Enchanted by Nora Roberts

was. It didn’t strike her as being new, but surely it couldn’t be otherwise. If it was ancient, someone would have written about it, tourists would come to see it, scientists to study.
    Curious, she started to step through two stones, then immediately stepped back again. It seemed the air within quivered. The light was different, richer, and the sound of the sea closer than it had seemed only a moment before.
    She told herself she was a rational woman, that there was no life in stone, nor any difference between the air where she stood and that one foot inside the circle. But rational or not, she skirted around rather than walking through.
    It was as if the deer had waited, halfway around the dance just down a thin, shadowy path through the trees. Just as it seemed she looked at Rowan with understanding, and amusement, before she bounded gracefully ahead.
    This time when she followed, Rowan lost all sense of direction. She could hear the sea, but was it ahead, to the left, or to the right? The path twisted, turned and narrowed until it was no more than a track. She climbed over a fallen log, skidded down an incline and wandered through shadows deep as twilight.
    When the path ended abruptly, leaving her surrounded by trees and thick brush, she cursed herself for beingan idiot. She turned, intending to retrace her steps, and saw that the track veered off in two directions.
    For the life of her she couldn’t remember which to take.
    Then she saw the flash of white again, just a glimmer to the left. Heaving a breath, then holding it, Rowan pushed through the brush, fought her way out of the grasp of a thick, thorny vine. She slipped, righted herself. Cursing vividly now, she tripped and stumbled clear of the trees.
    The cabin stood nearly on the cliffs, ringed by trees on three sides and backed by the rocks on the fourth. Smoke billowed from the chimney and was whisked away to nothing in the wind.
    She pushed the hair out of her face, smeared a tiny drop of blood from a nick a thorn had given her. It was smaller than Belinda’s cabin, and made of stone rather than wood. Sunlight had the mica glittering like diamonds. The porch was wide but uncovered. On the second floor a small and charming stone balcony jutted out from glass doors.
    When she lowered her gaze from it, Liam was standing on the porch. He had his thumbs hooked in the front pockets of his jeans, a black sweatshirt with its arms shoved up to the elbows. And he didn’t look particularly happy to see her.
    But he nodded. “Come in, Rowan. Have some tea.”
    He walked back inside without waiting for her response, and left the door open wide behind him. When she came closer, she heard the music, pipes and strings tangled in a weepy melody. She barely stopped her hands from twisting together as she stepped inside.
    The living area seemed larger than she’d expected, but thought it was because the furnishings were very spare. A single wide chair, a long sofa, both in warm rust colors. A fire blazed under a mantel of dull gray slate. Gracing it was a jagged green stone as big as a man’s fist and a statue of a woman carved in alabaster with her arms uplifted, her head thrown back, her naked body slender as a wand.
    She wanted to move closer, to study the face, but it seemed rude. Instead she walked toward the back and found Liam in a small, tidy kitchen with a kettle already on the boil and lovely china cups of sunny yellow set out.
    “I wasn’t sure I’d find you,” she began, then lost the rest of her thought as he turned from the stove, as those intense eyes locked on hers.
    “Weren’t you?”
    “No, I hoped I would, but … I wasn’t sure.” Nerves reared up and grabbed her by the throat. “I made some cookies. I brought you some to thank you for helping me out last night.”
    He smiled a little and poured boiling water into a yellow pot. “What kind?” he asked. Though he knew. He’d smelled them, and her before she’d stepped out of the