Haunting Beauty (23 page)

“No one really knows what they mean,” he went on. “Some think the symbols have to do with the constellations, others think they have to do with balance and harmony.” He pointed at the spiral pattern. “This one—the tri-spiral—is thought to be the spiral of life.”

Danni looked down at the intricate pattern with new curiosity.

“But see,” he went on, “that’s only one school of thought. There are others who say it represents the triple goddess. Three is a sacred number.”

“Which one do you think it is?”

Cathán touched the pendant with his finger and then quickly jerked it back. “I’m sorry, may I?” She gave a tight nod and watched as he lifted it from where it rested against her skin. “There is no way to prove one theory over the other. So much of our history was oral that we can only guess at it. The spirals are ancient so they could be the circle of life—life, death, and rebirth. It’s a mystical symbol though. Seems it should be something beyond life and death. To me anyway. It could also represent eternal truth.”

“Eternal truth? Interesting. How do you know so much about them?” she asked, looking up. He was standing very close again, and she tried to be calm about it. He seemed completely focused on the necklace and probably wasn’t even aware he was crowding her.

“I’m a bookworm as well as a history lover,” he said. Another flush crept up his face, and his smile had a shy quality that she found endearing. She had a sudden mental image of him as a boy, reading-under the covers long after bedtime. “I’m . . . what do you Ameri cans call it? A nerd.”

She laughed. Her father was anything but a nerd. Complex, yes. Confusing—one moment concerned about his wife’s emotional well-being and the next focused completely on a necklace a new servan-t wore—absolutely. But he was far from the horn-rimmed stereotypi cal nerd.

“It’s a personal obsession of mine, I guess,” he was saying. “Ever since I was a boy. I suppose it’s the mystery of it. These symbols are everywhere and yet no one has ever cracked the code. What do they mean? Why do some spiral clockwise and others counterclockwise—like this one. It’s significant, you know. Many believe the spirals that curl this way are connected to pagan spells. They were used to manipulate the natural order of things.”

“Spells? Like magic?”

He raised his brows and grinned. “Aye. You could be wearing a powerful charm around your lovely neck, Danni. Have a care what you do with it.”

He laughed and finally stepped away. Danni smiled back, but his words unsettled her. Sean had called it a charm as well, but she hadn’t though much of it—not in the way her dad meant it. A charm . . .

She’d been touching the necklace when the walls had thinned and the floor beneath their feet vanished. Coincidence? Wasn’t Danni and Sean being here proof that magic was at work?

There was a knock on the back door and it made her jump. Grateful for the distraction, she hurried to it and flung it open to find Sean on the other side. His very presence—tall and strong and . . . fascinating, if she was honest—took her breath away. If he’d really been her husband, the sight of him would have made her pulse race every day. He was little more than a stranger to her now and look what he did to her equilibrium.

Aware of her father’s watchful eyes, she gave Sean a tight smile and stood back so he could enter. “I was just finishing up,” she said, hurrying back to wipe the sink and fold the towel. Bronagh expected the kitchen to gleam at the end of the day, and Danni didn’t want to incur her displeasure.

“I’ll wait on the porch,” Sean said. “Don’t want to dirty your floor.” Then he noticed Cathán leaning so casually against the counter and frowned.

“Sean, this is Mr. MacGrath.” Danni said. To her father, “This is my h-husband, Sean.”

Cathán gave Sean a nod, but didn’t move closer. Didn’t offer to shake hands. In his eyes, there was something wary, guarded. A sense that he was missing the bigger picture and knew it.

“Danni tells me you’re second cousin to Niall,” Cathán said.

“That’s right,” Sean answered.

“Who is your father?”

Sean blinked, lifting his chin so he could look Cathán in the eye. “Why do you care who my father is?”

“I only wonder that I never heard of you.”

“Well, I’ve never heard of you either.”

This brought Cathán’s brows up in surprise. “Truly? Where did you grow up?”

“Killarney.”

“And what brings you to Ballyfionúir?”

“Work.”

“There’s none to be had in Killarney?”

“I’m sure there is. But my—Colleen—is getting old. She’s all the family I have left, so I wanted to be near.”

“What about Niall?”

“What about him?”

“He’s family, too, isn’t that right?”

Sean shrugged, taking Danni’s hand as she reached his side. His touch was warm, his grip big and encompassing. It steadied her—made her realize just how off-kilter she felt. Surprised, she shot him a grateful smile.

The exchange was not lost on her father. He continued to study them for a while longer and then said, as if conceding, “Well, there’s plenty of work here. At least for the time being.”

“I’m ready,” Danni said abruptly. “It was nice talking to you Mr. MacGrath.”

She took Sean’s arm and turned him away from the house. But before they’d taken a step, Cathán said softly, “You still haven’t told me who your father is, Sean Ballagh. Is it ashamed, you are?”

Sean stilled and faced him again. There could be no misinterpreting the intent of Cathán’s comment, though Danni couldn’t understand what compelled him to taunt Sean that way. Cathán meant to insult, and from the look on Sean’s face, he’d succeeded.

“Now why would you think that?” Sean asked tightly.

The slow smile that spread over Cathán’s face was cool. “Just a feeling,” he said lightly. “No offense intended, of course.

Sean’s answering smile was equally cold. “None taken . . . of course. You’re not the first MacGrath to be jealous of what a Ballagh has, are you now?”

Cathán’s face flooded with color, but before he could sputter out his denial, Sean had closed the door behind them.

Chapter Nineteen

“
W
HY should he care who my fucking father is?” Sean snarled as they walked away. “What did he say to you? Do I need to go back and teach him some manners?”

“No,” Danni said hastily, catching the anger glinting in Sean’s eyes. “He was very polite and nice.”

Sean made a derogatory sound. He looked tired and dirty, and his face was flushed from the wind and sun, though there’d been a layer of clouds for most of the day. She wondered at that—at his burning under the watery rays. He’d been a spirit until yesterday morning and his skin hadn’t seen the sun since . . .

It boggled her mind, thinking of that, of them really being here, twenty years ago. Meeting themselves in a parallel time before their lives would be changed forever. It was the stuff of movies and science fiction novels.

“I’m to believe he didn’t say a thing about me, then?”

“He wanted to know how long we’d been married.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But earlier when Fia told him my last name, he just got . . . curious I guess. It seemed to set him off. Are there bad feelings between your family and his . . . mine?”

Sean glanced at her from the corner of his eyes. “You could say that.”

“But you said my father sent you to get me.”

“I never did.”

“You certainly implied it, and you know that’s what I thought. That’s as good as a lie.” When Sean didn’t answer, only continued to walk with his eyes staring stiffly at the ground, Danni asked quietly, “Is anything you told me true?”

He stopped in the middle of the path and faced her, taking her shoulders roughly between his big hands. “I came for you,” he said, but his tone made it clear he wasn’t happy about it. “That much was true.”

She swallowed hard, feeling anger and betrayal mix into her confusion. A part of her reasoned that Sean couldn’t be expected to tell the whole truth about why he came to her house that morning. Chances were good that he didn’t know himself.

But she couldn’t deal with the lies—not from Sean. They were in this together, and she needed to know that she could trust him. Depend on him.

He’s a ghost, Danni. And your being here is impossible . . .

She shook her head.
Impossible
had become quite the norm lately.

“I came for you,” he repeated, this time with less anger.

The grip he had on her shoulders eased, and his fingers moved in a gentle caress. It would be easy to let it go, to lean against the solid warmth of his broad chest, let those strong arms wrap around her. But Danni knew better than anyone that
easy
rarely meant
good
.

She pulled out of his hands and started walking again. “Well, next time you come for someone, make it someone else,” she retorted over her shoulder.

He mumbled a response she didn’t have to hear to understand. He was pissed off again. Well, so was she. Fueled by her righteous anger, she kept walking. After a moment, he fell in step beside her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have been more honest about why I wanted you to come home. The years after your mother disappeared with you and your bother were not . . . pleasant. Most people loved Fia and hated my father for what they thought he’d done. Since he wasn’t around to face them, I became his stand-in.”

“But you didn’t do anything. And you were just a boy.”

“A surly one with a pissy outlook on life. It wasn’t hard to hate me, too.”

Danni looked at him from the corner of her eye, knowing this must have been how he’d interpreted his existence in Ballyfionúir after his death. Friends and neighbors had turned their backs to him, not because they hated him, but because they couldn’t see him. And the few that sensed his presence mostly feared him. What a sad and lonely existence it must have been for him. He didn’t know he was a spirit; he only knew that he was outcast.

Not for the first time she wondered what he would say, what he would do if she were to give up her own secrets and tell him the truth. Would he believe her if she told him he was a ghost—or at least had been a ghost when he’d shown up on her doorstep? Of course not. But what if he did believe her? What if telling him pushed him to accept that he was dead? What if all he needed was to acknowledge the fact to make the transition from spirit to the beyond? Would he still be here with her, or would he simply vanish like a drop of water into an ocean? There was no way to know, and she was too much of a coward to risk it. To risk him leaving her here, alone.

She took a deep breath and slowly let it out. “It’s been a long day,” she said.

“Aye, that it has,” he agreed, accepting her peace offering with a tight smile.

“Did you learn anything? Any clues about how we got here?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I spent the day with my father who’s been dead for twenty years. I learned that I was a stupid boy.”

She waited for him to say more about that, but he didn’t. He just kept walking, hands shoved in his pockets now, eyes turned to the ground beneath his feet.

“What about you?” he asked, not looking up. “Did you learn anything?”

“Maybe,” she said. “What do you know about the Book of Fennore?”

That did draw his attention. He finally glanced up, surprised. “No more than anyone knows of it.”

“Very enlightening,” she said, feeling her frustration rise again. “Could you be a little more forthcoming?”

He let out an exasperated breath. “It’s a legend. No one’s ever seen it, but that doesn’t stop people from believing in it all the same. I would guess the same people believe in leprechauns as well.”

“And probably time travel, too?” she said sweetly.

He gave a conceding shrug. “You have a point. Why are you bringing it up? What do you know of it?”

“It was supposed to have powers. Magical powers,” she said.

“So do fairies, if it’s fantasy you’re wanting.”

“I don’t appreciate the sarcasm, Sean. Something brought us here and it wasn’t a 747. We are a walking paradox right now. You get that? You had breakfast with your
self
, remember. If you have a reasonable explanation for how that could happen, I’m all ears.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I didn’t think so,” she muttered.

“What is it you’re thinking about the Book of Fennore?” he asked.

She thought of quipping back with his own “no more than anyone else,” but managed to refrain. She didn’t want to fight—she was too tired for it. But her temper didn’t seem to understand that.

“Well, I think it’s real, for one.” She waited for him to deny it, but he didn’t.

Instead he gave a sharp nod and reluctantly said, “When I was a boy, I heard it had been found.”

“Here?”

He nodded. “There were rumors about it the night you disappeared.”

“I read that on the Internet. Do you believe it?”

“It’s not something I ever wanted to believe. If it is real, it’s a terrible thing, the Book. Worse than any evil ever born. We grew up fearing it—fearing whoever might use it, like a boogeyman.”

Danni swallowed and looked away. “When I mentioned it to my . . . to Fia she acted . . . strange. Not frightened as much as . . . uneasy. I don’t know how to explain it. But I thought, if it wasn’t a myth—if it really existed, this would be the place for it, right? This is where the legend put it, in Ballyfionúir. And if it
was
here before then . . .”

“Then what?”

“Well then, maybe it had something to do with
us
being here now. I know it sounds nuts, but this
is
nuts, Sean, and we’re not going to find a rational explanation for how we just lived through a day that happened twenty years ago.”

“All right, so say it is true and we’re here because of the Book of Fennore. What then? Are you thinking we might find it?”

She shot him a look, seeking out any sign of mockery in his eyes. He held his hands up. “I swear, an honest question is all it is. You want to find it and use it, is that the way of it?”

“Maybe.”