Why bother being original.
He’d stood at his rental vehicle and looked at the building Bexley occupied.
Then he’d got on with it and drove to the airport.
“Thinking?” his brother scoffed cheerfully. The miracle was he’d figured out Kiernan’s meaning from his disjointed phrases. “No thinking involved.”
True.
“Who?” Cahill asked.
“You don’t know her.”
“You’ve been at the Slash-C.”
“You don’t know her,” he repeated.
“Must’ve been fast,” Cahill said thoughtfully.
Too soon. They both knew it. He was sure they’d both known it. But the need…
His brother asked, “Strong attraction?”
“Attraction?” The waves from her echoing contractions, drawing him deeper. Not like the bracing — ah yes, bracing — ocean waves of his native Donegal or his adopted New England. But waves of heat, surrounding him… “Yeah. Into bed nearly straight off.”
“Is that so?”
Kiernan grunted fatalistically. “Did you talk to Val or Matty, then?”
“Me? Neither one of the two.”
“They talked to Eleanor,” Kiernan concluded, which might as well be them talking to his brother. “So you know we were both at the ranch a few days, was all.”
“And you were as good as rude to her.”
Cahill sounded as if he found that significant. Lifelong experience told Kiernan arguing would be seen as proof of his guilt. He hadn’t been truly rude.
“Until,” Cahill said, “you took the girl to bed one time with no thinking.”
Kiernan made a noncommittal sound.
Cahill, proving his interpreting skills, stated, “Ah. Not one time. You had a repeat performance of tumbling, no thinking.”
“Not the last time. That was thinking alone. You could say I came to my senses.”
There’d been a different tumbling. The tumbling of memories. Chips of memory forming a mosaic of Felicity’s betrayal. The simple phrase, last summer. An arm pulled from his hold. A final kiss on his cheek.
Last summer. It made all the difference. Confirming she’d used him from the beginning. Every day. Every touch. Every moment together. Using him.
“What do I know of this woman — any woman? Very little.” He heard very come out verra, a sign his accent had thickened, a sign — according to Eleanor and Val — of emotions close to the surface. “Nothing.”
“You know she’s not Felicity,” Cahill said calmly.
Kiernan snorted. “I don’t. I’m not competent to know that, as I didn’t know Felicity wasn’t Felicity.”
He braced, waiting for Cahill to say he couldn’t know anyone wasn’t Felicity without getting to know the person better and that meant giving the person a chance. Trouble was, giving Bexley a chance meant getting close to her and that meant wanting to make love to her, which opened a can of worms.
Not worms.
Snakes.
Boa constrictors.
“So, that’s that? End of this Bexley, eh?”
He was silent too long. “Yes. She was off like a shot, so…”
“What sent her off, then?”
“Don’t know.”
“You hadn’t spoken a word?”
“I hadn’t.”
His brother’s silence demanded more.
“I stopped.”
“Stopped…? Uh, in flagrante?”
“In foreplay.” Kiernan swallowed. “The third time.”
“Ah. So you stopped. And she was off like a shot.”
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re the wise old man on the mountain and I’m the novice come to collect your wisdom.”
“Because it’s wisdom I’ve got.”
They’d been through this before. Many times. In humor and the comfortable shoulder-shoving competition of brothers. But that was before Felicity. Before Kiernan’s failure to see what was happening between them stood in stark contrast to what Cahill had with Eleanor.
“All right, then. Dispense your wisdom, oh, Ancient One.”
“I’ll give you Ancient One and make you suffer when next we’re together. But for now I’ll show my superior understanding and wisdom. She had her own movie playing in her head.”
“What?”
“You each have your own movie playing in your heads. The happy news is when you’re with the right woman, and there long enough, the movies in your heads are about each other and happy ones. But where you are now, your movie in your head’s about Felicity. You said as much. It’s what made you stop. You were in the moment with Bexley the first time — excuse me, times — and in foreplay the third. Then something switched on the movie in your head about Felicity. Isn’t it?”
A pair of words — last summer — with its instant reminder of Felicity. Bexley drawing her arm away from his hold as Felicity had done. Her soft kiss on his cheek.
“Yeah,” he said slowly.
“And whatever you did or stopped doing or how you stopped doing it flicked on her movie in her head. And that’s why she skedaddled out of there.”
What was the movie in Bexley Farber’s head?
No. He didn’t care. He couldn’t care.
He’d left the Slash-C before he had to — had to — see her again.
He was getting the hell away from her.
Far away. For good.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
December 24
The stockings were done.
The girls had viewed them with awe when Bexley turned them right side out as if they were gossamer.
Kiernan, aware of Pauline’s attention, tried not to watch too closely.
Now Bexley planned a reprise of the star-folding, though she wanted them to use different materials.
“It’s a treasure hunt. Find whatever you can that we can fold into more stars, but especially what’s red or green or gold or — oh, even better — shiny. Something that sparkles.”
“What about alum-uh… alum-num foil like the cookie sheets? That’s shiny.”
“That’s an excellent thought, Molly, but it’s so thin, I’m afraid it wouldn’t work.”
“Over something,” Dan murmured. “Not as thick as cardboard.”
Bexley’s eyes lit up. “Oh, if you could make that work…”
Kiernan pushed down the thought that he’d damn well make it work if he were Dan.
“Come now, let’s begin this treasure hunt.” Pauline herded them toward the doorway.
Molly stopped there and called back, “Aren’t you coming, Bexley?”
“You all go on ahead. I need to think about something.”
Kiernan devoted himself to clearing the table, using that as an excuse to stay here.
Gramps didn’t bother with subterfuge. He just stayed seated.
Pauline didn’t even glance at him, much less try to cajole him. Kiernan could swear he heard a disgruntled sigh from the older man.
But then he forgot Gramps and concentrated on Bexley’s seemingly aimless wandering around the room.
It was hard to track her movements without seeming to. He pivoted to see Bexley give her head a rueful shake and move away from staring at the bar.
She made another circuit of the room, looking intently at nothing he could see. Then, from a position close to the doorway to the store, she turned and stared back across the room, past him and the table, to the opposite wall.
The corners of her lips turned up. Her eyes opened slightly wider. She’d spotted something.
He twisted to look where she was looking, but it told him less than her face did, so he twisted back toward her.
“Hubcaps.”
Few people ever spoke that word with the warmth Bexley gave it.
What if she said his name with that dreamy, caressing intonation?
She had. Once. Before—
“What?” His word came out rough.
She didn’t seem to notice, still staring at the wall of hubcaps.
“You said they make trees of lobster pots in Gloucester and whiskey barrels or deer antlers in other places.”
Cautiously, because he might have an idea where this was going, he acknowledged he had said part of that. “Yeah.”
“And hubcaps.” She moved across the room to the incomplete display of dulled hubcaps, touching one here, looking up at another, testing the weight of a third. “How do they do that?”
“I’ve no idea. None a’tall.”
“It would need a framework. Say, a cone of chicken wire around a ladder… No, something stiffer, to hold them up…”
“What are you saying over there about my hubcaps?” Gramps demanded from his distant chair.
“If you moved closer and didn’t deny yourself the warmth of the stove and the company of your family, you’d know,” Bexley called back to him.
Kiernan stood, took a couple steps closer to her.
“With no desire to be the Grinch, I’d point out we’ve nothing of the sort here. No chicken wire, never mind something stiffer. Not even much more wire than what we used to hang the snowflakes.”
She pulled her bottom lip in between her teeth, still looking at the hubcaps. She backed up, nearly stepping into him from not looking where she was going, surveying the hubcaps with her head tilted this way and that.
What on earth did she see when she did that? He tried shifting his head for a different view, but still saw a wall of grimy hubcaps, and not all that clearly, because neither the wagon wheel light fixture hanging from the ceiling, nor the lights behind the bar had much illuminating oomph by the time they reached this wall.
“If we can’t have a three-dimensional tree, we might make do with a two-dimensional one,” she said at a last.
“Of hubcaps?” He didn’t doubt her, not after what she’d created already. But he did wonder how.
“Of course. That’s what we have to work with, like those other trees. Antlers and whiskey barrels and lobster pots. We’ll have to scrub them all so they’re shiny. I like green trees better than shiny, but it will have to do.”
He felt something like a ball of lead plunge low in his stomach. He’d cleaned many a hubcap, working part-time at a carwash and detailing business while he was in school. But he’d had all the tools and potions available, not to mention not one of them had started as grimy and dirty as the best of these. Gramps had collected them in the wild, so to speak, mostly straight from dirt roads. Then they’d sat beside the stove for who knew how long, adding smoke to their mix and baking it all on.
With industrial cleaners and a week, they might be able to return the sparkle to that wall of hubcaps.
“Let’s start with one, you and me, and see how it cleans up.”
She stilled.
He suspected it was the you and me.
“You’ve set all the others to tasks.” He spoke casually, as he moved past her, regarding the hubcaps and picking out the least dingy. “Think this one’s the best. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
In accepting that as the best candidate, she’d also agreed to them doing the chore together.
He lifted it from the nail it hung on.
“Hey. What’re you doing? You’ll leave a hole in my display,” Gramps shouted as the others trooped back in.
“It looks better already,” Pauline said stoutly.
He was quelled into disgruntled mumbles.
Kiernan’s feeling of being pleased with himself continued while Bexley oohed and ahhed over every shiny, colored, reflective bit of paper they’d found, then wrote down the steps in case they forgot how to fold the paper into stars while she was otherwise occupied.
He and Bexley gathered the cleaning supplies they’d used yesterday, adding a stiff brush from the closet, then went into the women’s room.
Bexley propped open the door, with a murmur about bringing more warmth into the small space.
It was chilly.
But he thought it had more to do with the prospect of being in that small space with him. That left his self-satisfaction as dented as any of the hubcaps.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
After an awkward start, they’d found a good working rhythm.
One-quarter of the circle soaked in the sink, then rotated up to have more cleaning solutions sprayed on it. Kiernan plied the wire brush once it had gone through those first two steps. Then she scrubbed with a cloth to remove what he’d loosened.
Starting on a second go-round of the hubcap, Bexley felt the weight of the silence dragging at her. Surely it couldn’t be worse if she started a conversation.
Impulsively, she said, “You’re good with those girls. I’d have expected you to be good with Dan, probably Bobby, but, honestly, I’m surprised you’re that good with Lizzie and Molly. You must have a sister.”
“No.”
Later she recognized the undercurrent in that single syllable. In the moment, occupied with scrubbing, she said, “Really? It’s only you and Cahill? And there’s quite a gap in your ages, isn’t there?”
“There is. We had a sister.” Behind his matter-of-factness, something brought her gaze to his face. He kept plying the brush. “Closer in age to Cahill. I wasn’t born when she died. Nor when our father died a few weeks later.”
Her hands froze. “Oh, Kiernan.”
“No sympathy for me,” he instructed with would-be ease, still working. “As I said, I wasn’t there to feel the loss. How can you miss what you’ve never had? All the sorrow and the loss fell to our mother and to Cahill. The sorrow most of all to Ma. For all she laughs and enjoys life now, there remains that sorrow, deep and wide. For the husband she loved so dear and for Patsy. Cahill, along with the sorrow and the loss, carried responsibility for so long. Not for our father, who was in an English hospital, hoping a specialist could work a miracle. But for Patsy. He was about young Dan’s age when a confusion led to him and Patsy being put on a ferry back to Ireland without our mother. Cahill fought, trying to get himself and Patsy off and back to Mom. He was taken off all right, but Patsy went away on the ferry. There was a storm…”
“No.” Dread smothered her.
“Patsy drowned, along with a number of others, but most were saved.”
“Oh, Kiernan.”
“No need for sorrow for me, Bexley. I never knew Patsy or our father. Mom was carrying me without knowing it, that’s what made her sick, and started the confusion that led to Patsy being alone on the ferry.”
“You can’t possibly feel you were responsible—”
“Responsible? No. I didn’t feel responsible.”
Something was behind that, but before she could examine her certainty, much less ask anything, he went on.
“I knew naught of this for a long time. Not until I took Cahill’s car and went off, intending never to return. It wasn’t a well-thought-out plan—” His eyes gleamed with a hint of devilment. “—considering at that time I, too, was about young Dan’s age and possessed a rudimentary understanding of driving a vehicle at best. But, ah, I was mad with anger at my brother.”
“Why?”
“Responsibility. His motto, his strength, his burden. I see all that now. At that age I saw only that it was the word out of his mouth every other sentence and each of those sentences directed at me. When I ran away, Mom kept it from Cahill. He’d worked through the night with some emergency at the inn he owned by then and was sleeping in. Not that he’d have noticed his car gone six days out of seven as it was, because he worked every minute.
“Still, Mom shielded him from knowing what an ungrateful little — I’m sure you get the idea — I was. Mom searched for me herself and enlisted the help of a neighbor who was by way of being a distant cousin as well. I had the good fortune of fetching up against those folks first, rather than my mother. I don’t suppose she would have spared me much at that moment. But nor would she have told me the history I needed to know. I have no doubt M
om and Cahill thought they were protecting me from hurt. But there came a time when the ignorance they left me in caused not only pain to me, but me causing them pain. My greatest regret.”
“Did you… Did you tell them you knew? Did you talk about that history?”
“Not then. I hadn’t given them cause to put any faith in me to that point, I needed to do that before we talked.” A flicker of his grin flashed. “Or I was too scared. After Cahill came to America, Mom and I did talk. I needed her to know she could rely on me. As for Cahill, well, it was considerably easier to finally talk with him after he met and married Eleanor. He still has a way of treating me like more of a child than a man, teasing, especially about wom—” He stopped.
“Women? Is that what you were going to say?”
“It was. But as the words arose, I realized it was not entirely accurate, nor fair to my brother. He did, indeed, bedevil the life out of me over the girls I dated.”
“Ah. The many, many girls you dated, from what I hear.”
“The many girls I dated,” he compromised.
“But not—” She paused, dropped her head to resume cleaning, but pushed through to the end. “—about the serious one?”
“No, not about her.”
Despite keeping her head down, she knew he was looking at her.
“How much did Val tell you?” he asked.
“Not much. Pieces.” She didn’t mention other pieces came from other people.
Sometimes as if they forgot she hadn’t known what happened with the woman Kiernan had thought was The One.
Sometimes as if they were willing her to know what was in their memories without saying the words straight out … but that was mostly Donna Currick.
“It’s over and done with. Well in the past.” Kiernan cleared his throat. “All in the past.”
He closed the conversation, but couldn’t stop her thoughts.
Over and done with. That’s what she’d thought in July about Nigel.
Until she’d asked herself if she would have reacted so immediately to Kiernan’s rejection if she’d been over it? Not over Nigel and the breakup — that truly was done with long before — but over the repercussions of the relationship.
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