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“Calin Farrell, you need a vacation.”

Cal lifted a shoulder, sipped his coffee, and continued to brood while staring out the kitchen window.

He wasn’t sure why he’d come here to listen to his mother nag and worry about him, to hear his father whistle as he meticulously tied his fishing flies at the table.

But he’d had a deep, driving urge to be in the home of his childhood, to grab an hour or two in the tidy house in Brooklyn Heights. To see his parents.

“Maybe. I’m thinking about it.”

“Work too hard,” his father said, eyeing his own work critically. “Could come to Montana for a couple of weeks with us. Best fly-fishing in the world. Bring your camera.” John Farrell glanced up and smiled. “Call it a sabbatical.”

It was tempting. He’d never been the fishing enthusiast his father was, but Montana was beautiful. And big. Cal thought he could lose himself there. And shake off the restlessness. The dreams.

“A couple of weeks in the clean air will do you good.” Sylvia Farrell narrowed her eyes as she turned to her son. “You’re looking pale and tired, Calin. You need to get out of that city for a while.”

Though she’d lived in Brooklyn all of her life, Sylvia still referred to Manhattan as “that city” with light disdain and annoyance.

“I’ve been thinking about a trip.”

“Good.” His mother scrubbed at her countertop.

They were leaving the next morning, and Sylvia Farrell wouldn’t leave a crumb or a mote of dust behind.

“You’ve been working too hard, Calin. Not that we aren’t proud of you.

After your exhibit last month your father bragged so much that the neighbors started to hide when they saw him coming. ”

“Not every day a man gets to see his son’s photographs in the museum. I liked the nudes especially,” he added with a wink.

“You old fool,” Sylvia muttered, but her lips twitched. “Well, who’d have thought when we bought you that little camera for Christmas when you were eight that twenty-two years later you’d be rich and famous? But wealth and fame carry a price.”

She took her son’s face in her hands and studied it with a mother’s keen eye. His eyes were shadowed, she noted, his face too thin. She worried for the man she’d raised, and the boy he had been who had always seemed to have…something more than the ordinary.

“You’re paying it.”

“I’m fine.” Reading the worry in her eyes, recognizing it, he smiled. “Just not sleeping very well.”

There had been other times, Sylvia remembered, that her son had grown pale and hollow-eyed from lack of sleep. She exchanged a quick glance with her husband over Cal’s shoulder.

“Have you, ah, seen the doctor?”

“Mom, I’m fine.” He knew his voice was too sharp, too defensive. Struggled to lighten it. “I’m perfectly fine.”

“Don’t nag the boy, Syl.” But John studied his son closely also, remembering, as his wife did, the young boy who had talked to shadows, had walked in his sleep, and had dreamed of witches and blood and battle.

“I’m not nagging. I’m mothering.” She made herself smile.

“I don’t want you to worry. I’m a little stressed-out, that’s all.

” That was all, he thought, determined to make it so.

He wasn’t different, he wasn’t odd. Hadn’t the battalion of doctors his parents had taken him to throughout his childhood diagnosed an overdeveloped imagination?

And hadn’t he finally channeled that into his photography?

He didn’t see things that weren’t there anymore.

Sylvia nodded, told herself to accept that. “Small wonder. You’ve been working yourself day and night for the last five years. You need some rest, you need some quiet. And some pampering.”

“Montana,” John said again. “Couple of weeks of fishing, clean air, and no worries.”

“I’m going to Ireland.” It came out of Cal’s mouth before he’d realized the idea was in his head.

“Ireland?” Sylvia pursed her lips. “Not to work, Calin.”

“No, to…to see,” he said at length. “Just to see.”

She nodded, satisfied. A vacation, after all, was a vacation. “That’ll be nice. It’s supposed to be a restful country. We always meant to go, didn’t we, John?”

Her husband grunted his assent. “Going to look up your ancestors, Cal?”

“I might.” Since the decision seemed to be made, Cal sipped his coffee again. He was going to look up something, he realized. Or someone.

It was raining when he landed at Shannon Airport.

The chilly late-spring rain seemed to suit his mood.

He’d slept nearly all the way across the Atlantic.

And the dreams had chased him. He went through customs, arranged to rent a car, changed money.

All of this was done with the mechanical efficiency of the seasoned traveler.

And as he completed the tasks, he tried not to worry, tried not to dwell on the idea that he was having a breakdown of some kind.

He climbed into the rented car, then simply sat in the murky light wondering what to do, where to go.

He was thirty, a successful photographer who could name his own price, call his own shots.

He still considered it a wild twist of fate that he’d been able to make a living doing something he loved.

Using what he saw in a landscape, in a face, in light and shadow and texture, and translating that into a photograph.

It was true that the last few years had been hectic and he’d worked almost nonstop. Even now the trunk of the Volvo he’d rented was loaded with equipment, and his favored Nikon rested in its case on the seat beside him. He couldn’t get away from it—didn’t want to run away from what he loved.

Suddenly an odd chill raced through him, and he thought, for just a moment, that he heard a woman weeping.

Just the rain, he told himself and scrubbed his hands over his handsome face. It was long, narrow, with the high, strong cheekbones of his Celtic forefathers. His nose was straight, his mouth firm and well formed. It smiled often—or it had until recently.

His eyes were gray—a deep, pure gray without a hint of green or blue. The brows over them were strongly arched and tended to draw together in concentration. His hair was black and thick and flowed over his collar. An artistic touch that a number of women had enjoyed.

Again, until recently.

He brooded over the fact that it had been months since he’d been with a woman—since he’d wanted to. Overwork again? he wondered. A byproduct of stress? Why would he be stressed when his career was advancing by leaps and bounds? He was healthy. He’d had a complete physical only weeks before.

But you didn’t tell the doctor about the dreams, did you? he reminded himself. The dreams you can’t quite remember when you wake up. The dreams, he admitted, that had pulled him three thousand miles over the ocean.

No, damn it, he hadn’t told the doctor. He wasn’t going that route again. There had been enough psychiatrists in his youth, poking and prodding into his mind, making him feel foolish, exposed, helpless. He was a grown man now and could handle his own dreams.

If he was having a breakdown, it was a perfectly normal one and could be cured by rest, relaxation, and a change of scene.

That’s what he’d come to Ireland for. Only that.

He started the car and began to drive aimlessly.

He’d had dreams before, when he was a boy. Very clear, too realistic dreams. Castles and witches and a woman with tumbling red hair. She’d spoken to him with that lilt of Ireland in her voice. And sometimes she’d spoken in a language he didn’t know—but had understood nonetheless.

There’d been a young girl—that same waterfall of hair, the same blue eyes.

They’d laughed together in his dreams. Played together—innocent childhood games.

He remembered that his parents had been amused when he’d spoken of his friend.

They had passed it off, he thought, as the natural imagination of a sociable only child.

But they’d been concerned when he seemed to know things, to see things, to speak of places and people he couldn’t have had knowledge of. They’d worried over him when his sleep was disturbed night after night—when he began to walk and talk while glazed in dreams.

So, after the doctors, the therapists, the endless sessions, and those quick, searching looks that adults thought children couldn’t interpret, he’d stopped speaking of them.

And as he’d grown older, the young girl had grown as well. Tall and slim and lovely—young breasts, narrow waist, long legs. Feelings and needs for her that weren’t so innocent had begun to stir.

It had frightened him, and it had angered him.

Until he’d blocked out that soft voice that came in the night.

Until he’d turned away from the image that haunted his dreams. Finally, it had stopped.

The dreams stopped. The little flickers in his mind that told him where to find lost keys or had him reaching for the phone an instant before it rang ceased.

He was comfortable with reality, Cal told himself.

Had chosen it. And would choose it again.

He was here only to prove to himself that he was an ordinary man suffering from overwork.

He would soak up the atmosphere of Ireland, take the pictures that pleased him.

And, if necessary, take the pills his doctor had prescribed to help him sleep undisturbed.

He drove along the storm-battered coast, where wind roared in over the sea and held encroaching summer at bay with chilly breath.

Rain pattered the windshield, and fog slithered over the ground.

It was hardly a warm welcome, yet he felt at home.

As if something, or someone, was waiting to take him in from the storm.

He made himself laugh at that. It was just the pleasure of being in a new place, he decided.

It was the anticipation of finding new images to capture on film.