The Man Behind The Mask. Barbara Hannay

face on one side and sticking straight up on the other. But he was now wide-awake and ready to fight.

      “You heard her,” he said, “put her down. Who are you? What have you done to my aunt Nora?”

      Not his mother. His aunt.

      The boy dashed back into the house and came out wielding a coat rack. He held it over his shoulder, like a baseball bat he was prepared to swing. His level of menace was laughable. Brendan was careful not to show that he had rarely felt less threatened.

      Still, he couldn’t help but admire a kid prepared to do battle with a full-grown man.

      Brendan closed his eyes, and was suddenly aware he didn’t feel the weight of new cynicism. Instead he was acutely aware of how the sweet weight in his arms and the woman’s warmth were making his skin tingle. He was aware that the air smelled of rain and rose petals, and that those smells mingled with the clean scent of her hair and her skin.

      Two and a half years ago, in the night, a phone call had changed everything forever. He’d been sleepwalking through life ever since, aware that he was missing something essential that other people had. That it was locked inside the tomb, and that even if he could have rolled the rock away, he was not sure that he would.

      And now, another middle of the night phone call, leading to this moment. He was standing here in a stranger’s yard with a woman who either was trouble, or was in trouble, in his arms, an adolescent boy threatening him with a coat rack, Deedee oblivious to it all, struggling to get her dying cat out of the car.

      Brendan was aware that the rock had rolled, that a crack of light had appeared in the darkness. He was aware of feeling wide-awake, as if he was a warrior waiting to see if it was a friend or foe outside.

      For the first time in more than two years he felt the blood racing through his veins, the exquisite touch of raindrops on his skin. For the first time in so long, Brendan knew he was alive.

      And it didn’t make him happy.

      Not one little bit.

      Instead, he felt deeply resentful that the prison of numbness that had become his world was being penetrated by this vibrant, demanding capricious energy called life.

      “Put me down!” Nora insisted again, hoping for a nononsense tone of voice that would hide the confusion she was really feeling.

      She looked up into the exquisite strength of the stranger’s face. Through the fabric of the expensive rain jacket he had wrapped around her, she could feel the iron hardness of his chest where she leaned into it. His arms, cradling her shoulders and her legs, were bands of pure steel.

      She should have fought harder against being picked up and toted across the yard like a sleeping baby. Because it was crazy to feel so safe.

      The stranger had a certain cool and dangerous aloofness about him. He had already made it clear he had heard some exaggerated claim about her energy that had allowed him to put her in the category of gypsies, tramps and thieves.

      So the feeling of safety had to be attributed to the terrible knock on her head. Being in his arms made Nora achingly aware that she had been alone for a while now. Carrying the weight of her world all by herself. It was a relief to be carried for a change. A guilty pleasure, but a relief nonetheless.

      Now, looking up at him, she could feel something shifting. His hands tightened marginally on her and some finely held tension played around the corners of his sinfully sensuous mouth.

      The soft suede of his deep, deliciously brown eyes had not changed when he had called her a healer, his tone accusatory, but now they had hardened to icy remoteness and sparked with vague anger.

      Well, he had come to her rescue and was being threatened with a coat rack. Naturally, he would react.

      But now he was not the man she had awoken to, one with something so compelling in his face she had reached up and touched…

      She shook that off, striving for the control she had lost when she’d accepted his arms around her, accepted being cradled against the fortress of his chest, accepted the comfort of being carried.

      She could not be weak. She had to be strong. Everything was relying on her now. She was completely on her own since her fiancé had said, “Look, it’s him or it’s me.”

      Surely, when her sister had appointed her guardian of then fourteen-year-old Luke she had not expected that turn of events! Karen had thought she was entrusting her son to a home, to a stable, financially secure environment that would have two parents, one her sister, Nora, affectionately known within the family as “the flake,” the other a highly respected stable person, a vet with his own practice.

      But the highly predictable world Karen had envisioned for Luke didn’t happen. When everything had fallen apart between her and Vance, Nora had risked it all on a new start.

      She had to be strong.

      “Look,” Nora said, “you really have to put me down.”

      The man ignored her, looking flintily past her to Luke.

      To get his attention off her nephew, and to show she meant business, she smacked the stranger hard, against the solid wall of his chest. It felt ineffectual, as if she was being annoying, like a bug, not powerful like a lioness.

      Still, when his arm slid out from under her knees, and she found herself standing, albeit a bit wobbly, on her own two feet, instead of feeling relieved she felt the oddest sense of loss.

      He had carried her across her yard with incredible ease, his stride long, powerful and purposeful, his breath remaining steady and even. It was the kind of strength a person might want to rely on.

      If that person hadn’t made a pact to rely totally on herself!

      Get a grip, Nora ordered silently, moving away from the man. She was genuinely relieved that Luke dropped the coat rack and came to her side.

      Casting a look loaded with suspicion and warning at the man who had carried her, Luke got his shoulder under her arm and helped her toward the house.

      “What happened? Did he hurt you?”

      “No. No. It wasn’t him. I couldn’t sleep and I went to check the animals. One of the new horses must have spooked and knocked me over.”

      “Why would you go out in the corral by yourself?” Luke asked.

      “My question precisely.” The man’s voice was deep and calm, steady.

      “Those horses were wild when they were brought in,” Luke said accusingly. “That one took a kick at the guy unloading him.”

      She didn’t like it one little bit that it felt as if the two were forming an alliance against her!

      Why had she gone into the corral when the horses were so restless? Probably she hadn’t even thought about it, overly confident in her ability to calm animals.

      Since she was a little girl she had found refuge from her mother and father’s constant bickering by bringing home broken things to fix. Tiny wounded birds, abandoned cats, dogs near death.

      Inside, Nora was still the girl who had been seen by family and school chums as an eccentric, a kook, and she was more comfortable hiding her gifts than revealing them.

      Which made her very uncomfortable with whatever this stranger thought he knew about her.

      Would Karen have ever made her guardian of Luke if she knew Vance would not be in the picture? Probably not. She would have known her sister could not be trusted to control impulses like jumping into a corral full of flighty horses in the middle of the night!

      Nora was solely responsible for Luke. What if he’d found her out there in the mud? Hadn’t he been traumatized enough? She was supposed to be protecting him!

      Still, it was unsettling to her that what she remembered, in far more detail than her lapse of judgment before entering the corral, or the moments before being