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“So you think it was a key to return to Ynys Avalenn?”
Jack’s earlier lightheartedness turned serious. “They say Sir Archibald died a desolate and broken man. Regretted leaving his Fey lover and spent the whole rest of his life trying to find the way back to the summer kingdom and the woman he’d left behind.”
“Then all your assumptions are wrong.”
A frown settled over his usual open features. “Perhaps yours are too, Cat.”
She stiffened. She’d walked right into that little ambush. “Thank you for the genealogy lesson, Mr. O’Gara. But while you’re looking to puncture assumptions, it might be best to start with your cousin’s.”
Jack stared past her into the shadows of the stairwell. “I’m one step ahead of you, Miss O’Connell.”
Rolling her eyes, she turned to retrace her steps. Reached the stairs just as Aidan stepped off the bottom riser. How long had he been standing there? How much had he heard? She struggled to look anywhere but into those penetrating, bronze brown eyes. Feel nothing but the churning maelstrom of her own anger and ill usage.
Lines of exhaustion shadowed his drawn, pale face. His arms hung stiffly at his sides as if it took all his will to keep from reaching for her.
“Catriona?” Her name rose soft as a sigh between them.
She closed her eyes on his appeal. If only she could close her heart as easily. “What I did was wrong, but not what came of it. My son was a gift. Not a penance.”
He said nothing.
When she looked on him again, she sensed the fettered restraint. It vibrated through him. Shivered the air between them. “I’m frightened,” she said quietly.
This time he did reach for her. No more than a skim of her arm with his fingers but it was enough to send need licking like a wildfire through her. “So am I.”
“Of what will happen if you love me?”
“No, a chuisle, of what will happen if I don’t.”
They were alone together. Jack finding a feeble excuse to disappear shortly after dinner. And still they remained as clumsy and shy with one another as if surrounded by inhibiting company. Too much said on both sides to overcome easily. Still they tried. Fumbled through a half dozen attempts to bridge the tortured, miserable silence.
Aidan paused in his nervous pacing. “I never had a chance to
tell you. I’ve had an update from Dublin. Still no sign of your friend Geordie, I’m afraid.”
Her partner’s fate lay buried beneath a mountain of more recent calamities, yet never completely obscured. Cat’s hands tightened on her skirts. “He’ll turn up. I’m sure of it.”
Aidan toyed with a bowl upon a shelf. Straightened an already straight picture. “He means a lot to you.”
How did she quantify Geordie’s influence on her? His selfless generosity, his healing patience, his good-humored affection. He’d been her family. His loss was like a bruise upon her heart.
“He showed me how to stitch a life together from the merest scraps. For that, I can never repay him.”
Aidan met this statement with a look of grim determination. “We’ll discover what happened, Cat. If he lives, we’ll find him.”
She lifted her gaze to his. The shadows lurking in his gold-flecked eyes. The remnants of illness in the sharp bones and sunken hollows of his face, the thick auburn hair brushing his collar, the set of his shoulders, the boundless energy barely contained within the rangy, muscled frame.
So much had become so precious in such a short time.
Her throat constricted. “Scraps can always be rewoven, Aidan. Geordie’s taught me that much.”
The same charged silence fell between them. But a silence fraught with monumental shifts and decisions made. He crossed the room in angry strides. Shocked her by dropping to his knees at her feet.
“And if I ask you to remain with me? Here at Belfoyle? What would you answer?” His words came hasty and stumbling. His face bearing a fevered flush of color.
She tensed, looking to humor to turn aside a question she dared not ponder too long. “I would say you’ve suffered a relapse. Are out of your mind?”
His gaze fell to her stomach. “And if you carry my child? Have you thought of that?”
