Across the room, the television murmured through an old black-and-white movie. Gary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in sleek evening dress embraced in a wine cellar. Notorious, Gray thought. A tale of love, mistrust, and redemption.
For reasons he didn't choose to grasp, her choice of entertainment annoyed him all the more.
"You shouldn't have waited up."
She glanced over at him, her needles never faltering. "I didn't." He looked tired, she thought, and moody. Whatever he'd searched for in his long day alone, he didn't appear to have found it. "Have you eaten?"
"Some pub grub this afternoon."
"You'll be hungry, then." She started to set her knitting aside in its basket. "I'll fix you a plate."
"I can fix my own if I want one," he snapped. "I don't need you to mother me."
Her body stiffened, but she only sat again and picked up her wool. "As you please."
He stepped into the room, challenging. "Well?"
"Well what?"
"Where's the interrogation? Aren't you going to ask me where I was, what I was doing? Why I didn't call?"
"As you've just pointed out, I'm not your mother. Your business is your own."
For a moment there was only the sound of her needles and the distressed commercial voice of a woman on television who'd discovered chip fat on her new blouse.
"Oh, you're a cool one," Gray muttered and strode to the set to slam the picture off.
"Are you trying to be rude?" Brianna asked him. "Or can't you help yourself?"
"I'm trying to get your attention."
"Well, you have it."
"Do you have to do that when I'm talking to you?"
Since there seemed no way to avoid the confrontation he so obviously wanted, Brianna let her knitting rest in her lap. "Is that better?"
"I needed to be alone. I don't like being crowded."
"I haven't asked for an explanation, Grayson."
"Yes, you have. Just not out loud."
Impatience began to simmer. "So, now you're reading my mind, are you?"
"It's not that difficult. We're sleeping together, essentially living together, and you feel I'm obliged to let you know what I'm doing."
"Is that what I feel?"
He began to pace. No, she thought, it was more of a prowl-as a big cat might prowl behind cage bars.
"Are you going to sit there and try to tell me you're not mad?"
"It hardly matters what I tell you when you read my unspoken thoughts." She linked her hands together, rested them on the wool. She would not fight with him, she told herself. If their time together was nearing an end, she wouldn't let the last memories of it be of arguments and bad feelings. "Grayson, I might point out to you that I have a life of my own. A business to run, personal enjoyments. I filled my day well enough."
"So you don't give a damn whether I'm here or not?" It was his out, wasn't it? Why did the idea infuriate him?
She only sighed. "You know it pleases me to have you here. What do you want me to say? That I worried? Perhaps I did, for a time, but you're a man grown and able to take care of yourself. Did I think it was unkind of you not to let me know you'd be gone so long when it's your habit to be here most evenings? You know it was, so it's hardly worth me pointing it out to you. Now, if that satisfies you, I'm going to bed. You're welcome to join me or go upstairs and sulk."
Before she could rise, he slapped both hands on either arm of her chair, caging her in. Her eyes widened, but stayed level on his.
"Why don't you shout at me?" he demanded. "Throw something? Boot me out on my ass?"
"Those things might make you feel better," she said evenly. "But it isn't my job to make you feel better."
"So that's it? Just shrug the whole thing off and come to bed? For all you know I could have been with another woman."
For one trembling moment the heat flashed into her eyes, matching the fury in his. Then she composed herself, taking the knitting from her lap and setting it in the basket. "Are you trying to make me angry?"
"Yes. Damn it, yes." He jerked back from her, spun away. "At least it would be a fair fight then. There's no way to beat that iced serenity of yours."
"Then I'd be foolish to set aside such a formidable weapon, wouldn't I?" She rose. "Grayson, I'm in love with you, and when you think I'd use that love to trap you, to change you, then you insult me. It's for that you should apologize."
Despising the creeping flow of guilt, he looked back at her. Never in the whole of his life had another woman made him feel guilt. He wondered if there was another person in existence who could, with such calm reason, cause him to feel so much the fool.
"I figured you'd find a way to get an I'm sorry out of me before it was over."
She stared at him a moment, then saying nothing, turned and walked into the adjoining bedroom.
"Christ." Gray scrubbed his hands over his face, pressed his fingers against his closed eyes, then dropped his hands. You could only wallow in your own idiocy so long, he decided. "I'm crazy," he said, stepping into the bedroom.
She said nothing, only adjusted one of her windows to let in more of the cool, fragrant night air.
"I am sorry, Brie, for all of it. I was in a pisser of a mood this morning, and just wanted to be alone."
She gave him no answer, no encouragement, only turned down the bedspread.
"Don't freeze me out. That's the worst." He stepped behind her, laid a tentative hand on her hair. "I'm having trouble with the book. It was lousy of me to take it out on you."
"I don't expect you to adjust your moods to suit me."
"You just don't expect," he murmured. "It's not good for you."
"I know what's good for me." She started to move away, but he turned her around. Ignoring the rigid way she held herself, he wrapped his arms around her.
"You should have booted me out," he murmured.
"You're paid up through the month."
He pressed his face into her hair, chuckled. "Now you're being mean."
How was a woman supposed to keep up with his moods? When she tried to push away, he only cuddled her closer.
"I had to get away from you," he told her, and his hand roamed up and down her back, urging her spine to relax. "I had to prove I could get away from you."
"Don't you think I know that?" Drawing back as far as he would permit, she framed his face in her hands. "Gray-son, I know you'll be leaving soon, and I won't pretend that doesn't leave a crack in my heart. But it'll hurt so much more, for both of us, if we spend these last days fighting over it. Or around it."
"I figured it would be easier if you were mad. If you tossed me out of your life."
"Easier for whom?"
"For me." He rested his brow on hers and said what he'd avoided saying for the last few days. "I'll be leaving at the end of the month."
She said nothing, found she could say nothing over the sudden ache in her chest.
"I want to take some time before the tour starts."
She waited, but he didn't ask, as he once had, for her to come with him to some tropical beach. She nodded. "Then let's enjoy the time we have before you go " She turned her face so that her mouth met his Gray laid her slowly onto the bed. And when he loved her, loved her tenderly.
Chapter Twenty-one
For the first time since Brianna had opened her home to guests, she wished them all to the devil. She resented the intrusion on her privacy with Gray. Though it shamed her, she resented the time he spent closed in his room finishing the book that had brought him to her.
She fought the emotions, did everything she could to keep them from showing. As the days passed, she assured herself that the sense of panic and unhappiness would fade. Her life was so very nearly what she wanted it to be. So very nearly.
She might not have the husband and children she'd always longed for, but there was so much else to fullfill her. It helped, at least a little, to count those blessings as she went about her daily routine.
She carried
linens, fresh off the line, up the stairs. Since
Gray's door was open, she went inside. Here, she set the linens aside. It was hardly necessary to change his sheets since he hadn't slept in any bed but hers for days. But the room needed a good dusting, she decided, since he was out of it. His desk was an appalling mess, to be sure.
She started there, emptying his overflowing ashtray, tidying books and papers. Hoping, she knew, to find some little snatch of the story he was writing. What she found were torn envelopes, unanswered correspondence, and some scribbled notes on Irish superstitions. Amused, she read:
Beware of speaking ill of fairies on Friday, because they are present and will work some evil if offended.
For a magpie to come to the door and look at you is a sure death sign, and nothing can avert it.
A person who passes under a hempen rope will die a violent death.
"Well, you surprise me, Brianna. Snooping."
Blushing red, she dropped the notepad, stuck her hands behind her back. Oh, wasn't it just like Grayson Thane, she thought, to come creeping up on a person.
"I was not snooping. I was dusting."
He sipped idly at the coffee he'd gone to the kitchen to brew. To his thinking, he'd never seen her quite so flummoxed. "You don't have a dust rag," he pointed out.
Feeling naked, Brianna wrapped dignity around her. "I was about to get one. Your desk is a pitiful mess, and I was just straightening up."
"You were reading my notes."
"I was putting the notebook aside. Perhaps I glanced at the writing on it. Superstitions is all it is, of evil and death."
"Evil and death's my living." Grinning, he crossed to her, picked up the pad. "I like this one. On Hallowtide-that's November first."
"I'm aware of when Hallowtide falls."
"Sure you are. Anyway, on Hallowtide, the air being filled with the presence of the dead, everything is a symbol of fate. If on that date, you call the name of a person from the outside, and repeat it three times, the result is fatal." He grinned to himself. "Wonder what the garda could charge you with."
"It's nonsense." And gave her the chills. "It's great nonsense. I used that one." He set the notebook down, studied her. Her high color hadn't quite faded. "You know the trouble with technology?" He lifted one of his computer disks, tapping it on his palm as he studied her with laughing eyes. "No balled up papers, discarded by the frustrated writer that the curious can smooth out and read."
"As if I'd do such a thing." She flounced away to pick up her linens. "I've beds to make." . "Want to read some of it?"
She paused halfway to the door, looking back over her shoulder suspiciously. "Of your book?"
"No, of the local weather report. Of course of my book. Actually, there's a section I could use a local's spin on. To see if I got the rhythm of the dialogue down, the atmosphere, interactions."
"Oh, well, if I could help you, I'd be glad." "Brie, you've been dying to get a look at the manuscript. You could have asked."
"I know better than that, living with Maggie." She set the linens down again. "It's worth your life to go in her shop to see a piece she's working on."
"I'm a more even-tempered sort." With a few deft moves he booted his computer, slipped in the appropriate disk. "It's a pub scene. Local color and some character intros. It's the first time McGee meets Tullia." "Tullia. It's Gaelic."
"Right. Means peaceful. Let's see if I can find it." He began flipping screens. "You don't speak Gaelic, do you?"
"I do, yes. Both Maggie and I learned from our Gran."
He looked up, stared at her. "Son of a bitch. It never even occured to me. Do you know how much time I've spent looking up words? I just wanted a few tossed in, here and there."
"You'd only to have asked."
He grunted. "Too late now. Yeah, here it is. McGee's a burned-out cop, with Irish roots. He's come to Ireland to look into some old family history, maybe find his balance, and some answers about himself. Mostly, he just wants to be left alone to regroup. He was involved in a bust that went bad and holds himself responsible for the bystander death of a six-year-old kid."
"How sad for him."
"Yeah, he's got his problems. Tullia has plenty of her own. She's a widow, lost her husband and child in an accident that only she survived. She's getting through it, but carrying around a lot of baggage. Her husband wasn't any prize, and there were times she wished him dead."
"So she's guilty that he is, and scarred because her child was taken from her, like a punishment for her thoughts."
"More or less. Anyway, this scene's in the local pub. Only runs a few pages. Sit down. Now pay attention." He leaned over her shoulder, took her hand. "See these two buttons?"
"Yes."
"This one will page up, this one will page down. When you finished what's on the screen and want to move on, push this one. If you want to go back and look at something again, push that one. And Brianna?"
"Yes?"
"If you touch any of the other buttons, I'll have to cut all your fingers off."
"Being an even-tempered sort."
"That's right. The disks are backed up, but we wouldn't want to develop any bad habits." He kissed the top of her head. "I'm going to go back downstairs, check on the progress on your greenhouse. If you find something that jars, or just doesn't ring quite true, you can make a note on the pad there."
"All right." Already reading, she waved him off. "Go away, then."
Gray wandered downstairs, and outside. The six courses of local stone that would be the base for her greenhouse were nearly finished. It didn't surprise him to see Murphy setting stones in place himself.
"I didn't know you were a mason as well as a farmer," Gray called out.
"Oh, I do a bit of this, a bit of that. Mind you don't make that mortar so loose this time," he ordered the skinny teenager nearby. "Here's my nephew, Tim MacBride, visiting from Cork. Tim can't get enough of your country music from the States."
"Randy Travis, Wynonna, Garth Brooks?"
"All of them." Tim flashed a smile much like his uncle's.
Gray bent down, lifted a new stone for Murphy, while he discussed the merits of country music with the boy. Before long he was helping to mix the mortar and making satisfying manly noises about the work with his companions.
"You've a good pair of hands for a writer," Murphy observed.
"I worked on a construction crew one summer. Mixing mortar and hauling it in wheelbarrows while the heat fried my brain."
"It's pleasant weather today." Satisfied with the progress, Murphy paused for a cigarette. "If it holds, we may have this up for Brie by another week."
Another week, Gray mused, was almost all he had. "It's nice of you to take time from your own work to help her with this."
"That's comhair," Murphy said easily. "Community. That's how we live here. No one has to get by alone if there's family and neighbors. They'll be three men or more here when it's time to put up the frame and the glass. And others'll come along if help's needed to build her benches and such. By the end of it, everyone will feel they have a piece of the place. And Brianna will be giving out cuttings and plants for everyone's garden." He blew out smoke. "It comes round, you see. That's comhair."
Gray understood the concept. It was very much what he had felt, and for a moment envied, in the village church during Liam's christening. "Does it ever... cramp your style that by accepting a favor you're obliged to do one?"
"You Yanks." Chuckling, Murphy took a last drag, then crushed the cigarette out on the stones. Knowing Brianna, he tucked the stub into his pocket rather than flicking it aside. "You always reckon in payments. Obliged isn't the word. Tis a security, if you're needing a more solid term for it. A knowing that you've only to reach out a hand, and someone will help you along if you need it. A knowing that you'd do the same."
He turned to his nephew. "Well, Tim, let's clean up our tools. We need to be getting back. You'll tell Brie not to be after fiddling with these stones, will
you, Grayson? They need to set."
"Sure, I'll-Oh Christ, I forgot about her. See you later." He hurried back into the house. A glance at the kitchen clock made him wince. He'd left her for more than an hour.
And she was, he discovered, exactly where he'd left her.
"Takes you a while to read half a chapter."
However much his entrance surprised her, she didn't jolt this time. When she lifted her gaze from the screen to his face, her eyes were wet.
"That bad?" He smiled a little, surprised to find himself nervous.
"It's wonderful." She reached into her apron pocket for a tissue. "Truly. This part where Tullia's sitting alone in her garden, thinking of her child. It makes you feel her grief. It's not like she's a made-up person at all."
His second surprise was that he should experience embarrassment. As far as praise went, hers had been perfect. "Well, that's the idea."
"You've a wonderful gift, Gray, for making words into emotions. I went a bit beyond the part you wanted me to read. I'm sorry. I got caught up in it."
"I'm flattered." He noted by the screen she'd read more than a hundred pages. "You're enjoying it."
"Oh, very much. It has a different... something," she said, unable to pinpoint it, "than your other books. Oh, it's moody, as they always are, and rich in detail And frightening. The first murder, the one at the ruins. I thought my heart would stop when I was reading it. And gory it was, too. Gleefully so."
"Don't stop now." He ruffled her hair, dropped down on the bed.
"Well." She linked her hands, laid them on the edge of the desk as she thought through her words. "Your humor's there as well. And your eye, it misses nothing. The scene in the pub, I've walked into that countless times in my life. I could see Tim O'Malley behind the bar, and Murphy playing a tune. He'll like that you made him so handsome."
"You think he'll recognize himself?"
"Oh, I do, yes. I don't know how he'll feel about being one of the suspects, or the murderer, if that's what you've done in the end." She waited, hopeful, but he only shook his head.
"You don't really think I'm going to tell you who done it, do you?"
"Well, no." She sighed and propped her chin on her fist. "As to Murphy, probably he'll enjoy it. And your affection for the village, for the land here and the people shows. In the little things-the family hitching a ride home from church in their Sunday best, the old man walking with his dog along the roadside in the rain, the little girl dancing with her grandda in the pub."
Books by Nora Roberts Page 109