She sniffed, rocked back on her heels. Damn it, he was right. “I’m not finished,” she said coolly. She scooped up more sand and worked it in. “And what is that supposed to be?”
“It will be the drawbridge.”
“A drawbridge?” Delighted, she leaned over to study the platform he fashioned with his quick, clever hands. “Oh, that’s wonderful. You’re definitely sand castle-skilled. I know just what it needs.”
She scrambled up and raced to the house. She came back with some wooden kitchen matches and a bit of red ribbon that she’d cut in a triangle.
“Chain would be better, but we’ll be innovative.” She poked the tip of the long match into the side of the drawbridge, slid the other end into the castle wall. “Fortunately, the royal family here is having a ball, so the drawbridge stays down.” She set a second match in the other side.
She broke a third match, looped her ribbon around it, then hoisted her makeshift flag on the topmost tower. “Now that’s a sand castle.”
She plucked up the bottle of wine and poured for both of them. “To Dolman Castle.” A dream, she thought, they’d made together.
After clinking her glass to his, she drew up her knees and looked out to sea. “It’s a beautiful night. So many stars. You can’t see sky like this in New York, just slices of it, pieces between buildings, so you forget how big it is.”
“When I was a boy, I used to come out at night and sit here.”
She turned her head, rested her cheek on her knee. “What else did you do when you were a boy?”
“Climbed the cliffs, played with my friends in the village, worked very hard to get out of chores that would have taken less time and less effort than the eluding of them took. Fished with my father.”
He fell into silence, and the depth of it had Allena reaching out to take his hand. “You miss him.”
“I left him, alone. I didn’t know he was ill that last year. He never told me, never once asked me to come back and tend to him. He died by himself rather than ask me for that.”
“He knew you’d come back.”
“He should have told me. I could’ve brought him to Dublin, gotten him to hospital, for treatments, specialists.”
“It’s always so much harder on the ones who’re left behind,” she murmured. “He wanted to be here, Conal. To die here.”
“Oh, aye, to die here, that was his choice. And knowing he was ill, and frail, he climbed the cliffs. And there at the stone dance is where his heart gave out. That was his choice.”
“It makes you angry.”
“It makes me helpless, which is the same thing to me. So I miss him, and I regret the time and distance that was between us—the time and distance I put between us. I sent him money instead of myself. And he left me all he had. The cottage, and Hugh.”
He turned to her then and pulled the chain at her neck until the pendant slid clear. “And this. He left this for me in that small wood box you see on the dresser in the bedroom.”
The shiver raced over her skin, chill and damp. “I don’t understand.”
“His mother had given it to him on his eighteenth birthday, as it had been given to her. And he gave it to my mother on the day he asked her to marry him, at the stone circle, as is the O’Neil tradition. She wore it always. And gave it back to him, to hold for me, on the night she died.”
Cured in Dagda’s Cauldron. Carved by the finger of Merlin. “It’s yours,” she murmured.
“No. No longer mine, never mine as I refused it. The day I buried my father, I came here and I threw this into the sea. That, I told myself, was the end of things.”
There’s only one, the old woman had told her. It belonged to her. She had found it, or it had found her. And led her, Allena thought, to him. How could she feel anything but joy at knowing it? And how, being who he was, could Conal feel anything but anger?
For her it was a key. For him a lock.
Allena touched his cheek. “I don’t know how to comfort you.”
“Neither do I.” He rose, pulled her to her feet. “No more of this tonight. No more castles and stars. I want what’s real. My need is real enough.” He swept her up. “And so are you.”
9
SHE couldn’t sleep. No matter how short the night, she couldn’t bear to waste it in dreams. So she lay quiet, and wakeful, reliving every moment of the day that had passed.
They’d ended it, she thought now, with love. Not the slow and tender sort they’d brought each other the first time. There’d been a desperation in Conal when he carried her into bed from the beach. A kind of fierce urgency that had streaked from him and into her so that her hands had been as impatient as his, her mouth as hungry.