Dark Enchantment (2 page)

Chapter Two

Five Days Later…

“Y
ou’re getting on a flight this morning and leaving the country? Just like that. Seriously?” Standing at the stove in the kitchen of the condo that Arianna shared with her two best friends, Tara Price waved a spatula around for emphasis. “The memorial service was only yesterday. You need your friends right now. It’s too soon to go running off alone.”

The early morning sunlight taunted Arianna as it streamed through the kitchen window, its cheery reflection bouncing off the stainless steel appliances and glass-faced wooden cabinetry. “My darkest hour drenched in sunshine,” she murmured in a bitter monotone. ‘Such a mockery.”

From her seat at the granite breakfast bar in the center of the kitchen, she turned her gaze to the mirror on the wall behind her. Staring back at her through dazed blue eyes was a stranger, expression drawn, cheeks pale and sunken, her long blonde hair lackluster.

Tara set a plate of bacon and eggs in front of her grieving friend. She exchanged a pained glance with their other roommate, Michaela Daniels, perched at the bar beside her. Michaela set her bagel on the saucer in front of her and covered Arianna’s hand with her own. “Ah, babe, I’m so sorry.”

“I know. Thanks.” Arianna forced a smile at her little friend. A pint-sized pixie with super-sized Attitude, the two of them had been tight since childhood.

Arianna looked at her plate and grimaced. The glistening layer of grease on the two eggs staring plaintively back at her made her stomach roll. “Tara, you know I can’t eat this early in the morning.”

“Well, try. It’s been five days since your dad…since…. You’ve hardly eaten a thing,” she finished uncomfortably, then paused. “At least it was quick, sweetie. A blessing he didn’t suffer.”

Official diagnosis, a brain aneurysm. One mind-blowing explosion of pain and the lights went out. Permanently. He never saw it coming.
“Yeah, a real blessing. My father dead at the grand old age of forty-nine. Happy days.”

Tara sighed, the sound like a deflating balloon as she sank onto a wood and chrome stool beside Arianna. “Sorry. Dumb thing to say.” Looking down, she went quiet for a moment. “Don’t go, honey, please. It’s too soon. You’re still in shock. I mean, I haven’t even seen you cry.”

“Now that’s not likely to happen, is it?” At that moment, the urge to lash out was paramount; the need to shake a fist in the Face of God uncontrolled.
How could Da just go and die like that? How could he leave me here all alone?
“You know I can’t cry, Tara.”
Never had. Not once in twenty-eight years.

The flash of temper seemed to provide at least a modicum of relief. As if it had incinerated some of the grief, cut it off from the source like a smaller blaze seeded into the path of an approaching wildfire.

Tara’s face fell. “I’m so sorry,” she apologized again. “I just thought… I mean, with it being your dad and all….”

Remorse hit Arianna hard. Snapping and snarling did help transform her sadness into something that was, for her, far more manageable—a fit of temper. Still, dumping all that toxic waste on her oldest friend just wasn’t fair. “No, Tara. I’m the one who should be apologizing. I’m being a bitch. And you deserve better than that.”

Tara’s lips pressed together; her brow furrowed in worry. “Cut yourself some slack, would you, babe? You just lost your dad, for heaven’s sake.” The nervous energy that kept Tara’s tall, willowy frame model slim propelled her to her feet. The chunky blonde layers of hair framing her face fell forward as she gave another swipe of the dishcloth over the already immaculate island bar. “That’s why I’m so worried about you leaving today. It’s just way too soon for you to go gallivanting off to some foreign country on your own.”

Nag, nag, nag.
Arianna bit her tongue until she would have sworn she tasted blood. Still, the exercise helped her manage to keep the words a thought, even as she prayed for patience. She loved Tara; she really did. But, from the moment Arianna had mentioned leaving immediately for Ireland—purportedly, to scatter her father’s ashes—the girl had just refused to let it go.

Tara muttered under her breath as she turned back to the sink. Something about locking Arianna in her room until she came to her senses.

And she’d do it, too,
Arianna thought. “For the umpteenth time, Tara, Ireland is
not
a foreign country. Not to me. I was born there.”

“Yeah, and left when you were only three. Which makes you about as Irish as...as the Pope. No, wait a minute, he’s
more
Irish. At least
he’s
a practicing Catholic.”

“Yeah, very funny,” Arianna muttered, chasing a strip of bacon around her plate with the tines of her fork.

“Stop playing with your food!” Tara ordered, hands on hips in that exasperated mother pose she had long ago perfected. “Lord knows, if you’re bent and determined to fly out of here this morning, you need to eat something.”

At the thought of food, Arianna swallowed, again tasting bile. The low-grade nausea she had been experiencing since her father’s death had been only exacerbated by the smells of condolences pouring into the condo in the form of food. There were soups and salads, hot casseroles and desserts of every variety. The freezer was packed, the fridge and cupboards groaning, and still the stuff kept pouring in. So much so, she reasoned that they could have fed a small third world country on the surplus alone.

Catching Tara’s insistent gaze, Arianna sighed. “Yes, Mother dearest.” Dutifully, she shoveled a forkful of egg into her mouth and began to chew. Her empty stomach gurgled in appreciation, surprising her with how hungry she really was.

Until now, Michaela had sat quietly, managing to avoid getting caught in the crossfire between her two friends. But Arianna’s snide remark brought about a forfeited snicker and an eye-roll.

“I saw that.” Tara shot her a glare as she took another swipe of the spotless sink.

“Don’t mind her, Mick,” Arianna teased in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood. “You gotta know it’s hopeless.”

Tara had been seven, Arianna three when she and her da had arrived in Maine from Ireland. As soon as Tara discovered that the new kid on the block, the one with the funny accent, didn’t have a mother, she had made Arianna her very own living doll.

“You didn’t even buy a round-trip ticket.” While Tara nattered on, Arianna amused herself with visions of her fair and slender friend. Hands wrapped around a baseball bat, she was pummeling a horse already sprawled lifeless on the ground. “What’s up with that? You can’t just uproot your whole life and run away on a whim. What about your business?”

“I have a manager? Karen’s done a great job whenever I’ve been away at antique auctions and on buying trips. She’ll keep things on track just fine until I get back.”

“Okay, then, what about Damien? You don’t honestly think the guy’s going to hang around indefinitely, waiting for you to come to your senses.”

Arianna hissed a tired sigh. “Let’s not go there right now, okay?” Tara opened her mouth to say something else, but Arianna cut her off. “I mean it, Tara. It’s not like that with us. We’ve only been dating for a few weeks.
Casually
dating.”

“Casual? Is that what you call it? You’ve spent every night in his bed since…” Tara’s voice trailed off, as if she couldn’t bear to say the words.

“Since my father died,” Arianna finished for her,
needing
to say the words. Maybe it would help her begin to accept the finality of his being gone. “I told you, Damien lost his own dad when he was a kid. Which means he gets what I’m going through. I can’t explain it, but just having him hold me through all the sleepless hours….”

“He’s not going to wait forever.”

Michaela brushed crumbs off the counter onto her plate as she stood up. “Don’t listen to her, babe. He’ll wait. Dude’s crazy about you. And he’s smokin’! So, why the heck have you been dragging your feet?” The question was a tongue poking at a sore tooth. “Why not just jump his bones and give up the V card, already?”

Arianna frowned at the idiom. So what if she was still a virgin? With all the talk about women’s ‘choices’ today, why did she get such flack over her decision to remain abstinent? It was true that her father had raised her with a healthy dose of Christian values—spiked with a liberal shot of Catholic guilt. But that wasn’t what had kept her chaste all these years. Aside from the fact that she was overly picky about men—Damien being the first guy she had dated in several years—something else had stopped her from going further.

She felt like she would be cheating on another man.

Fact of the matter was, she was already in love—with a man she couldn’t have.

And no, the guy wasn’t married. Her luck, it couldn’t be anything as
simple
as that. Nope, bat-crap crazy as it sounded, the man she loved was an illusion, a veritable puff of smoke. A late-night figment of her all-too-fertile imagination.

And every bit as real to her as the two women standing in the kitchen with her now.
Torn Between Two Lovers,
she thought, her lips in a wry twist. But, of the two vying for a place in Arianna’s heart, only one was a mortal man conceived of flesh and blood. The other was the fulfillment of every woman’s erotic fantasy, a dark angel born of her secret dreams.

“You already know why I can’t be with Damien that way.” Arianna watched her closest friends exchange troubled glances.

“You mean the magic man,” Michaela confirmed.

“I thought you’d stopped having the dreams,” Tara said.

“Just stopped talking about them,” Arianna replied.

Yes, the waking dreams had haunted her for as long as she could remember. Of course, in the beginning, she had been too young to question the web of enchantment, the spell that spirited her through a mystical portal to another dimension. To some other place in time.

And, it had been there, on the far side of nowhere, that she had first encountered him.

The boy with eyes of green and hair as black as the darkest night.

Arianna had grown up like that, waking in a storybook castle stretched high above a wild and rocky shore. She had been in high school before recognizing the significance of the dream-carved setting: it was the rugged coast of the west of Ireland where she had been born. As the years fled by, she had watched manhood sculpt the boy’s lanky body, carving ripped lean muscle into his lengthening torso.

The pattern of the dream had never altered, at least not until the night of her eighteenth birthday. It was then, for the first time, that he jerked to a halt in the sand. His head angled, chin tipped upward, his gaze appeared to sweep across the hulking fortress atop the rocky cliff. He seemed to be searching for something…. Or some
one
.

Now, she knew there was no way the young man could have seen her standing at that window. Not from that distance. Certainly not cloaked in midnight’s shadows as she had been. And yet, like a laser in the night, his glittering gaze sliced through the distance and the darkness, until he had found her.

Over a decade had passed since that fateful night. And yet, Arianna recalled the incident as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. Tiny hairs rose now on her arms and legs, as she relived the stunning impact of that incandescent gaze. And the punch of supernatural power that had sent her reeling, her heart fluttering like a baby bird trapped in a nest of human hands.

The image had been burned indelibly into her memory. His hand raised, his index finger pointed at her, then crooked in a beckoning motion. It was an invitation to come and walk with him. Needles of ice danced over her skin as she had reached out to him, her hand slipping through the narrow castle window. A scream lodged deep in her throat as she felt herself being swept up, up into a dizzying whirlwind, into a blinding flash of crystal light. And then, somehow, within the space of a single heartbeat, she was there beside him, the two of them walking hand-in-hand in the cloud-dappled moonlight.

With their very first encounter on that windswept shore, Arianna’s heart had become the possession of that dark and brooding stranger, her illusive phantom of the night.

Forcing herself back to the present, Arianna noted her friends worried expressions. Tara’s pronouncement was short, succinct, and to the point. “You need to see a psychiatrist. Try to figure out what happened in your early childhood to mess your head up. Now, come on. Enough daydreaming. Flight’s leaving in less than three hours. You have everything? Tickets? Passport?”

“Tara,
breathe
!” Michaela ordered. “There’s no rush. We have plenty of time.” Then, in an aside to Arianna, “I know you don’t want to hear this, kiddo, but she
is
right, you know. You really haven’t thought this thing through—”

Arianna gave her a stricken look. “Not you, too.”

“You’re losing weight and you have dark circles under your eyes,” Tara bit out. “Just for the record, you look like hell.”

“Hey, don’t hold back. Tell me what you really think.”

Tara’s green eyes shot quicksilver. “Go ahead, be flippant. But I want you to know I have a bad feeling about this trip you’re taking. A
very
bad feeling.”

Tara was an archaeologist, a scientist. A pragmatist to the very core. So admitting something airy-fairy like that had to have cost her dearly. “But you don’t
get
‘feelings’,” Arianna reminded her in a soft voice.

“That’s right, I don’t. Which is
exactly
why you should take this one to heart. Look, why don’t you just postpone the trip—” As Arianna opened her mouth to protest, Tara raised a silencing hand. “For a
week
. Is that too much to ask? It’ll give me a chance to tie up any loose ends from the Tundra dig and come with you.”

Tara had arrived home from her most recent expedition on October 30
th
, the day before Arianna’s father had died.

Michaela’s dark chocolate eyes, inherited from a Native American great-great grandmother, brimmed with compassion. “Better yet, just reschedule to a later flight today. I’ll get packed and come with you myself.”