Haunting Embrace (4 page)

“She slipped,” Áedán said. “We need to get her warm.”

Colleen didn’t even glance his way. Instead she gaped at Meaghan as if she’d never seen a wet female before. Granted, Meaghan was a sight. The jeans she wore clung to her legs and the T-shirt had become a second skin, outlining something lacy over her breasts, communicating just how cold she really was, reminding him how hot she’d felt just moments before in his arms. That traitorous feeling inside him protested at the sight of her body wracked with cold, but he steeled himself against his own baffling reactions.

Bending—for Colleen’s benefit, he told himself—he took Meaghan’s hands between his again and continued to rub. The gash in his palm had soaked through Mickey’s handkerchief and throbbed, but the bleeding had stopped and he ignored the pain. Meaghan’s breath plumed in front of her. Outside their shelter, distant thunder boomed ominously, and all three of them startled. Colleen tucked the infant closer to her body, adjusting the blanket over his head to keep him warm.

What could have possessed her to come to this cavern?

“What are you doing here, Mrs. Ballagh?” he asked again.

“Sure and didn’t she tell me I’d find you here and to bring clothes, but I didn’t know why, did I now?” Colleen said, still staring at Meaghan.

And with a trickle of unease, Áedán realized that she had yet to answer him, had yet to even glance his way. Was it deliberate? Was she angry about something? Colleen had never been anything but kind and thoughtful to Áedán since her husband had brought him to their door and commanded that she feed him.

“Who told you she’d be here?” Áedán asked warily. When Colleen still didn’t respond to his question, he looked at Meaghan, glad to see that spark still glinting in her eyes instead of the vacant look she’d awakened with. “What is she talking about?”

Teeth chattering, Meaghan shook her head.

“It’s the truth,” Colleen went on, as if Meaghan had denied her claim. “She told me that I’m to go to the cavern this afternoon. ‘Bring clothes,’ she says. ‘They might be needed.’ She said I would find a girl and she might be as naked as Eve in the garden. Instead I find one near turned to ice, but I’ve no doubt it was you she meant.”

“Who?” Áedán barked again. “Who told you?”

He stood and stalked to Colleen’s side, feeling, once again, that dread coiling tight and fear tripping over his skin. But with each step, a new kind of horror overtook him. Colleen’s gaze never flickered from Meaghan. Even the baby in her arms looked right through him as he stopped in front of them both.

“I don’t suppose I even need to ask if your name would be Meaghan, do I?” Colleen went on, shaking her head even as she confirmed her suspicions. “What other young miss would be down here in the cold, shivering like an ice maiden?”

“Mrs. Ballagh,” Áedán said, reaching out to take her arms in his hands and demand her attention. He watched a shiver go through her body at his touch, but she didn’t look his way, didn’t acknowledge that he was even there. Instead she moved toward Meaghan with an air of purpose, brushing him out of the way without a glance.

“I don’t know how you got here, missy, or who you might be, but I mean to help you. Let’s get you out of those wet clothes and into the dry ones I brought.”

In that moment, Áedán realized that he’d been right to fear this cavern.

After five days of taking meals across the table from Colleen, of working with her husband from dawn to dusk, of doing whatever menial task would help her, suddenly she couldn’t see him. Suddenly she looked right through him as if he were invisible . . . as if he didn’t even exist at all.. . .

He jerked his gaze away from Colleen to Meaghan, where she sat on the boulder shivering. She stared back with wide, uncomprehending eyes. So he wasn’t invisible to her. The realization both comforted and terrified him. Why could
she
see him and not Colleen?

That dark and insidious feeling that had greeted him at the gaping mouth of the cavern surged triumphantly around him now. It mocked the ego that had cloaked him as he’d crossed into this den, and now he felt again that strange wobbling weakness in his limbs. The air reeked of the Book of Fennore, of the world that had been his prison for longer than he could remember.

And it whispered that Áedán would never be free.. . .

Chapter Three

M
EAGHAN felt frozen from the inside out. Shivers wracked her body, clenching muscles, churning her insides, pounding in her brain. But none of that compared to the eviscerating shock that sliced through her as she grappled with the three unbelievable truths that met her eyes.

One, she was back in the cavern, back where her nightmare had begun on the Isle of Fennore. Only, if Áedán could be believed, decades had passed—or been lost. If it was 1956, then Meaghan had regained consciousness over thirty years before she’d even been born.

Impossible.
And yet, impossible had become her new normal, hadn’t it?

She shook her head, moving to the second in her list of unbeliev-ables. In the chaos of their escape from the nightmare world where they’d met, somehow Áedán and Meaghan had landed here together. How, she didn’t know. Why, she couldn’t guess. But it felt preordained in a way that filled her with foreboding. Áedán was six feet plus of muscle and man, but Meaghan wasn’t foolish enough to think him
just
a man. There was something otherworldly about Áedán. Something that pinged against her instincts and warned her not to underestimate him.

When they’d been trapped together in that nightmare world that belonged to the Book of Fennore—a world that defied description or explanation—Áedán had been invisible to everyone but Meaghan. She hadn’t known if that made him a ghost, an illusion, or a twisted figment of her imagination. She’d eliminated the last from the line of options; his touch had been too real to be fabricated by her mind. Out of necessity, they’d become uneasy allies with a common foe, if vastly different goals. But she didn’t trust him.

Even now she didn’t know who or
what
Áedán really was, other than dangerously attractive and masculine in a way that made every feminine cell in her body vibrate. She’d been dreaming of him when she’d awakened. Crazy, carnal dreams, filled with scent, taste, texture, and desire that burned hot enough to incinerate her. When she’d seen him leaning over her, she hadn’t thought twice about wrapping her arms around him and losing herself in the arousal that had followed her out of the dream. She still fought the urge to go to him, to finish what she’d started.

And he knew it. She could see it there in that hot gaze that took in every detail, from her heaving breasts to her swollen lips. It might have been humiliating, being so open, so easily read by a man she wasn’t sure she liked and knew she certainly didn’t trust.

But Áedán wasn’t immune to her either.

Meaghan didn’t need her empathic skills to feel Áedán’s lust coming at her like the tide, rolling in waves that shushed over her and then retreated, leaving in their wake a hollow, achy yearning and the mystifying taste of fear. The longing she understood, but the fear confused her. She didn’t sense danger around them and couldn’t begin to guess what he might be afraid of here, in this deserted cavern with only two women and a child.

Her gaze moved at last to the tiny figure holding her baby—the third and most unbelievable truth she had to face.

The young woman who stood an arm’s length away, wearing an expectant expression that Meaghan knew all too well, was none other than Colleen Ballagh.

Colleen Ballagh.

She couldn’t mistake the familiar features. The dark eyes, the cheekbones that Meaghan had always wished for, the full lips. No more than five foot three, Colleen Ballagh still managed to have a presence about her, a bearing that spoke of strength and pride. Meaghan had always thought that wisdom and age had given her that regal air, but now she saw that it must be innate, because in this crazy reality Colleen looked years younger than Meaghan. She hardly seemed old enough to be a mother, let alone have one child in her arms and another on the way.

Meaghan closed her eyes for a moment, besieged by her own realizations. Oh yes, she knew Colleen Ballagh. But the last time she’d seen this woman had been at a funeral.
Colleen’s
funeral. She’d died a feisty old woman, leaving her family bereft and mourning her loss.

“Who is she?” Áedán demanded, cutting his eyes between them.

“Colleen Ballagh,” Meaghan managed to say.

Colleen. Ballagh.

Here. Now. Alive. But how?

“I know her name. But
who
is she? Who is she to
you
?”

My grandmother. And I think the child in her arms will one day be my dad.

She didn’t say that part, though. It was too crazy, too fundamentally wrong to voice.

“That’s right,” Colleen said, and for a moment Meaghan thought she’d heard her thoughts. “I am Colleen Ballagh. And you would be Meaghan, isn’t that the way of it?”

“How does she know who you are?” Áedán asked, his voice thick with suspicion. Evidently he didn’t remember that Meaghan’s last name was also Ballagh. “Why can’t she see me?”

Meaghan wanted to answer him, to tell him she didn’t have a clue how Colleen knew who she was. She wanted to ask him why Colleen’s inability to see him came as a surprise when no one else but her had been able to see him before. Then she remembered . . . when Colleen had first entered, Áedán had expected her to recognize him. He’d spoken to her familiarly. He’d been shocked when she looked right through him.

“Ask her,” he insisted.

Don’t tell me what to do,
she wanted to bark back, bristling at his commanding tone. But she couldn’t say that, not unless she wanted Colleen to think her crazy—crazier than she probably already did.

“How do you know who I am?” Meaghan asked calmly, shooting Áedán a speaking glance to back off. He might be the sexiest man to grace the earth, but he got under her skin—and not in a good way. He’d had that effect on her since the first moment she’d met him.

“Now isn’t that a question,” Colleen answered with a tight smile. “The two of us, we’ve a tale to share, have we not? But you’ll freeze to death if you don’t get changed into dry clothes, and I’ve not the time nor the energy to nurse you back to health, so I suggest you get to it and then we’ll have our chat. I’m not sure how the clothes will be fitting you—they’re mine and you’re a bit bigger than I am, but dry is dry. The shoes belonged to my husband’s first wife and are too big for me. They should be fine for you.”

Colleen dropped her satchel to the ground and knelt down, balancing the baby in her arms as she began to work the knot that held it closed. Over her bent head, Áedán captured Meaghan’s gaze in the deep forest green of his own, trapped her between the shifting shades. He was angry—she saw it in the hard glitter of gold that flecked the greens, sensed it in the chilled air between them. But the other emotions spewing and frothing within him held her under. He felt she’d betrayed him in some way, but she couldn’t fathom why.

“What have you done, beauty?” he said, using the absurd pet name he’d given her when they’d been trapped together. “Why did you lure me here?”

She hadn’t, but even if she could argue the point with him, she could see it would do no good. His mind was made up. He cloaked the churn of bitterness he felt behind a placid expression of arrogance and boredom she knew too well. When they’d met for the first time, her ability to sense emotions had been suppressed by the eerie energy of the world of Fennore, and that mask had fooled her. Now she could see behind it. She only wished her empathic gift came with subtitles.

“What have you done?” he repeated, moving closer, invading her personal space with his size and sheer presence. He made the cavern seem suddenly too small.

“Nothing,” she whispered.

Colleen paused and looked up from the bag. “Nothing? Well, I’d hardly call this nothing, would I now? It’s more like a miracle. Or maybe an omen. Time will tell the truth, I suppose.”

“What do you mean?” Meaghan asked before Áedán could tell her to do it.

“You, being here where you don’t belong.” When Meaghan would have fired another question, Colleen held up her hand. “Don’t bother to ask, I won’t answer another. Not here. I don’t like this place. Never have.”

No, Meaghan had never liked it either. The cavern held an air of malignant blackness that went deeper than the inky pool at their feet. She’d seen the underbelly of what caused that rotted, malevolent feeling. It was the Book of Fennore—an ancient tome that predated even the Bible. It housed more than the archaic runes, which covered its pages from edge to edge, symbols of an extinct language that told a terrible tale. The same symbols that marked the walls here. The Book held a curse, the curse imprisoned an entity—a powerful being bent on destruction.

Áedán made a sound of irritation and turned his back, frustration etching every fine line of muscle trailing from broad shoulders to lean hips and long legs.

“How did she know to bring you clothes?” he muttered.

It was a good question, though she was loath to act as his parrot and ask it.

“How did you know I’d need clothes, Co—Mrs. . . .” Meaghan trailed off, looking uncertain about what to call the other woman. She’d been Nana to Meaghan since she’d learned to speak. All of Colleen’s grandchildren called her Nana.

“Colleen will do just fine,” she said. “And I swear to tell you everything once we get you changed and away from this place. We can only hope the storm keeps moving. We won’t make it up the stairs if it starts to rain again. I had to wait it out in the castle ruins before I could come down. Now, can you dress yourself or do you need help?”

Meaghan gave a jerky nod. “I can manage it on my own. My fingers are just a little numb, but they work.” Reluctantly, Meaghan shrugged out of the coat Áedán had draped over her shoulders, shivering violently as his warmth went with it. Colleen caught the jacket up, staring at it with consternation.