enough to spread like sweet cream butter. "In town, I heard the most amusing thing. 'Twas all they're talking of."
"Tell, Sorcha! Tell!" the other maid chimed in.
"Have ye ever heard of old Barrister Fyfe?"
Ciaran rubbed at his temple, his head giving a throb of protest. His brains were muddled enough; the last thing he needed was to be trapped in here listening to servants gossip.
"Who hasn't heard o' the barrister? What a scandal 'twas when he off and married that wife o' his—Vanessa, her name is. Young enough to be his daughter, an' altogether gorgeous she is."
"Not to mention picked fresh out o' a brothel," Sorcha sneered. "Well, Emer, seems after a taste o' respectability, she missed having company after all those years samplin' men like sweets. She's been availin' herself of any gentleman with breeches that unfasten—even tumbled the Barneses' stable lad, an' he but fifteen years old."
Ciaran's lip curled in disgust, an instinctive recoiling. What kind of woman would dally with a mere boy? Had he known any women like the barrister's wife? If so, he must have felt nothing but revulsion for them.
"Seems Fyfe tired o' being the laughingstock o' Glenceo. Made it known from one end o' the town to the other that the next time he caught a man takin' what was lawfully his, he'd shoot him dead."
"Hope he bought a whole raft o' bullets," Emer chortled. "He'd have t' cut down half the men in town."
"Arrived home early this afternoon, an' sure enough, heard a commotion. They say she howls like a bitch in heat when she's got 'er legs 'round a handsome man's hips."
