HauntingBeauty







Chapter Twenty-one


SEAN didn’t ask why she was crying. Some part of him knew to do so would be to invite an even greater breakdown. Somehow Sean sensed that Danni’s tears sprang from a deeper well of emotion than fear and confusion over how they’d ended up here. Her pain came from a part of her as hot and central as the core of the earth. She didn’t just cry, she wept as if wounded to her very soul. Her misery could not be mistaken for anything less than grieving. But what did she mourn?
Everything that made him a man wanted to demand an explanation. Wanted to fix whatever was wrong and make her world right again. He managed to control the urge, perhaps because the same man who drove it also recognized the fault in it. He couldn’t fix anguish. No matter how he wanted to, he couldn’t. And in this, trying and failing her would be worse than not trying at all.
So he did what he could. He held her. Tried to give comfort through strength. Weathered her storm. His shirt was wet with her tears and still they flowed, a river of loss that had become too much to dam. He’d taken her bundle of clothes and set them aside then rocked her slowly, gently. Rubbed her back, his hands occasionally slipping higher than the towel to meet warm and silky skin. The contact was electric and it distracted him, but he stayed the course, offering nothing more than his strength and his embrace.
He couldn’t have said how long he held her before her sobs became sniffles and her tears finally ceased. He’d become lost in the feel of her, lost in her scent and the warm vibration of her body. She lifted her head from the hollow of his shoulder where it fit so perfectly and looked at him with those tear-soaked eyes. Her lashes were dark and spiky, her pupils huge and black, ringed by a circle of smoky light that shimmered with her pain.
He wanted to kiss her. He wanted to touch her as he’d done that morning—if in fact it had been more than a dream, more than a fantasy that played endlessly in his mind. But she looked embarrassed now and vulnerable, and he couldn’t bring himself to cross that line of trust. With a control he didn’t know he was capable of, he pressed his lips to her forehead and stepped back.
“I’m sorr—” she began.
“Don’t, Danni,” he said.
Those beautiful eyes rounded and she nodded once. Quickly, curtly.
“I was going to unpack the supper Nana sent,” he said, turning, giving her a moment to compose herself. “Why don’t you put some warm clothes on?”
She gave another jerky nod. “I will. Go ahead and shower. I’ll unpack the food when I’m dressed.”
He sensed her desperation for a task to fill her mind and nodded.
“I hope I left you some hot water,” she said, turning toward the curtained bedroom.
“You did, I’m sure. I thought I would have to drag you out to get a turn, but you were only in there for a few minutes.”
She paled at this, and he glanced into the tiny room wondering again what had sent her out in such a state of shock. What thoughts had poured over her with the spray of water? But he didn’t ask.
His shower was considerably longer than hers, and the hot water lasted nearly to the end. As he seemed to be doing with everything of late, he found himself entranced by the feel of the spray against his skin, the sensation of lather in his hands. Why did everything feel so different here? So vivid and tangible. Since waking that morning, it seemed even the act of breathing—of existing at all—was like a seduction in itself.
Dry, he dressed in clean boxers and a pair of worn jeans that were only a bit too big. They hung low on his hips, and he thought of the rappers who wore them around their thighs as a fashion statement. A fashion statement that was years from being made in this time or place. Colleen had sent several shirts, but most were too small. Left with only two that fit, both too heavy for indoors, he opted to go without.
He felt like a new man when he emerged to find Danni sitting in front of the fire he’d started. Her golden brown hair had almost dried and it shone in the muted light. She wore an oversized man’s T-shirt—one that would have been too small for him—and a pair of stretchy pants that ended at thick white socks. She glanced at him over her shoulder with wide, shell-shocked eyes.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
Her gaze moved from his face to his chest, slowly down then quickly up again. She blushed, and something within him, something deep and male, growled with satisfaction.
They ate the cold meal Colleen had sent and cleaned the dishes afterwards. They spoke very little, but between them there buzzed a tension as real as the air in their lungs and the food they’d consumed. It was full dark outside, but Sean suspected it was no later than seven or eight. He was bone tired, but also alert, attuned to the woman beside him.
“Have you ever been married, Danni?” he asked her suddenly.
“No.”
“Why is that, do you think? Are the men of Arizona entirely daft?”
Her smile was tight and sad. “I came close—twice.”
“What happened, then?”
He thought she might not answer. He was prying, and she didn’t owe him any explanations about herself or her past. But he hoped she’d tell him. He wanted to know about the other men in her life. He wanted the power to drive them from her memory.
“The first time, I was very young. My . . . Jack. That was his name. He met someone else.” She looked down at her white socks. “He didn’t tell me though. I think he might have actually gone through with the marriage rather than face up to what he was doing if I hadn’t caught him at it. I don’t understand it. To this day, I don’t. But I saw them together.”
He waited, wondering if she’d seen them in person, or if she’d “dreamed” them like she had the banshee. She hadn’t said as much, but he suspected she saw things the same way Nana did. He wondered if her sudden questions about the Book of Fennore had been spurred from such a sighting.
“Jack tried to deny it when I confronted him,” Danni was saying, “but I knew too many details. He said he didn’t love her and it was a mistake.” She looked up at Sean with another tight smile. “I wanted to believe him. I wanted it so badly that I forgave him, even knowing that I could never forget what he’d done. Yvonne thought I was nuts. I guess she was right. But getting married, having a family. Being part of a family . . . It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
He swallowed hard, remembering how he’d used that very lure to bring her back home. Is it not what you’ve wished for, Danni?
“The second time I caught him, I knew that even if I married Jack, we’d never be a couple. We’d just be two people who shared a last name and liked to pretend they were together. That probably doesn’t make sense, but it’s how I felt. But even then, I still couldn’t bring myself to kill my dream. I waited for him to do it.”
“He left you?” Sean said, surprised.
“Yes.” She took a deep breath, pulled her knees up under her chin, and wrapped her arms around them. “He left me.”
Sean wanted to move closer. He wanted to hold her again, to smooth out the silky skin puckered between her brows. “What about the other guy you almost married?”
“His name was David. He didn’t cheat on me, but he didn’t want me either. He said I was too reserved, too cold. He wanted a woman he could love, not just admire.” She blinked, and Sean suspected tears would have been in her eyes had she not already cried an ocean. “I never understood what he meant by that. Do you think I’m cold?” she asked.

Hell, no. She was a flame, and he felt raw and open from the burn of her. “I think he was a fucking idiot.”
She studied him, looking for something false in his words, in his eyes. Something she wouldn’t find. She smiled then. It was but a whisper of the real thing, but it was for him and only him.
With the kitchen cleared, she poured them both tea and sat at the table. She looked small in the man’s shirt, fine boned and pale as the moonlight. Once more she drew her knees up, wrapped her arms around them.
“How about you?” she asked after a moment. “Have you been married?”
“No. Not even close.”
He saw something in the look she gave him that nudged a dark place in his mind. He sensed there was a purpose behind it, but he couldn’t begin to fathom what it was or how to question it.
“Why not?” she asked. “Don’t you want to get married? Have children?”
He shrugged, realizing he hadn’t thought of it for years, hadn’t even considered it a possibility. The reason why eluded him now though. “I never met anyone I trusted enough, I guess,” he said, answering both himself and the woman across the table from him.
“Trusted enough? What about loved enough? They go together, don’t they?”
“Not always. I’ve known men who didn’t trust their wives alone in the next room, but they loved them anyway.”
Danni set her jaw and shook her head. “It has to be both for me. Doesn’t it for you?”
“Yes.”
She stared at him again with that same probing look. He felt like he was under a spotlight, a glaring search beam that rousted out the slumbering mongrels crouching and snarling in his memory. What did she want to know? Why did he fight so hard to keep it from her? He didn’t like her questions, but it was his refusal to answer even himself that made him stand and pace a few steps away.
“You’ve had serious relationships, though. Haven’t you?” she asked.
He forced a shrug. “I’ve known women.”
“I wasn’t implying otherwise,” she said, coloring to the tips of her small ears.
He wanted to kiss them. He wanted to kiss every inch of her. She pressed, “I just wondered if you’d had relationships. Commitment.”
“Sure and what woman wouldn’t want such a thing from me? I’ve barely a pot to piss in.”
“Some women care more about the man than they do his money.”
“Well, I’ve yet to meet one.”
She shifted, and he took a perverse pleasure in knowing that he’d made her uncomfortable. It didn’t matter that he’d delved into her personal life. He didn’t like her returning the favor.
“So that’s why?” she said, dispersing any hope that she’d given up on the questions. “You don’t think you have enough to offer?”
He turned his back to her, running a hand over his face. “Not entirely. I seem to have a knack for meeting women in their time of need.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“Only in that our union tends to be a bridge to something else.” He glanced at her over his shoulder, suddenly wondering if he’d just described his time with Danni. Surprised by the tight knot in his gut at the idea of it. He didn’t want to be the bridge with Danni MacGrath. He wanted to cross over it. He wanted to stand on the other side with her in his arms. And that bothered him. It worried him because women were creatures he’d never quite understood, and if he managed to foray that gap between them, he could not predict what she would do.
“Have you ever been in love?” Danni persisted, but she sounded ill at ease as she asked. Despite the wisdom of keeping his back to her, of keeping his thoughts shielded in that way, Sean turned to watch another wave of the delicate pink spread over her cheeks.
“I suppose the closest I came to love was with Molly Clark. Her husband had died, and she was alone in the world with five children to feed. I came to help her with the chores. Cut peat for her fire and brought her food when I could.”
“How did you meet her?”
Another question he didn’t like. It was too hard, reaching back in his memory, and the anger nipped his heels again. “Jesus, I don’t even remember.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“Now why would you want to know that?”
She tried to smile, tried to pretend the question had been light-hearted, teasing. But the pink flush darkened, crept from brow to throat, and there was real pain in her eyes. Why would she feel pained by the question? The woman mystified him.
He said, “She had five children and only the wee hours of the night to spend with a man.”
“And did you? Spend those wee hours with her?”
“Aye,” he said, thinking of those stolen minutes in the dark of her room when the moon began to fade and the sun pondered its rise. She’d welcomed him into her arms, turned her soft touch to his skin. He remembered the warmth of her, the need in her kisses, the slumberous weight of her body shifting under him.
“Like a dream lover,” Danni said softly, somehow plucking the memory from his head.
Sean scowled at that. What did she mean, “dream lover” ? But a part of him knew, a part that went scurrying into the dark when her bright beam sought it out. It was real enough, what he’d shared with Molly, even if he couldn’t recall her face now. Perhaps not as vivid, not as fiery as what he and Danni had shared that morning. He stopped the thought there. He didn’t know for a fact if they’d shared anything, did he now?
He chewed on his lip for a silent moment, wondering what went on behind her lovely gray eyes. She sat unmoving, arms still wrapped around her knees, and her stillness struck him as unnatural, as if she’d suddenly been set in plaster and hardened to a point where moving would shatter her into a million powdery fragments.
“Sean, there’s something I need to . . .”
She paused and he waited, a tightness clenching his chest. What did she need? What was she going to say? The words seemed to drag her down, clog in her throat. And some instinct told him not to pressure her. Not to force those words out. He didn’t want to hear them.
As if sensing his thoughts, she licked her lips and looked away, and a confounding wash of gratitude went through him. Whatever she’d been about to say, she’d changed her mind.
“I—I was just going to ask, when did your mother . . . when did you lose her?”
His relief vanished as quickly as it came. She couldn’t know the barbs attached to her question, but they bit at his skin and tore his flesh.
“I told you, five years ago—from now—from this time. I was nine.”
“Were you really there?”
He nodded. “And my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” she said.
He didn’t respond to that. Even now, it was too painful to talk about.
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?”