The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

illusion and a myth?”
    “No, I won’t lie. I love him.”
    He threw up his hands and groaned. “But you won’t belong to him?”
    “I won’t be anyone’s convenience ever again.” Her voice rose, snapped with a different kind of power. “The belonging, if it ever happens, will be on both sides, and be complete. I gave myself once to a man who didn’t love me, because it seemed the sensible thing to do and because . . .”
    She closed her eyes a moment, realizing she’d never admitted it, never once even to herself. “Because I was afraid no one ever would. I was afraid I’d always be alone. Nothing seemed more frightening to me than being alone. That’s just not true anymore. I’m learning how to be alone, and to like myself, to respect who I am.”
    “So the fact that you can be alone means you must be?”
    “No.” She threw up her hands this time, whirled around to pace. “Men,” she muttered. “Why does everything have to be explained step by step to men? I don’t have to be married to be happy. And I’m certainly not going to changethe life I’ve just started, risk marriage again and throw myself into someone else’s vision unless I damn well want to. Until I know I come first for a change. Me, Jude Frances Murray.”
    Her voice rose as she jabbed a hand at her own heart. And Carrick’s eyes went narrow and thoughtful.
    “I’m not settling for one inch less than all. Just because I’m in love with Aidan, just because we’re lovers, doesn’t mean I’m going to swoon from the thrill of being told he’s decided he needs a goddamn wife and I’m the one he’s picked out. I’ll do the picking out this time, thank you very much.”
    Flushed and out of breath, she glared at Carrick. And there, she realized, was everything she hadn’t put into words before. Hadn’t understood was inside her to be put into words. She would never, never again settle for less than everything.
    “I thought it was mortals I didn’t understand,” Carrick said after a moment. “But I’m thinking now it’s just female mortals I don’t understand. So explain this to me, would you, Jude Frances? Why isn’t love enough?”
    She let out a quiet sigh. “It is, when it is.”
    “Why are you speaking in riddles?”
    “Because until you solve it yourself, it doesn’t do any good to be told. And when you do solve it, you don’t need to be told.”
    He muttered something in Gaelic, shook his head. “Heed this—a single choice can build destinies or destroy them. Choose well.” Then, flicking his wrists, he vanished in a ripple on the air.
     
    Aidan was no less frustrated with women than Carrick at that moment. If someone had told him his ego was badly bruised, he would have laughed at them. If someone hadtold him that was panic that kept sneaking up to tickle the back of his throat, he would have cursed them as a lying fool. If they’d mentioned that the clutching around his heart was hurt, he’d have snarled them out of the pub.
    But it was all those things he felt, and confusion along with them.
    He’d been so certain that he understood Jude. Her mind and heart as well as her body. It was lowering to realize he’d missed a step somewhere. It was true enough he’d jumped his fences, so to speak. But he hadn’t expected her to be so cool and casual in her response to his proposal.
    For Christ’s sake, he’d proposed marriage to a woman, to the woman, and she’d smiled and said no thank you as pretty as you please, then gone back to the ceili .
    His sweet and shy Jude Frances hadn’t stammered and blushed, but had eyed him with cool consideration, then had turned him down flat. It didn’t make a bit of sense when any fool could see they belonged together.
    Like two links in a long and complicated chain. It was a chain he could envision perfectly, one of sturdy continuity and tradition. Man to woman, generation to generation. She was the one he was meant to be with, so that together they could forge the next links on that long chain.
    A different approach altogether was needed, he told himself as he paced his rooms instead of finishing up the day’s paperwork. He knew how to woo and win a woman, didn’t he? He’d wooed and he’d won plenty before.
    Of course that had been for entirely different purposes, he thought and began to worry again. But not so much he admitted to himself—not yet—that he was a babe in the woods in the matter of wooing a woman into a wife.
    He heard