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only two pieces of her work. One was as delicate as a daydream, a slim almost weightless column riddled with shimmering rainbows and hardly larger than the span of his hand from wrist to fingertip.
    The second, and the one he could admit privately haunted and enticed him, was a violent nightmare, fired from a passionate mind into a turbulent tangle of glass. It should have been unbalanced, he thought now as he studied the piece on his desk. It should have been ugly with its wild war of colors and shapes, the grasping tendrils curling and clawing out of the squat base.
    Instead, it was fascinating and uncomfortably sexual. And it made him wonder what kind of woman could create both pieces with equal skill and power.
    Since he had purchased it a little more than two months before, he had tried with no success to contact the artist and interest her in patronage.
    He had twice reached her by phone, but the conversation on her part had been brief to the point of rudeness. She didn’t require a patron, particularly a Dublin businessman with too much education and too little taste.
    Oh, that had stung.
    She was, she had told him in her musical west county brogue, content to create at her own pace and sell her work when and where it suited her. She had no need for his contracts, or for someone to tell her what must be sold. It was her work, was it not, so why didn’t he go back to his ledgers, of which she was certain he had plenty, and leave her to it?
    Insolent little twit, he thought, firing up again. Here he was offering a helping hand, a hand that countless other artists would have begged for, and she snarled at it.
    He should leave her to it, Rogan mused. Leave her to create in obscurity. It was certain that neither he nor Worldwide needed her.
    But, damn it all, he wanted her.
    On impulse, he picked up his phone and buzzed his secretary. “Eileen, cancel my appointments for the next couple of days. I’m going on a trip.”
    It was a rare thing for Rogan to have business in the west counties. He remembered a family holiday from childhood. Most usually his parents had preferred trips to Paris or Milan, or an occasional break in the villa they kept on the French Mediterranean. There had been trips that had combined business and pleasure. New York, London, Bonn, Venice, Boston. But once, when he had been nine or ten, they had driven to the Shannon area to take in the wild, glorious scenery of the west. He remembered it in patches, the dizzying views from the Cliffs of Mohr, the dazzling panoramas and gem-bright waters of the Lake District, the quiet villages and the endless green of farmlands.
    Beautiful it was. But it was also inconvenient. He was already regretting his impulsive decision to make the drive, particularly since the directions he’d been given in the nearby village had taken him onto a pitted excuse for a road. His Aston Martin handled it well, even as the dirt turned to mud under the ceaseless driving rain. His mood didn’t negotiate the potholes as smoothly as did his car.
    Only stubbornness kept him from turning back. The woman would listen to reason, by God. He would see to it. If she wanted to bury herself behind hedges of furze and hawthorn, it was her business. But her art was his. Or would be.
    Following the directions he’d been given at the local post office, he passed the bed-and-breakfast called Blackthorn Cottage with its glorious gardens and trim blue shutters. Farther on there were stone cabins, sheds for animals, a hay barn, a slate-roofed shed where a man worked on a tractor.
    The man lifted a hand in salute, then went back to work as Rogan maneuvered the car around the narrow curve. The farmer was the first sign of life, other than livestock, he had seen since leaving the village.
    How anyone survived in this godforsaken place was beyond him. He’d take Dublin’s crowded streets and conveniences over the incessant rain and endless fields every day of the week. Scenery be damned.
    She’d