Dark Enchantment (18 page)

Caleb’s eyes lit with good humor. “Try it,
cailín
. It’s quite tasty. Healthy as well.”

She said yes to the soup, and to the colcannon and the boxty, potato dishes. She also accepted a serving from a steaming kettle of beef and Guinness stew.

Then there were crubeens. “Pig’s feet?” she asked and declined.

By the time the servers left the head table and began to circulate around the room, Arianna’s plate was piled high. A short, plump woman bustled into the hall, her light brown hair highlighted with threads of gray. Hands perched on her generous hips, she surveyed the state of the service.

Caleb motioned her over. “Arianna Sullivan, meet Cook. Maeve McGee would be her given name, but doesn’t she prefer being addressed by her title.”

“And why wouldn’t I so?” she replied jovially. “It’s pleased I am to meet you, Miss—”

“You may call her Arianna,” Caleb interjected, a teasing light in his eyes as he stole the words right out of her mouth.

“Arianna, then. And I’m hoping you’ve a more discriminating palette than Himself here,” she goaded her employer good-naturedly. “Prefers plain old meat and spuds, he does.”

“Cook is Flanagan’s daughter,” Caleb explained, clearly in his element. “Born and raised right here on the demesne. She was after leaving us for a spell, but didn’t I lure her away from a five-star restaurant in Dublin. Convinced her ‘twas only right to return here to hearth and home.”

“Pressure in a job like that one’ll put a body in an early grave,” she admitted. “Anyways, where else would I rather be than here, working for this one?”

“Ah, go one with you.” His fondness for the woman evident, he sniffed the air. “Sure, don’t I smell something burning in the kitchen?”

Maeve swiped at him with one of her oven mitts and walked away, chuckling softly.

The woman adored him
. While Caleb’s air of authority commanded the respect of his staff, it took kindness to earn their love.

Arianna buttered a chunk of sweet treacle bread and took a bite, watching him interact with his guests as she chewed. His aristocratic features reflected strength of character. And yet the untidy toss of his jet-black hair charmingly muted the strong lines of his profile.

Though he played well the relaxed role of a gracious host, those searing green eyes of his missed nothing. “Flanagan,” he said, giving a discreet nod toward one of the trestle tables. A row was breaking out between two staff members who must have imbibed more than their fair share of the table wine.

As the dishes were cleared, fiddles and pipes, tin whistles and drums, appeared in the hands of some of the diners. An impromptu session began and everyone at the head table moved to sit in chairs grouped together on the floor. For the next hour or so, Arianna laughed and visited with Caleb and his friends until, one at a time, the men said their farewells.

Worn out from all the activity, Arianna sighed. “Jetlag’s still doing a number on me I’m afraid,” she said. “It’s been really nice, but if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll call it a night.”

“I’ll walk you up to your apartment,” Caleb said, getting to his feet. “I’ve to be leaving for Wales tomorrow morning at first light, so I’ll be retiring early tonight myself.”

“You’re leaving tomorrow?” She felt suddenly bereft…abandoned. Absurd, she knew, given that she had only just met the man. “How long will you be gone?”

“A day, two at most. But you’re to make yourself at home here whilst I’m away.”

At the door to her room, she paused. “Thanks…um, Caleb? Something’s been bothering me. Can I…ask you a question?”

His head tipped to the side, eyes wary. “You can, o’ course.”

She drew in a breath, let it out. “It’s the dreaming I told you about. I’ve tried to explain it away as a result of our having met at Granny’s when I was a baby. But that doesn’t account for how I recognized you, the way you are now.” She licked her lips. “Or how I knew the way your mouth would feel when you kissed me.”

“No, it doesn’t,” he said, surprising her with his candidness. “And it’s time we spoke about that.” His hand closed around the doorknob and he pushed the door open. “But we’d best do that in here, rather than standing in the hall.”

Someone had already set a fire to burning in the hearth in the sitting room. A lamp on the gate-legged table beside the sofa had been left on, and was casting a soft light over the room. Caleb pulled her down onto the sofa beside him.

“I share your memories, Arianna,” he said, with no preamble. “I’ve no understanding of how, or why, we met in the land of dreams. But I remember….
everything
.” The look in his eyes told her his recollections weren’t limited to their innocent walks in the sand as children.

“Thank you, God,” she breathed and closed her eyes. She wasn’t crazy after all.

Caleb framed her face with his hands, searched her eyes. “The memories have been driving me fecking demented,” he admitted in the merest breath of sound.

She raised her mouth, welcoming his kiss, inviting him to renew his possession. Her stomach took a slow swirl as he accepted what she offered, his hands threading through her hair, his mouth moving carefully over hers, reacquainting both of them with that which could not be explained.

But then he pulled away from her, his lips moist from their kisses. “I’m aching with the need to touch you, taste you, be inside you. To take you in all the ways we both remember. But I regret there are things here, in the physical realm, that make such intimacy between us impossible.”

With that, Caleb rose to his feet and left her. Stunned by his admission, trying to make sense of everything he had told her, she sat staring at the door long after it had closed behind him.

Chapter Nineteen

A
rianna woke to the cry of sea gulls, to the rhythmic cadence of waves crashing against the rocks below her window. And to a feeling of bliss so powerful it was like Da had risen from the grave, she had won the lotto, gotten married to her one true love and given birth to her first child, all on the very same day. She wasn’t crazy. After so many years of wondering what the dreams meant, Caleb had finally confessed to sharing them with her. Admitted that, somehow in the grand scheme of things, theirs was a spiritual connection. He had come to know her, to make love to her, in the sleepy mists of another dimension.

After making quick work of a shower, she headed downstairs in search of her morning caffeine fix. Following the luscious smells of grilling meats and fresh-baked bread, she found the kitchen located beside the Great Hall. As she entered the room, Maeve glanced up from the onion she was dicing. “You’re awake, so,” she said with a welcoming smile. “Ready for breakfast, are you? How’d you fancy a fry?”

“A fry?”

“A full Irish breakfast. Eggs, rashers, black and white pudding—”

She politely declined the heart-attack-on-a-plate. “Sounds delicious, but that’s too much food for me so early in the day. I have to admit I’d offer up my first born child for a cup of that coffee I smell though.”

Maeve chuckled. “I just poured out the last of it. Go on and sit yourself over there whilst I make fresh.”

Arianna sat at the whitewashed oak table Maeve had indicated and watched her plunk a biscuit-shaped pastry onto a small plate. She stuck it in front of her. “Might as well nibble on one of these fresh-baked scones,” she said, placing a crock of butter, a jar of strawberry jam and a bowl of fluffy whipped cream within easy reach.

“Thanks, I believe I will.” Arianna slathered butter and jam on her scone and topped it with a big dollop of the whipped cream. She took a bite. “Oh, wow. Now I
know
I’m in Ireland.”

“So, did you have a good kip?” Maeve scooped coffee beans into a grinder and let it whir for a few seconds. She dumped the contents into a glass cafetiere and added boiling water from the teakettle.

“Slept like a log, thanks. I swear I can’t seem to get caught up though.”

Maeve fit the gold metal top on the cylinder and pushed all of the swimming coffee grounds to the bottom of the cafetiere, leaving the freshly brewed coffee on top. She poured Arianna a cup and set it in front of her.

After adding cream and sugar, she took her cup to the window. Pressing her forehead against the windowpane, she checked to see if there was a beach directly below. Apparently, the kitchen had been constructed on a jut of rock about two hundred feet above the crashing surf. “Wow, this view is absolutely to die for.”

“Jaysus, Mary and Joseph, now don’t be saying that around any of the kitchen staff,” Maeve remarked. “Aren’t they superstitious enough as ‘tis, always whinging about what happened at Dunluce Castle back in the sixteen hundreds.”

Arianna frowned.
They’re worried about something that happened four hundred years ago?
“What happened?”

“Kitchen there was built out on the verge of a cliff like this one. One day during a storm, it broke off and plunged into the sea.”

“That’s horrible.”

“’Twas. Course, we’ve no worries about such a thing happening here. Not with faerie magic shoring up the foundation of the keep.” Maeve raised the top of a commercial dishwasher and began loading it with cups and saucers left over from breakfast.

Arianna smiled, thinking how refreshingly quaint—how very
Irish—
was this talk of the faeries. It was common knowledge that many of the older folk still believed in the “good people”. And even those who claimed they did not were known to hedge their bets by giving the earth spirits a wide berth. Stories abound of farmers who had allowed a faerie rath on their land to be disturbed only to become victims of some magical retribution. To this very day in Ireland, highway construction projects were sometimes delayed, or abandoned altogether, for that very reason.

The woman chattered on about a storm brewing farther up the coast. “’Twould have hit Clare hard had Himself not been holding it back.” Maeve clucked her teeth as she stirred the contents of an iron kettle. “Stubborn as a mule is that one, when he’s after setting his mind to a thing. And come hell or high water, he was flying that helicopter of his over to Shannon, where he keeps his plane….”

Arianna froze, scone midway between mouth and plate, her gaze fixed unbelievingly on the woman’s ample backside. It seemed Maeve’s talk of faerie magic hadn’t been a reference to the wee people in general, but rather to Caleb in particular. Now hero worship was one thing…. But the woman had to be mad as Alice’s long-eared companion, if she honestly believed her employer had magically held a thunderstorm at bay.

Standing at the stove, her back to Arianna, Maeve wasn’t aware of the shocked reaction her comment had garnered. Or of the fact that Flanagan had stepped silently into the room behind her.

“Maeve!” His tone was so sharp with censure that the woman jumped, dropping her wooden spoon into the pot she was stirring.

She spun around. “Holy God, Da. If I were a cat you’d have scared eight lives off me.”

“I need to see you in the larder…em…about supplies.”

“I’m putting a bit of lunch together right now. Suppose we do it in a wee while?”

“
Now,”
he insisted, careful to avoid Arianna’s eyes.

With a put-upon sigh, Maeve lowered the flame on each burner and followed her father out of the room.

Arianna got up and went over to the counter to top off her coffee cup. It was unnerving, to say the least, to be having a pleasant conversation with someone, only to discover that said person was a full-time resident of La-La Land. Seriously unbalanced. Probably the reason Caleb had talked her into coming home; so that he and her father could keep an eye on her.
Poor Flanagan,
Arianna thought.
So staid and proper. And of a generation when mental illness in the family was considered a shame and a scandal. A deep, dark family secret.

As Arianna set down the carafe, she realized she could hear the hum of Flanagan’s voice through an air-vent in the ceiling.

“Miss Sullivan’s an outsider, Maeve. Totally unaware of the family’s…em… eccentricities, shall we say.”

“Now don’t you be giving me a bollocking over that, Da. Not when no one’s bothered their arse warning me about it before now.”

What were they talking about? Concealing Maeve’s mental challenges?

“’Twas a spur of the moment thing, Himself deciding to bring her here. Not that I’d any reason to expect you’d be entertaining a castle guest in the kitchen,” he pointed out.

Maeve disregarded the jab. “How long will he be keeping her here?”

“A day, a week, a month? Forever? Sure, I haven’t a clue. His instructions were simply that the girl was not to leave the demesne in his absence.”

What?
“And why is that exactly?”
Yeah, why?

“Caleb may be like a son to me, Maeve, but ultimately he’s our employer. And as such he’s not under any obligation to be explaining himself.”

“So, we’re to be her gaolers then, is it?”

Jailers?
Arianna’s eyebrows kissed her hairline. Caleb intended to hold her here against her will? All at once, an insidious pinprick punctured her little bubble of joy. Had he just been messing with her head last night, when he’d admitted sharing her dreams? Worse, had he arranged to have her cottage trashed while they were in Galway, giving him a perfectly plausible excuse for luring up here? And if so, why? For what nefarious purpose?

“Just mind yourself around the woman, daughter. I’ve to go now and alert the servants to keep their mouths shut…and their children away from the front of the property. Himself’s after ordering the crocodiles left free in the moat until he returns.”

Crocodiles? Holy crap, he was serious.
The conversation in the pantry halted abruptly as the mug in Arianna’s hand slid through her fingers and shattered into a million pieces on the flagstone floor.

Father and daughter made a hasty reappearance in the kitchen.

Arianna sent them a wan smile. “I’m so sorry. I was heading back to my room and thought I’d take another cup of coffee up with me. The darned thing slipped out of my hand.”

“No worries, luveen,” Maeve said sweetly. “I’ll have it cleaned up straight away.” She reached into the cabinet for another mug, filled it and handed it to Arianna. “Here you are now, sweeting, take this and go on. I’ll send Molly up to collect you when lunch is served.”

Back in her sitting room, Arianna sat staring off into space. Just what the heck had she gotten herself into? Why had Caleb left orders that she was to be held prisoner until his return?

“Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.”
Who did he think he was dealing with anyway? Freaking Rapunzel? A woman he could keep locked away in his castle tower, pining for her lover’s return.
Arianna huffed.
Fat chance.

If only her cell worked up here, she would simply call a taxi. But when she had tried to check in with her friends last night, there had been no service.

Pondering her situation, Arianna tapped her nails against the arm of the chair. She was in good shape, so walking the few miles into town certainly wouldn’t kill her. The only problem was going to be getting across that crocodile-infested moat. Most people had
dogs
to guard their property. Leave it to Caleb to do the dramatic.

Then she had a light bulb moment, remembering how they had entered the property the day before. If he had a remote control device in the SUV, it only stood to reason that there was a complementary manual switch located nearby, maybe in the gatehouse. All she had to do was find it.

Her master plan devised, Arianna went to brush her teeth and finish getting dressed. As she walked back into the bedroom a few minutes later, she almost tripped over a pile of dirty linen. A girl with long, red curls was bending over the bed, smoothing out the duvet. She glanced up at Arianna with a timid smile.

“You must be Molly.” The girl nodded, her cheeks coloring prettily. “I’m glad you’re hear. I’ve been wanting to thank you, for unpacking for me and everything.”

“’Twas nothing, Miss.”

“Arianna, please.”

“Arianna. Such a lovely name you have there.”

“Thanks. Umm…Molly, I’m going to go hiking around the grounds for a while. Caleb…um…Himself, uh….” The girl giggled behind her hand, while Arianna struggled to come up with the proper reference for her employer. “Well, anyway,” she said finally, with a grin, “
he
suggested I do some exploring while he’s gone. When we arrived, he used some remote control thingy to lower the drawbridge. Would you happen to know where—?”

A brief knock on the door interrupted their conversation.
Darn!
“I’ve your lunch, luveen.” Maeve met her in the sitting room, tray in hand. “Thought you might prefer eating here. You only had a scone for breakfast, so I’ve brought a fair bit. Molly,” she called into the bedroom, “Grandda requires you in the Hall.”

As the young girl came through the bedroom door, dirty linen bundled in her arms, Arianna turned to her. “You don’t have to change my sheets every day. I only do it once a week at home.” With a slight nod, the girl scampered past the two women and fled the room.

Maeve set the tray on a small round table in the corner. Taking a step back, she looked everything over. “Is there anything else you’ll be needing before I go?”

Only the location of that stupid switch.
“No, thanks,” Arianna answered sweetly.

Maeve returned her too-bright smile and ducked out of the room.

“Looks like I’ve been banished from the public areas for the duration of
Himself’s
absence,” Arianna observed wryly. Flanagan was taking steps to ensure that no one else blabbed any more forbidden castle secrets.

Since there was no telling how long it would take to escape, Arianna figured she might as well eat, keep up her strength. Sitting down at the table, she dipped a chunk of crusty bread into a hearty bowl of Irish stew. The condemned, enjoying her last meal. Well, at least she wasn’t doing her time here, as a prisoner of the castle, wasting away in its dungeon.

Far from it, she thought, allowing the subtle beauty of her surroundings to relax the tight cords knotting the back of her neck. The sturdy Victorian bygones set about on a solid parquet floor scattered with antique rugs spoke longingly of another era. Wooden shutters on the windows held the brisk chill of the North Atlantic winds at bay. A log and turf fire blazed in the twelve-foot hearth, filling the space with a cozy warmth that was completely at odds with her present situation.

How she wished things had turned out differently. That there had been none of the craziness, none of the subterfuge. Arianna jumped at a knock on the door.
What now?

It was Flanagan. “Himself’s on the phone for you, miss.”

Caleb? On the telephone? What now, indeed?

Arianna opened the door. “Thanks, Flanagan. I’ll get it over there.” She gestured toward a black landline phone on an oak table beside one of the armchairs. He gave a short bow and turned to leave.

“Caleb? What a nice surprise.” Sarcasm dripped from her words like sap from a sugar maple tree.

“I’d a wee break, so thought I’d check in.”
Wow
. Even now, knowing what she knew, the sound of his voice made her spirits soar. She must be insane. “Wanted to be certain you’ve everything you need.”

“Yeah, everything but my freedom,” sang the bird in the gilded cage.

“Oh, I’m quite comfortable, thank you. Read a little bit before I went to bed last night. Alice in Wonderland.” She had immersed herself in a leather-bound copy she had found on one of the bookshelves here in the sitting room. Her reading choices had spanned the genres from the most technical scientific journal to a copy of a sixteenth century Bible. There had even been a modern-day, faerie tale romance amongst the more literary works.