Dark Enchantment Read Online Free

the girl latched on to something... Well, let’s just say that a crocodile with its jaws locked around its prey had nothing on her. “Look guys, you know I love you, right?”
    Tara leaned toward Michaela conspiratorially. “Uh-oh, better roll up your pants legs. I got a feeling it’s gonna start getting deep in here.”
    “I’m serious .” Arianna’s voice went soft and low. “You two have always had my back. And I...well, I honestly don’t know how I’d have made it through this past week without you.”
    Tara’s eyes filled and she looked down, picking at some invisible spot on the kitchen counter with her fingernail. “I hear a ‘but’ coming.”
    “ But, ” Arianna conceded, “this is something I have to do alone. Have to do now . I can’t explain it, except to say that knowing I’d be leaving today...going to fulfill Da’s final wishes... Well, it’s the glue that’s been holding me together.”
    As one might expect, Arianna had related to them only her father’s “wishes” to have his ashes scattered from the cliffs in County Clare, as stated in his will. Smart girl that she was she had purposely left out any mention of his visit from beyond the grave, a thing she had yet to get even her own head wrapped around.
    Not to mention that an I-see-dead-people confession would have gone over like a sack of cement. They would have probably considered it their collective duty to have her committed—for her own protection.
    “You know, that’s another thing I don’t get.” Tara rinsed out the dishcloth and draped it over the faucet to dry. Leaning a hip against the counter, she crossed her arms. “Remember when we booked the graduation trip to Ireland? Your dad got so freaked about it we had to cancel. And as much as you travel on business, you never went back there...to spare his feelings.”
    Of course, how could Arianna forget. Ireland was the land of her birth. And yet, contrary to her snappy comeback of earlier, it really was a foreign country to this Irishwoman-raised-American. To make matters worse, while growing up, there had been no old family photos, no cozy talks about the life she and her father had once shared there with her mother. Subjects, he had made abundantly clear, that were strictly off-limits.
    Consequently, whatever had happened in Ireland all those years ago...whatever anguish had caused him to dissociate himself from everything and everyone he had ever known and loved...remained to this day shrouded in mystery.
    Old family secrets, Arianna reflected sadly. Secrets her father had taken with him to the grave.
    To spare his feelings, Arianna had stood firm, refusing to give in to what, at times, had amounted to a near compulsion to return to her birthplace. Because nothing on earth… nothing …had been worth the risk of putting that haunted look back in his eyes. Or of unlatching the yawning black jaws of grief she had watched swallow him whole, time and again, throughout her childhood.
    Tara cleared Arianna’s empty plate away, and Arianna propped her elbow in its place, chin in hand. “Twenty-five years…and he never got over losing my mother.” She stared off into space and sighed, her tone low, wistful. “Well, at least they’re together now.”
    “Blows my mind he held onto the family home in Ireland all these years,” Tara said, rinsing the plate and stacking it in the dishwasher.
    “Never even mentioned it to me,” Arianna said. “Just had the place privately deeded into my name, the paperwork stored with his will in his safe deposit box.”
    And then, there was the key to the property , Arianna thought to herself.
    The key he had transcended death itself to place personally into her hand.

Chapter Three
    “T o the left, to the left.” As she turned onto the N18 out of Shannon Airport, Arianna hummed the words to an old Beyonce song like a mantra, a reminder to drive on the wrong side of the road. Not to mention that she was driving from the wrong side of