He’d felt the punch of it, the power, like a blow meant to awaken rather than to harm.

His mind had sizzled from it, and nothing—not the beer, not his youth, not even the shock—had been able to dull the thrill.

She’d looked at him, Jordan remembered again as he scanned the parapet. And she’d known him.

Flynn and Brad hadn’t seen her. By the time his mind had clicked back into gear and he shouted them over, she was gone.

It had spooked them, of course. Deliciously. The way sightings of ghosts and fanciful creatures are meant to.

Though years later, when he wrote of her, he made her a ghost, he’d known then—he knew now—that she was as alive as he.

“Whoever you were,” he murmured, “you helped me make my mark. So, thanks.”

He stood there, hands in his pockets, peering through the bars. The house was part of his past, and oddly, he’d considered making it part of his future. He’d been toying with calling to see if it was available just days before Flynn had contacted him about the portrait of the young Arthur of Britain. He’d bought that painting on impulse five years ago at the gallery where Malory used to work, though he hadn’t met her then. Not only had it been a major element of Malory’s quest, but they’d discovered the painting, along with The Daughters of Glass and one Brad had bought separately had all been painted by Rowena, Jordan thought, centuries ago.

New York, his present, had served its purpose for him. He’d been ready for a change. Ready to come home. Then Flynn had made it so very easy.

It gave him the opportunity to come back, test the waters, and his feelings. He’d known, this time he’d known, as soon as he saw the majestic run of the Appalachians, that he wanted them back.

This time—surprise—he was back to stay.

He wanted those hills. The riot of them in fall, the lush green of them in summer. He wanted to stand and see them frozen in white, so still and regal, or hazed with the tender touch of spring.

He wanted the Valley, with its tidy streets and tourists. The familiarity of faces that had known him since his youth, the smell of backyard barbecues and the snippets of local gossip.

He wanted his friends, the comfort and the joy of them. Pizza out of the box, a beer on the porch, old jokes that no one laughed at the same way a childhood friend did.

And he still wanted that damn house, Jordan realized with a slow, dawning smile. He wanted it now every bit as much as he had when he was a sixteen-year-old dreamer with whole worlds yet to be explored.

So, he would bide his time there—he was cagier than he’d been at sixteen. And he would find out what Rowena and Pitte planned to do with the place when they moved on.

To wherever they moved on.

So, maybe the house was both his past and his future.

He ran bits of Rowena’s clue through his head. He was part of Dana’s past, and like it or not, he was part of her present. Very probably he would be part—one way or another—of her future.

So what did he, and the Peak, have to do with her quest for the key?

And wasn’t it incredibly self-serving to assume that he had anything to do with it.

“Maybe,” he said quietly to himself. “But right at the moment, I don’t see a damn thing wrong with that.”

With one last look at the house, he turned and walked back to his car. He would go back to Flynn’s and spend some time thinking it through, working out the angles.

Then he would present them to Dana, whether she wanted to hear them or not.

BRADLEY Vane had some plans and plots of his own. Zoe was a puzzlement to him. Prickly and argumentative one minute, scrupulously polite the next. He would knock, and the door to her would crack open. He could detect glimmers of humor and sweetness, then the door would slam shut in his face with a blast of cold air.

He’d never had a woman take an aversion to him on sight. It was especially galling that the first one who did happened to be the one he was so outrageously attracted to.

He hadn’t been able to get her face out of his mind for three years, since he’d first seen After the Spell, the painting he’d bought—the second one Rowena had painted of the Daughters of Glass.

Zoe’s face on the goddess who slept, three thousand years, in a coffin of glass.

However ridiculous it was, Brad had fallen in love at first sight with the woman in the portrait.

The woman in reality was a much tougher nut.

But Vanes were known for their tenacity. And their determination to win.

If she’d come into the store that afternoon, he could and would have rearranged his schedule and taken her through. It would’ve given him the opportunity to spend some time with her, while keeping it all practical and friendly.

Of course, you’d think that when her car broke down and he happened by and offered her a lift, that interlude would have been practical and friendly.

Instead she’d gotten her back up because he pointed out the flaws in her plan to try to fix the car while wearing a dinner dress, and he, understandably, had refused to mess with the engine himself.

He’d offered to call a mechanic for her, hadn’t he? Brad thought, getting riled up again at the memory. He’d stood there debating with her for ten minutes, thus ensuring that whatever she did they would both be late to the Peak.

And when she grudgingly accepted the ride finally, she spent every minute of it in an ice-cold funk.

He was absolutely crazy about her.

“Sick,” he muttered as he turned the corner to her street. “You’re a sick man, Vane.”

Her little house sat tidily back from the road on a neat stamp of lawn. She’d planted fall flowers along the sunny left side. The house itself was a cheerful yellow with bright white trim. A boy’s red bike lay on its side in the front yard, reminding him that she had a son he’d yet to catch sight of.

Brad pulled his new Mercedes behind her decade-old hatchback.

He walked back to the cargo area and hauled out the gift he hoped would turn the tide in his favor.

He carted it to the front door, then caught himself running a nervous hand through his hair.

Women never made him nervous.

Annoyed with himself, he knocked briskly.

It was the boy who opened it, and for the second time in his life, Brad found himself dazzled by a face. He looked like his mother—dark hair, tawny eyes, pretty, pointed features. The dark hair was mussed, the eyes cool with suspicion, but neither detracted a whit from the exotic good looks.