Harlequin Holiday Collection - Four Classic Seasonal Novellas

to convince himself he’d agreed to her offer for purely professional reasons.
    But that didn’t explain why he spent the next hour with his arms crossed behind his head, staring up into the darkness and thinking about ways to get the delectable Ms. Sophie Hawthorne into bed.

Chapter Four
    Sophie and Clint arrived at the Brú na Bóinne visitor center well before dawn on the longest night of the year. The visitor center controlled access to the three ancient tombs set on a high plain overlooking the River Boyne.
    Bundled in the thick pea jacket she’d purchased at a secondhand store and a wool muffler wrapped around her throat, Sophie was prepared for the biting cold. So was Clint. In a camel-hair overcoat, a wool driving cap and the black-framed glasses she suspected he didn’t really need, he looked very much the eager tourist about to experience a once-in-a-lifetime event.
    Although the sun wouldn’t top the ridge to the east for another three hours, huge crowds were already waiting in line for transport out to the tombs. Sophie tucked her gloved hands in her pockets while Clint met his Irish contact from the Arts and Antiquities Division.
    Brisk and businesslike, Inspector Dennis Fitzgerald whisked them around the security checkpoint and onto a minibus. Their destination was the largest of the site’s three passage tombs—so called because of the shadowed, narrow inner passages that led to the burial chambers. There were hundreds of such tombs scattered across Ireland, including one on the magnificent Hill of Tara, which later became the seat of the Celtic kings of Ireland. But most scholars, Sophie among them, considered Newgrange the granddaddy of them all. Five hundred years older than the pyramids at Giza and a thousand years older than Stonehenge, the tomb dominated a high hill above the river.
    Inspector Fitzgerald got off the bus first to coordinate with the local constabulary. As they stepped onto the hill, Clint kept Sophie tucked against his side to shield her from the icy wind.
    Sophie’s breath caught at the sight of the massive cairn illuminated by floodlights. Two hundred thousand tons of grass-covered earth formed the rounded roof. Beneath the roof was an upper ring of white quartz “pebbles,” polished to a lustrous sheen by centuries of river water before being gathered by the ancient tomb builders. Beneath the glistening quartz ring stood the base, consisting of ninety-seven monstrous curbstones weighing five or more tons apiece, silent sentinels to man’s determination.
    As Sophie well knew, Newgrange was much more than a burial site. It was a holy place that housed the spirits of the ancestors and thus provided a link to the gods. Religious rituals such as the one taking place this morning had been held at the site for millennia.
    “Just think,” she murmured to Clint, “the people who built this tomb had no clock, no watches, no calendars. Yet every winter solstice for more than five thousand years, the rising sun shines through that box.” She pointed to a square opening directly above the tomb’s entrance. “Sunlight inches its way along the blackness of the passage and illuminates the inner burial chamber for fifteen or twenty minutes. As brief as it is, that phenomenon signals the end of the long, dark winter and the coming of spring. In a more mystical sense, it celebrates the rebirth of the earth and of the king, who the ancient builders believed would lead them again in the afterlife.”
    “Like Christians celebrating the birth of Christ,” Clint murmured.
    “Exactly.”
    She smiled up at him, pleased he’d paid attention to her somewhat lengthy discourse last night about how modern religions incorporated many pagan beliefs. She would have elaborated further but remembered this visit represented more than a mystical event for Clint.
    He maintained a casual stance, one arm hooked loosely around Sophie’s waist, but she could feel the tension in him as he scanned the crowd. Her nerves fluttered as she, too, searched the faces muffled by wool scarves and warm hats pulled low on foreheads.
    “Do you have any idea what this person we’re searching for looks like?” she murmured.
    “Not a clue.”
    Slowly they wove their way through media crews, families sipping hot chocolate, serious sun-and-star worshippers, even two bridal parties where the soon-to-be newlyweds wanted to start their life together on a day sacred since ancient times. Sophie gave the happy brides