The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

and trouble. Tell me, Trevor, does she bring you joy as well?”
    “You mean Darcy?”
    “And who else have you been walking with?” Gwen questioned. “Of course I’m speaking of Darcy Gallagher. A beautiful and complicated woman that, with a voice like . . .” She trailed off, shaking her head and lightly laughing. “I was going to say like an angel, but there’s little of the angels about that one. No, she’s a voice like a woman, full and rich and tempting to a man. She’s tempted you.”
    “She could tempt the dead. No offense.”
    “None taken. I wonder, Trevor, don’t you think she’s what you’re looking for?”
    “I’m not looking for anything. Anyone.”
    “We all look. The lucky find.” Her hands, stilled, lay on the cloth with bright patterns of thread. “The wise accept. I was lucky, but not wise. Could you not learn something from my mistake?”
    “I don’t love her.”
    “Maybe you do and maybe you don’t.” Gwen picked up her needle again. “But you haven’t opened your heart to the risk of it. You guard that part of yourself so fierce, Trevor.”
    “It may be that part of myself doesn’t exist.” Chewed off at the knee in Ardmore, he thought, before I was even born. “That I’m just not capable of loving someone the way you mean.”
    “That’s foolishness.”
    “I hurt another woman because I couldn’t love her.”
    “And, I think, hurt yourself in the process. It puts doubts about yourself in your mind. Both of you, I can promise, will not only survive it, but be better off for the experience. Once you stop thinking of your heart as a weapon instead of a gift, you’ll find what you’re looking for.”
    “My heart isn’t the priority here. The theater is.”
    She made a sound that might have been agreement. “ ’Tis a grand thing to be able to build, and build to last. This cottage, simple as it is, has lasted lifetime and lifetime. Oh, sure a few changes here, another room there, but the core of it remains. As does the faerie raft beneath it, with its silver towers and blue river.”
    “You chose the cottage over the castle,” he pointed out.
    “I did. Aye, I did. For the wrong reasons, but in spite of it, I won’t regret my children or the man who gave them to me. Perhaps Carrick will never understand that part of my heart. I’ve come to understand it would be wrong to ask him to do so. Hearts can merge and the people who hold them still stand as they are. Love accepts that. It accepts everything.”
    He saw now what pattern she worked into the cloth. It was the silver palace, its towers bright, its river blue as gemstones, its trees heavy with golden fruit. And on a bridge that spanned the water were two figures, not yet finished.
    Herself, Trevor realized, with her hands held out toward Carrick’s.
    “You’re lonely without him.”
    “I have . . .” She brushed a finger gently over the threads that formed a silver doublet. “An emptiness in me. A place that waits. As I wait.”
    “What happens to you if the spell isn’t broken?”
    She lifted her head again, her eyes dark and soft and quiet. “I’ll bide here, and see him only in my heart.”
    “For how long?”
    “For as long as there is. You have choices, Trevor Magee, as once I had. You have only to make them.”
    “It’s not the same,” he began, but she faded away, like mist. “It’s not the same,” he said again, to the empty room. Though he turned the chair around, it was some time before he picked up the phone and managed to get on with the business at hand.
    He called his father first, and that connection of voice to voice soothed his nerves. With his rhythm back, he fell into routine, contacted Nigel in London, and his counterpart in Los Angeles. He checked the time again, noted it was closing in on midnight. Seven in New York, he thought, and called the ever reliable Finkle at home.
    Notes were piled on his desk, his computer up and running, and the phone tucked on his shoulder with Finkle’s voice droning through when he heard the sound of a car pulling in. Trevor shifted, angled so he could see through the window.
    And watched Darcy walk toward the garden gate.
    He’d forgotten the wine.
    She considered knocking, but she’d seen the light in his office window. Working, are you? With a sly glint in her eye she let herself in the front door. She thought they’d soon put a stop to that, and walked straight up the stairs.
    She paused at the door to his office, finding