Born in Shame

by Nora Roberts

  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 jacket, 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."r />
  "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."

  "Yeah, that makes all the difference."

  "It means you're a twentieth-century man, a forward-looking man who understands technology and uses it."

  "Murphy has a top-of-the-line milk machine," Gray pointed out. "His new tractor's the best modern technology's come up with."

  "And he cuts his own turf," Shannon finished, smiling. "And his blood is full of Celtic mystique. You can't tell me that part of him doesn't believe in banshees and fairies."

  "Okay, I'd say Murphy's a fascinating combination of old Ireland and new. So your question to me is do I believe in visions." He waited a beat. "Absolutely."

  "Oh, Grayson." Frustrated, she sprang up, strode two paces down the path, turned, and strode back. "How can you sit there, wearing Nikes and a Rolex and tell me you believe in visions?"

  He looked down at his shoes. "I like Nikes, and the watch keeps pretty good time."

  "You know very well what I mean. You're not going to have any trouble rolling into the twenty-first century, yet you're going to sit there and say you believe in fifteenth-century nonsense."

  "I don't think it's nonsense, and I don't think it's stuck in the fifteenth century, either. I think it goes back a whole lot further, and that it'll keep going through several more millenniums."

  "And you probably believe in ghosts, too, and reincarnation, and toads that turn into princes."

  "Yep." He grinned, then took her hand and pulled her down again. "You shouldn't ask a question if the answer's going to piss you off." When she only huffed, he toyed with her fingers. "You know when I came to this part of Ireland, I had no intention of staying. Six months maybe, write the book, and pack up. That's the way I worked, and lived. Obviously Brianna's the main reason I changed that. But there's more. I recognized this place."