The Last Bride in Ballymuir Read online

  She loved it.

  She wanted to tug off his work shirt and run her fingers over the hard rises of muscle on his chest. She wanted to trace lower to the arousal she could feel insistent—but, no, not frightening—against her belly. A quiver, then another ran through her, decidedly not fear. She wanted, trembled with wanting, practically keened with wanting.

  Michael abruptly set her back on her feet. “You’re shaking. I’m scaring you, aren’t I?”

  Hands still braced on his chest, sure she couldn’t stand on her own, she tried to pull together words. “No ... no you’re not,” she managed, thinking that she was the one who sounded muddled now. “Just hold me.”

  He did, rubbing his hand up and down her back. “We’re best not left alone,” he said. “At least not until we’re both ready to, ah ... see this to its natural end.”

  Kylie nodded, the side of her face pressed into his chest. His heart was slowing now, and she could sense his tremendous struggle to rein himself in. Michael, patient, kind, and infinitely desirable Michael. He was right, though. She wondered if she’d feel this grand, sweeping need if she were in a place private enough that it could be satisfied.

  Minutes slipped by as they held each other. Eventually, she stepped back and found that she could stand on her own. “I’ll help you with the painting now,” she offered.

  “One promise, first,” he said with a crooked grin. “You’ll keep the shirt on. I’m not sure I’d survive that dropping to the floor as well.”

  “The shirt stays on,” she agreed, doubting she’d survive the consequences of taking it off. But she was beginning to want to find out.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There’s trouble in every house, and some in the street.

  —Irish Proverb

  Michael knew he was no saint. Yet watching Kylie walk about half-undressed and knowing that to touch her again would be as incendiary an act as he could imagine, he felt a kinship with those martyred souls. Saints, though, never fell to temptation. He was falling, and falling fast.

  He glanced around the room, racking his brain for just one more task that would have her up on tiptoe, giving him a tasty peek at pink panties. Ah, temptation, those panties and the skin beneath. Skin that he now knew for certain was firm and silky and that he believed must taste of paradise. He closed his eyes, reveling in a vision of pale white skin and fine, slender legs hugging tight around his....

  “Michael... Michael, you’re dripping paint all over the floor!”

  “Sweet—” He cut off the oath, and swung his paintbrush back over the can. Giving painting up for now, at least, he wiped the brush and lay it in a tray.

  “Perhaps it’s time I take over as supervisor,” Kylie said, her eyes shining with amusement. “You’re not earning your wages.”

  In truth, he wasn’t, but he was earning something of far greater value—Kylie’s trust. There was an ease to their togetherness they hadn’t managed before. If the cost was a certain discomfort below the belt, he’d lived through worse.

  “Well then, supervisor, I’m at your mercy.” Which, indeed, he was. “Tell me what you want”

  She swallowed once, and a blush crept upward from the collar of that damned shirt and began to paint her face.

  “I want you to have dinner with me. Tonight. In town. Someplace fine.” She blurted out the words quickly.

  Frustration and vile, acid emotions he couldn’t begin to name swallowed him whole. Dammit, it wasn’t so much to ask, that meal someplace fine. That is, if he could eat—hell, walk down the street— without the hard stares and comments not quite out of hearing. If she could be seen with him without destroying her reputation. She asked for the moon, and it killed him not to deliver.

  “Are you forgetting you called in sick today?” he prompted, relieved that the excuse had even come to him. “It wouldn’t do to be running into one of the parents, or worse yet, your boss.”

  Kylie’s shoulders slumped. “I’d forgotten. I make a dreadful liar, don’t I?”

  He worked up a smile. “That’s no sin.” Though it was a sin to be playing so mercilessly on her sense of duty.

  She sighed, then turned to look out the window. After a moment she swung back to face him. “I don’t want this day to end. It’s silly, I know, to think I’m so special that time would stop for me.”

  He walked to her. Heedless of the paint smears on his hands, he cupped her face between his palms. “You’re a thousand small wonders, Kylie, love, adding up to one grand miracle.” He softly kissed her, a tribute to her and a promise to both of them that he wouldn’t destroy what they were so carefully building. “Let’s get this room cleaned up. Then you drive on home and I’ll come for you later. What do you think of dinner and maybe a show in Tralee? You should be safe enough that far from home.”

  Her smile returned. “That sounds grand.”

  An hour later, Michael stuck his nose into a barren refrigerator. For a woman who claimed to live on only a bit of yogurt, his sister had a mysterious way of making food disappear. He wanted just the smallest nibble to tide him over until Tralee, and he wouldn’t be having even that. Unless he did what he hadn’t in weeks—made a trip to town without Vi to shield him.

  Wincing, Michael slammed the refrigerator shut. God, what a coward he’d become, standing behind his sister. His future came to him in an ugly vision— years of slump-shouldered, tail-tucked scurrying.

  Since Kylie’s sensitive ears weren’t present to witness the act, he loosed a string of oaths. The hell if he’d let this town starve him out. The hell if he’d live as though he was under siege. He’d rather take the blows and face them alone than hide anymore. Only one thing in his life would he hide, and that was his time with Kylie. Michael wrenched on his jacket and readied for war.

  He marched through town meeting each expression of distrust with a bold grin and an exaggerated nod of his head. And behind that smile wide enough to swallow the River Shannon, he thought, sodding old biddies whispering behind their hands and not knowing shit.

  He swung open the door to Spillane’s making the bell chime with frantic alarm. Whistling loudly, he took a basket and filled it at his leisure. Spillane followed four paces behind, stopping each time Michael did. After the third aisle he’d had enough. Michael swiftly turned the corner, then hauled to a stop. He wheeled around as the grocer came up on his heels.

  “Is there something you’re wanting to say to me, Spillane?”

  The man actually wrung his hands. “I was just wondering if... if... you’re finding everything you need?”

  “Were you now? How charitable. I’m doing fine, thank you. That is, unless you might have some explosives hidden behind that row of Puffy Oaties. A man can never be too prepared, if you know what I mean.”

  Spillane’s mouth worked in a round, gaping “O” with no sound to match the motion.

  “What? None at all?” Michael gave a regretful shake of his head. “Then after you take my money— and you will be taking it—I’ll just have to visit the hardware. I can work bleedin’ miracles with a few boxes of nails and a bit of plastique, you know? Top in my class at terrorist school.”

  He ambled to the counter and set down the basket. “Hurry along, Spillane. I’ve got business to attend to.”

  Michael’s smile was meaner as he strolled back through the village streets. Meaner, but also one hell of a lot more genuine. Doing penance had never been one of his favorite pastimes, and doing it for those who didn’t deserve his apologies was repugnant. What he repented for—and he did repent—was between himself and that God who had looked the other way at so many crucial times in his life.

  Stones and glass houses, Michael thought as he took the steps to Vi’s front door. Plenty of stones hereabouts, and some strong arms to heft them. All he could do was snatch the missiles from the air and fling them back at their senders. Imperfect justice was better than none at all.

  To Kylie, Tralee was a wonderful, almost exotic place. It amazed her that sh
e’d have the choice between spicy Indian cuisine or sturdy Irish meat and potatoes, and between live theater or cinema. After all, choice wasn’t something she’d experienced often in life.

  As she and Michael cut through the pathways of Town Park on their way from dinner to a movie, he held tight to her hand. Kylie smiled, wondering if he thought she’d wander off in the soft twilight if set free. Silly, because there was no place she’d rather be than by his side. Especially here. She imagined that after imprisonment a man would value solitude, but it was such a pleasure to walk next to him in the busy park, with couples and families all bustling from one place to the next.

  Dormant now, in summer the park’s roses would be in full, glorious bloom. She drew in a deep breath, imagining their scent and practically seeing the riot of yellows and crimsons.

  As she indulged in this walking dream, Michael slowed. “Am I moving too fast for you?”

  “No, I was just smelling the flowers.”

  He made an amused noise, sort of a cross between a growl and a laugh. “Like you imagined how Muir House smelled?”

  She nodded. “Exactly.”

  “I’m beginning to worry about you, love. For a practical woman, you don’t seem very well anchored in the here and now.”

  It wasn’t so much that she didn’t know where she was. Over the empty years, she simply had fallen into the habit of embellishing life. Gazing at Michael, she realized that the here and now was finally enough.

  “I like it, that you’re worrying,” she said. “But don’t waste much sleep over me. Not for that, at least.” Flirtation was coming easier and easier, too.

  He chuckled and gently tugged her hand. “You’re becoming just a bit of a tart.”

  “That’s not so bad, is it?” She had meant the question to be joking, but its tentative tone gave away her concern. The rules, the boundaries, those lines one simply didn’t cross when dealing with matters of a sexual nature, it was as unfamiliar to her as the mulligatawny soup she’d tried—and loved—at dinner.

  They stopped, and he took both her hands in his. “It’s not. At least if you don’t loose your newfound talents on anyone else. I want you to be comfortable with me, and know you can say or do anything. Between us, away from the others, anything, Kylie.”

  This gift held only the value she was bold enough to give it. She was braver now, stronger than she had been that day Michael first stepped over a low stone wall and into her life. She knew what she wanted, though she still wasn’t quite brazen enough to give it words.

  “Thank you,” she said, then went up on tiptoe and brushed a kiss against his mouth, chilly but welcoming in the evening air.

  They walked to the cinema without sharing any more talk. Kylie was accustomed to his silences, but still wished that she could slip inside his mind and see what he examined with such intensity when those quiet times came.

  Turning the corner, they found that a small group had already queued up for the night’s shows. As they took their place at the end of the line, she offered up some teasing chat about how kind it was of him to agree to the Shakespearean movie instead of the action thriller she suspected most everybody else would be seeing. As she spoke her gaze brushed over the crowd, then flew back to one head of auburn-colored hair. A shrill, unpleasant laugh carried back to her.

  “Evie,” she muttered just under her breath, thinking how unfair it was that even miles away from home she would be haunted by Evie Nolan.

  She watched as Evie took a last drag on a cigarette, then stepped a bit out of line to toss the butt onto the sidewalk and grind it under the toe of her black, sharp-heeled boot. Just the sight of her was enough to dim the bright evening. Kylie unconsciously slipped closer to Michael.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Grand. Couldn’t be better,” she lied, then added, “I’m looking forward to the show.” Particularly because Evie would as likely be caught translating Attic Greek as she would watching Shakespeare. “I haven’t been to the cinema in ages.”

  “More recently than I have,” Michael said with just a hint of a smile.

  “I doubt that it’s changed so much. Just to bring back memories of your youth, we’ll sit in the back row and kiss.”

  “If it’s my youth we’re trying to conjure, we’d do better by pelting the audience with hard candies.”

  “One of those, were you?”

  “Trouble from beginning to end,” he said.

  Almost in answer, Kylie again heard Evie’s harsh laughter.

  “Sometimes I wish I’d been a bit more trouble myself. Just a spot or two of mischief to keep Da on his toes,” Kylie said, trying to drown out thoughts and sounds of Evie. It didn’t work.

  Kylie knew that if she were brave, she wouldn’t care who saw them together—Evie, the Gaelscoil teachers, or the entire village. She shouldn’t care, but an unpleasant churning in her stomach told her that she might, after all.

  Lies and evil were Evie’s forte. A night at the cinema would become a tryst at the hotel when Evie was through refashioning events. And once a story was out in town gossip, it was as good as fact. Better, actually.

  Kylie smoothed a lock of flyaway hair with one shaking hand. She’d been naive to think that she and Michael could walk the village streets without a wave of malicious but oh-so-sanctimoniously-delivered gossip following: “Did you hear about the schoolteacher and the child killer?” It seemed they couldn’t even manage a night out in Tralee.

  She forgot what she’d just been talking to Michael about, where they were, everything but the tension that was making tiny beads of perspiration form on the back of her neck. She felt ill, physically ill.

  She opened her mouth, intending to come up with some good reason for the two of them to leave. “Ah—”

  At that moment, Michael’s hand tensed, then just as quickly relaxed.

  “I—” he said, then hesitated before asking, “You were saying something?”

  “Dinner’s suddenly not sitting too well with me,” she said barely able to voice the lie above a whisper. “Would you mind too much if we went home?”

  He tipped up her face and looked at her with obvious concern. “You’re looking pale. Maybe it’ s best if we came back another night.”

  One when Evie’s back home making someone else miserable, Kylie thought. “I’ll make it up to you,” she said aloud.

  Michael took her hand again and led her toward the car. And away from Evie. “You’ve got nothing to make up, love.”

  At that last word—love—warmth flowed over the frozen edges of Kylie’s guilt. He’d been calling her that more often—love. She wasn’t vain or even hopeful enough to think it meant he really loved her. Or even so sure that beneath the hard anger that held him, Michael knew how to love. Still, he cared. And she cared for him.

  She’d done right by protecting them from Evie tonight. It didn’t make her weak or selfish. She was simply looking out for their well-being. Practically noble, she was. Her stomach rolled again. Kylie ducked her head and watched her feet and Michael’s close the distance to safety.

  Michael saw Kylie safely inside her tiny home, then sat in his car and watched as a light flickered on in her bedroom. He leaned back against worn upholstery and released the breath he felt as though he’d been holding for the past hour and more. It had been a close thing tonight, avoiding Evie Nolan. Kylie might think herself strong, but she was too inherently good to survive what Evie could deliver.

  Thank God the Indian food hadn’t set well. Thank God they’d gotten away before she had seen Evie. Kylie would have insisted on facing her down. Michael knew that as surely as he knew his own name. And as surely as he knew that Gerry Flynn was waiting for him down at the main road, ready to tail him back through the village, as he had all the way to Kylie’s. Small-town life at its finest.

  A large city like Dublin or even Cork had a certain amount of appeal. A man could get lost there, simply fade into anonymity. And anonymity was something he craved mor
e than a good meal, or mates to share a pint and a laugh with. But a large city didn’t hold Kylie O’Shea, and Michael was afraid that she held him.

  One battle to the next, he thought, starting the car and readying himself for whatever Flynn had in mind this night. Once Michael made the main road, the Garda followed him steadily to the edge of the village, then flashed his lights. Michael pulled over, his jaw so tense that the ache crept down his neck.

  ‘‘Evening,” Flynn said as he gazed into the car’s open window. “Would you mind stepping on out?”

  “A pleasure.” He hated sitting beneath the man’s gaze. It brought back memories of how it had felt to be slammed into the pub floor and have Flynn sneering down at him with an oddly intense expression of hatred. Even older memories of hard, concrete floor, brutal hits, and humiliation slithered forward to claim him. Michael shoved them back. He was a free man now, free to be hunted and harassed.

  Glad for his inches and muscle in excess of Flynn’s, he got out of the car and leaned casually against its fender. In the steady shine of the Garda’s headlights, he caught Flynn’s hostile expression. “Time for another friendly chat, is it?”

  “You left town tonight.”

  Michael shrugged. “That’s not a crime.”

  “It might be if you were meeting old friends.”

  “I was entertaining new ones,” he answered, knowing that the smugness he hadn’t quite been able to suppress would just tie Flynn all the closer to his tail. ‘‘You know Kylie was in the car with me, and you know I just dropped her back home.”

  “What I don’t know is where you went.”

  “And you’re looking for me to tell you? Not too bloody likely. You’ll just have to start wandering further afield.”

  Flynn clenched, then unclenched his jaw before getting words out. “It would be in your favor if you were cooperative.”