Haunting Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page A

waited impatiently for her to answer his question. When had she last seen her mother, Fia MacGrath?
    With effort, he held his tongue, sitting placidly while she laid out the tea, performing the task like an elegant ritual. She had slender fingers with short nails, unadorned but for a silver ring on the middle one with the entwined symbol for yin and yang at its center. Her wrists were small and feminine, her ivory skin smooth and creamy. Her hair hung to her shoulders in a thick, glossy veil of what seemed a thousand shades of gold and amber, russet and toffee. Like the sunrise, it defied description.
    She looked up suddenly and caught him staring. At her feet, the dog growled.
    “It was Wednesday, October twenty-fifth, 1989. I was four or five,” she said, answering his question as she took her seat. “I don’t know which. When my mother didn’t come back, it was discovered that the papers she’d filled out for the day care center were all false. The address, the name, everything on it. They assumed my birth date was incorrect as well.” She looked at the announcement again. “If this is real, I was five.”
    “October twenty-fifth,” he repeated. Was there some significance to the date?
    “I don’t know why she picked that day,” Danni said, reading his mind. “If there’s a reason, twenty years of thinking about it hasn’t made it any clearer to me. When did she disappear from Ireland?”
    “About three weeks before that.”
    “Three weeks? What was she doing all that time?”
    He shook his head, feeling her frustration, her hurt, that such a painful event should happen on such a random timeline. He wanted to reach out and offer her comfort, but the hypocrisy of it was too much for him to manage.
    “I know even less than you do,” he said. “I expected you to answer that for me. You and your brother,” he murmured, almost to himself.
    Her eyes glistened and she lowered her lashes to hide them from him. “I didn’t remember that I had a brother,” she said. “I think I used to talk about him, when I was little. But everyone assumed I’d made him up. After a while, I guess I thought they were right.”
    Bloody hell. Where was Rory? What had Fia done with Danni’s brother? Had both children made the journey to the U.S. with her? Or didn’t Rory make it out of Ireland alive? Had they gotten to him first?
    “How can you be so sure?” she asked suddenly. “What makes you so certain that this is my mother? That this is my family?”
    “Aside from the resemblance?”
    “It could be a coincidence, nothing more.”
    She said it earnestly and yet she didn’t believe it. He could hear it in her voice, in the way it wavered between hunger and hurt. There was too much mystery and darkness about his story—too much of the same about her own—for her to be joyous over the news of a lost family suddenly found. But he could see the longing there inside her, knew instinctively that she’d waited her whole life for someone to walk through the door and tell her she wasn’t alone.
    “It’s no coincidence, Danni,” he said, forcing the words past his guilt. “It’s the truth I’m telling you. Have you not a birthmark, right here?”
    He took her left hand in his, turning it as he gently pushed the sleeve of her sweater up to reveal the pale skin on the other side. There, just below the crook, was the faint pink rose-shaped pattern he sought. His grandmother had said it would be there, but some part of him had doubted it. He was a fool, to be certain.
    Danni bent her head to stare at the birthmark, and the soft, clean scent of her hair seemed to wrap him in a warm and unexpected intimacy. He brushed the small mark with his thumb, thinking her skin felt like heated satin. She jerked slightly, as if she, too, had felt the electricity in the touch. Her face was close to his, their heads bent together.
    “It’s a family mark,” he murmured, looking into her eyes. She stared back, hesitant, as aware as he