The star seemed to flash straight into his eyes, taunting him. Without moving, Conal took a deliberate step back. No, he would not speak of love.
“Where are your shoes?”
“My shoes?” He’d spoken with such gentle affection that her eyes stung as she looked down at her own bare feet. “I must have left them behind. Silly of me.”
“So you wander barefoot through the dew, pretty Allena?”
Words strangled in her throat. She threw her arms around him, burying her face at his shoulder as emotions whirled inside her.
“Allena.” He pressed his lips to her hair and wished, for both of them, he could break this last chain that held his heart. “What am I to do about you?”
Love me. Just love me. I can handle all of the rest. “I can make you happy. If only you’d let me, I can make you happy.”
“And what of you? There are two of us here. How can you believe, and accept, all I’ve told you and be willing to change your life for it?” He drew her back, touched a fingertip to the pendant. “How can you, Allena, so easily accept this?”
“Because it belongs to me.” She let out a shaky breath, then took one in, and her voice was stronger. “Until it belongs to another.”
Steadier, she took a ladle from a drawer and spooned batter into the skillet. “You think I’m naive, and gullible, and so needy for love that I’ll believe anything that offers the possibility of it?”
“I think you have a soft heart.”
“And a malleable one?” The cool gaze she sent him was a surprise, as was her nod. “You may be right. Trying to fit yourself into forms so that the people you love will love you back the way you want keeps the heart malleable. And while I hope to be done with that, while I’m going to try to be done with that, I prefer having a heart that accepts imprints from others.”
A patient heart, she thought, but by God if it was a cowardly one.
Deftly, she flipped the pancakes. “What hardened yours, Conal?”
“You’ve good aim when you decide to notch the arrow.”
“Maybe I haven’t reached into the quiver often enough.” But she would now. Movements smooth and unhurried, she turned the pancakes onto a platter, spooned more batter into the pan. “Why don’t you ever speak of your mother?”
Bull’s-eye, he thought, and said nothing as she set him a place at the table.
“I have a right to know.”
“You do, yes.”
She got out honey, cinnamon, poured the tea. “Sit down. Your breakfast will get cold.”
With a half laugh, he did as she asked. She was a puzzle, and why had he believed he’d already solved her? He waited until she’d emptied the skillet, turned it off, and come to the table to join him.
“My mother was from the near village,” he began. “Her father was a fisherman, and her mother died in childbirth when my own mother was a girl. The baby died as well, so my mother was the youngest and the only daughter and pampered, she told me, by her father and brothers.”
“You have uncles in the village?”
“I do. Three, and their families. Though some of the younger have gone to the mainland or beyond. My father was an only child.”
She drizzled honey on her pancakes, passed the bottle to Conal. He had family, she thought, and still kept so much alone. “So you have cousins here, too?”
“Some number of them. We played together when I was a boy. It was from them that I first heard of what runs in me. I thought it a story, like others you hear, like silkies and mermaids and faerie forts.”
He ate because it was there and she’d gone to the trouble to make it. “My mother liked to draw, to sketch, and she taught me how to see things. How to make what you see come out in pencil and chalk. My father, he loved the sea, and thought I would follow him there. But she gave me clay for my eighth birthday. And I…”
He paused, lifted his hands, stared at them through narrowed eyes. They were very like his father’s. Big, blunt, and with strength in them. But they had never been made for casting nets.
“The shaping of it, the finding what was inside it…I was compelled to see. And wood, carving away at it until you could show others what you’d seen in it. She understood that. She knew that.”
“Your father was disappointed?”
“Puzzled more, I think.” Conal moved his shoulders, picked up his fork again. “How could a man make a living, after all, whittling at wood or chipping at hunks of rock? But it pleased my mother, so he let it be. For her, and I learned later, because in his mind my fate was already set. So whether I sculpted or fished wouldn’t matter in the end.”