Up Close and Personal

by Maureen Child

  As if he’d discovered his place and had no more need to wander about pretending he didn’t care that he was alone.

  All he had to do now was go home, tell Laura that he was done being pigheaded and tell her that she bloody well would marry him. His mind hadn’t changed on that, but he could tell her he loved her, and he would. He wouldn’t go blurting out something big like that though. He’d need to take her somewhere special, he told himself. When he finally opened himself to love and wanted to lay his heart at his woman’s feet, then he damned well would make an occasion of it.

  At the round tower, he thought, with the past surrounding them and the future theirs to grab.

  It would be perfect.

  “Have you nodded off then?” Maeve asked, giving him a shove. “I’ve come all the way to the city to see you, the least you could do is pay attention.”

  Laughing, he came back to himself and focused his gaze on the small woman in front of him. “You’re absolutely right. I was just…coming to a decision is all.”

  “Is that right?” Eyes gleaming with speculation, she looked him over.

  “It is,” he said with a grin. The woman’s curiosity was piqued, but she’d just have to wait as Laura should be the first to know that he’d come to his senses at long last.

  “So, what is it I can do for you, Maeve?” he asked, studying the woman who had been his world from birth to the age of ten.

  She frowned at him. “You can wake up to the truth of things before it’s too late to set them right.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means, I’ve come to speak with you about Laura.”

  “Laura? What’s wrong?” He pushed off the edge of the desk. “Has something happened to her?”

  “She looked fine when last I saw her,” Maeve told him.

  A trickle of unease dripped through his system. “When last you—but she said she was going to spend the day—one moment.”

  He stopped, scrubbed one hand across the back of his neck, then shoved that hand into his pants pocket. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. Looking down at the prim little woman in front of him, Ronan said flatly, “She said she was spending the day with you. That you’d agreed to let her sketch your portrait.”

  “Aye, well,” Maeve told him with a sniff, “she didn’t have time for that, did she? She’d a plane to catch after all.”

  “A plane?”

  “’Tis what I said. I know you’re not deaf.”

  “Maeve, tell me—”

  “She looked as though she’d had a good cry for herself when she stopped at my cottage to tell me goodbye.”

  “Goodbye?”

  “Are you only going to repeat words to me, Ronan? Or are you going to hear me out?”

  That got his attention. It was very similar to what he’d said to Laura just a few nights ago when he’d laid out his reasonable, very logical proposal. The one that he wished now he could call back and wipe from her mind. A fool is what he was.

  The woman offered him love, and he offered her friendship.

  It was a wonder she hadn’t coshed him over the head with something heavy.

  Then Maeve’s words echoed inside him.

  Laura had a plane to catch?

  She was leaving Ireland?

  Leaving him?

  Ronan got a grip on the wild racing of his thoughts and forced himself to focus on the woman staring at him. Her pale green eyes were narrowed on him in a way he hadn’t seen since he was nine years old and had broken his mother’s favorite vase with a kick of a football.

  “I’m listening, Maeve,” he told her. “What did she say? Where did she go? And by all that’s holy why did she go?”

  That last question wasn’t hard to answer though. She’d left because he’d given her no choice. His compromise was all one-sided, expecting her to give up all that she was and in exchange, he offered her a legal contract of a marriage.

  Idiot.

  Carefully, Maeve worked the latch on her purse and pulled out a thin, ivory-colored envelope. Ronan recognized the stationery as the same as what he kept in his desk at home. That trickle of unease became a slippery flood as he took it and tore open the flap. He read the brief note in a second or two.

  Ronan,

  I’m sorry to leave this way, but if I had looked you in the eye, I wouldn’t have been able to say goodbye. I never would have found the courage to go. And I have to go. I can’t stay with a man who won’t let himself love me.

  I’ll never forget my time here, with you. And when you do come back to Cosain in California, I’ll return Beast to you, too. I don’t want you to be alone in your beautiful new house.

  Please remember that I love you,

  Laura

  He stared down at the damned letter, his gaze moving over and over the words, and still he didn’t believe it. A yawning emptiness opened up inside him and promptly coated over with a skim of ice. His fist crumpled the paper and held tight as though, if he squeezed hard enough, he could make the words disappear.

  When Ronan knew he could speak without the hard knot in his throat strangling him, he muttered, “She’s gone? She left?”

  “Seems clear to me she has,” Maeve told him, her gaze fixed on him as if trying to read his heart, his mind.

  Good luck to her with that, he thought frantically. Even he couldn’t make sense of all of the thoughts and emotions charging through him.

  She’s gone.

  “Off to the airport she went, to catch one of Sean’s flights to London she says and from there on to home.”

  Home. Where she’d be an ocean away from him.

  “And what’ll you do about it?”

  His gaze shot to Maeve’s. The canny old woman was watching him, knowing that what she’d told him would either make him or break him. Well, it had done the former. He’d already made up his mind to have Laura and damned if he’d let this stop him.

  “I’ll stop her,” he said. “Then I’ll bring her back here, kiss her senseless and convince her to marry me.”

  Maeve gave him a sharp nod. “That ought to do it. You’ve a bit of time yet. I had Aidan Muldoon drive her to the airport and told him to get lost on the way. She’ll miss her plane. The rest is up to you.”

  “You’re a brilliant woman, Maeve Carrol.”

  “I know. What’re you standing here for? Don’t you have a plane to catch?”

  “I do indeed.” He bent down, gave her a hard kiss on the cheek, then grinned at her. “Bless you, Maeve. I’ll have my assistant arrange for a ride home for you.”

  Maeve settled back in her chair as Ronan grabbed up his suit coat and strode from the room, hollering for Molly as he went.

  “Well, now,” Maeve said to herself with a pleased smile, “if my boy can’t convince the girl that she’s loved, no one can. Yes, well worth the trip to Galway, I think.”

  Then she stood and followed Molly out to the waiting car.

  Eleven

  By the time Laura arrived at the airport, her plane was long gone. And when she tried to book another, she was told there was a problem with her passport. Honestly, she’d never been more frustrated in her life.

  The industrial gray walls of the security office were closing in on her, Laura thought. She was nervous enough to need to pace but there wasn’t enough room to accomplish it, so instead, she stayed glued to the chair she’d been in for nearly—she checked the wall clock again—two hours.

  “I don’t understand,” Laura complained for what had to be the fiftieth time. “Why am I being held here?”

  “As I said, there’s a problem with your passport, miss,” the airport security chief answered, “and until it’s settled, you’ll simply have to wait.”

  “But what kind of problem?”

  “That I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “Can I get you another cup of tea?”

  “No, thank you. What you can do, is let me leave. I have to make my connecting flight in London.”

&
nbsp; “Not until things are sorted out, miss.”

  Sorted out. How could they sort something out when they hadn’t even told her what was wrong? But then, nothing had gone right for Laura from the moment she left Maeve’s cottage. She had hired Danny Muldoon’s son Aidan to drive her to the airport, but the boy had gotten so turned around they’d been completely lost and she’d missed her flight on Irish Air.

  If she didn’t get another one soon, she’d miss her flight out of Heathrow as well.

  “Am I under arrest for something?”

  “No one’s said anything about arrests, now have they? There’s no need to be upset, miss. I’m sure this will be taken care of as soon as himself arrives.”

  Suspicion curled in her belly. “Himself? Who’s himself?”

  “The one who’ll straighten this out, miss.” The burly security guard had closely cropped red hair, an explosion of freckles on his round face and guileless blue eyes.

  Laura narrowed her own gaze on him. Something was going on here. And it wasn’t just the security guard. Aidan Muldoon, getting lost in a county where he’d lived his whole life? Laura missing her plane? Unable to book another one? Seemed wildly unlikely unless…

  “There you are.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as the sound of that deep, oh-so-familiar voice echoed in her mind, her heart. Her heartbeat quickened as she turned around to look up into Ronan’s eyes. “You were behind all of this, weren’t you?”

  He only glanced at her before turning his gaze to the security chief. “Thanks for this, Eddie. Could we have a moment?”

  “Sure you can, Ronan.” Affably, the man walked around his desk and stepped outside, leaving Laura alone with the man she wanted to kick.

  When the guard was gone, Laura shouted, “You know each other!”

  “Sure. Eddie Flanagan lives in Dunley. His mother, Frances, runs the post office. I grew up with Eddie.”

  “How nice for you.” Ready to explode now, Laura fired a hard look at him. “So basically what? You called the airport and got your old buddy Eddie to do you a favor by arresting me?”

  “You weren’t arrested,” he said. “Just detained until I could get here from Galway.”

  “You had no right,” she snapped and grabbed her purse. “I’m leaving Ireland. Leaving you, and you can’t stop me.”

  “Oh, I can and all,” he purred, that voice of his rumbling through the tiny room and dancing along every one of her already twitchy nerve endings.

  She whipped her hair back and glared at him. “Just go away, Ronan.”

  “I’ll not.”

  Laura grabbed the handle of her suitcase and drew it up to its telescoping length. “You shouldn’t be here.” She stopped and stared at him. “Why are you here?” A second or two later, what must have happened clicked. “Maeve,” she said, nodding to herself. “Maeve told you.”

  “Aye, she did.”

  “The traitor,” Laura murmured, and thinking back, remembered that it was Maeve who had arranged for Aidan to drive Laura to the airport. It had all been a trick. A way to stall her until Ronan could find her.

  “I should have known,” she said. “Of course they’d all be on your side.”

  “You left me a note,” he accused.

  Disgusted at how badly her nicely laid out plan had failed, she muttered, “It was better. Easier.”

  “Easier than what?”

  “Than looking into your eyes and trying to say goodbye.”

  “’Twas cowardly, Laura,” he said. “Sneaking off, trying to be gone before I knew anything about it. Before I could do anything about it.”

  “Cowardly?” she countered and welcomed the first, hot flash of temper that jolted through her. “As cowardly as couching a marriage proposal as a contract between friends? That kind of cowardly, Ronan?”

  He winced, and she was glad to know the barb had hit home. She’d hugged that ridiculous proposal to her breast for days now and it was good to finally tell him how she felt about it.

  “That’s a word I’d never thought to apply to myself,” he admitted softly with a shake of his head. “But the sad truth is, you’re right. It was cowardly. But you’ve done no better here. So we’re quite the match.”

  She hated the little room they were standing in. She felt as if she couldn’t breathe. She hated having to look at him and say goodbye.

  “You ruined everything,” she told him. “If you had just stayed away…”

  “Then I would have missed my chance,” he said, snatching up the handle of her suitcase and taking hold of her arm with his free hand.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “Getting out of this bleeding closet for one,” he told her. “We’ll go outside to talk.”

  “No, we won’t. I’m not going anywhere with you, Ronan.” Laura dug in her heels and pulled back when he tugged at her.

  “You’ll come. Either under your own power or tossed over my shoulder. Your choice.”

  She looked up into his eyes and knew he wasn’t kidding. So to spare herself the humiliation of being the center of attention at the airport, she gave in. When he opened the door, she sailed past Eddie and gave him a fierce frown when Ronan thanked the man for his help.

  Laura’s heels clicked against the linoleum floor. She heard the monotone voice coming over the speakers announcing flights she wouldn’t be taking and she heard the whirr of her suitcase wheels as Ronan marched them straight through the doors into the cold Irish wind.

  The roar of a jet taking off muffled his voice when he said, “This way,” and gave her another tug.

  Laura was still frowning when he drew her across the parking lot and stopped beside his shiny black Range Rover.

  “Say what you have to say already,” she told him. “I’ve still got time to catch another flight to Heathrow to make my connection.”

  Ronan looked down at her and felt his world wobble before steadying up. He’d spent the drive from Galway, figuring out what he wanted to say to her, but now that she was here, in front of him, his plan dried up and the words came tumbling out.

  “You’d no right to leave me like that, Laura. Without so much as a word.”

  “I didn’t do it to hurt you,” she argued. “Or to make you mad. I was trying to make this easier on both of us.”

  “How could it ever be easy, losing you?”

  “Ronan—”

  “No,” he cut her off fast and grabbed hold of her shoulders when she would have turned away. They were in a damned car park with the stench of cars all around them and the thunder of jets in the distance. Not the romantic scene he’d imagined, at the round tower behind the manor.

  But the day a man told his woman he loved her carried its own beauty. One that could be found, he told himself, even in a car park. Taking a breath, he said, “You had your say in that bloody note. Now it’s my turn.”

  Nodding, she pulled back from him, and his hands curled into empty fists without the touch of her.

  “Fine,” she said. “Say it then. Tell me how we should be married as friends.”

  “I love you.”

  She stopped. Blinked. Stared. “What?”

  “Not the way I’d planned to say it, but you drive me to distraction, woman, so I’ll say it again, just to make certain that you heard me.” He grabbed hold of her and this time, she didn’t pull away. Yanking her in close, he looked down into her blue eyes and lost himself there. “I love you, Laura.”

  “Ronan—”

  “If you hadn’t bloody well run off to the airport,” he added, “I’d have told you all of this by the round tower. I had a plan.”

  “A plan?” A small smile curved her mouth.

  “Aye. It came to me this morning—” He stopped and frowned. “Before Maeve showed up with that bleeding note.” Scowling to himself, he hurried on. “I’ve been a fool.”

  “You have.”

  He snorted a laugh. “Figures that now you’d be agreeing with me.”

  S
he grabbed hold of the lapels of his suit and tugged. “Keep talking, Ronan. I’m listening.”

  “All right then, I’ll lay it all at your feet and then you make your choice. A plane. Or home. With me.”

  Laura nodded, and the wind caught the ends of her hair, lifting it into a tangle about her face. Her smile was soft and understanding. Her eyes glimmered with a sheen of tears that he hoped to hell meant she was happy. He stared down at her and realized what he’d almost lost.

  He sighed and said, “Once I thought that if I never said the word love, that I’d be safe. I’d keep from making the mistakes my parents had and wouldn’t pay the price in misery. The truth is, I didn’t want to love you, Laura.”

  She shook her head. “Liar.”

  Ronan grinned. “Aye, all right, that’s a lie. I wanted to. I was just too—”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She reached up and cupped his cheek in the palm of his hand, and he felt the soft, steady heat of her ease inside him.

  He caught her hand in his and held it in place. “The truth is, without the word love, nothing is safe. Because nothing matters.”

  “I do love you,” she whispered.

  A car honked and someone shouted and Ronan grinned.

  “I’ll want to hear that often,” he warned.

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “I love you, Laura. And you’ll be going nowhere this day or any other unless it’s with me.”

  She laughed a little and shook her head. “I still have to go back, Ronan. I’ve got a home in California. A business.”

  “I’ve thought of that as well,” he rushed on, refusing to accept any hindrances to the future he could see laying out in front of them. “If you want to sell real estate, you can do that here, you know. Or you could paint. You’ve a lovely gift for it, Laura, and I’d be proud to see you make something of it.”

  “Oh, Ronan—”

  “As to your business,” he said, “if you want to remain partners with Georgia, we can do that, too. I’ll need to go back and forth to America on business. We can live half the year here and the other half there, if it suits you.”