“There’s nowhere else I would rather be.”
Chapter Nine
ORDINARY DECENT CRIMINAL
The next week passes like a chick flick montage. I help Ondine sell her silver necklaces at Christmas markets in Galway, Cork, and Limerick, hike the ancient forests around Killarney, snap selfies beside the Cliffs of Moher. I spend an evening sitting beside the fire with Colin’s gran while she patiently tries to teach me how to knit, and another drinking thick, foam-topped ale and listening to upbeat traditional Irish music in a pub with Colin.
Colin spends his days filming intense, high-action scenes, staggering back to his hotel half frozen and completely exhausted. One night I got a text from him:
I would love to take you out tonight, a stór, but I am in tatters. Fancy a quiet night with a passably good-looking, battered Irishman?
I replied instantly:
Go way outta that, ya fecking gorgeous Irishman. How about I pick up some fish and chips from the Blue Bull and we watch whatever’s on the television?
(When Ondine’s father offered to arrange a tour of a local whiskey distillery and I told him I didn’t want him troubling himself, he said, “Go way outta that!” Ondine told me it meant “Don’t be silly.”)
Colin texted me back:
Ah, what a ride you are, Grace Murphy! Keep it up and I will fall in love with you.
You mean you’re not already?
Not answering that question. I need to keep some things secret for Christmas.
I arrive at his room armed with steaming, crispy fish and chips wrapped in paper and a bottle of peppermint-scented massage oil topped with a red bow. Colin is staying in one of the courtyard lodges, one-bedroom apartments nestled in the forest behind the main lodge.
He opens the door wearing a towel around his lean waist, his hair damp from the shower, an angry purple bruise on his massive right bicep. My breath catches in my throat. For a nanosecond, I think I have knocked on Colin Monaghan’s door, but then he pulls me into the room, bends me backward over his arm, and kisses me the way only Colin Banks can kiss me.
“I missed ya today, Grace Murphy,” he says, looking into my eyes.
“I missed you, too.”
“I’m glad.”
He goes into the bedroom to get dressed while I turn on the gas fireplace and unpack the fish and chips, arranging them on plates I find in the kitchen cupboard.
Colin returns wearing charcoal cashmere lounge pants and a matching hoodie that hugs his chest and biceps. We eat our fish and chips and talk about everything and nothing, like two old friends or familiar lovers. I have never felt such a comforting, easy familiarity with a man before.
It’s after eleven when Colin leans back in his chair, raises his fists in the air, and yawns.
“I should go,” I say, standing and carrying the dishes to the sink. “It is getting late and you have an early call tomorrow morning.”
He grabs me around the waist and pulls me onto his lap, nuzzling my neck with his nose, kissing my collarbone.
“Not so fast,” he says, growling in my ear. “I believe you said something about a shoulder massage . . . unless you want me to massage you?”
Considering he spent twelve hours hanging from a helicopter’s landing skids, I am more than a little impressed and flattered that he would even make such an offer.
I follow him to the bedroom. He pulls off his hoodie and tosses it on the floor, collapsing on the bed facedown. I stare at his broad shoulders, rippled back tapering to a narrow waist, and lust flickers inside me, like the flames in the gas fireplace, growing fiercer by the second.
I remove the lid from the bottle, pour a generous amount of oil onto my hand, and rub my hands together until my palms are warm. I start at the sexy valley at the base of his spine and slowly move up, up, up, until I reach his shoulders, pushing my palms against his deltoids, and kneading the knots away.
I haven’t been massaging him for long before I am aware of the soft, even rise and fall of his back. I sit on the edge of his bed, staring at his handsome face, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight streaming through a gap in the curtains, and I wish I could freeze this moment, capture it in a snow globe to gaze upon again and again.
I cover him with a blanket and creep to the door when he mumbles something. I walk back to the bed and his hand shoots out, grabbing me by the wrist and pulling me into bed beside him.
“Stay, a stór,” he says, his voice thick with sleep, his eyes sealed shut. “Please.”
Of course I stay. What would you do if a sexy Irishman called you “his treasure” and begged you to spend the night with him? I kick off my boots and snuggle against him.
The first full night I spend with Colin “Could Be the Man of My Dreams” Banks, outrageously gorgeous, stud of a stuntman, we sleep fully clothed, spooning like two old married people. It’s the best night’s sleep I have ever had.
The next morning, I am hurrying down the path that leads away from Colin’s room and back to the main lodge when I see Colin “Gorgeous but Shorter and Older than I Thought” Monaghan dressed in plaid flannel pajama bottoms and a heavy, navy blue pea coat.
I am so stunned, I stop dead on the sidewalk, staring with my mouth hanging open. In ten seconds, I am going to be face to face with the man I have dreamt about since high school and I look like the homeless woman that sleeps on the bench in Love Park, back in Philadelphia. My clothes are rumpled. I have a wicked case of bed head. And the sexy, smoky eyes I was working last night have smudged so much I look like a linebacker with two wide black swipes of liner on my upper cheeks.
And then it happens....
Colin stops walking and looks at me, fixing his sweet Belgian-chocolate brown gaze on me. He is close enough for me to see the moles on his left cheek and the stray hairs fanning out from the top of his expressive, thick brows.
He smiles a little nervously and waits for me to move, but my feet are frozen to the path. I am literally transfixed by the lank of black hair, shot through with gray, hanging down the side of his face. Colin’s hair is as thick and beautiful as his expressive brows, but grayer than I imagined.
“Oh. My. God!” My excited voice echoes around the quiet courtyard, bouncing off the stone path. “You’re Colin Monaghan. I am Grace. Grace Elizabeth Murphy, from America.”
He grabs my elbow and opens his mouth to speak.
“I write fan fiction about you!” My verbal locomotive has left the station and is full-steam ahead. It won’t stop for anyone, not even Colin “I Finally Found Him” Monaghan. “I was thinking about writing a story about an American girl who is totally obsessed with you and travels to Ireland to track you down . . . but not in a creepy way.”
I laugh . . . in a creepy way. Colin lets go of my arm.
“Everything all right here?”
I look over Colin’s shoulder. A hulking man in a black sweatshirt with the word “Security” printed across the chest is hurrying toward us, followed by a maid and a woman carrying a clipboard and two smartphones. She’s wearing the same black jacket and snapback members of the crew wore the day I botched their helicopter scene.
“You’re the nutter from the beach, aren’t you?” she says, squinting. “What are you doing here?”
Just then, Colin strolls up. The Other Colin. The only Colin. My Colin.
“Grace?”
Colin Monaghan backs away and the security guard steps in front of him, like security guards do when they are protecting megastars from deranged fans. It reminds me of a clip I saw on TMZ, when paparazzi swarmed around Britney Spears as she left a restaurant. Poor Brit-Brit had this terrified expression, like a little kitten backed into a corner by a pack of snarling dogs.
And then, suddenly, it hits me. I am the deranged fan. I am the one everyone is staring at. I am the one the megastar is trying to get away from.
“You have been observed lurking around the grounds many times over the last few weeks,” the security guard says. “I know you are not a g
uest. So, what are you doing here?”
“She told me she was in love with Colin Monaghan. She said she came all the way from America just to meet him. She even said she would pay me two hundred euros and name her firstborn after me if I would sneak her into his room,” the maid says.
“I was only kidding,” I say, forcing a laugh. “Seriously? You didn’t think I was for reals, did you?”
Colin, my Colin, looks at me through wide, disbelieving eyes with an expression that makes me feel ashamed and desperate and sad all at once.
“Is this true, Grace? Did you come to Ireland just to meet Colin Monaghan?”
I consider my options. I could pretend to faint. It always works in Jane Austen flicks. I could snort and roll my eyes in a totally “as if ” way. Or, I could own it.
Yes. Yes, I did travel over three thousand miles, cash in my Hilton Honors points, and take a serious chunk out of my savings in the hopes of meeting the man who made me laugh out loud in In Forgetting My Mind, made me cry with longing in A Year Without Summer, and scratch my head in utter confusion in The Prophecy of Nobody. You gotta problem with that?
In the end, Colin “Thinks I Am a Stalker” Monaghan turns and walks away without so much as a “Top o’ the morning to ya!” The security guard sticks close to the megastar. The maid clucks her tongue at me before hurrying back to her cart. Clipboard Girl shoots Colin, my Colin, a pointed, “ditch the groupie loser and get your shit together” look.
And Colin, my Colin, looks at me the same way he did the day we met on the beach. I am waiting for him to say, “Are ya a fecking eegit?” but he doesn’t. Instead, he shakes his head, runs his hand through his hair, and says, “I have to go to work now. We’ll talk later.”
But we don’t.
Chapter Ten
A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD
After I text Vivia and tell her what happened, she texts back:
So what if you had a slightly disturbing obsession with the man who could be his older, grayer, less muscular doppelganger. That is hardly a reason for Colin Banks to end your relationship, is it? I don’t think so. We all have our oddities. Even Colin—Probably Lets the Yellow Mellow—Banks. Go to him.
I reply:
I don’t know what that means—lets the yellow mellow.
It means he probably doesn’t flush the toilet every time he goes. But that’s not really the point.The point is this: we are all flawed, fragile, cast-off china, collecting dust in the antique store that is life. The trick is finding someone who sees our worth despite the tiny, hairline cracks. You’re a treasure, Grace.
Every Halloween I watch M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs, a sci-fi thriller about hostile aliens invading earth. My favorite scene—besides the one where the long-legged alien pokes his gray head out from behind a tree—is the “which type of person are you” scene, when the main character says that people can be divided into two groups: the kind that see signs and the kind that explain things away as coincidences.
I see signs. I believe there are complex cosmic connections. I believe nothing happens randomly.
Vivia describing me as a treasure is a sign. It has to be. I didn’t tell her Colin called me a stór. I don’t believe she randomly chose that word to describe me.
I don’t want to believe it.
I want to believe that a higher power compelled her to use that word to reignite my hope, to spur me into action.
It’s the day before Christmas Eve. It’s been thirty-five hours and forty-six minutes since I watched Colin walk down the path at Parknasilla. He promised we would talk, but he hasn’t called, e-mailed, or texted. I’ve checked—eighty-four times. I click out of my texts and open my e-mail, just in case Colin decided to send me a note. No new e-mail messages.
Eighty-five times.
I have been stressing about Christmas Eve, debating whether I should show up at his gran’s cottage in my Sunday best or stop trying to resuscitate a relationship too weak to survive beyond its infancy. I had just convinced myself to wait for Colin to reach out to me and then I got the sign.
I slip my feet into my boots and grab my coat.
“I am going to find Colin.”
“It’s about fecking time!” Ondine has been wrapping Christmas gifts for her family for the last few hours while I watched the snow fall and checked my phone for messages. She drops a shiny red bow and stands up. “Let’s do this thing!”
“You’ve been a godsend, Ondine. Truly. My very own Clarence.”
“Clarence?”
“Clarence Odbody,” I say, smiling. “The angel who saves George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life.”
“I get it.” Ondine sits back down. “You need to do this alone, am I right?”
I nod. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Go way outta that,” she says, waving her hand at me. “Go in with ya. Go get your man, Grace, but take a scarf because the snow is pouring like Guinness on Saint Patrick’s Festival.”
I give her a quick hug and hurry out the door, ignoring her suggestion to grab a scarf. Who needs a threadbare scarf? I have passion, purpose, and pure adrenaline to keep me warm. I am motivated by an ageless longing, driven by the purest of emotions. Surely, the fates are in my favor. Fate favors the bold.
I hop into my rental car and put the key in the ignition, turning the wipers on to clear the thick, fluffy snow from my windshield, and take off down Oysterbed Road. I wish I had wings so I could fly to Colin, because I want to be by his side now, for the rest of my life.
I’ve never felt this urgency, this overwhelming, all-powerful need to be with a man. Sure, I have fallen in and out of lust, but I’ve never been in love. Not really. Not like this. Maybe Vivia was right. Maybe I fell “in love” with Colin Monaghan to keep from falling in love with a mere mortal, to keep from feeling what I am feeling right now: vulnerable.
Oh my God!
I am a classic case, aren’t I? Poor little fatherless girl who grows up so terrified of abandonment she finds the one unobtainable bad boy to idolize and a series of real, accessible bad boys to perpetuate the familiar.
I don’t know if Colin Banks is the right guy, but I know he is a good guy. A real, flesh-and-blood man who makes my idol look like an illumination, a shadow, a mere projection of the reality.
“Go to Ireland,” Vivia said. “Track Colin Monaghan down . . . or don’t. Whatever you do, take the time to get to know the Grace I already know: the one who is funny, smart, kind, and completely worthy of all that is good.”
I came to Ireland to find Colin Monaghan, but I have found something far more precious: a belief that I am worthy of what is good.
I navigate a series of switchbacks and make the turn onto the steep road leading to Colin’s gran’s cottage, but the snow is too thick and my little Volkswagen Polo gets stuck. I shift into reverse and give it gas. The wheels make a high-pitched whining sound, but the car doesn’t move. I alternate between reverse and drive, hoping to rock the car out of the drift, but it only moves a few inches. I shift into park, open my door, and step out of the car, my boots sinking deep in the snow.
The VW is well and truly stuck—the tires have made channels in the dirt road. I am going to have to call the rental car company’s roadside assistance for a tow truck. I get back into the car, crank the heat, and grab my iPhone out of my purse.
No signal. Of course.
It’s getting dark and the snow is really coming down. Even if I could get a signal, there’s a chance roadside assistance wouldn’t be able to dispatch a tow truck before morning.
I will die if I wait until morning. Maybe not of hypothermia, but definitely of adrenaline overdose. I have to talk to Colin tonight. I have to make it better.
I turn the car off, strap my purse crosswise around my chest, and leave the warmth of my little rental car, stepping into the blowing, swirling snow.
The cottage is at the top of the hill, maybe a mile away. If I can jump off a cliff into a freezing sea, I can walk a mile, uphill, in a b
lizzard. I flip my collar up, shove my hands in my pockets, and trudge through the snow, sticking close to the side of the road.
By the time I finally reach the drive leading to the cottage, the snow has stopped falling and the sky is filled with a million silvery stars. Tall red candles burn in each of the cottage’s glowing windows.
The door opens before I have a chance to use the knocker. Colin’s gran is standing in the doorway.
“Ah, my poor, poor luv,” she says, wrapping a thick heather-blue scarf around my shoulders. “You’re frozen through. It’s a good thing I made this scarf for ya.”
I look at her through a haze of tears.
“For me?”
“Aye.”
I nuzzle my nose against the scarf, catch the scent of lavender, and the tears spill down my frozen cheeks.
“Come in, luv,” she says, stepping back. “Come in.” I shake my head. She pulls her cardigan tighter around and steps closer, pulling the door closed behind her.
“I am sorry,” I sniffle. “It’s just, growing up, I used to hear my friends talk about their grandparents and I always felt so envious. I wished I had a grandma to bake me cookies and knit me scarves and a grandpa to ruffle my hair and say silly things like ‘Rubber baby buggy bumpers.’”
She pats my cheek with her weathered hand. The door opens and Colin appears. My heart skips a silly, sappy beat and fresh tears fill my eyes. Colin’s gran pats my cheek again before going back inside and shutting the door.
“What are ya doing here, Grace?”
My tongue is frozen to the roof of my mouth. What am I doing here? I rehearsed what I wanted to say on the drive here, but the words seem to have been blown away by the blizzard. It doesn’t help that Colin is scowling.
“I had to see you . . . to explain.”
He looks over my shoulder, down the drive.
Winter Wishes Page 30