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end. Her room. He crossed the hall and passed through the door.
    She stood at the window, her temple resting against the smooth pane, her fingers wrapped around the brass latch. She thought it would keep him out. He would show her otherwise.
    “ How did you get in here?” she asked, wondering at what point it would be appropriate to scream. If this was a prank, some tasteless joke cooked up by Frank, she would look like a fool.
    Her question seemed to amuse him. “I passed through the door.”
    “Get out,” she said. She ran through all the possible explanations for this man in her head. A crazed reenactor. One with an improbably thorough knowledge of the grave goods she’d excavated only hours ago, and a lot of free time to spend at the gym. A thief who had plundered her discovery, and then come straight to visit her, decked in the loot. None of it made any sense.
    Unless she was delirious. She’d contracted malaria in the Yucatán last year, but an attack in this climate seemed unlikely. Perhaps she was really out of her mind with fever and this was all a bizarre dream, her mind conjuring a hero to fit the discoveries she’d made in the tomb, a body to fill that empty bier.
    And what a body. Biceps she wouldn’t be able to circle with both hands, whorled with sinuously inked tattoos. Thighs like tree trunks, sturdy, muscled, virile. The drumbeat between her legs sped faster.
    She realized she was staring, openmouthed, at his body. Just short of panting.
    Over a complete stranger who was probably some local lunatic with a fetish for Celtic jewelry and—dear God, were his nipples pierced beneath that shirt? And why did the thought make hers contract to hard points? What was happening to her?
    “Speak your name.” That voice again.
    She obeyed before she realized what she was doing. “Beth.”
    “Beth,” he repeated. “It tastes like a meadow after rain. Beth. It pleases me. Show me your breasts.”
    She reached for the shoulder of her blouse, started to push it down, then stopped. What was she doing?
    “Go ahead,” he instructed. His voice was music that reached deep into her soul, made her want to join the dance.
    She shook it off, said, “No,” but it was like the tide, lapping at her, and the urge came back even stronger. She wanted to expose her breasts. Because she wanted him to touch them. She fought it.
    He knew. “Why resist,” he asked, “when surrender will bring so much pleasure? When you want to be on your back, beneath me, filled.”
    She almost came from the thought alone and remembered with frightening clarity that she had never experienced a climax with another person in the room. She’d never come with a man. Or, at least, she had never come with Frank, the only man she had ever been with. And this one was a total stranger, and probably deranged. The thought was a tiny spark of sanity, and she clung to it. “Who are you?”
    “I’m Conn.” As though that explained everything.
    “Conn who?”
    That seemed to amuse him. “Of the Aes .”
    “ Aes ,” she repeated the syllables. “That just means ‘people’in Gaelic.”
    “You are pedantic as a Druid,” he said drily, but he also sounded amused. He crossed the room and touched her hair, stroked it. And she let him. She enjoyed it, was lulled by it. And by his voice, which went on, “You came to the mound looking for me. Surely you knew what you would find there. Only the Aes Sídhe , the people of the mounds, the Tuatha Dé Danann dwell in the hills.”
    He was smug, like Frank, because he was handsome and women threw themselves at his feet. She hated that. And herself, a little, because she’d fallen for it, once. She latched on to her irritation, tried to use it to keep her head clear. “I am not some gullible tourist. I have a PhD in archaeology,” she snapped. Or tried to snap. It came out more of a moan. She leaned into his touch, so sure, so deft. “The Tuatha Dé Danann are not real. They’re a myth. The old Celtic