The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

back to the car.
    “You might have let him come in out of the rain,” Jude commented.
    “You don’t seem to be in any great hurry to ask me in out of it.” Aidan angled his head as he studied her face. “Maybe you hold a grudge after all.”
    “You didn’t bring me flowers.” But she stepped back to let him come inside and drip.
    “I’ll see that I do next time. You’ve been cleaning. The house smells of lemon oil, a nice, homey scent. If you get me a rag, I’ll wipe up this wet I’m tracking in to your nice, clean house.”
    “I’ll take care of it. I have to go up and get my tape recorder and so forth. We’ll work in the kitchen. You can just go ahead back.”
    “All right, then.” His hand closed over hers, making her frown. Then he slipped the flowers out of her fingers. “I’ll put these in something for you so they don’t look quite so pitiful.”
    “Thank you.” The stiffly polite tone was the only defense she could come up with against six feet of wet, charming male in her hallway. “I’ll only be a minute.”
    She was barely longer than that, but when she walked into the kitchen he already had the flowers in one of Maude’s bottles and was handily brewing a pot of tea.
    “I started a fire there in your hearth to take the chill off. That all right, then?”
    “Of course.” And she tried not to be annoyed that every one of the tasks he’d done took her three times as long to accomplish. “Have a seat. I’ll pour the tea.”
    “Ah, it needs to steep a bit yet.”
    “I knew that.” She mumbled it as she opened a cupboard for cups and saucers. “We make tea in America, too.” She turned back, set the cups on the table, then hissed out a breath. “Stop staring at me.”
    “Sorry, but you’re pretty when you’re all flustered and your hair’s falling down.”
    Mutiny ripe in her eyes, she jammed pins back in violently enough to drill them into her scalp. “Perhaps I should make myself clear. This is an intellectual arrangement.”
    “Intellectual.” Wisely he controlled the grin and kept his face sober. “Sure it’s a fine thing to have an interest in each other’s minds. You’ve a strong one, I suspect. Telling you you’re pretty doesn’t change that a bit, does it?”
    “I’m not pretty and I don’t need to hear it. So if we can just get started?”
    He took a seat because she did, then cocked his head again. “You believe that, don’t you? Well, now, that’s interesting, on an intellectual level.”
    “We’re not here to talk about me. My impression was that you have a certain skill as a storyteller and are familiar with some of the myths and legends particular to this area.”
    “I know some tales.” When her voice went prim that way it just made him want to lap at her, starting anywhere at all. So he leaned back in his chair. If it was intellectual she wanted, he figured they could begin with that . . . then move along.
    “Some you may know already, in one form or another.The oral history of a place may shift here and there from teller to teller, but the heart of it remains steady. The shape-shifter is told one way by the Native Americans, another by the villagers of Romania, and still another by the people of Ireland. But the same threads weave through.”
    While she continued to frown, he lifted the pot to pour the tea himself. “You have Santa and Father Christmas and Kris Kringle—one may come down the chimney, another fills shoes with candy, but the basis of the legend has its roots in the same place. Because it does, time after time, country after country, the intellect comes to the conclusion that the myth has its core in fact.”
    “You believe in Santa Claus.”
    His eyes met hers as he set the pot down again. “I believe in magic, and that the best of it, the most true of it, is in the heart. You’ve been here some days now, Jude Frances. Have you felt no magic?”
    “Atmosphere,” she began, and turned her recorder on. “The atmosphere in this country is certainly conducive to the forming of myths and the perpetuation of them, from paganism with its small shrines and sacrifices to the gods, Celtic folklore with its warnings and rewards and the addition of culture seeded in through the invasions of the Vikings, the Normans, and so on.”
    “It’s the place,” Aidan disagreed. “Not the people who tried to conquer it. It’s the land, the hills and rock. It’s the air. And the blood that seeped into all of it in the fight