Haunting Embrace (5 page)

“Where did you get this coat, missy? ’Tis a borrowed one from my Mickey. He gave it to Mr. Brady, his deckhand.”

Mr. Brady? Deckhand?
Meaghan shot a glance at Áedán and then looked away from his piercing eyes. He seemed to thrum with emotion—violence, bewilderment . . .
pain.
The pain went so deep that it dominated everything else. She didn’t understand the complexity of what he felt, but she couldn’t miss the power of his feelings.

“Tell her you found the coat here,” he said when the silence stretched.

“I found the coat on the rocks,” she mumbled, mesmerized by the shock waves of his feelings. Gaze narrowed on hers, he stepped closer, invading her space again, stealing all the air in the cavern. When she would have looked away, he took her chin in his hand and held her steady, searching her face, trying to pry her thoughts from inside her.

Colleen made a small tsking noise. “That’s not like Mr. Brady to be so careless.”

“I’ve been working for her husband since I got here,” Áedán said.

She jerked her chin from his long, warm fingers, noticing for the first time that he had a handkerchief wrapped around his palm and it was soaked in blood. He’d been working for her grandfather? It was hard to imagine Áedán doing any type of labor.

“He can see me,” Áedán went on. He pointed to Colleen. “
She
can see me. Everyone on this forsaken island can see me—or could until now. Until
you
appeared.”

Stunned by this news, she tried another silent question.
Why?

“I’ve no fecking idea,” he said. “Get dressed so I can get some bloody answers.”

All too aware of Áedán’s hot eyes following her every movement, Meaghan reached in the bag Colleen had brought and pulled out a shapeless bundle of brown wool. It was a dress, apparently. The twin to the unflattering sack Colleen herself wore, by the looks of it.

Nearly blue with cold, Meaghan pulled her sodden T-shirt over her head. She heard Áedán suck in a soft breath, and glanced up to find him standing very close, the heat of his body scorching the air, his attention fixed on her breasts, puckered against her wet, nearly transparent bra. The look he gave her burned her icy skin as he lifted a hand and softly traced the scalloped lace with a finger.

Had Colleen not been there, she would have told him to take his fecking hand off her, but her grandmother stood quietly by, her cheeks pink as she caught sight of Meaghan’s sheer bra.

And Áedán’s touch had momentarily immobilized her. No, it was more than his touch. For one unguarded moment, emotions flashed across his face. She saw vulnerability; she saw grief. She saw hopeless longing that touched her more deeply than his hands. She felt his hunger in the air—had tasted it in his kiss when she’d first opened her eyes. There was more to Áedán than the cynical and disdainful front he showed the world, and it was all there in his gaze for that fleeting instant.

While Meaghan stood like a statue, he trailed his fingers down to her cleavage and then suddenly glanced up, catching her by surprise before she could conceal the knowledge of what she’d surmised. Immediately that window into his soul slammed shut, and there was nothing but challenge in his face now. He cupped her breast, daring her to do something, to say something when he knew that she could do neither. She raised her brows, trying to appear tough, insulted, and unaffected. His quick flash of teeth told her she’d failed.

With a glare, she tugged the brown dress over her head, forcing him to step back. She didn’t reach for the fastening on her jeans until it covered her. Fighting the wool, she had to twist and turn to peel the wet denim off her legs, too aware of the green eyes tracking her every move, but finally she was free of her dripping garments and immediately warmer for it. Colleen had brought thick black stockings and the promised shoes. Scowling, Meaghan put them on, fighting the desire to look up to see what lurked in his gaze now. She was afraid he’d see how much he’d disarmed her with that brief caress, with those knowing eyes. She tasted lust in the air between them. His or hers? She couldn’t tell and didn’t want to pursue it for fear of the answer.

Blasted man.

But she couldn’t banish the memory of that stark longing she glimpsed on his face.

“Well,” Colleen said brightly. “You certainly fill that out better than I do.”

“Indeed,” Áedán agreed in a silky, dangerous voice.

As Colleen had said, Meaghan was bigger boned and taller than her grandmother, and the dress didn’t hang like a sack on her. Instead, it hugged her hips and thighs, and she had to pull the fabric together in order to button up the front—which she did as quickly as her frozen fingers would allow.

Holding the baby with practiced ease, Colleen began stuffing Meaghan’s discarded clothes into her satchel, but a deep boom of thunder warned them that the storm had not moved on as they’d hoped. An instant later, the downpour erupted, sealing them inside with its fury. Meaghan shuddered. She wanted to get away from this cavern and all that it represented.

“What’s the matter, beauty?” Áedán murmured, standing too close.

“Don’t call me that,” she muttered under her breath so that Colleen, who had moved to the mouth of the cavern and stood staring at the rain with a frown, would not hear.

“I had no idea you wore such interesting trimmings beneath your garments,” he baited in that velvet voice, the light tone a sign of danger if she’d ever heard one.

“Well, I hope you got a good look, because you won’t be seeing my
trimmings
ever again,” she snapped back in a low undertone.

He smiled darkly at that, but she could still feel his touch tracing the lace of her bra, warming her skin, seducing her senses despite her desire to resist him.

Colleen sighed and turned back to face Meaghan, her eyes anxious. “It looks like we’ll be stuck for a while more, like it or not. Best have a seat and wait it out.”

Nodding, Meaghan sat on one of the boulders and Colleen perched on another, shifting her baby to a comfortable position. Áedán stood nearby, watching, waiting . . . a dark and dangerous shadow with lust in his eyes and who knew what in his heart.

Meaghan pried her gaze from him and nervously glanced at Colleen, wanting to pepper her with questions but knowing better than to do it. The Colleen that Meaghan had known all her life was a woman who liked things on her own terms. She couldn’t say if, like her regal bearing, it was an innate inclination or one she’d grown into.

Besides, tension knotted Meaghan’s stomach and she didn’t know how to begin. If this was her grandmother, then Meaghan had somehow awoken in the past. What if she did or said something that might impact her future? What if she changed history? She’d seen
The Butterfly Effect
. She’d read
A Wrinkle in Time
. She knew she walked a dangerous path—but how did she get off it? How did she get back to her own time?

The gray-green light from the stormy sky outside trickled in and gave the cavern an eerie cast. The echo of rain coming down in great sluicing sheets combined with the surging tide and made Meaghan feel as if she sat in the belly of a great beast. She eyed the markings on the ceiling anxiously, knowing just how true that might be. The Book of Fennore was a monster of another kind, and this was its lair. She felt it to her bones.

“I knew to come to the cavern because I had a visitor who told me to do it,” Colleen said abruptly, slicing through Meaghan’s fearful thoughts and answering the question she hadn’t known how to form.

“Who?” Meaghan and Áedán asked at the same time.

“She said her name was Saraid.”

Áedán gave a muttered curse, and she felt the blast of his shock but couldn’t ask him why or how he knew this
Saraid
.

“Saraid?” she repeated, watching Áedán pace from the corner of her eye. “She’s a friend?”

“Ach, no. I’d never seen the likes of her before. She just appeared at my house without warning. She was dressed in the queerest clothes, and I’ll tell you, she seemed a bit delighted to catch me by surprise.”

“Delighted?”

“Aye. There was no mistaking it.”

“But she was a stranger? You didn’t know her? Why—”

“Well, sure and don’t I wish I knew why. I was doing me wash, as always, and suddenly I turned and there she was, standing just behind me, dressed in costume, would you believe?”

Meaghan shook her head. But really, at this point, what wouldn’t she believe?

“I swear it. She says to me, ‘Colleen of the Ballagh, I’ve come to give you a message.’ Just like that.”

The baby in her arms—Niall, Meaghan’s
father
—fussed, interrupting them. Colleen took a moment to soothe him. When she looked up again, her eyes gleamed blacker than midnight.

Áedán said, “Ask her—”

“What kind of message?” Meaghan interrupted him impatiently.

“She says to me that she’s come from the past, she did. The past. She says, ‘You are of my blood.’ Then she says her name is Saraid of the Favored Lands, if you can imagine such a thing. Like it were a title she’d been given. I’ll tell you now, I was more than a bit afraid of her. I didn’t know if she was a spirit or something worse.” Colleen paused to let the significance of that sink in.
Something worse
could mean many things to the Irish. “But she weren’t of this world, that much was clear.”

“Tell her to get to the point,” Áedán snapped. “What did Saraid want? What did she say?”

Meaghan scowled at him. As an old woman, Nana Colleen had been able to silence the birds with a mere look. One did not simply demand that Colleen Ballagh
get to the point
.

“The woman, Saraid, she says to me that she was sent by Ruairi. Not just any Ruairi, mind. She says it’s Ruairi of Fennore who sent her.”

Áedán gave a bark of bitter laughter and shook his head. Meaghan was too stunned to do more than gape. Ruairi of Fennore was a mythological Irish hero who had lived over a thousand years ago.

He was also, Meaghan suspected, her lost half brother who’d vanished during Nana Colleen’s funeral. Her brother’s name, though not pronounced in the ancient Irish way, was also Rory. Meaghan had been searching for him when she herself had been swept away from the real world and into another, twisted realm that she still could not comprehend.

In the days before it had happened, she’d chanced upon a picture in a book about the great hero, Ruairi of Fennore. She could still remember the shock she’d felt as she stared at it, as she took in the familiar features, the blue eyes so like her own. Her half brother, Rory, and Ruairi of Fennore did not merely resemble one another. They were identical in every way, right down to the scar on his chest that she’d glimpsed when he’d come home for Nana’s funeral.

She had a good idea of just how much power the Book of Fennore wielded, and she suspected that somehow Rory had been caught in it, as she had. And like her, he’d been sent to another time, another place, where he’d become the stuff of legends.. . .

And now here was her grandmother telling her that Ruairi of Fennore had sent a woman to deliver a message to Meaghan. . . .

“Oh, I know what you’re thinking,” Colleen interrupted her thoughts. “And I won’t deny that I’ve had a drop or two in my time, but I swear to you now, I’d not a thing to drink but tea. Not that I believe she was
really
sent by Ruairi of Fennore. Ach, no. Could have been anyone. Show me a man who doesn’t think he’s Ruairi of Fennore once he gets a pint or two in him, is what I say to that.”

Colleen finally glanced into Meaghan’s face and then she paused.

“Now tell me why you’re looking like that, missy?”

“You won’t believe me,” Meaghan said, shaking her head.

Colleen snorted. “Didn’t I just tell you I had a visitor from the past? The woman sent by a myth, for the love of Mary. And what she had to say . . . Well, no sane person would believe it.”

Colleen shook her head in complete bewilderment and went on. “I thought her simple, I did, but now I don’t know, for she said I’d find you in this cavern, that I must go and help you, and isn’t that just what I did? Tell me what it is you think I won’t believe, missy. I’m finding meself as gullible as a child at Christmas.”

But Meaghan didn’t dare put into words even one of the crazy thoughts in her head. As if sensing the conflict within her, Áedán moved to her side and gently touched her shoulder in a brief but comforting way. Surprised, it took all of her self-control not to look at him, not to give in and search his face for clues to his thoughts. She could feel the heat of him burning through the chill and wanted to lean closer.

Instead, she focused on her grandmother and asked, “Was that it? Was that all she said? Go to the cavern and you’d find me?”

Still eyeing Meaghan with those piercing black eyes, Colleen asked, “Would you be wanting a prediction or something? It’s not enough that she told me to come here? She made some comment about a chicken and an egg and which came first. I don’t see the relevance of it, but she thought it quite amusing.” She paused for a moment, and then, “Now it’s your turn. Why don’t you tell me what you’re doing in this cavern, Meaghan Ballagh?”

“Ballagh?” Áedán repeated slowly, moving around so he could see her face. “Meaghan
Ballagh
?”

The second time it sounded like a condemnation. With a muffled curse, he shook his head and withdrew another step. Immediately, she missed the warmth and comfort of having him at her side and called herself a fool for it. She didn’t understand the accusation she heard in his tone, though. She’d told him her full name when they’d met. It wasn’t her fault he’d forgotten it, but he looked at her as if she’d pulled an elaborate scam on him.

Frowning, she eyed her grandmother. What did
she
think of their shared last name? Had Saraid told Colleen that Meaghan was her granddaughter? Or did Colleen think they were merely distant relatives, if even that? Ballagh was common enough in Meaghan’s time, especially on the Isle of Fennore.

“Well?” Colleen said with raised brows and a pointed look, waiting for Meaghan to answer her question. “How did you get here?”