Books by Nora Roberts

by Roberts, Nora

  He never expected to find her in his kitchen, standing at the stove with the apron his mother used when visiting wrapped around her waist.

  "I thought you'd be sleeping."

  She glanced over, smiling at the way he took off his cap when he came in the house. "I heard you outside, laughing with the boy who helps you milk."

  "I didn't mean to wake you." The kitchen smelled gloriously of mornings from his childhood. "What are you doing there?"

  "I found some bacon, and the sausages." She prodded the latter with a kitchen fork. "It's cholesterol city, but after last night, I thought you deserved it."

  The foolish grin broke over his face. "You're cooking me breakfast."

  "I figured you'd be hungry after doing whatever you do at dawn, so-Murphy!" She squealed, dropping the fork with a clatter as he grabbed her and swung her around. "Watch what you're doing."

  He set her down, but couldn't do anything about the grin as she muttered at him and washed off the fork. "I didn't even know you could cook."

  "Of course I can cook. I may not be the artist in the kitchen Brie is, but I'm more than adequate. What's this?" She poked into the bucket he'd set down when he'd come in. "There must be three dozen eggs in here. What do you do with so many?"

  "I use what I need, trade away or sell the rest."

  She wrinkled her nose. "They're filthy. How did they get so dirty?"

  He stared at her a moment, then roared with laughter. "Oh, you're a darling woman, Shannon Bodine."

  "I can see that was a stupid question. Well, clean them up. I'm not touching them."

  He hauled the bucket to the sink, began to oblige when it suddenly dawned on her just where eggs came from. "Oh." She winced and flipped bacon. "It's enough to put you off omelettes. How do you know if they're just eggs and not going to be little chickies?"

  He slid her a look, wanting to make sure she wasn't joking this time. Poking his tongue in his cheek, he washed off another shell. "If they don't peep, you're safe."

  "Very funny." She decided she was better off in ignorance. She really preferred thinking of eggs as something you took out of nice cartons stacked in the market. "How do you want them cooked?"

  "However you like, I'm not fussy. You made tea!" He wanted to kneel at her feet.

  "I couldn't find any coffee."

  "I'll get some next I'm in the village. It smells grand, Shannon."

  The table was already set, he noted, for two. He poured them both tea, wishing he'd thought to pick her some of the wildflowers that grew alongside the barn. He sat when she carried a platter to the table.

  "Thank you."

  There was a humbleness in his voice that made her feel twin edges of guilt and pleasure. "You're welcome. I never eat sausage," she commented as she took her seat. "But this looks so good."

  "It should. Mrs. Feeney made it fresh only a few days ago."

  "Made it?"

  "Aye." He offered her the platter first. "They butchered the hog they'd been fattening." His brow drew together in concern when she paled. "Is something wrong?"

  "No." With hurried movement, she waved the platter away. "There are just certain things I don't care to visualize."

  "Ah." He gave her an apologetic smile. "I wasn't thinking."

  "I should be getting used to it. The other day I walked in on a discussion Brie was having with some guy about the spring lambs." She shuddered, knowing now just what happened to cute little lambs in the spring.

  "It seems harsh to you, I know. But it's just the cycle of things. It was one of Tom's problems."

  Deciding the toast she'd made was safe, Shannon glanced over. "Oh?"

  "He couldn't stand to raise something for the table- for his own or someone else's. When he had chickens, he gathered the eggs well enough, but his hens died of old age more often than not. He was a tender-hearted man."

  "He let the rabbits go," Shannon murmured.

  "Ah, you heard about the rabbits." Murphy smiled at the memory. "Going to make a fortune off them, he was -until it came down to the sticking point. He was always after making a fortune."

  "You really loved him."

  "I did. He wasn't a substitute for my father, nor did he try to be one. It wasn't the male figure they say a boy needs in his life. He was as much my father from my fifteenth year as the one who made me was before. He was always there for me. When I was grieving, he'd pop up, take me for a ride to the cliffs, or a trip into Galway with the girls. He held my head the first time I sicked up whiskey I'd had no business drinking. And when I'd had my first woman, I-"

  He broke off and developed a keen interest in his meal.

  Shannon lifted a brow. "Oh, don't stop now. What happened, when you'd had your first woman?"

  "What usually happens, I'd suppose. This is a fine breakfast, Shannon."

  "Don't change the subject. How old were you?"

  He gave her a pained look. " Tisn't seemly to discuss such matters with the woman you're currently sharing breakfast with."

  "Coward."

  "Aye," he agreed heartily and filled his flapping mouth with eggs.

  "You're safe, Murphy." Her laughter faded. "I'd really like to know what he said to you."

  Because it was important to her, he crawled over his embarrassment. "I was... I'd been..."

  "You don't have to tell me that part." She smiled to soothe him. "Now, anyway."

  "After," he said, relieved to have gotten past that first leap. "I was feeling proud-manly I'd guess you could say. And as confused as a monkey with three tails. Guilty, terrified I might have gotten the girl pregnant because I'd been too hot-young and stupid," he corrected, "to think of that before the matter. So I was sitting out on the wall, a part of me wondering when I might get back and do the whole thing again, and the other part waiting for God to strike me dead for doing it in the first place. Or for Ma to find out and do the job quicker and with less mercy than God ever would."

  "Murphy." She forgot herself and bit into a slice of bacon. "You're so sweet."

  "It's as much a moment in a man's life as it is a woman's I'd say. Anyway, I was sitting there thinking of what you might imagine, and Tom comes along. He sits next to me and says nothing for a time. Just sits and looks out over the fields. It must have been all over my face. He puts his arm around my shoulders. 'Made a man of yourself,' he says, 'and you're proud of it. But it takes more than sliding into a willing lass to make a man. Takes responsibility.' "

  Murphy shook his head and picked up his tea. "Now I'm sick thinking I might have to marry her, and me barely seventeen and no more in love with her than she with me. And I say so. He just nods, not lecturing or scolding. He tells me if God and fate are looking kindly, he knows I'll remember it, and have more of a care next time out. 'There'll be a next time,' he says, 'because a man doesn't stop going down such a lovely path once he's begun it. And a woman is a glorious thing to hold and to have. The right woman, when you find her, is more than sunlight. You watch for her, Murphy, and while you're sniffing those sweet flowers along the way, treat them with care and affection, and don't bruise their petals. If you love with kindness, even when you can't love with permanence, you'll deserve the one who's waiting along that path for you.' "

  It took Shannon a moment to find her voice. "Everyone says he wanted to be a poet, but didn't have the words." She pressed her lips together. "It sounds as though he did to me."

  "He had them when it counted," Murphy said quietly. "He often lacked them for himself. He carried sadness in his eyes that showed when he didn't know you were looking."

  Shannon looked down at her hands. They were her mother's hands, narrow, long fingered. And she had Tom Concannon's eyes. What else, she wondered, had they given her?

  "Would you do something for me, Murphy?"

  "I'd do anything for you."

  She knew it, but just then couldn't let herself think of it. "Would you take me to Loop Head?"

  He rose, took their plates from the table. "You'll need your jacke
t, darling. The wind's brisk there."

  She wondered how often Tom Concannon had taken this drive, along the narrow, twisting roads that cut through the roll of fields. She saw little stone sheds without roofs, a tethered goat that cropped at wild grass. There was a sign painted on the side of a white building warning her it was the last stop for beer until New York. It nearly made her smile.

  When he parked the truck, she saw with relief that there was no one else who had come to see the cliffs and sea that morning. They were alone, with the wailing wind and the jagged rocks and the crash of surf. And the whisper of ghosts.

  She walked with him down the ribbon of dirt that cut through the high grass and toward the edge of Ireland.

  The wind lashed at her, a powerful thing blown over the dark water and spewing surf. The thunder of it was wonderful. To the north she could see the Cliffs of Mohr and the still misted Aran Islands.

  "They met here." She linked her fingers with Murphy's when he took her hand. "My mother told me, the. day she went into the coma, she told me how they'd met here. It was raining and cold and he was alone. She fell in love with him here. She knew he was married, had children. She knew it was wrong. It was wrong, Murphy. I can't make myself feel differently."

  "Don't you think they paid for it?"

  "Yes, I think they paid. Over and over. But that doesn't-" She broke off, steadied her voice. "It was easier when I didn't really believe he loved her. When I

  didn't, couldn't think of him as a good man, as a father who would have loved me if things had been different. I had one who did," she said fiercely. "And I won't ever forget that."

  "You don't have to love the one less to open your heart a bit to the other."

  "It makes me feel disloyal." She shook her head before he could speak. "It doesn't matter if it's not logical to feel that way. I do. I don't want Tom Concannon's eyes, I don't want his blood, I don't-" She pressed her hand to her mouth and let the tears come. "I lost something, Murphy, the day she told me. I lost the image, the illusion, that smooth quiet mirror that reflected my family. It's shattered, and now there are all these cracks and layers and overlapping edges when it's put back together."

  "How do you see yourself in it now?"

  "With different pieces scattered over the whole, and connections I can't turn away from. And I'm afraid I'll never get back what I had." Eyes desolate, she turned to him. "She lost her family because of me, faced the shame and fear of being alone. And it was because of me she married a man she didn't love." Shannon brushed at the tears with the back of her hand. "I know she did love him in time. A child knows that about her parents-you can feel it in the air, the same way you can feel an argument that adults think they're hiding from you. But she never forgot Tom Concannon, never closed him out of her heart, or forgot how she felt when she walked to these cliffs in the rain and saw him."

  "And you wish she had."

  "Yes, I wish she had. And I hate myself for wishing it. Because when I wish it I know I'm not thinking of her, or of my father. I'm thinking of me."

  "You're so hard on yourself, Shannon. It hurts me to see it."

  "No, I'm not. You have no idea the easy, the close-to-perfect life I had." She looked out to sea again, her hair streaming back from her face. "Parents who indulged me in nearly everything. Who trusted me, respected me every bit as much as they loved me. They wanted me to have the best and saw that I got it. Good homes in good neighborhoods, good schools. I never wanted for anything, emotionally or materially. They gave me a solid foundation and let me make my own choices on how to use it. Now I'm angry because there's a fault under the foundation. And the anger's like turning my back on everything they did for me."

  "That's nonsense, and it's time you stopped it." Firm, he took her shoulders. "Was it anger that made you come here to where it began, knowing what it would cost you to face it? You know he died here, yet you came to face that, too, didn't you?"

  "Yes. It hurts."

  "I know, darling." He gathered her close. "I know it does. The heart has to break a little to make room."

  "I want to understand." It was so comforting to rest her head on his shoulder. The tears didn't burn then, and the pang in her heart lessened. "It would be easier to accept when I understand why they all made the choices they made."

  "I think you understand more than you know." He turned so that they faced the sea again, the crashing and endless symphony of wave against rock. "It's beautiful here. On the edge of the world." He kissed her hair. "One day you'll bring your paints and draw what you see, what you feel."

  "I don't know if I could. So many ghosts."

  "You drew the stones. There's no lack of ghosts there, and they're as close to you as these."

  If it was a day for courage, she would stand on her own when she asked him. Shannon stepped back. "The man and white horse, the woman in the field. You see them."

  "I do. Hazily when I was a boy, then clearer after I found the broach. Clearer yet since you stepped into Brianna's kitchen and looked at me with eyes I already knew."

  "Tom Concannon's eyes."

  "You know what I mean, Shannon. They were cool then. I'd seen them that way before. And I'd seen them hot, with anger and with lust. I'd seen them weeping and laughing. I'd seen them swimming with visions."

  "I think," she said carefully, "that people can be susceptible to a place, an atmosphere. There are a number of studies-" She broke off when his eyes glinted at her. "All right, we'll toss out logic temporarily. I felt-feel- something at the dance. Something strange, and familiar. And I've had dreams-since the first night I came to Ireland."

  "It unnerves you. It did me for a time."

  "Yes, it unnerves me."

  "There's a storm," he prompted, trying not to rush her.

  "Sometimes. The lightning's cold, like a spear of ice against the sky, and the ground's hard with frost so you can hear the sound of the horse thundering across it before you see it and the rider."

  "And the wind blows her hair while she waits. He sees her and his heart's beating as hard as the horse's hooves beat the ground."

  Clutching her arms around her, Shannon turned away. It was easier to look at the sea. "Other times there's a fire in a small dark room. She's bathing his face with a cloth. He's delirious, burning with fever that's spread from his wounds."

  "He knows he's dying," Murphy said quietly. "All he has to hold him to life is her hand, and the scent of her, the sound of her voice as she soothes him."

  "But he doesn't die." Shannon took a long breath. "I've seen them making love, by the fire, in the dance. It's like watching and being taken at the same time. I'll wake up hot and shaky and aching for you." She turned to him then, and he saw a look he'd seen before in her eyes, the smoldering fury of it. "I don't want this."

  "Tell me what I did, to turn your heart against me."

  "It isn't against you."

  But he took her arms, his eyes insistent. "Tell me what I did."

  "I don't know." She shouted it, then, shocked by the bitterness, pressed against him. "I don't know. And if I do somehow I can't tell you. This isn't my world, Murphy. It's not real to me."

  "But you're trembling."

  "I can't talk about this. I don't want to think about it. It makes everything more insane and impossible than it already is."

  "Shannon-"

  "No." She took his mouth in a desperate kiss.

  "This won't always be enough to soothe either of us."

  "It's enough now. Take me back, Murphy. Take me back and we'll make it enough."

  Demands wouldn't sway her, he knew. Not when she was clinging so close to her fears. Helpless to do otherwise, he kept her under his arm and led her back to the truck.

  Gray saw the truck coming as he walked back to the inn and hailed it. The minute he stepped up to Shannon's window he could sense the tension. And he could see quite easily, though she'd done her best to mask it, that she'd been crying.

  He sent Murphy an even look, exactly the
kind a brother might aim at anyone who made his sister unhappy.

  "I've just come back from your place. When you didn't answer the phone, Brianna started worrying."

  "We went for a drive," Shannon told him. "I asked Murphy to take me to Loop Head."

  "Oh." Which explained quite a bit. "Brie was hoping we could go out to the gallery. All of us."

  "I'd like that." She thought the trip might dispel the lingering depression. "Could you?" she asked Murphy.

  "I have some things to see to." He could see it would disappoint her if he made excuses, and that she wouldn't talk to him now in any case. "Could you hold off for an hour or two?"

  "Sure. We'll take Maggie and the monster with us. Rogan's already out there. Come by when you're ready."

  "I need to change," Shannon said quickly. She was already opening the door as she glanced back at Murphy. "I'll wait for you here, all right?"

  "That's fine. No more than two hours." He nodded toward Gray, then drove off.

  "Tough morning?" Gray murmured.

  "In several ways. I can't seem to talk to him about what happens next." Or what happened before, she admitted.

  "What does happen next?"

  "I have to go back, Gray. I should have left a week ago." She leaned into him when he draped an arm over

  her shoulder, and looked out over the valley. "My job's on the line."

  "The old rock and a hard place. I've been there a few times. No way to squeeze out without bruises." He led her through the gate, down the path, and to the steps. "If I were to ask you what you wanted in your life, for your life, would you be able to answer?"

  "Not as easily as I could have a month ago." She sat with him, studying the foxglove and nodding columbine. "Do you believe in visions, Gray?"

  "That's quite a segue."

  "I guess it is, and a question I never figured I'd ask anyone." She turned to study him now. "I'm asking you because you're an American." When his grin broke out, hers followed. "I know how that sounds, but hear me out. You make your home here, in Ireland, but you're still a Yank. You make your living by creating fiction, telling stories, but you do it on modern equipment. There's a fax machine in your office."