by JoAnn Ross
Kate brushed an equally tender fingertip against the teenager’s forehead. “Then, with his good-bye said, his spirit faded away, like morning mist beneath a summer sun.”
“Wow,” Zoe repeated. Kate could practically hear the circuits whirring in her head beneath the now-flattened magenta spikes. “Is it true, then? What those men said? Are you really a witch?”
“There are some who’d be calling me that,” Kate allowed mildly. “And I wouldn’t be arguing the label. However, in reality, I’m more druid than witch.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s a bit complicated, but basically a witch casts magic spells. I don’t possess the power to do that and would not if I could. Yet I’ve always been more in tune with nature than some. Me mother said that I could hear the leaves unfurling from the seed pods in the darkness beneath the turf before I could walk.”
“Did you really make that lightning bolt come down?”
“Aye. Oh, I wouldn’t have hurt Brian, mind you. But there was a point that needed to be made. And even without the faeries to deal with, his foolish road could never possibly conquer the earth, even if he’d succeeded in building it.”
“Why not?”
“Because Man, Earth and the Otherworld must constantly be kept in balance, and those things made by the hands of man can never rule over nature. What do you suppose would have happened if the highway construction crew had managed to uproot the tree and spread their asphalt and concrete along the cliff?”
“They would have killed the tree?”
“No. Because no matter how hard man may try to conquer his environment, mere human actions will never halt the ongoing force of the land. Wouldn’t the roots continue to grow in the darkness beneath that road? Wouldn’t they continue to press against the surface until finally breaking free so they can lift their bright green faces to the sun, the fire of all creation?”
“I’ve seen that,” Zoe confirmed breathlessly, seemingly enthralled by thoughts she’d never before considered. “Roads and parking lots where grass and weeds have broken through.”
“Of course you have. Every entity in the universe must remain free to be itself. And in the end, nature will always prove victorious.”
“What else can you do? Can you cause an earthquake? Or a hurricane? Can you start fires?”
“Would you have me be putting on a show for you?” Kate’s smile took the bite from her words as she smoothed her palm over the child’s spiky hair. “Two other things you must know about druids is that, first, we only answer the questions we choose to. And second, such powers are a sacred trust and not to be used lightly.”
Zoe appeared to consider that. “Okay. But you said you saw your brother. Does that mean you can tell the future? Like those psychic hot lines on TV?”
“Not exactly. Now, I wouldn’t be one to be putting down anyone’s natural abilities, but from what I’ve seen, those individuals mostly appear to be taking money for telling people what they truly want to hear in the first place.”
“I called one once.”
“Did you now?”
“Yeah.” Zoe sighed. “My mother and I had a fight about me wanting to leave school and go live with her right before she went off to Greece. Then she drowned before I could apologize for the things I said that night.”
“Ah, darling, of course she knows that you’re contrite.” Kate’s heart went out to this poor lost girl. “A child is always foremost in a parent’s mind. Even when there are differences and arguments. Death doesn’t change that.”
“Do you really think so?”
“I do, indeed. Modern society believes death is the last thing. But in truth it’s merely a cobweb we pass through.” She pointed out the window at the silver moon that was floating in the midnight sky. “That moon will get smaller and smaller until it vanishes from our sight. Without it, the night appears a dark and frightening place, yet is the moon truly dead, never to return again? Or isn’t the dark moon merely a passing phase of the bright, which will return again to light our sky and our lives.”
“I don’t think my mother’s going to come back.”
“Perhaps it’s her destiny to move on.”
“She was already real good at that.” Zoe sighed. “Could you speak to her for me, like you did your brother? Could you tell her that I’m okay?”
“If I were your mother, I’d much rather be hearing such news from you.”
“I don’t know how to talk to the dead.”
“Of course you do. It’s no different from speaking with the living. Just open up your heart and she’ll hear you. And if you keep your heart open enough, you’ll be hearing her responses to you, as well.”
“Really?” Vast hope shimmered in that single word.
“I promise.” Kate straightened the sheets, and tucked her in, as she would one of her own. “Now, why don’t you be getting some sleep? You know, I was having a thought while I was brushing my teeth tonight.”
She waited for Zoe to say something. But the teenager seemed to be retreating back into her mutinous, silent mode.
“I was thinking that I’d probably be needing a little help with your da’s horse.” She was encouraged when Zoe didn’t correct her unintentional slip, reminding her that Alec was her stepfather.
“You want me to help you?”
“If you’d like. After you get your studies done each day.”
Zoe thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know anything about horses.”
“Ah, I told you, darling, it’s in your blood.” She bent and brushed her lips against the girl’s temple.
“I don’t know if Alec will let me.”
“Why don’t you be leaving the MacKenna to me? If he doesn’t immediately take to the idea, I’ll be putting a spell on him.”
“I thought you didn’t do spells.”
“Isn’t there always a first time for everything?”
Her words earned a smile. Oh, it was faint, sure enough. But, Kate thought with satisfaction as she returned to her own room, it was a start.
10
KATE WOKE IN A BAD MOOD. Despite having stuffed her pillow with soothing hops and sweet woodruff, she’d spent a restless night chasing sleep. Finally, as the moon had ridden higher and higher in the night sky, she’d slipped downstairs and brewed herself a cup of lemon balm tea, which finally allowed her to drift off to sleep sometime before dawn. But even that short rest hadn’t helped, since it was filled with dreams in which she was doing all sorts of hot, erotic things with the American.
Obviously the lemon balm had affected her strangely. “I must have made it a bit too strong,” she decided.
Despite her belief that dreams were communications from the Invisible World, Kate could not believe they actually had anything to do with the Yank himself. It had been a very long time since she’d had such a visceral reaction to a man. Even as she continued to find those images unsettling, Kate assured herself that she should be relieved her horrific marriage hadn’t killed every bit of womanhood she possessed. It was encouraging to discover that after all she’d suffered with Cadel, she could respond to a man in such an elemental, female way.
Not that she intended to get involved with Alec MacKenna. After all, by both the laws of Ireland and the Church she was a married woman. And would be for more than two years to come. Divorce may now be possible, but it wasn’t easy. Nor quick. So, while she wasn’t about to complicate matters by having herself a flirtation with the Yank trainer, perhaps someday, once she was legally free, she might consider taking a tumble.
She’d willingly surrendered her virginity to a man she’d believed at the time she loved, only to realize later that her poor brain—and several other vital body parts—had been bedazzled by clever words and thrillingly wicked touches.
She’d married out of duty to her family and her unborn child to a man she’d neither loved nor desired. But at the time she’d not had a plethora of choices. The truth was that while Cadel had not been
in the market for a wife, the stud had proven an appealing enough dowry that he’d agreed to make an honest woman of her, thus saving the Fitzpatrick family from the shame she would have brought them from giving birth to a child—by a Yank, for heaven’s sake!—out of wedlock.
Now, as the mere memory of those dreams seeped into her veins like warm honey, Kate reminded herself that even though sometime in the future she might be willing to engage in a passing affair, she had no intention of ever again giving her heart to any man.
She was, after all, a modern woman of the new millennium, on her way to becoming one of the first divorcees in Ireland. Surely in this brave new world, which allowed females such freedom not known since the ancient days of Celtic Brehon law, women were once again free to separate love and sex.
For a modern woman, she was certainly a pitiful sight. Kate groaned as she looked at herself in the mirror over the sink. The flesh beneath her eyes was puffy and appeared to be bruised. If she didn’t get some decent sleep soon, she was going to resemble Echtga-the-Awful, the underworld hag for which Galway’s Slieve Aughty mountains had been named.
She dressed and went out to the brood barn to check on her favorite mare, who’d been born on this very stud. It was the mare’s first pregnancy and Kate was pleased she was progressing nicely.
“You put Guinness in her feed?” a deep voice rumbled behind her.
“Aye.” Kate kept pouring the creamy, black-as-bog-water stout into the alfalfa. “I do. Hasn’t it been prescribed by doctors for old people and pregnant women for two centuries?”
“Surely not these days.”
“Surely so,” she responded easily. “We’ve also given it to our pregnant mares three times a week since the eighteen-hundreds. It happens to be full of vitamins. Indeed, its creamy head is due to local seaweed, which is filled with nutrients and gathered on our own beach.” There had been times, during lean years, when the extra income from that seaweed had paid for feed.
“I doubt its popularity has anything to do with it being a good source of vitamins.”
“I suspect you’re right, Mr. MacKenna.”
He shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans—which fit his long legs very nicely—rocked back on the heels of his boots, and looked around the brood barn where the visiting mares, along with her own, were stabled.
It consisted of several large stalls, outdoor pens where the would-be mother horses could be corralled before and after breeding, along with a covered breezeway she’d added two summers ago.
“Is that the breeding barn on the other side of the breezeway?”
“It is. We keep three stallions of our own at stud, as well as a number of visitors whose owners have hired us to make a match. More and more of the breeders are going to artificial insemination, but despite understanding a need to keep up with the times, I prefer the old-fashioned way.”
“If horses could talk, there are probably a great many stallions who’d thank you for sticking with tradition.”
“And what makes you think they haven’t?”
She’d meant it as a jest. But obviously he found nothing humorous in her light statement. His face shadowed. “Who’s this?” he asked in a not at all subtle move to change the subject from her claim of equine communication.
“Nora Barnacle.” She stroked the pregnant bay mare’s nose.
“Named after Joyce’s wife?”
“Why, yes.” She couldn’t quite conceal her surprise. “I wouldn’t think that many Americans would be acquainted with James Joyce.”
He shrugged. “Traveling the circuit, I didn’t have a lot of time to make new friends. A guy I worked for turned me on to books when I was in my teens, so I used to spend most of my spare time reading.”
“Isn’t that fortunate for you. Books can be a grand companion.” Kate was surprised he’d chosen to use his free time in solitary pursuits. Knowing how easy sex was to be had on the racing circuit, she had no doubt any number of women would be more than willing to help him wile away his free hours.
When an unbidden and certainly unwelcome vision flashed before her eyes, a steamy scene from last night’s dream of rolling around with this man amidst tangled sheets, both of them as naked as the day they were born, Kate felt hot color flood into her cheeks.
She knew that most of the people in Castlelough would describe her as calm and collected, the type of person one would choose to ring up in an emergency. Oh yes, they’d undoubtedly say, Kate O’Sullivan may be a witch, but she’s certainly a level-headed one.
What no one—with the possible exception of Nora Gallagher, who could not be closer if she was a blood-born sister—knew was that all Kate’s life she’d been in constant war with her emotions. Emotions that ran too close to the surface. Wild, unruly, reckless emotions she fought to control now.
She rubbed her cheek against the side of Nora’s face. Horses had always calmed her. As it seemed, she in turn, calmed them. “Nora’s by Rebel’s Rogue out of Patrick’s Prize.”
“That’s quite a bloodline.”
“Aye. It is.”
Alec had observed the color flooding into Kate’s face and was amazed that there was a woman left anywhere in the world—even here in Catholic Ireland—capable of blushing. Kate O’Sullivan was no innocent virgin. She was married, with two children who’d arrived home from their aunt Nora’s home last evening.
The little girl, Brigid, a red-haired charmer, had chattered away like a magpie, filling her mother in on her adventures. The boy, Jamie, had appeared more quiet and a great deal more serious than his sister. That could be due to their difference in age. Still, there’d been something familiar in the boy’s sober blue eyes when Alec had first come into the room. A wariness Alec remembered all too well.
The flush faded and she seemed to relax again, laughing lightly as the mare nibbled her shoulder. She was dressed in an Aran sweater that came nearly to her knees, faded jeans and scuffed boots. Certainly not the garb of a faerie, yet there was something ethereal about her, almost as if she could be concealing a pair of gossamer wings beneath that heavy cream-hued sweater.
“The stallion who sired her baby is Fenian, whose first two colts have already proven themselves on the track and the third, a yearling, looks to have grand potential,” she continued, unaware of Alec’s uncharacteristic flight of fantasy. “He’s one of our more successful acquisitions.”
“How many foals do you deliver in a given year?”
“This baby, which will be the final one of the season, will make a grand total of forty I’ve brought into the world this year.”
“You brought into the world? Yourself?”
“I’ve had help with some of the more difficult births, but isn’t this my stud? People who bring their horses here and put them in my care expect me to be the one to tend to them.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“Ah, but surely you yourself know that it isn’t work when you love what you’re doing.”
“Point taken. You’ve got a nice setup.”
“Thank you. I hope to build a separate foaling barn this summer.”
“All the new business you’ll get when Legends Lake sweeps the Triple Crown should pay for any system you want.”
She tilted her head and looked up at him. “That’s quite a goal you’ve set for the colt.”
“He’s capable of that, and more.”
“So long as you can get him to stop jumping fences.”
“So long as we can get him to stop jumping fences.”
“Would that be meaning that you’re beginning to accept the idea of us working together?”
“It would be meaning,” he said, tossing her Irish syntax back at her, “that I don’t see how either of us has much choice in the matter. Because whether we like it or not, Mrs. O’Sullivan, we both have a helluva lot riding on this horse living up to his breeding.”
She studied him for a long silent moment. Since she seemed to be choosing her words with care, Alec waited h
er out.
“If I were to ask you something, would you answer me truthfully?”
“I don’t lie.”
“I thought not.” She nodded, seemingly satisfied. Her intelligent gaze lifted to his. “Are you typically as rude as you’ve been since arriving here in Ireland?”
Who the hell ever accused the Irish of being incapable of a direct statement? With those big lake blue eyes looking up through those incredible lashes at him, Alec would have found it impossible to not tell the truth.
“No. Not rude. I suppose I can be impatient. Brusque at times. And stubborn. People have, on occasion, even accused me of being conceited, but a close friend of mine once pointed out that it’s not bragging if it’s the truth.” He waited for her to smile at Pete’s old adage. She didn’t. “But rude? No.”
“I see.” She glanced out the open barn door, toward the paddock, and beyond, to the mist-draped lake and the castle ruins. In the dawning light he could see a pair of swans, one black, one white, floating on the glassy waters. She began shredding a piece of straw with long delicate fingers he found easier to envision strumming a gilded harp than pulling a foal from a twelve-hundred-pound horse.
The west was beginning to awaken. A ribbon of rose appeared at the top of the eastern mountains; lark song floated on the cool morning air. Alec heard the lowing of cattle and the baas of sheep in distant meadows. Kate appeared to be a woman comfortable with silences. He liked the fact that she didn’t feel the need to fill every conversational pause with words.
She turned back toward him. “Then the only thing I can conclude is that it must be me who has you behaving so uncharacteristically.” She ran her fingers down the front of Nora’s face again. “Is it that you don’t like me?”
“I don’t know you,” he pointed out.
“True enough. Nor have you made the slightest effort to become acquainted.” She held up a slender hand. “I’m sorry. Please forget I said that. It was rude of me.”
“Hey, I’m the one who’s rude, remember? Besides, it’s the truth. My daughter and I have been lousy houseguests. You’ve every right to be pissed off.”
