by Lia Lee
At this time of day, it was quite deserted, and the waitress took their order for coffee with a polite nod and no conversation at all. Carly slid into her side of the booth, setting her books on the table in front of her. Donovan craned his head to look at them.
“The Ghosts of Loch Naine? The History of Dunn Borrun?” He frowned at her. “What can you be doing?”
Carly lifted her chin at him, tapping the table impatiently with her fingers. “I’m learning about the town,” she said. “I’ve never lived in a place with such history before, and I wanted to know more about it.”
Donovan raised an eyebrow. “So you’ve decided that you are living here? Just like that?” When he wasn’t putting on a show for television cameras, his accent got thicker, she noted absently.
“Maybe, maybe not,” she said. “All I know is that it is going to be my decision.” To her shock, he snorted in response.
“What?” Carly demanded. “Is it so hard for you to think that a woman might want to make her own choices?”
Perhaps it was, she thought darkly. The man appeared not to think much of women—at least in his interviews—whether they made choices or not, whether they thought or felt.
Donovan only shrugged. “All I can say is that in your place, I might not make such a choice so lightly.”
“And I’m sure that you’re here for my best interests,” she sneered and he allowed a slight smile to flicker across his face.
“You have no reason to trust me, though I will say that I did save you the other day. Perhaps you’ll be so kind as to allow that to count for something?”
Carly hesitated for a moment, and cautiously, she nodded. “I know who you are, and I know what you do,” she said warningly. “Don’t try any games with me. I know that I have one thing that you want and that you’re known for getting your way when it comes to business.” Donovan laughed out loud, making the only other patron of the small restaurant, an elderly man with a newspaper, look up in irritation.
“Believe me, scrappy little American, there is more than one thing I want from you.” Against Carly’s will, she could feel a red blush move its way up her neck, and she rubbed at it awkwardly, frowning.
“Well, let’s keep ourselves to the honest and simple part of it. You want my grandmother’s house.”
“I am not going to lie, I do,” he said his grin taking on a rather hard edge. “That is the last property I need before I can put in a real proposal for the investors. If I don’t have it, all my plans, poof, they go up in smoke, you see?”
“Oh no, you’ll be halted from making another billion,” she said drily. “Whatever will you do?”
He snorted. “You sound like a child. If I’m going to keep my money, I need to make money, and I sure as hell am not going to be one of those parasites who sits on a horde and refuses to put it back into the community.” She looked uncertain, so Donovan continued.
“Don’t you see, Carly? An enterprise like the one I’m planning is going to bring life to the area. I mean, woman, look around you. You’re blinded right now by the charm and the beautiful old buildings, but there are people suffering here. Work is scarce, and that puts people close to the edge. One man gets a push in a place like this, and whoosh, his whole family goes with him.”
She shivered; it wasn’t like this sort of thing never happened where she was from.
“So you’re doing this all out of altruism, I see,” she said, and he let out a puff of irritated breath.
The waitress came back with their coffee, two thick-walled white mugs with something thick and black inside. It seemed as if Carly had to put in an unGodly amount of cream and sugar before it lightened up at all. Even when she drank it, there was a bitter, burnt aftertaste that made her flinch.
“Ah, see that? Remember how good coffee was back home?”
She glared at him. “How do you know how good it might have been?”
“Because it wasn’t from this place. Think about this place replaced with something new, something modern.”
Carly laughed in his face. “Are you seriously trying to tempt me into selling my grandmother’s cottage with nothing more than coffee? Really? That would never... Well, I actually know some people you probably could have caught like that, but I’m not one of them. I’m not going to be bought with good coffee, Donovan.” She thought that he was going to snap at her for her smart words, but instead he smiled. Did he have any idea how devastating his smile was? She hoped not, for her sake and the sake of any woman over eighteen in the vicinity.
“You said my name. I like the way you say my name.”
“And I like it when you don’t change the subject,” she said. “You can’t bring me around by appealing to my civic pride. As you say, I don’t even live here, and you are looking to put another few billion into your pockets.”
“All right then, we’ll cut to the chase.”
To her surprise, Donovan pulled a small pad of paper out of his pocket. He scrawled something on it, and then he passed it to her. For a moment, she thought that she must have read it incorrectly. Then her eyes adjusted and she stared at him.
“Are you serious?”
Unperturbed, he sipped his bitter coffee without a flinch. “I usually am when it comes to money. As to the rest, well, sometimes less so than I should be.”
“This is what you are offering me to...”
“...To sign over a property that you hadn’t laid eyes on before the beginning of the month,” Donovan said calmly. “To take a large amount of money, to go home, or perhaps to Dublin.”
“To Dublin?” she asked, her voice raising slightly. It felt as if things were beginning to move very quickly, and that she was quickly losing the thread of things. Donovan seemed to have a way of doing that to people.
“Aye. It’s quite beautiful there, and I have a house that I wouldn’t mind you seeing. Or perhaps if that doesn’t suit you, London or Milan.”She stared at him, her fingers knotting the slip of paper in her hands. “Are you propositioning me even when you’re trying to make a deal?”
“Is it working?” he asked with a roguish grin.
Maybe a little bit?
“No!” Carly said, standing up with a stomp. She gathered her library books up, feeling as if she were on the verge of tears. “Can’t you decide if I’m a business prospect or a romantic one?”
“I don’t feel as if I have to answer that question, but I will tell you right now that I don’t do romance. Too busy for it.”
“That’s right, you don’t like women,” Carly said ominously, and Donovan broke out into a laugh.
“So, you have been doing your research,” he said with a chuckle. “I commend you. As a matter of fact, I do like women well enough. Beautiful little fools, most of them, but charming, like little birds.”
Carly couldn’t keep her disgust from her face. If he really thought that about half the people on the planet, she would hang on to her grandmother’s cottage even if it burned down and she was living in the rubble.
She crumpled the slip of paper in her hand, dropping it on the table with disgust. “I don’t want to talk to you anymore,” she said, her voice a strained rasp. The look he gave her in return was still humorous, but there was an ice-cold edge to it.
Remember that, her mind whispered. This is who he truly is.
“I would be very careful if I were you,” Donovan said finally. “That is not an offer that will come again. I will make another one at some point, and I promise you, it will be less generous.”
“I don’t care if you offer me a few pennies or if you offer me a mountain range, I don’t care,” she snapped. “I don’t want to talk with you or deal with you again.”
She turned on her heel and stormed out of the restaurant, her face red with rage and embarrassment.
What did you expect, the voice in her mind taunted her. Did you think he would be different? That he would be the one to break through those walls you have set up? And such fine walls they are, when no one i
s ever going to try to knock them down…
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” she muttered as she walked.
Carly looked up just in time to see a woman with a baby in her arms veer to avoid her, and she winced. She shut her mouth and slowed her pace a little.
The worst part was that there was still a small voice inside her telling her that she had behaved poorly. It insisted that Donovan wasn’t a bad man, that she could trust him.
Carly knew that that voice was dangerous, and she drowned it out as best she could. It would drive her to do strange and risky things around Donovan, and in the end he would be left with what he wanted, and she would be left with nothing.
***
In the restaurant, the waitress, a woman who had obviously worked at the place for years and had seen it all, glanced after the gently closing door and came over to Donovan. She picked up Carly’s cup with a practiced nonchalance before looking at him.
“Fight with your girl?” she asked.
“You could say that,” Donovan murmured, shaking his head.
He turned down an offer of a refill, and instead sat at the diner trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.
It should have worked.
That was the head and tail of it. He had offered her far more than that cottage was worse, and if he had to be honest with himself, a little more on top of that simply because.…
“Because there’s something special about this one,” he said softly.
He couldn’t explain it even a little, but it was the truth. The moment he had laid eyes on Carly, fighting for her life in a back alley, there was something that had clenched around his heart and refused to let go. He was a man who would dive into a fight without a second thought, but he was not prepared for the chilling anger that swept over him at the men who were attacking her.
There was the outrage that they would assault a woman like that, but more than that, there was the ice-cold fury that they would lay hands on something that was his, that they might dare injure a hair on Carly’s head.
The moment he saw her, a part of him wanted to keep her with him forever.
What the hell was this, he wondered. He was thirty-four years old. He had been telling her the truth when he said he didn’t do romance. He had as a younger man and it had gone to hell, and he considered himself well out of it.
Carly, however, woke those feelings up again.
Donovan buried his face in his hands. No. This wasn’t happening. He was getting maudlin, he was stressed, he simply wanted to close the deal. That was the goal. That was the most important thing right at that moment, and he certainly wasn’t becoming infatuated with a brazen little American who didn’t know a good thing when she had it.
He would get what he wanted from her, and perhaps afterward there would be time for something else. Donovan shook his head to clear it of ideas regarding what that something else could be, and pulled out his wallet.
When the waitress came by next, she would be astonished at the amount of money he had left as a tip, but by then Donovan Reilly would be long gone. He had a campaign to plan, and he needed to keep his mind focused.
Chapter Six
The music was bright and lively, and even if she didn’t know the steps, Carly could barely stop herself from bouncing along with it. On the floor, a sextet of serious-faced young girls wove an intricate pattern on the dusty wooden floor with their feet, and when the music came to an end the audience burst into applause.
The band leader announced general dancing after that, and the crowd swelled and moved a little, people looking for partners and conversing with one another. Carly was content to watch, as she so often did at events like this, but then a small cup of cider was pressed into her hand.
She took it with a smile, expecting it to be one of the organizers or perhaps a member of the historical society that she was getting to know a bit, but then when she saw who it was, she scowled.
“You again,” she said, setting the cider aside. “Don’t you ever give up?”
“Well if I was going to give up, I would have had to have been trying something, wouldn’t I?” Donovan asked with a wink. Without so much as a second thought, he took a seat on the bench next to her.
“You’re always trying something,” Carly said, and it came out strangely flirtatious. She covered it with a smile, but she had a sinking feeling that he was laughing at her.
This was the way it had been going for two months now. He wasn’t stalking her, she knew that, but he had an uncanny knack for appearing at the places she wanted to go, whether it was a lecture on the history of the town or even a local sheep show. It was strange to see a man she knew to be worth as much as Donovan was in casual clothing, chatting up the people in the community.
Do they not see what he’s doing? She wondered, but she never found a place to air her suspicions about the man.
As for Donovan himself, he was the soul of kindness and congeniality. He was interested in what people had to say, he listened respectfully, and he offered solutions that were oftentimes taken. He was becoming a part of Loch Naine in a way that she never thought he would.
“I suppose I must be,” he said with a shrug.
“That was alarmingly honest of you,” she said warily, and he grinned at her. There was a slightly rueful hint to his smile, and Carly was not certain she had ever seen that before.
“I’m trying honesty,” he said. “Nothing else seemed to impress you, but I thought that this might be interesting at least.”
“Impress me?” she sputtered, and he rubbed her back gently with his warm hand.
“Yes. Money won’t do it, power won’t do it, so I thought I’d see how being honest might go.”
“All right then,” Carly said. Her mind was spinning right now, and she wasn’t sure what was going on. One thing that this man could always do was throw her off her stride, and now he was doing it again.
“All right?”
“All right then, honestly, what is it you want to do?” For a moment, there was such a powerful light in his eyes that she gasped a little, a tiny sound of surprise. There was some small part of her that knew exactly what it was that he wanted to do, and that part of her cried out for him as well. It was like being struck by lightning, it was like being stripped naked in the middle of the crowd.
She saw, clear as day, Donovan fighting back that primal urge, and what was left in its place was something that smiled at her with a reckless abandon.
“I’ll show you,” he said, taking her hand and dragging her onto the dance floor.
“Oh God, I can’t!” she yelped, but Donovan was laughing at her.
“Of course you can,” he said. “It’s dancing, it’s in your heart already.” Of course Carly had been raised in the United States, where her exposure to dancing had been a kindergarten tap class and stiff-armed swaying in eight grade. This was entirely different, and the couples on the floor whirled around her, their hands held lightly and high, their feet moving at the speed of light.
Carly’s first instinct was to draw away from Donovan, tugging hard if she had to, but then he took both hands in hers. There was a light in his gray eyes that called to her, and suddenly she was laughing as well. Her blood ran hot in her veins, and she realized she had never felt as bright as this before.
“Don’t run!” Donovan was calling to her. “Don’t run from me, pretty girl, just dance!”
“I don’t know how!” she said, but she was laughing as she said it. “Show me how!” He took her hands, one in each of his so that he was facing her.
“Simple as falling off a log. Simple as falling in love. Step to the right, bring your left foot to join, so right together, right together, left and turn...”
Despite the increasingly complicate patterns that the people around them were weaving, Carly was shocked at how easily she picked up the basics of the dance. Donovan was patient, teasing and encouraging by turns, and soon she had the sequence memorized, following Donovan and mirro
ring his motions.
“You’re good at this!” Donovan said.
It was a shock. She had never thought that she would be good at something like this, but there it was, and she was. She felt light and eternal on the dance floor, her steps moving quickly and twirls leaving her gasping with delight.
The music ended just as she spun towards Donovan, and instead of spinning her back out, he caught her in his arms. She was pressed against his chest, and in that moment, she would have sworn that the universe held only the two of them, only their eyes, only their breath, only the connection between them.
It was suddenly too much. She had danced in the arms of this dark and frightening man, one that she did not know or truly trust, and a part of her wanted to run away, rabbiting off into the darkness to hide under the covers.
As if Donovan could read her mind, he tightened his arms around her instinctively.
“Don’t run, pretty girl, don’t run from me,” he said roughly, and while force could not have kept her, the need in his voice did.
“What are we doing?” she asked, and she knew he had heard her even under the clatter of the other dancers.
His expression was complicated for a moment, and then the music started up again.
“We’re dancing,” he said with that crooked grin that she was growing to love. “Come on, this one’s easier.”
It was. This time, the men and the women were lined in two rows facing each other, progressing up and down the hall and then weaving between each other. All that Carly had to do was follow the women in front of her, and the older woman she was following tipped her a wink.
“This one is for courting couples,” she said. “It’s meant to show you who else might be in the hall that’s worth dancing with. Don’t let your man get too comfortable, eh?” Despite the woman’s words, as they wove through the lines, Carly’s eyes sought on Donovan over and over again. She could see that he certainly had his own admirers. There were girls barely out of school, and older women as well giving him an appreciative eye, but again and again, his gray eyes found hers.