Cates, Kimberly

  A rakehell. A scoundrel. Sir Aidan Kane was both and not the sensitive, lonely widower Norah Linton had expected to find. She had been tricked into coming to Castle Rathcannon by letters actually penned by Cassandra, Aidan's high-spirited daughter. Cass, as beautiful as a fairytale princess, had decided to give her wayward father the perfect gift—a wife. Now Norah was face to face with a dark-haired, green-eyed devil who not only didn't want her, but, it was whispered, had murdered the first Mrs. Kane.

  The mere idea of being leg-shackled to a prim, on-the-shelf spinster put Aidan Kane in a roaring bad temper. Then he realized who this chit was. As granddaughter of the great General Linton, Norah had the untarnished reputation and respected name that could keep Cass from being snubbed for his sins when she came out in London. Yet there was a danger in marrying this courageous woman who stood her ground before his wrath. She might discover the vulnerable man beneath his devil-may-care mask, crack the ice around his heart, and let loose feelings that promised all the delights of heaven... or a desire that could damn them both.

  They Stood in the Moonswept Ruins of an Ancient Castle....

  Aidan drew her into his arms, his mouth seeking hers, supplicant instead of hungry, reverent instead of carnal, asking for response instead of demanding it.

  She gave him her very soul.

  A cry of surrender shuddered through her, and she clung to him as he kissed her cheeks, her eyelids, her throat. He threaded his fingers through her hair, crushing the gardenia petals in his fingers, releasing their rich scent to mingle with the light tang of mist, the slight salt whisper of the sea.

  "I want you, Norah," he groaned, low in his throat. "Want you more than I've ever wanted any woman. Need you to touch me, angel." She could never know what that admission had cost him. "Let me take you back to Rathcannon, to my bed. Let me love you."

  "No," she breathed, her fingers tunneling beneath his cloak, trailing up the hard plane of his chest.

  Aidan's jaw knotted, and he started to draw away, but she caught at him with pleading hands, her eyes making him captive. "Aidan, please. I want you here... here with the magic all around us...."

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Original Publication of POCKET BOOKS

  A Pocket Star Book published by POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  Copyright © 1995 by Kim Ostrom Bush

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  ISBN: 0-671-89745-4

  Pocket Books printing May 1995

  POCKET STAR BOOKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Cover art by Jacqui Morgan; stepback art by Pino Daeni

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  This book is dedicated with love:

  To the Old Ones in Rathinane who welcomed me home.

  To Eileen Dreyer, Pathfinder, who shares Celtic blood and druid magic, and in whom bard-songs whisper to another generation.

  To Karyn Witmer-Gow, Navigator, who climbed to the top of the world and taught me about sea-magic on a rocky shore. Thank you for understanding.

  To Liz and Kieran O'Driscoll, and John and Kathleen Selman for taking us into their homes and letting us see a side of Ireland we never would have discovered on our own.

  And with special thanks to The Ghost.

  The Irish Fairy Tour, September 1993.

  CHAPTER 1

  Only a madman would have dared to ride the night-darkened road alone, with just the moon to guide him. Any sane traveler would have barricaded himself in the relative safety of a sturdy coach, outriders armed with blunderbusses mounting guard along the way. Lanterns would have blazed at the coach front, peeling back the shadows that could hide lurking danger.

  But never in the years Sir Aidan Kane had traveled the labyrinth of roads that led to Castle Rathcannon had he hidden from the night.

  He craved the darkness, the wind, the wildness. He embraced the haunting beauty of a land he could never truly understand.

  As if possessed by madness, he spurred his stallion down the road, his mantle billowing behind him like the wings of a dark angel, the planes of his face hard and reckless and wild.

  The night coiled about him, its chill breath whispering beneath his collar and through the mahogany waves of his hair. It mocked him with the shadows of the denizens of night—desperate rebels and soulless thieves seeming to leap out from behind every tree and rock.

  But Aidan wouldn't have given a damn if Lucifer's own army were clawing at his heels. He'd been destined to be the devil's own before he'd taken his first step, bedded his first woman. And Aidan Kane was being hunted by darker ghosts this night—the spirits of the poor bastards who had been betrayed by various Kanes of Rathcannon for five long centuries.

  Doubtless, those disinherited by the Kanes would have been thrilled at the prospect of sending Aidan to join his ancestors in hell, but he already suffered a far worse agony. An eternity of waiting, a grinding sense of impending doom that grew more painful with each beat of his stallion's hooves on the road to Castle Rathcannon.

  Rathcannon. Spoils of war. The reward for the countless betrayals and traitorous plots that were the only rightful legacy Aidan Kane had inherited from his ancestors.

  For five hundred years, the Kanes of Rathcannon had been the slender blade the English held to the throat of western Ireland.

  But if those unquiet Celtic spirits wanted vengeance against the Kanes, Aidan was certain they must be pleased, since even now he fought to secure the future of the only person he had dared to love.

  Aidan leaned close to his stallion's neck, trying to drive back the images in his mind. A rosy-cheeked little girl with silver-gilt curls, a small hand clutching at his, dragging him to see a nest of kittens or a thrush's speckled egg. A fairy-bright child urging her pony to soar over fences, never once imagining that she might crash to the ground.

  Cassandra.

  Child of all that was bright and beautiful, so brave and strong and lovely that nothing could dull the magic that surrounded her. Nothing except the darkness that consumed her father's soul.

  Aidan reined in the pain with practiced savagery. No, there had to be some way to help Cassandra, to shield her. To keep her safe, as he had from the moment he had brought her to the Irish castle beside the sea.

  Aidan leaned into the wild sea-sweetened air as if it could banish the stench of the city from his skin, brush away the traces of his mistress's hands.

  The wildlands had always seemed the gateway to another world, another life. And when he went there he was a different man, a better one, what few fragments of decency that still remained in his jaded soul polished bright for just a little while.

  But it was a cruel enchantment, for it made him pay for that brief span of time with the knowledge that the man who rode through the stone gates of Rathcannon was an illusion. And that the girl waiting for him in Rathcannon's tower chamber believed with her whole heart that he was real.

  Aidan raised eyes gritty from lack of sleep to the magnificent turrets of Rathcannon, which were bathed in the soft light of dawn. The surge of triumph he usually felt at winning his race with the sunrise was dulled by an insidious sense of dread. A dread that had crept more and more often into his consciousness for the past year. A sense of unease that told him that this tiny island of beauty in a sea of madness was slipping through his fingers forever.

  H
e reined Hazard to a halt outside Rathcannon's stables and was greeted by a short bowlegged man, Gibbon Cadagon. The aged head groom was already busy with his morning task of brushing out the impossibly long manes of an exquisite pair of perfectly matched ponies Aidan had imported from Spain for Cassandra's eighth birthday. Aidan didn't want to think about how many years ago that had been.

  "Welcome home, sir!" Cadagon exclaimed, lifting one hand from Lancelot's glossy gold flank, while Guenevere eyed Aidan's stallion with an expression of ill-disguised feminine admiration. "I know one young lady who will be pure delighted when she opens her eyes this morn! She's been stewing and stewing over whether or not you'd come."

  Aidan dismounted, tossing Hazard's reins to one of Cadagon's underlings. "I received the child's royal summons, didn't I?"

  Cadagon gave a hearty chuckle. "Miss Cassandra is not a child anymore, as she'll be telling you soon enough in that lofty way of hers! An' she's been worrying herself to a fever over whether or not you'd come. After all, you've been busy of late. We haven't got to see you near as much as we like, if you'll pardon my saying so."

  Aidan's cheeks stung, and he averted his eyes from the keen gaze of Cadagon. It chafed at him when he heard the edge of defensiveness in his own voice. "I visit when I can."

  Color flooded the pixyish Irishman's face. "I know that, sir, but Miss Cassandra, she... well, that daughter of yours grudges every day you're gone like a miser payin' out gold coins. I was tellin' Mrs. Cadagon just last evening that I never saw a girl adore her da more than our Princess does."

  If the elderly groom had plunged a pitchfork into Aidan's chest he could not have wounded him more deeply. Aidan's fists knotted unconsciously, and he wondered when the knowledge that his daughter loved him had become so painful. Perhaps it was when he had realized that time and truth would drive that hero worship from her eyes. Or when he began to picture just how bleak his life would be when she had left him behind.

  "Aye, Miss Cassie's got the whole castle in a pelter over your birthday. Why, the little termagant even bullied Coachman Sean into making the trip to Dublin to fetch up the gift she's got planned for you. Not that it was any surprise that she bent poor Sean to her will. She's been ordering the man on mysterious errands for months now, in her efforts to arrange things."

  "She sent Sean all the way to Dublin? What the blazes could this be about?"

  "I don't have the slightest idea, sir. But it must be something grand. The girl was acting right fairy-kissed, she was, threatening to run off to the city herself if we didn't send the coach. She would've done it, too. You know the Princess when she gets in one of her states. And then what would the lot of us have said to you?"

  Aidan knew he should be filled with parental wrath, or at least an appropriate measure of vexation at his daughter's antics. Instead, he felt a raw tenderness squeeze his heart. "The girl is incorrigible. Mrs. Brindle always said she would be."

  "Mrs. Brindle! Sometimes I think she's the worst o' all of us! Acting so stern and all prunes and prisms, when she's as soft on the girl as any of us! She's the one who finally surrendered to the girl. The surprise seemed to mean so much to Miss Cass, it did. And well, sir, no one understands how persuasive Cassandra can be better than you do. You've never been able to say no to her yourself."

  "I've never been able to say no to one last roll of the dice either, Cadagon, but throwing them has usually gotten me neck-deep in trouble. Give Hazard an extra measure of oats once he's cooled down."

  Aidan strode up to the castle, and a footman scrambled to open the heavy door still emblazoned with the crest of the family the Kanes had disinherited generations before. But Aidan barely returned the youth's greeting. He hastened through the corridors of the glistening haven he had built for his daughter, then took the stairs two at a time, unable to quell the strange tightness in his throat as he hurried up to his daughter's room. When he reached the landing, the door was ajar, and he flattened his palm on it and gently pushed it wide.

  Sunbeams filtered through the wide windows he'd had carved out of the castle's old defenses, brilliant diamond patterns of stained glass setting the exquisite chamber aglow.

  If the weavers of legend had set out to fashion a fairy bower, it would have mirrored this suite of rooms at Rathcannon. The walls were warmed with tapestries stitched by the holy sisters in France ages past. Unicorns laid their heads in maidens' laps, knights tested their courage against dragon fire. Trees spilled gold and silver fruit into children's hands while blossoms grew in exquisitely sewn fields.

  Even the furniture that filled the chamber had been patterned after the fanciful stories Cassandra Kane adored: Nymphs and woodsprites danced across the rosewood armoire, dainty fairies with gauzy silver wings adorned the candlesticks. The four posts on her huge tester bed were wound about by garlands of flowers, so delicately wrought it seemed that when one touched them their fingers should come away wet with dew. Curtains—which Cass had insisted were the impossible blue-green of a mermaid's hair— draped the bed, the velvet hangings embroidered with winged horses that seemed so lifelike the mere brush of a hand should make them take flight.

  But to Aidan the most miraculous creature in the room had always been the girl who drowsed among coverlets sprinkled with gold-flecked stars.

  Cassandra, half angel, half imp—a treasure that fate had foolishly thrust into a rogue's awkward hands. The most intense battle Sir Aidan Kane had ever waged had been his struggle not to destroy her.

  With a stealth acquired by years of practice, he slipped across thick carpets from lands of spice and mystery, and his throat felt oddly tight as he saw a gilt chair drawn close to the bed. A blanket had been draped across its seat, and a small satin pillow placed atop it, small luxuries he knew Cassandra had set out the night before in an effort to make him more comfortable when he took up his customary vigil.

  He could remember the first time she had devised the chair, heard her child's plea echo in his memory. She had been seven years old, still reeling from her mother's death in the disaster that had nearly cost Cassandra her own life as well.

  She had grasped his hand, tight in her own, and stared up at him with wide blue eyes.

  Papa, when it's time for you to visit, I wake up and wake up and think you are here, and run to your room again and again until I'm quite fractious indeed and my feet are very cold. If you slept in the chair, when I woke up I could reach out and touch you and make certain you are real.

  Aidan would have walked through fire for his daughter. It had always seemed a small sacrifice to please her by taking up a vigil in the chair on the nights he arrived at the castle. What he hadn't expected was that those night watches would become the most precious moments of his life.

  Times when he could watch Cassandra's little face, soft, rosy, content, her lashes feathering across her cheeks. He could know that she was safe, that she was happy, and that, for a brief, precious space in time, nothing could hurt her—not even Aidan himself.

  Slowly, he reached out, to draw back one of the bed's embroidered curtains, his gaze taking in the tumble of silver-blond curls tossed across her pillows. For an instant, he pictured her cuddling the doll he'd bought her in London, imagined his daughter's rosy little mouth sucking on two fingers, the way she had when she was small.

  He had spent countless hours worrying that she would ruin the shape of her mouth, but as he looked down at the girl now, he would have been grateful for such a minor concern. There were far more painful dangers drawing inexorably nearer to Cassandra with every day that slipped past.

  She was growing up. Aidan's heart lurched as the morning light revealed the face of a girl on the verge of blossoming into a woman. Even in slumber, there was an expectancy in those features that were so familiar and yet suddenly so changed.

  A splinter of pain pierced Aidan's chest at the sudden awkwardness he felt—the knowledge that he no longer belonged here, keeping vigil. It was time the chair and blanket were tucked away forever.


  It was inevitable, Aidan knew, this letting go of childhood games once cherished. But that knowledge didn't dull the ache of knowing it would not be long before Cassandra abandoned him as well, leaving him behind the way she had the ragged doll she'd finally outgrown.

  Aidan closed his eyes, hearing the echoes of her chatter on his last visit.

  Was my mother beautiful when you first saw her at General Morton-Syffe's ball?

  Aidan had tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. Yes, she was beautiful.

  Beautiful and cunning, selfish and greedy for pleasure. A foolish, spoiled, brainless girl who threw herself away upon the rogue most likely to send her family into apoplexies....

  Mrs. Brindle says that my mother was the belle of the season, with a dozen beaux fighting over the privilege of bringing her a cup of ratafia. And when she eloped with you, three of her suitors went into such a deep decline they had to be sent to the seashore, and another nearly shot himself in desperation. Do you think that I will have as many beaux when I have my season in London?

  It had been difficult enough to speak of Delia, costing Aidan untold effort to keep his hatred of the woman from spilling into his voice or revealing itself in his eyes, where it could wound the one decent thing that had come out of his union with Delia March.

  But when dreams of London—balls and theaters, waltzing and flirtations—had crept into his daughter's conversations, Aidan had finally understood the depths hell could reach.

  My season in London...

  How many times had those words seared through Aidan the past three years, more painful than the pistol shot a disgruntled duelist had driven through his shoulder?

  He had reeled at the realization that Cassandra had spun out fantasies that could never come true, and his own responsibility for her inevitable disillusionment had festered inside him, a wound that wouldn't heal.

  Since she was five, he had kept her safe, happy in her castle beside the Irish Sea—a princess running about her private kingdom in a gilded pony cart, begging for presents, hurling herself into his arms, laughing, laughing. He had marveled at her, a miracle of goodness in a lifetime ill spent.