The Last Bride in Ballymuir Read online

  “Well enough.” She paused, then added, “He’ll be released in several weeks,” wondering why she’d even volunteered such information.

  “That must be a difficult thing for you.”

  Kylie focused on her hands clenched in her lap. “I’d imagine that it will be more difficult for my father.”

  “I’m afraid my sympathy lies more with you,” Vi said in the softest of voices.

  “Thank you, but I don’t need your sympathy,” she replied, knowing it for the lie it was.

  “Well, Nan always said...”

  Nan. Kylie flinched at the echo of her morning’s conversation with Michael. So much alike, these siblings, yet so different, too. Both with a bolder spark of life than most souls carried. But even then, one so world-weary, so without hope. She glanced at Michael and saw the last shadow of discomfort ease from his features. So Nan held resonance for him, too. He shifted restlessly, and Kylie let her heart guide her words.

  “Would you like to take a walk, stretch your legs a bit?” she asked him, knowing that it was like asking the sea if it would like to return to its shore.

  “I would,” he said, rising at the same time.

  Stretching like a cat waking from a long nap, Vi lazily asked her brother, “Would you like me to join you?”

  “Not bloody likely.” Michael hurried Kylie toward her jacket and the door. “Keep the fire burning for us, Violet. We won’t be gone long.”

  The chill bite of wind, the distant sound of a dog barking, the clasp of a hand large and warm. Some of life’s moments crystallized so vividly, so vitally that they lived forever. For Kylie, this would be one of them. She wished she could close this magical sphere around the two of them for eternity. Since she couldn’t, she gripped tighter to Michael’s hand, satisfying herself with that, at least. They walked to the very fringe of town. The moon, golden ripe, shone low in the sky. At the edge of the drive to one of the grander houses sat two large stones. One leaned against the back of the other, creating a place to dally. A place to talk. Kylie stopped.

  “Do you mind if we rest a minute?”

  “I’m sorry, have I been moving too fast for you?”

  “Well, your legs are a great deal longer than mine and you move with such a sense of—” She searched for the proper word. “—purpose. But, really, I just wanted to stop here.” She gestured at nature’s bench with her free hand. “Lovely, isn’t it, under the moonlight.”

  Michael agreed, but Kylie noticed he didn’t look away from her face as he said it.

  “Come sit with me,” she offered, tugging him toward the stones. “There’s something I should have told you last night, and I don’t want another day to pass without doing it.”

  “Out here, though?”

  “There are some things your sister doesn’t need to know.” She paused, then chuckled. “Though looking at her, I get the sense that she knows most everything in the world already.” She sat on the lower of the two rocks, patting its hard surface with her hand. “Just a few minutes and we’ll be on our way.”

  Michael sat, then drew in a hissing breath. “You’d best be quick or we’ll both be numb.”

  The cold beneath her was fine incentive to hurry the truth along. “Last night, when I—I panicked, it wasn’t your fault. I knew what you were thinking—that it was—and I let you think it. It was easier, you see, than telling you about something that once happened to me.”

  “Kylie,” he began, and she knew he was going to try to cut her off.

  “Let me do this. If I don’t, we’ll never see our way clear of it.” She drew in a breath and gave him the words with no prettiness about them, for there was no prettiness in what had happened to her. “The summer I turned eighteen—the summer my father got in trouble—I was raped.”

  She could feel Michael tighten next to her. His hand over hers was as hard and inflexible as the rock they sat upon.

  “You don’t need to dredge this up.”

  “Yes, I do. And I’ve dealt with it already. Mostly, at least,” she added, feeling the fingers of last night’s fear curl around her. “I’ve spent enough hours being counseled that it should be behind me.”

  She waited until her eyes and Michael’s had met and held. “What I’d like to have is an exorcism of sorts. I want to tell you the whole thing, so you’ll know, then I want it to go away. Will you listen?”

  He nodded, a slow and deliberate movement.

  Kylie grasped both his hands in hers, forging a physical link to get her through this. “My father came up with a scheme for a resort on a parcel of low coastline not far from Dingle. He wanted it to be the next Wexford, a seaside resort with hotels and cottages for families to come and vacation for a summer fortnight. He sought financing, negotiated with landowners, brought in people from town as partners. Everyone was so excited, it was going to be brilliant.

  “One problem, though. Da was more fond of living the grand life than following through on plans. The first thing he did was build himself an enormous home on the one parcel he’d managed to acquire. He told everyone that it was to be operated as a country guest house once the project was up and running. He took more and more money, and nothing but that house ever materialized.”

  Taking the comfort she needed, she shifted on the cold surface, moving closer to Michael. “Oh, I think he meant to follow through. At first, at least. But it was like everything else since my mother died. Nights out with his friends were more important. Traveling and the drink were more important…. On my eighteenth birthday, he took me out to dinner and told me that times were going to be troubled, but I wasn’t to worry because he had a plan.” She shook her head. “Da always had a plan.”

  “The next day, a business associate stopped over at the house for a meeting. This man was no one I’d ever seen before. From London, Da said, and he was very smooth looking, expensive suit, shiny shoes, and just so polished. He caught me staring at him—I couldn’t help myself. I was eighteen and hadn’t been further away from home than Killarney and he was so ... different looking, like someone out of those glossy magazines. Anyway, they left for lunch and didn’t come back for hours.”

  It had been close to the time that Gerry Flynn was to pick her up for a special birthday dinner.

  When she’d first arrived in Ballymuir, he’d been her protector, fighting off the childhood bullies who’d been pleased to have a shy outsider for a new target. Later, they’d started dating. He’d been the first to kiss her, the first—and last—to say he loved her.

  That night, which she’d been certain was going to be magical, she’d even put on her mother’s pearls. She wanted Gerry to see her looking like the princess he always called her.

  “When they got back to the house, Da was barely able to stand he’d had so much to drink. I helped him upstairs and got him settled in, something I’d done plenty before. I figured Mr. Keefe, that man, would be gone by the time I got back downstairs. He wasn’t, though. I tried to usher him along, but he just poured himself a drink and stood there watching me. He asked me if I knew of my father’s financial difficulties. I said, yes, I knew something about it.”

  Kylie paused to draw in a bit of courage. “He moved closer and put one finger under my chin, bringing my face up to his. I noticed that his nails were all polished and smooth, just like the rest of him, and for some reason this frightened me.”

  She had sensed that something was terribly wrong. She’d considered running out of the house, but she was so unaccustomed to the heels she’d put on, she knew she wouldn’t make it far. Glancing at the grandfather clock ticking away in the corner, she had comforted herself with the fact that Gerry would be there any minute now.

  “He told me how pretty I was. Then he told me how wealthy he was, and how he’d like to help my father out, given the proper incentive. I was so naive, I had no idea what he was saying, at first. When he made himself plainer, I was furious. I refused him, and he shrugged, telling me that my father’s fate would be on my conscience.
I told him I didn’t see that as being any worse than what he proposed. He smiled then, and said that willing or not, I’d be having the chance to compare those sins.”

  She had turned on her toes and run toward the door to the enormous salon. Feet slipping on the parquet floor, she wasn’t fast enough. As the ability to fight was brutally stripped from her, she’d heard the sound of her mother’s broken strand of pearls pinging against that hard, hard floor.

  “He forced me,” she finished.

  “God. Oh, God,” she heard Michael whisper just beneath his breath as he drew her onto his lap. He held her so rightly that it seemed he tried to absorb her body into the strength of his.

  Gerry had eventually arrived, late as always. She had tried to scream for him, but could get no sound past the hand that made her teeth cut into the tender skin of her mouth. She heard him calling for her, heard his footsteps on the marble entry hall, then the wood of the salon floor. Then she heard his inarticulate cry, and his footfalls clip away when Keefe ordered him to get out.

  He had left. Simply left.

  Kylie burrowed even closer to Michael. “I know you’re not Keefe, and that I’m no longer a stupid little girl.” She quickly silenced Michael’s objections to what she’d called herself. “But last night...last night was the first time since then that a man’s done more than kiss me.”

  Curled up on him with the sound of his heart drumming beneath her ear, she felt brave enough to tell him what he needed to hear. What she needed to say. “When you touched me, I gloried in it. I wanted you to touch me, and I wanted so very much to touch you. I still do, but some last bit of guilt and fear over what happened that night has gotten wrapped up in all the good feelings.”

  “Guilt?” he interrupted, sounding almost angry. “Guilt?” His arms came even tighter around her. “You haven’t a thing in this world to feel guilty over.”

  She smiled sadly into the rough fabric of his jacket. “I know, and the first thing I had to learn to do was forgive myself. It was the hardest thing, too. I kept thinking if he hadn’t caught me gawking at him, if I’d been more sensible about having a stranger in the house—”

  “If your bastard of a father hadn’t passed out,” Michael offered. “Have you considered that one?”

  Kylie nodded. “I have, and I’ve managed to forgive him. He doesn’t know what happened, and God willing, he never will.”

  Michael didn’t comment, then after a silence asked, “What happened next?”

  “I took myself to a clinic in Tralee that night, and was home well before Da rejoined the world. Keefe, of course, was gone. Other than the people who’ve treated me, I’ve never told anyone.”

  “I’m thankful you’ve told me,” he murmured into her hair. “I’d take it all back for you, if I could. If I had known you then, I would have protected you. I’d have never let you come to harm. And even now, I’d like to hunt down the son of a bitch and give him what he deserves.”

  Another stone on his cairn.

  Kylie felt a primal surge of emotion, pure, hot, and so close to lust. All of Father Cready’s talk of forgiveness had carried only so far. Though it was wrong, she wanted Keefe damned, wanted him to suffer. And she still felt a horrible, heartbroken pain over Gerry Flynn—the boy who’d said he loved her and then left her there in her own blood and shame.

  “It’s in the past,” she said, willing it to be so. Willing the moment’s hatred that had seized her to slink back into the darkness.

  “It is,” Michael agreed in a soothing voice, his hand making a broad sweep over her back. “And now I’ll keep you safe.”

  “And I’ll do the same for you,” Kylie replied, at first meaning it a joke, a way to lighten the moment. But the words had no sooner escaped into the night than she was overwhelmed by a fierce protectiveness. She’d face down anyone—even the specter of Keefe—for this man.

  Laughter rumbled in Michael’s chest as he stood, staggering slightly, moaning about the cold, and holding her tight against his body. “I’m sure you will, Kylie O’Shea.”

  He let her slide down the length of him until she found her feet. “Laugh if you will,” she admonished him in her best schoolteacher’s voice. “But believe in me, too.”

  “I do,” he said as he brought his mouth to hers. “I do.”

  He kissed her then, his broad hands cupping her face, his mouth firm and wonderful. Wrapping her arms around him, Kylie gave herself up to his strength. And in doing so, she found a strength of her own.

  Moonlight flowed over them, blessing them, she thought. Even when a car drove very slowly past, its headlights adding to the wash of the moon, she didn’t stop kissing him. Fate owed her nothing, but if it was kind, it would give her this man.

  Chapter Twelve

  When the dance is at its hottest, that’s the time to stop.

  —Irish Proverb

  Kylie had just turned onto the main road toward Gaelscoil Pearse when she noticed a Garda’s car rapidly closing on her. She glanced at the speedometer, then recalled it had given up the ghost weeks before. Still, it didn’t feel as though she were speeding. Just to be sure, she slowed and drove as sedately as she did when taking Breege to Sunday Mass. No easy task since she was scarcely going to make the morning bell as it was.

  She hummed to herself and studiously tried to avoid looking back in the mirror. Then a short burst of siren gained her attention. The Garda was right behind her—certainly close enough to be recognized.

  “Gerry,” she groaned, then drew to the side of the road.

  His face was set in hard lines as he came to her car door. Since the window crank was also still broken, Kylie stepped out.

  “Was I doing something wrong?” she asked, knowing full well she hadn’t been.

  “You didn’t come to a complete stop before turning.”

  “A complete stop for whom? In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no one around.”

  “I’m around.”

  She gave in to exasperation. “If what you’re looking for is a confession that I counted only to two-and-a-half instead of three before proceeding, you won’t be getting one.”

  He looked down at the road beneath their feet then back up at her. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

  Jolted by the mixture of anger and some other indefinable emotion blazing across his face, Kylie backed off a step, bumping against her car.

  “What do you mean?” she asked in a carefully neutral tone.

  He jutted out his jaw. “I mean the men you choose.”

  In an instant she recalled the prior night, and the car that had slowly passed by as she and Michael kissed. It had to have been Gerry. “You certainly are around, aren’t you?”

  His face turned a bright crimson at her sardonic words, but he didn’t retreat. “You could have waited and had a good man, a man such as—” His jaw flexed as he cut off whatever he’d been about to say. “You could have had a man who’d honor and marry you, but instead you let that... that evil bastard touch you!”

  Time seemed to be playing fast and loose with more than just Kylie. She drew in a slow breath. In the years since that horrible night, they’d never discussed it. She’d heard nothing at all from him for months. Then had come the calls while she was away at school. He’d never said a word—just hung up— but she’d known it was Gerry. And since she’d been back in Ballymuir, he was always there—visible, but just far enough away she couldn’t precisely say he was watching her. She could feel it, though. And feel his anger. An anger she simply couldn’t understand.

  “Are you referring to the night of my eighteenth birthday dinner, or to last night with Michael Kilbride?”

  He shook his head slowly, reminding her of a fighter reeling under a ringing punch. “I mean Kilbride!”

  “Do you really? Somehow I doubt it.” She looked somewhere over his shoulder, off into rolling fields where the morning mist still clung like a silvery blanket. “You know,” she said in a low voice, “I’ve spent a lot of ye
ars wondering how you could have done that. How you could have left me there with that man.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Sheep dotted the high slopes. At a whistled signal from an unseen farmer, a dog crept low and stealthily toward the flock. “Of course you don’t. After all, what’s the point in dredging up the past? You turned away from me that night, and you’ve never shown a moment’s remorse.”

  “Turned away from you? I’ve always watched over you. Always! Even when you were away at university—after your father proved to be the thief he is—I got word of how you were doing. You don’t know what I felt then, or what I’m feeling now. But look at me!” He pulled her face toward him when instead she tried to keep her one link to the here and now, that dog earning its day’s feed.

  “I said, look at me!”

  Unwillingly, Kylie did.

  Gerry waved a hand at his dark uniform. “I have official responsibilities, now. I have duties to uphold and a reputation to preserve.”

  Her laugh was bitter. “Gerry Flynn, member of the Garda Siochana, a guardian of the peace. That’s hardly a fitting title. You didn’t guard me with much care that night.”

  It was his turn to look away. His hands were pulled into tight, white-knuckled fists. “That night, you were willing. I know you were.”

  Kylie let the sight of him drift off. The dog had turned the flock back down the hillside. She watched its every move as if her life depended on it. And in some odd way, she knew that it did. Forgiveness, echoed the old refrain in her head.

  “It helps you, believing that,” she eventually said, once she was able to draw breath without the stabbing pain of that old wound. “Well, I won’t deprive you of your comforts. I know too well what that feels like.” Then the fierceness that had been born last night came back to her. It was a pure, primal feeling, and she embraced it. “But I will tell you to leave Michael and me alone. We’re none of your business.”