'I'm sure you're right, but I-'
'Can't go quite that fast, or you wouldn't be Jude.'
Though it cost him, he drew her back to study her face. More than pretty, he thought now, but solid as well. Why was it, he wondered, she didn't seem to know just how pretty or just how solid she was?
Because she didn't, more time and more care were needed.
'And I like Jude, as I've said before. You need some courting.'
She couldn't say if she was stunned, amused, or insulted. 'I certainly don't.'
'Oh, but you do. You want flowers and words, and stolen kisses and walks in soft weather. It's romance Jude Frances wants, and I'm the one to give it to you. Well, now, look at that face.' He caught her by the chin as an adult might a sulky child, and she decided insult won. 'You're pouting now.'
'I certainly am not.' She would have jerked her face free, but he tightened his grip, then leaned down and kissed her firm on the mouth.
'I'm the one who's looking at you, sweetheart, and if that's not a fine pout, I'm a Scotsman. It's that you're thinking I'm making fun of you, but I'm not, or not much anyway. What's wrong with romance then? I'd like some myself.'
His voice went warm and rich, like whiskey by the fire. 'Will you give me long looks and warm smiles from across the room, and the brush of your hand on my arm? A hot, desperate kiss in the shadows? A touch'-he skimmed his fingertips over the curve of her breast and all but stopped her heart-'in secret?'
'I didn't come here looking for romance.'
Hadn't she? he thought. With her myths and legends and tales. 'Looking or not, you'll have it.' On that score his mind was made up. 'And when I make love with you, the first time, it'll be long and slow and sweet. That's a promise. Walk back with me now, before the way you're looking at me makes me break that promise as soon as I've made it.'
'You just want to be in charge. In control of the situation.'
He took her hand again in the friendliest and most annoying of manners. 'I suppose I'm accustomed to being so. But if you want to take over and seduce me, darling Jude, I can promise to be weak and willing.'
She laughed, damn it, before she could stop herself. 'I'm sure we both have work to do.'
'But you'll come see me,' he continued as they walked. 'You'll sit and have a glass of wine in my pub so I can look at you and suffer.'
'God, you're Irish,' she whispered.
'To the bone.' He lifted her hand and nipped her knuckle. 'And Jude, by the way, you're damn good at kissing.'
'Hmmm,' was the safest response she could think of.
But she went to the pub, and sat and listened to stories. Over the next days as spring took a firmer hold on Ardmore, Jude could often be found at the pub for an hour or two in the evening, or the afternoon. She listened, recorded, took notes. And as the word spread, others with stories came to tell them, or to be entertained by them.
She filled tapes and reams of pages and dutifully transcribed and analyzed them at her computer while she sipped at what was becoming her habitual cup of tea.
If sometimes she dreamed herself into the stories of romance and magic, she thought it harmless enough. Even useful if she stretched things a bit. After all, she could understand the meanings and the motives all the better if the stories and the actions in them became more personal.
It wasn't as if she was going to waste time actually writing it that way. An academic paper had no room for fancies or fantasies. She was only exploring until she found the core of her thesis, then she'd tidy up the language and delete the ramblings.
What the hell are you going to do with it, Jude? she asked herself. What do you really think you're going to do even if you polish and perfect and hammer it until it's dry as dust? Try to have it published in some professional journal absolutely no one reads for pleasure? Use it to try to kick off a lecture tour?
Oh, the idea of that happening, however remote the possibility, felt like an entire troop of Boy Scouts tying knots in her stomach.
For an instant she nearly buried her face in her hands and gave in to despair. Nothing was ever going to come of this paper, this project. It was self-defeating to believe differently. No one was ever going to stand around at a faculty function and discuss the insights and interests of Jude F. Murray's paper. Worse, she didn't want them to.
It was no more than a kind of therapy, a way to pull her back from the edge of a crisis she couldn't even identify.
What good had all those years of study and work accomplished if she couldn't even find the right terms for her own crises?
Poor self-esteem, bruised ego, a lack of belief in her own femininity, career dissatisfaction.
But what was under all of that? Really under it. Blurred identity? she mused. Maybe that was part of it. She'd lost herself somewhere along the line until whatever was left, whatever she'd been able to recognize, had been so pale, so unattractive, that she'd run from it.
To what?
Here, she thought and was more than a little surprised to realize that her fingers were racing over the keyboard, her thoughts were speeding out of her head and onto the page.
/ ran here, and here I feel somehow more real, certainly more at home than I ever did in the house William and I bought, or the condo I moved into after he'd grown tired of me. Certainly more at home than in the classroom.
Oh, God, oh, God, I hated the classroom. Why couldn't I ever admit it, just say it out loud? I don't want to do this, don't want to be this. I want something else. Nearly anything else would do.
How did I become such a coward, and worse, so pitifully boring? Why do I, even now with no one to answer to but myself, question this project when it pleases me so much? When it gives me such satisfaction. Can't I, just for this little piece of time, indulge myself with something that doesn't have any solid, guaranteed-practical purpose or goal?
If it's therapy, it's time I let it work. It's not doing any harm. In fact, I think-I hope-it's doing me some good. I feel attracted to the writing. That's an odd term to use, but it fits. Writing attracts me, the mystery of it, the way words fit together on a page to make an image or a point or just to be there, sounding.
Seeing my own words on the page is thrilling. There's a wonderful kind of conceit in reading them, knowing they're mine. Part of that terrifies me because it's so incredibly exciting. For so much of my life I've turned away, backed away, hidden away from anything that's frightening. Even when it is thrilling as well.
I want to feel substantial again. I yearn for confidence. And under it all, I have a deep and nearly crushed-out delight in the fantastic. How it was nearly crushed and by whom isn't really important. Not now that I find the glimmer of it's still there, inside me. Enough of a glimmer for me to be able to write, at least in secret, that I want to believe in the legends, in the myths, in the faeries and the ghosts. What harm is there in that? It can't possibly hurt me.
No, she thought, leaning back again, resting, her hands in her lap. Of course it can't hurt me. It's harmless and it makes me wonder. It's been too long since I really let myself wonder.
Letting out a long breath, she closed her eyes and felt nothing but the sweetness of relief. 'I'm so glad I came here,' she said aloud.
She rose to look out the window, satisfied that she'd used her writing to fight off the threat of despair. Her days here, nights here, were soothing some threatening storm inside her. These little moments of joy were precious.
She turned away from the window, wanting the air and the outdoors. There she would ponder the other aspect of her new life.
Aidan Gallagher, she thought. Gorgeous, somehow exotic, and inexplicably interested in solid, sensible Jude F. Murray. Talk about the fantastic.
Perhaps the time spent with Aidan wasn't quite so soothing, she admitted, though she was careful enough to arrange things so they were never alone. Still, the lack of privacy didn't stop him from flirting, from indulging himself in those long looks he'd spoken of, or the slow, secret smiles, the lazy brush of a hand over her arm, her hair, her
