She's had enough trouble, MacQuade, without you adding to it, he warned himself inwardly, but he savored the delicate brush of her hair a moment more before he drew away.
"So," he said, his voice aggravatingly unsteady, "you said you needed to talk to me about something."
Setting the lantern back on the ground, Ashleen tucked her legs beneath her, sitting there in a pool of soft gray skirts. "It's about Meggie."
Garret winced, feeling memories dig deep in his chest.
"Mr. MacQuade, you were wonderful with her tonight. I can't thank you enough for—for coming."
"Don't thank me. I've been a horse's ass ever since West Port Landing. It was the least I could do. I'm just sorry you were disappointed."
"Disappointed?" Incredulous eyes met his.
Damn, he was pointing out thorns to the woman again. "That she didn't talk."
"What she did with you tonight—choosing to sit by you, letting you touch her doll—that was enough for me." She arched back her head, smiling up into the heavens as if she saw angels. "Sometimes miracles require patience. And this one... with Meggie, I've been waiting a long time."
Miracles... had Garret ever believed in them?
He regarded her, silent for a moment. "That first day, when I hollered at the child, you said something about finding her... with her mother."
"Yes." Ashleen's face was shaded softly with sorrow. "Meggie's mother was my dearest friend from the time we could both toddle through our front gates. For years we told each other everything, shared all our dreams, hopes, all our secrets."
Garret knew he should draw back from that musical, alluring voice, not encourage confidences borne of the starlit night. Instead he heard himself asking, "What kind of secrets, Mary Ashleen?"
"The delicious kind all little girls share. For months Moira and I plotted to run away and be gypsies, to dance wildly around campfires while people threw coins. Then we were going to take to the High Toby, like highwaymen of old. But neither of us could find a gun or a sword, so we decided to become opera dancers."
"The next best thing to being a gypsy?" Garret asked, recalling his own long-buried childhood dreams, woven in the sprawling tree branches that had been his special refuge.
"Exactly." She shot him a blinding smile. "Father O'Hara was fit to be hanged the day Moira and I told him in confession."
There was so much life in her, so much devilish delight, that despite his better judgment Garret smiled. He could imagine Ashleen O'Shea in a whirlwind of adventure such as she'd described far more easily than he could picture her locked away in some musty old abbey.
Though Garret tried, he couldn't imagine that a woman who loved so openly, so eagerly, everything from recalcitrant horses and wilted roses to castoff children would choose a life walled off from the world.
It's none of your concern, MacQuade, he warned himself roughly.Why the hell should you even care?
But he couldn't stop himself from wondering why she had chosen a life she was so unsuited for. Had her parents forced her? This priest, O'Hara? Had she been so poor that she'd had to choose between life as a nun and starvation? Or had there been something—someone—who had taken the love she offered so freely and shattered her, so that she had fled to the only haven she had known?
Garret's jaw clenched, and he resolved that he would not—would not—ask any more damn fool questions or learn anything more that would make this ethereal angel seem real to him. Maybe then she would go away, back to her wagon, serene in the moonlight.
Leave him alone... so damn alone.
But she only sat there silent, her eyes a million dreams away. For a gut-wrenching instant Garret wished he could travel there with her.
The longing welled, expanded, filling the silence until he groped for something to drown out the echoes of his own secret need.
He busied himself stowing his drawing gear in his saddlebags, his voice edged with a subtle touch of something akin to panic as he grasped Ashleen's last words. "So what did this Father O'Hara do when he discovered you were plotting to run off? Lock you in the convent and force you to be a nun?"
"Force me? No." Was there pain about the tender corners of her mouth? Clouds of remembrance in eyes that had been wistful blue?
For all his inner turmoil, Garret couldn't bring himself to seek refuge in something that so obviously hurt her.
"It's none of my business, I know," he said gruffly. "It's just that you look so right in the middle of all those kids, teasing them, telling them stories, tucking them into bed. I would've thought that..."
He let his sentence trail off, unable to form his thoughts into words.
The idea of Ashleen tucked away in some cozy cottage filled with babies pleased him mightily, but the thought of her sharing it with some mule-stubborn man who didn't appreciate her set Garret's teeth on edge.
