Haunting Beauty (27 page)

He looked up and saw Danni’s eyes fill with distress. She didn’t know the details, but she’d guessed they were tragic. She asked, “How … I mean, why—why didn’t Niall go to prison?”

He took a deep breath, seeing that she’d want details, knowing he couldn’t evade them. “My mother had a foul temper, and when she drank, there was no calming her,” he said softly. “She’d rant at the butcher with the same ire as she would her husband—everyone had seen her in a fit of it. On that day—the day she died—she was especially drunk and especially angry. She pulled a knife on my father and they fought over it. It was so fast, I didn’t even know what had happened until I saw her on the floor, with a knife in her chest.”

Danni started to say something, but stopped.

“Go ahead—whatever it is, go ahead and say it.”

“Well, if they were fighting over the knife she pulled, it does sound like an accident, Sean. Is there a reason you’d think he did it on purpose?”

Don’t ask
, Sean wanted to shout.
Don’t ask me that.
Ignorance was the only way out of the dark labyrinth surrounding them. What she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her. Couldn’t shred her hopes like tissue paper.

“Other than the fact that he was twice her size, you mean?” She nodded, scrutinizing his face with those gray eyes, peering into his very thoughts. Searching for what he couldn’t quite hide. Suddenly, she looked away and Sean knew she’d found it.

“Was it because of
my
mother?” she whispered.

The question hovered between them, an invisible line he didn’t want to cross. “I think so,” he answered truthfully, because he couldn’t lie. Not to Danni.

“I saw them today. Together.”

“Where?” But even as he asked, he knew. In the shower. Or rather, beyond the shower.

“You believe he killed her, don’t you?”

“Fia?” he asked. “Or my mother?”

“Either. Both.”

“I don’t want to believe it.”

“I don’t either.”

Which wasn’t, for either of them, the same as not believing it. He swallowed, trying to force that lump in his chest away.

“When are you going to tell me the truth, Danni?” he murmured.

She frowned, looking guilty. “I am. I have.”

He moved closer, put his hands on the arms of her chair, and looked straight into those beautiful eyes. “Where were you, when you saw them?” She swallowed, squirmed, tried to look away, but he took her chin in his hand and forced her to answer. “Where, Danni?”

“Beneath the ruins,” she said so softly he had to strain to hear her.

The answer shocked him. He knew where she was talking about. He’d grown up here, explored the island like a Viking on a quest.

“It’s not safe at the ruins,” he said.

She almost smiled at that. “I was careful.”

“Were you? Or was it another dream? Like the banshee?”

She didn’t answer. He could see the fear of it in her eyes. This wasn’t something she talked about, something she trusted others with. Knowing that made him all the more desperate for her to tell
him
. To trust
him
with her dark secrets.

“What are they like, your dreams?” he asked.

She looked hurt as she stared into his eyes, wounded by the realization that he’d somehow circumvented all of her carefully constructed barriers and now stood on the brink of discovery. He wanted to reassure her that he’d never use her secrets against her, but he didn’t know for certain that it was true. Nothing in this cracked place and time could be taken as certainty.

“What’s it like when you see things?” he pressed.

She hesitated another moment before saying in a voice thick with resignation, “Like I’m there, only I know I’m not. I feel things—the air, the cold. But I can’t change anything. I can only watch.”

“How do you know? Have you ever tried changing what you see?”

She frowned. “I can’t. I’m not really there. The people I see, they don’t see me back.”

“Ever?”

She faltered, her brows pulling together, puckering the skin between them. For the second time that night, he wanted to lean over and press his lips to that silky point, smooth it out.

“Once,” she began and he had to lean close to hear her. “Once I thought—I felt like—my mother saw me. Just for a moment. And today, earlier, I thought she heard me.”

The air seemed to still then, change into something solid and unyielding. Afraid his next question would turn it to stone, he asked, “Is it what’s happening now? This. Us. Are we really here? Or is this all an illusion that I’ve stumbled into?”

Her startled look became every thought that flashed through her mind. Surprise, denial, fear, and question. Possibility. “No,” she breathed.

“Are you sure?”

“I can’t—I’ve never been able to talk or be seen. No, it can’t be that.”

He held his relief at bay because even in denial, she wasn’t certain. “Just before we . . . before we fell through. In your kitchen, I felt like the walls were fading on us.” Sean struggled to find the words that could describe the experience. “Like they were turning to glass and when they were done, I wouldn’t recognize what was outside.”

Her nod seemed reflexive. A jerky agreement she didn’t realize she’d made.

“Can you call them?” he asked.

“The visions? You mean, can I make one happen?”

“Can you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. It’s always been someone coming to me. Someone wanting something.”

“And why is that?”

“How would I know? I don’t understand it. I don’t even know why it happens. Before you, it had been years—so long I’d forgotten what it felt like.”

He froze, staring at her with narrowed eyes. “What does that mean? Before me?”

“I saw you. Before you came to my house that morning.”

“You saw me?” he repeated stupidly. His mouth was dry and his tongue felt thick. He remembered the look in her eyes as he’d stood on her porch. As if she’d recognized him. As if she’d been
expecting
him.

“You said it was someone coming to you. Someone wanting something. What did I want?”

Me.
She didn’t say it, but it was there in her face. In the luminous window of her eyes. Well, it was true. He wanted her more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

“Why have you never tried to make one happen?” he asked.

“Why would I?”

He regarded her steadily, letting Danni find her own answer to the question. In honesty, he didn’t know it himself. But something inside was driving him. A question in his subconscious he couldn’t bring into focus. It forced words from his lips.

“It’s a mystery, how we are here. I can’t grasp the way of it. But I can’t deny that it’s happened either. Not when I’m sitting at this table. Not when I’ve stared into my own face. It’s impossible, but I’m thinking that somewhere there is an explanation.”

She pushed out of her chair, forcing him to move back. Her momentum took her a few steps away before she stopped, arms crossed protectively over her middle.

“All I’m asking, Danni, is for you to consider that nothing is what it seems. We are twenty years out of synch as you pointed out to me just this afternoon, and no amount of rationalization can make it sane. But it seems to make more sense that the answer lies within you and not with the Book of Fennore.”

“What if it’s you?” she demanded. “Why does it have to be me? Nothing like this ever happened to me before you came knocking on my door.”

“It couldn’t be me,” he said, with a grim laugh. “There’s nothing special about me.”

“Isn’t there, Sean? Are you so sure about that?”

She stared at him, willing him to see something that was beyond his ability. What did she mean? What did she want of him? How could she possibly think it—
this
—could have anything to do with
him
?

“Haven’t you felt out of synch for a long time?” she demanded.

And he nodded, without even realizing he meant to do it. Yes, yes,
yes
. He
had
felt unconnected, unaligned with the ticking of the clock, with the passage of the days. Adrift, lost, unaware of either. And then suddenly, here—now—when it made no sense at all, he felt eminently united with the spin of time. How could that be?

Something she saw on his face made Danni step back. Recant. “Never mind. This conversation is pointless,” she said. “Neither of us is special enough to change history. Whatever—however we’ve come to this place, it had nothing to do with you or me.”

And yet, like a door that once opened could never be closed, the idea remained there, solid between them.

“I’m tired,” she said. And she looked it. Her gaze skittered toward the bed and then away. There was no couch, no extra bedding. Just the one narrow mattress on a spindly frame, crouched in the corner.

Sean stared at it, too, and then asked the question that had consumed most of the day. Somehow it was more pressing than how they’d come to be here. More urgent than who was or was not the instrument of their journey. He moved until he was standing right behind her. The top of her head reached his chin, the scent of her hair and her skin filled his senses.

Gently, insistently, he turned her. He felt the resistance in her body, in the gaze that climbed to meet his own.

In a voice he barely recognized as his own, he asked, “Did we make love this morning or was that just a different kind of dream?”

Chapter Twenty-two

I
T seemed Sean waited an eternity for her to answer. An eternity with nothing in it but her eyes, as mysterious as the evening fog, thick with silvery mist and wrought with the unknown. He saw his own confusion mirrored in their depths, and he knew that if making love to her had been only a dream, it was one they’d shared.

“It was a dream,” she insisted.

“Then how is it we dreamed it together?”

She frowned and shook her head. “We couldn’t. We didn’t.”

“Aye, we could,” he said, moving closer. “Aye, we did.”

The vulnerability was back in her eyes, but this time he knew—he
knew—
it came from a different place. She was comparing the passion of that dream to the image she held of herself. Because of the stupid men she’d known, she thought she was lacking. Somewhere along the way, she’d made up her mind that they were right and she was incapable of passion. Sean saw this, saw it as clearly as if it were spelled out in the air between them.

Even now she was withdrawing, battening down hatches, locking passageways. She couldn’t see what he knew instinctively. There was nothing cold or reserved about Danni MacGrath. He wanted to prove it to her. But in a moment when he should have been reaching out, he found himself hesitating.

Her hair lay in a swirling mess around her head, her skin glowing like pearl, her face bare and sweet. There was innocence in Danni, but there was also fire and passion. Dream or no, he’d felt it this morning and he wanted to feel it again—wanted desperately to feel it
more
.

He dropped his gaze to the pulse that beat at her throat. The man’s T-shirt clung to her breasts, peaking at hardened nipples. The stretchy pants fit her lean, shapely legs, molding curves and muscle all the way down to the thick white socks, and even those were somehow sexy, somehow intimate. He skimmed back up, imagined catching the hem of her shirt and pulling it over her head, baring those soft shoulders, the curve of her throat, the slope of her breasts.

A train wreck, that’s what this was. But the course was set and the outcome inevitable.

She didn’t say a word as she watched him, letting her own eyes move from his face to his bare chest to his stomach. His muscles tightened in anticipation, as if her glancing look were a touch that would heat his skin. He wanted her to look lower, to see that just standing this close to her had him thinking of so much more.

Neither spoke, because words would be redundant.

He felt incapable of movement and so he waited for her instead. Waited for the questions in her eyes to become answers, decisions. She swayed closer and the soft scent of her filled him with aching need. He wanted to bury his face in her hair, inhale, taste that scent. Taste every inch of her.

Her hands settled against his chest, light as petals, hot and silky and moving over the taut muscles. Searching, finding. They paused just over his heart, feeling the erratic beat, the labored pounding. He thought she could feel the blood rushing through his veins, urging him to move, to take. He felt hot, hotter than humanly possible. Like he might suddenly combust and melt into something only she could ply with her feather touch.

She stilled, those small hands holding his heart. Then she tipped her head back and he was staring into eyes of winter smoke and midnight slate. They were wide and round and hurt and bewildered. Why didn’t he touch her back?

“I’m afraid,” he said without meaning to.

Afraid that he’d fall into those eyes and never find his way out again. Afraid that this, which felt so real, could somehow be snatched away if he grasped too tightly. Afraid of returning to that land of numbness that had become his life. Afraid now to chance an escape.

The answer—a self-fulfilling prophecy—made him exhale with twisted humor. Danni bit her lip and then smiled back, slowly, sweetly, sexily.

“Don’t be,” she said, and it was his undoing.

With a muffled groan, he reached for her, pressed his hands to her hips, swallowing the small curve with his grasp and splaying his fingers across the soft flesh of her behind.

She moved in the wake of his capitulation—with tentative boldness, then with growing confidence that made his head light, his heart thump even faster. Her arms were around his neck now, her hips brushing the unmistakable erection trapped painfully in his jeans. It was the pain, glorious and real, that broke the last tie of his reserve.

He hauled her up hard against him, and the sound she made in her throat was like scented oil on wildfire. It filled every sense and ignited every receptive nerve in his body. Like he’d imagined, he caught the hem of her shirt and tugged it up in one smooth stroke. She lifted her arms in mute acceptance, standing before him like moonlight harnessed in shimmering flesh. Her skin glowed like a rare white opal, pale and alive, soft and warm. Her breasts were small and high, perfect as only God could create. He touched one and then the other, still fearing that she might vanish if he went too far, went too fast. Grasped too greedily.