Free Key Of Knowledge by Nora Roberts

element of that night he hadn’t had to imagine. Because it had happened. Because he’d seen it.
    Even now, as a man past thirty with none of the naïveté of the boy left in him, he believed it.
    She’d walked along the parapet, under the hard, white moon, sliding in and out of shadows like a ghost, with her hair flying, her cape—surely it had been a cape—billowing.
    She’d owned the night. He’d thought that then and he thought it now. She had been the night.
    She’d looked at him, Jordan remembered as he wandered to the iron gates, as he stared through them at the great stone house on the rise. He hadn’t been able to see her face, but he’d known she looked down, straight into his eyes.
    He’d felt the punch of it, the power, like a blow meant to awaken rather than to harm.
    His mind had sizzled from it, and nothing—not the beer, not his youth, not even the shock—had been able to dull the thrill.
    She’d looked at him, Jordan remembered again as he scanned the parapet. And she’d known him.
    Flynn and Brad hadn’t seen her. By the time his mind had clicked back into gear and he shouted them over, she was gone.
    It had spooked them, of course. Deliciously. The way sightings of ghosts and fanciful creatures are meant to.
    Though years later, when he wrote of her, he made her a ghost, he’d known then—he knew now—that she was as alive as he.
    â€œWhoever you were,” he murmured, “you helped me make my mark. So, thanks.”
    He stood there, hands in his pockets, peering through the bars. The house was part of his past, and oddly, he’d considered making it part of his future. He’d been toying with calling to see if it was available just days before Flynn had contacted him about the portrait of the young Arthur of Britain. He’d bought that painting on impulse five years ago at the gallery where Malory used to work, though he hadn’t met her then. Not only had it been a major elementof Malory’s quest, but they’d discovered the painting, along with The Daughters of Glass and one Brad had bought separately had all been painted by Rowena, Jordan thought, centuries ago.
    New York, his present, had served its purpose for him. He’d been ready for a change. Ready to come home. Then Flynn had made it so very easy.
    It gave him the opportunity to come back, test the waters, and his feelings. He’d known, this time he’d known, as soon as he saw the majestic run of the Appalachians, that he wanted them back.
    This time—surprise—he was back to stay.
    He wanted those hills. The riot of them in fall, the lush green of them in summer. He wanted to stand and see them frozen in white, so still and regal, or hazed with the tender touch of spring.
    He wanted the Valley, with its tidy streets and tourists. The familiarity of faces that had known him since his youth, the smell of backyard barbecues and the snippets of local gossip.
    He wanted his friends, the comfort and the joy of them. Pizza out of the box, a beer on the porch, old jokes that no one laughed at the same way a childhood friend did.
    And he still wanted that damn house, Jordan realized with a slow, dawning smile. He wanted it now every bit as much as he had when he was a sixteen-year-old dreamer with whole worlds yet to be explored.
    So, he would bide his time there—he was cagier than he’d been at sixteen. And he would find out what Rowena and Pitte planned to do with the place when they moved on.
    To wherever they moved on.
    So, maybe the house was both his past and his future.
    He ran bits of Rowena’s clue through his head. He was part of Dana’s past, and like it or not, he was part of her present. Very probably he would be part—one way or another—of her future.
    So what did he, and the Peak, have to do with her quest for the key?
    And wasn’t it incredibly self-serving to assume that he had anything