Raking a hand back through his black hair, Shane looked away from her. “Let it go, Faith. It just won’t work. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”

“But-”

“No, Faith.”

The look in his pewter gray eyes stilled the debate on her tongue. He wasn’t going to listen to her. The awful truth tolled inside her head like a death knell. Faith squeezed her own eyes shut against the pain, not opening them even when Shane’s fingers curved beneath her chin and his mouth brushed across hers. She didn’t watch him leave but listened to his footsteps as he rounded the foot of her bed and crossed the hardwood floor. When the door clicked shut behind him, she squeezed her hand tighter around the ring that burned like ice in her fist, and she cried.

She loved Shane Callan with her life, and he was leaving her.

TWELVE

HE WAS DOING the right thing, Shane told himself for the hundredth time as he wandered through the dark, silent house. He had touched Faith’s life only briefly, and look what had happened.

She had touched his life, and he would never be the same. Faith had given him a glimpse of joy, a sample of peace and contentment. Damn, but it hurt to have that slip through his hands! It had nearly killed him to walk out of her room that after noon, knowing she was hurting too. He would rather have taken her in his arms and kissed her tears away. But he was the reason she was in pain. Her life would be much better without him in it.

He leaned back against the door frame of the ballroom, a cigarette dangling from his lip, his whiskey flask in his hand. Hell, his life would be fine without the complication of a relationship; it had been for years. People didn’t try to get close to him. Even when he’d been young, he had always stood a little apart from the crowd. He was a loner. He had always accepted that.

Taking a pull on the flask, he thought about the future. A shudder ran through him that had nothing to do with the fine Irish liquor warming his belly. A few days ago he had sat on the beach with the sun on his face and the wind in his hair, his eye on the sweet serene woman beside him, his ears filled with the sounds of the sea and the laughter of a child. And he had let himself pretend that he could have that life. Now that image had faded, and all he saw once again was a bleak, gray plane. Shadows were his life, not sunshine, not rainbows.

He didn’t belong with Faith. Hers was a heart of gold; his was a heart of darkness.

Crossing the polished floor as silently as a cat, he went to the grand piano and flipped on the brass light. Shutting out all conscious thought about both the future and the past, he sat down and spread his long fingers across the cool ivory keys. Closing his eyes, he let his feelings flow directly from his soul to the keyboard.

Faith sat up in her bed, defying her doctor’s orders and nature as well. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t cry either. She had long since run out of tears. Rubbing her keepsake between her thumb and forefinger, she sat back against the pillows and stared unseeing into the shadows of her bedroom.

Shane would be leaving in the morning. Not because he didn’t love her, but because he did love her. He loved her and he was leaving her. Did that make any sense at all? Not to a woman, it didn’t. It especially didn’t make sense to Faith, who had always let her heart rule her head. But it made sense to Shane, and that was what she had to worry about.

She thought of the guilt and pain she had seen in his eyes, and her heart ached for him. Regardless of what she had told him, he blamed himself for what had happened to her, and some deep-seated, antiquated male sense of chivalry dictated that he let her go because of it. Men. Faith shook her head. No wonder the world was such a goofed-up place-men were in charge of it.

The question was. What could she do about Shane’s decision to leave? He had made her no promises. She had asked for none. What right did she have to try to hold him there?

Love.

Love gave her the right. If ever she’d known a man who needed love, it was Shane. Wary, cynical, spending his life in the shadows, he needed someone to reach out to him. That wasn’t simply Faith’s overactive sense of romanticism talking, it was the truth. She knew it with a certainty that radiated a sense of warmth throughout her entire being.

She loved Shane Callan. She hadn’t been looking for love when he’d barged into her life with his brooding black scowl and suspicious nature, but she’d found it nevertheless. Perhaps the fact that she hadn’t been expecting it made it all the more special. Certainly it made her realize what a gift that love was.

A gift so exceptional deserved to be kept and cherished. She couldn’t let Shane walk back into the shadows of a lonely existence without at least trying to make him understand, without at least trying to give him the love he so desperately needed in his life. As hardheaded as he was, he wouldn’t be easily convinced to accept it, but she had to try at least.

Moving to Anastasia and buying Keepsake had been a lifelong dream, but deep inside her Faith had nurtured another dream as well-to someday find a man to whom she could give the wealth of love she had stored up inside her, a man who would need her love and cherish her love and love her in return. She knew Shane was that man.

But what if she couldn’t change his mind?

The possibility he might reject her sent little jets of fear shooting along under the surface of her skin. After the years of rejection and indifference she had endured with William, she had no great desire to go through it again. And her feelings for William had been nothing compared to what she felt for Shane. If she laid her heart at his feet, and he still walked away…

Gamely she swallowed down the knot of panic that had lodged in her throat like a stone. No, she wasn’t going to consider the possibility of defeat. There was no point in it. If a person let fear stand in the way, she would never attain any dream, and if she’d ever had a dream worth reaching for, it was this one.

Squeezing her little gold heart, Faith lifted it and pressed a kiss to the keepsake for good luck. She eased herself out of bed, amazed at the amount of strength that simple action sapped from her. If getting out of bed left her breathless, following her dream was going to be a heck of a workout, she thought, as she stuffed her good arm into the sleeve of her ivory satin robe and awkwardly pulled the left side up to cover her injured shoulder.

Using the wall for support, she slowly made her way down the hall, music leading her as it had on a fateful night not so long ago. The first time she had heard Shane play had been her first glimpse of the man behind the stony facade, the man she had fallen in love with. The notes that now drifted to her softly through the still, dark house were just as revealing.

The piece he was playing was achingly tender, soft and sweet. And it filled her with hope. The longing in Shane’s music was real and strong. It reached out to her with a poignancy that brought tears to her eyes. This was not the music of a man who had coldly made the decision to walk away from love. This was the music of a man who wanted a dream but felt he couldn’t reach for it; who wanted a home but believed he couldn’t have one; who ached for love but let duty deny him of it.

Pausing to gather her strength, Faith leaned back against the wall and let the tears roll down her cheeks. They were tears for the beauty of Shane’s song, for the pain beneath it. Lord, please let me convince him, she prayed, her teeth digging into her full lower lip as a wave of emotion swept through her.

Ker-thump.

The music stopped abruptly and silence hummed in the air.