“Wow,” Jill said, shaking her head. “Who knew?” She laughed loudly. She took a swig of beer and then just asked what she’d wanted to know. “I’m looking around this house and it doesn’t look like a school teacher’s house. How do you afford this,” she waved her hand around, “And a BMW?”
Now it was Coyle’s turn to laugh. He stood, went over to a bookshelf in the corner of the room and pulled two books off. He returned to the couch, dropping the books between them. Jill reached out to pick them up, opening the top one.
“Traditional Irish History, by –” she looked up at him. “Coyle T. Donovan. Really?”
He nodded demurely. “I’ve written a couple of text books on Irish history, one for secondary school – high school in America – which is what I teach, and one for primary school. They’ve done quite well. Both have been adopted and recommended by the Department of Education here in the Republic and also up in Northern Ireland.”
“Ah,” she said. “So this is where the money is coming from. But how –” She flipped through the book to find the ‘about the writer’ page. “Coyle Donovan writes about Irish history when not teaching secondary school. He earned his doctorate –” she paused and looked up at him in surprise with wide eyes, but then looked back to the book and kept reading, “his doctorate in Irish Historical Studies at Trinity College and is considered an expert in his field. He lives in Killarney, very near where he grew up.” She put the book down on her lap. “Now I get it. You’ve been a bit of a mystery to me, Mr. Donovan. Suave, plenty of money, while still down to earth and normal enough to be a schoolteacher. You live a dual life, don’t you?”
“Actually, I’m writing another one for university.” He gestured over to the corner of the large room, near the bookshelves, where Jill now saw a laptop and a stack of papers and books on a desk. “That’s mostly what I’ve been doing this summer.”
Coyle moved back to the couch, now sitting very near Jill. She could smell musky cologne, warmed by his body heat. Very aware of him, she uncurled her legs and shimmied over, so that she was sitting right next to him. She didn’t look at him, instead pretending to be concentrating on the cover of his book she held in her hands. She wouldn’t remember what it said later. She was too distracted by the man whose shoulder touched her shoulder, whose hip touched her hip, whose thigh touched her thigh.
“Jill,” Coyle said, his voice now low.
She turned her head to look at him and he was suddenly kissing her. The books fell from her hands and lap and she reached up to touch his hair. Thoughts whirled around and around in her head. They hadn’t been together since the night of Teagan’s wedding. Things had cooled off when she had abruptly decided to stay in Ireland, and Jill had thought it was because Coyle considered that night a fluke, a fling. After all, she was still married. They’d become good friends, talking during the slow hours at the pub, she behind the bar washing glasses, he on his customary stool at the end of the bar.
Their kiss deepened and Jill felt her body dissolving into his. It was a feeling of losing control, something she definitely wasn’t used to. She suddenly felt panicky. Pulling away from him, she stood and walked over to the mantle over the fireplace. She didn’t turn to look at him; instead, she made herself busy looking at the photographs on the mantle. There was a photo of Coyle, Mary, Tara and Teagan, as kids, sitting on one of those rock walls she’d seen all over Ireland. Another one of Coyle and his mother, probably in his twenties.
Jill looked at the pictures one by one, stalling and trying not to deal with her current situation. When she got to the last picture, it was a photo of a younger Coyle and a very pretty woman. They had their arms around each other. She remembered the photograph in Bridy’s house of Coyle and a young woman. Jill looked more closely at the photograph on Coyle’s mantel. It was the same young woman, the waif-like blond, in this picture. Feeling a tug of jealously, she quickly suppressed it. After all, what claim did she, Jill, have on the man? None.
“Who’s this?” she asked casually, turning to Coyle and gesturing to the photograph.
He stood and walked over to where she was, picking up the photo and staring into it.
“That’s… Sharon.”
Jill cocked her head in question, her eyes widening, but she didn’t say anything.
“Sharon is my wife.”
Jill felt like she’d been punched in the stomach. “Your wife?”
Coyle returned the frame to its place on the mantle. Sitting down into a big leather recliner, he sighed.
“Sharon and I were married a long time ago. She has a lot of great qualities, but being straight isn’t one of them.”
“You’re married?”
“I did tell you I’d was married when I was younger,” Coyle said softly, gazing at Jill.
“Was. I thought it was a past-tense was,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. She had a lot of practice at looking calm while falling apart inside, living with Scott. It never crossed her mind that she’d ever let a man make her feel this way again.
“I said I’d married. I didn’t say anything about it being over.”
Jill didn’t say anything; she only waited while her heart began a slow ache. Her mind flitted to the phone calls at Bridy’s, the calls from a “Sharon.” The derisive, nasty tone of her voice. Oh, that Sharon.
“She’s an artist. We went to university together, that’s where I met her – in an art history class.” Coyle paused, looking down at his hands and then back up at Jill. “She got in with a bunch of sort of derelicts, starting smoking pot and the next thing I knew, she was doing coke and heroin.”
He stood again and wandered over to the window that looked out into the darkness.
“I thought I could save her, so I asked her to marry me. It was good in the beginning. She stopped hanging around with those people, found a job at a little art gallery in Dublin. I was working on my Ph.D. at Trinity by that time. I thought everything was fine. But after a while, because I had to spend a lot of time on my studies, she got bored and lonely and starting looking for trouble again.”
He turned and looked at Jill, his grey eyes stony. “One day I came back from the library and she was gone. Cleaned out our stash of money, took a few clothes, and left. That was, oh, about ten years ago. I tried finding her over the years. A few weeks ago she started ringing my mum’s.”
Jill softly asked, “And you never divorced her?”
“Ah, well, divorce in Ireland is possible, but difficult.” Coyle laughed wryly. “First you have to have lived apart for four years, which we’ve certainly passed. In the heat of things, when I decided she wasn’t coming back after a few months, it was easy to get fired up about divorcing her. But after five years,” he shrugged, “I hadn’t met anyone else and by then was thinking maybe marriage wasn’t for me anyhow, so why bother getting divorced, you know?”
She glanced up at him. Was he telling the truth? Was he over this Sharon? Wanting to look away again, she felt unable to.
“Jill, I have to honest with you.” Coyle looked at her, his eyes serious and quiet. “I feel responsible for her. Her parents died in a car accident while we were at university and she has only one sister, who won’t have anything to do with her because of her drug problems.”
He moved to where Jill still stood by the fireplace. Reaching down, he took both her hands in his and looked into her eyes. “But I do not love her anymore. Not like a husband or a lover. That died when she left me, when she chose drugs over me.”
Jill wasn’t sure what to think. This was one of those watershed moments, she knew. She could walk away now, keep him at arms distance, stay friends. Or she could follow her heart and trust him. The first path would be painful for a while, but she thought eventually she’d get over him. The second path could be even more painful, but if it worked out, the payoff enormous. She looked up into his face, seeking truth, hope, faith. She was pretty sure she saw it there.
She leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his
large torso. Coyle’s arms immediately came around her and they stood there for a long time, tied up with feelings and longing. Jill wanted – no, needed – for Coyle to be telling the truth. She needed him to be hers, to need her back.
After what seemed like an eternity, Coyle loosened his arms and looked down at her. “Stay the night?” he asked simply.
Months had passed since the night they had spent together after Teagan’s wedding. Jill had tried not to think of him like that, unclothed and pressed up against her own naked body, the way his heated breath had touched every part of her skin. She had pushed all those memories away, chalking that night up to one remarkable, but not-to-be-repeated experience. Coyle had been more than friendly with her since then, but he had taken a step back and not pursued her in that way. Jill assumed that while he liked her, he probably thought that night had been a mistake and didn’t want it repeated either.
But the thing was, she couldn’t forget that night. Several times in her little room above Bridy’s kitchen, Jill had woken up in a sweat, sitting up in bed remembering the touch of Coyle, who had visited her in her dreams. In her bike travels around Killarney, pictures of Coyle riding that old red bike to the horse stables flitted into her head. While working at the pub, Jill would often glance down to the end of the bar where Coyle always sat and whether he was there or not, a flood of heat fell over her senses.
Jill had felt guilty, tried to think of Scott, back home in Phoenix. She tried to remember times when he had made her feel this way, but it had been so long, the feelings would not come. The harder she had tried replacing Coyle with Scott in her thoughts and dreams, the more Coyle invaded them.
Now he was standing in front of her, asking her to stay. Jill knew this wasn’t like the night after the wedding. This was different, pre-meditated. Coyle had obviously been thinking about her, too. She looked up at him, into his gray-green eyes and at that moment decided she was in exactly the right place.
“Yes,” she told him. “I will stay.”
Chapter 21
The sun had found itself early the next morning, burning through the Irish mists and poking through the sheer curtains on the windows in Coyle’s bedroom. Jill squinted as she opened her eyes, not entirely sure where she was at first. The sensation of heaviness came to her and she realized she was in Coyle’s room, in his bed, and he was soundly asleep, his muscular arm thrown over her.
She could only see half his face as she gazed at him. His head was wedged into her shoulder, his longish brown hair messy. His jaw was dark with stubble and in the relaxed state of sleep, his mouth was soft and, she thought, almost childlike.
The night before had been wonderful. Coyle had been gentle, yet strong, with her. Their lovemaking had been the most sensual thing she’d ever experienced, their bodies so entwined and meshed that she had felt like she had lost some of herself into him and had taken some of him as well. She hated doing it, but she compared their night with the sex she had with Scott. She knew that she probably had felt that way with Scott in the beginning of their relationship, but she honestly couldn’t remember. Maybe she hadn’t.
In any case, here she was, with this beautiful man sleeping next to her, the two of them snuggled up in a huge bed with enormous feather pillows, the morning sun streaming through the curtains. It was heaven.
Then the phone rang. Jill groaned, as Coyle sat up abruptly and started automatically reaching for the phone. Great, thought Jill. So much for the perfect moment.
“Hello,” Coyle croaked into the phone. “Oh, um, hi.” He listened for a moment, then laughed. “Ya, sure it was good craic.”
Jill looked at him like he was crazy – crack? Then she remembered “craic” meant “good times” in Irish. She smiled at him and he smiled back as he listened to the caller.
He abruptly said, “You’re messing!” He listed for a bit more, then said, “Well, work away.” He held out the phone to her. “It’s for you.”
Jill, confused, took the phone from him. “Hello?”
“Jill, it’s Kevin from the band last night.”
“Oh, hi Kevin,” she said, giving Coyle a bewildered look, to which he returned a grin and a wiggle of his eyebrows.
“You were grand last night, just grand,” Kevin said. “The crowd, they loved you and Collie thought you were brilliant, too.”
Jill felt a rush of pleasure at the compliment. She wasn’t used to it, but she felt it was something she wanted more of.
“Sure, and we want to talk to you about joining the band,” Kevin said.
Jill blinked furiously. Did he just say what she thought he had?
“What?”
“Yeah, so we found out the reason Collie was needing to run off the stage to piss was because she’s pregnant. And us with a big tour already planned. We figure you can go on tour with us, you learn the songs and both you and Collie sing, and if everything works out with you, when she can’t go anymore, you can step in as the lead female singer.”
Jill still couldn’t comprehend. “You want me to join the band?”
Kevin laughed. “Sure, Jill, we do. At least temporarily.”
Jill was dumbfounded. She continued to blink, her mouth moving, nothing coming out. Coyle took the phone from her.
“Kevin, Jill will ring you back in a bit,” he said. “She’s grand, sure.” He hung up the phone and gathered Jill in his arms. She still couldn’t speak. “So, what do you think?” he asked.
Jill shook her head. “I can’t believe it!” And suddenly she was out of his bed, jumping and dancing around in his room, without realizing she didn’t have a single piece of clothing on. When she did realize it, she didn’t care. “Coyle, they want me to be in the band! To perform in front of people!”
Just as suddenly as she had leapt up, she sat down on the edge of the bed. “In front of people. Didn’t they say they were playing big venues? Stadiums?” she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. “Thousands of people. Thousands.”
She twisted around onto the bed and looked at Coyle, who was still half-laying in the bed. “I don’t know if I can do it,” she said.
Coyle smiled, pulled her back into the bed and said, “Yes, you can.” Together, they started laughing, laughing and kissing and for Jill, a little tears mixed in. She hadn’t felt so happy, so alive, in years.
“So, I’m five months along,” Collie was saying, as she loaded food onto her plate from the Styrofoam containers on the table.
Jill shook her head in wonder. “You don’t look five months along.”
Collie laughed. “The magic of creative dressing. I’ve known for months, but you know, I just didn’t want to tell the guys until I felt like it was really happening. Darin – he’s my husband – has been after me for months to tell them.” She finished her plate off with a handful of potato crisps and carried over to the table. Jill followed and they both sat down.
“Anyway, that hysterical story Kevin likes to tell about me running off the stage to go to the restroom is because this wee one,” she waved her fork at her stomach, “was sitting right on my bladder.”
Jill smiled in understanding. “I hate to say it, but it’s probably only going to get worse.”
Collie’s face lit up. “Do you have kids?”
“Two of them. Twins, actually. They’re 23 now and pretty terrific.”
“Wow, twins,” Collie said. “That’s intense. I don’t know if I could handle twins.” She put her fork down and rubbed her belly. “I’m not sure I can handle one.”
“You’ll do fine. There’s lot’s of on-the-job training available,” Jill smirks at Collie and they both bust up laughing.
“What’s all this?” Kevin says, as he sits down next to his sister.
“Ah, just girl stuff,” Collie says, still laughing.
“Great,” Kevin says, grinning back. He turned his attention to Jill and slid a stapled packet of papers over to her. “Here’s the rehearsal schedule, the warm-up tour dates and the main tour dates. The
main tour ends about the same time Collie here is supposed to have her wee one, so we’ll need you through then. Otherwise we’ll have to start canceling concert dates and we hate doing that.”
Jill leafed through the packet. Dates and time and places. Lots of them. It was overwhelming and she looked nervously up at Kevin.
He must have seen the concern on her face. “Don’t worry, lass. We’ll carry you along. You just need to sing.” He grinned.
“Besides,” Collie said through a mouthful of salad, “I plan on being there until the end, so you won’t be alone.”
Kevin rolled his eyes. “Whatever, Collie. Either way, you lasses have distinctly different voices and they compliment each other. I can’t wait to get you both rehearsing and see what kind of harmonies and depth we can add.”
That afternoon, they met with the band’s agent Thomas Lane, who agreed to represent her as well. Jill and the band quickly came to an agreement about her cut of the profits; they were very generous and Jill realized that while she wasn’t going to get rich during this tour, she was going to be able to add a significant amount to the money her father left her. It would be enough to see her through whatever was going to happen once she returned to Phoenix.
If she returned to Phoenix. She’d been in Ireland for about three months now. She had pushed most thoughts of Phoenix and Scott to the back of her head. There had been a handful of calls to Scott, who appeared to be starting to understand that Jill might not be back. She’d talked to Martie and Ryan more, but Martie continued to berate her mother on her crazy notions. Ryan was the only one who still seemed happy for her, albeit a little worried.
Coyle accompanied Jill to her first rehearsal. They rehearsed at Kevin’s house, in a well-appointed studio built behind his house in Killarney. The house itself was gorgeous, all bare wood and open space. Jill followed Coyle and Kevin through it, briefly meeting Kevin’s wife, Susan, a redhead beauty who stood behind the counter in the kitchen, waving at them with the knife she’d been using to dice carrots. Through the back doors and into an Eden of trees and flowers, Kevin and Coyle chatted about the local hurling team, while Jill looked slack-jawed at the yard. The studio was at the back of the property, a cottage from the outside, but once Jill stepped in, she saw it was a state-of-the-art recording studio. The only studio she’d ever been in was the one at the arts school back in college and it wasn’t in the same league as this one. There were several rooms, the first being almost like a living room, with two sofas, a recliner, a large flat-screen television mounted on the wall and even a small kitchen. One wall had a large glass plate window that looked into the other sections of the studio: a control room containing top-of-the-line recording gear and an enormous live room where they recorded.
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