by Nora Roberts
Aidan took two long breaths, but his head still reeled as though he'd swallowed a bottle of Jameson's. Or been clobbered by one. "You were married?"
"Technically." She fluttered a hand. "Do you have a handkerchief?"
Staggered, Aidan dug in his pocket, handed it to her. "I think we'll start back at some beginning, but we'll get you some dry clothes and some hot tea before you catch a chill."
"No, I'm all right. I should-"
"Just be quiet. We'll go upstairs."
"I'm a mess." She blew her nose savagely. "I don't want people to see me."
"There's no one out there who hasn't shed a few tears of their own, and some right here in this pub. We'll go out and through the kitchen and up."
Before she could argue, he took her arm and pulled her to the door. Then even as the first wave of embarrassment hit, he continued to pull her, into the kitchen, where Darcy looked over in surprise.
"Why, Jude, whatever's the matter?" she began, then closed her mouth as Aidan gave a quick shake of his head and nudged Jude up a narrow staircase.
He opened a door at the head of it and stepped into his small, cluttered living room. "The bedroom's through there. Take whatever works best for you, and I'll put on the tea."
She started to thank him, apologize, something, but he was already moving through a low doorway. There was enough tension in his wake to bow her spirits even lower.
She stepped into the bedroom. Unlike the living room, it was neat as a pin and sparsely furnished. She wished she had the time, and the right, to poke about a bit. But she moved quickly to the little closet, giving herself time only to scan the single bed with its navy cover, the tall chest of drawers that looked old and comfortably worn at the hinges, the faded rug over an age-darkened wood floor.
She found a shirt, as gray as her mood. While she changed she studied the walls. There he had indulged in his romantic side, she thought. Posters and prints of faraway places.
Street scenes of Paris and London and New York and Florence, stormy seascapes and lush islands. Towering mountains, quiet valleys, mysterious deserts. And of course, the fierce cliffs and gentle hills of his own country. They were tacked up edge to edge, like a fabulous, eccentric wallpaper.
How many of those places had he been? she wondered. Had he been to them all, or had he places still to go?
She let out a huge sigh, not caring that the sound was ripe with self-pity, and carrying her wet sweater, went back into the living room.
He was pacing, and stopped when she came in. She was dwarfed by his shirt and looked small and miserable and not nearly up to dealing with the emotions swinging around inside him. So he said nothing, not yet, merely took her sweater and carried it into the bath to hang over the shower rod and drip.
"Sit down, Jude."
"You've every right to be angry with me, coming in this way, behaving as I did. I don't know how to begin to-"
"I wish you'd be quiet for a minute." He snapped it at her, telling himself when she winced that he wasn't made of stone. Then he stalked into the kitchen to deal with the tea.
She'd been married, was all he could think. That was quite a detail she'd neglected to mention.
He'd thought her to have had little experience with men, and here she'd been married and divorced and was obviously still pining for the bastard.
Pining for some fancy man in Chicago who wasn't true enough to keep his vows, and all the while Aidan Gallagher had been pining for her.
If that wasn't enough to burn your ass, what was?
He poured the tea strong and black and added a healthy drop of whiskey to his own.
She was standing when he came back, the fingers of her hands twisted together. Her damp hair curled madly, and her eyes were drenched. "I'll go downstairs and apologize to your customers."
"For what?"
"For making a scene."
He set the cups down and drew his brows together to study her with as much bafflement as irritation. "What do I care about that? If we don't have a scene in Gallagher's once a week we wonder why. Will you sit down, damn it, and stop looking at me as if I was about to take a strap to you?"
He sat after she did, then picked up his own tea. Jude sipped, burned her tongue, then hastily set her cup down again.
"Why didn't you tell me you'd been married?"
"I didn't think of it."
"Didn't think of it?" His cup clattered as he snapped it down on the table. "Did it mean so little to you?"
"It meant a great deal to me," she returned with a quiet dignity that had him narrowing his eyes. "It meant considerably less to the man I married. I've been trying to learn to live with that."
When Aidan said nothing, she picked up her tea again to give herself something to do with her hands. "We'd known each other several years. He's a professor at the university where I taught. On the surface, we had a great deal in common. My parents liked him very much. He asked me to marry him. I said yes."
"Were you in love with him?"
"I thought I was, yes, so that amounts to the same thing."
No, Aidan thought, it didn't amount to the same thing at all. But he let it pass. "And what happened?"
"We-he, I should say, planned it all out. William likes to plan carefully, considering details and possible pitfalls and their solutions. We bought a house, as it's more conducive to entertaining and he had ambitions to rise in his department. We had a very small, exclusive, and dignified wedding with all the right people involved. Meaning caterers, florists, photographers, guests."
She breathed deep and, since her tongue was already scalded, sipped the tea again. "Seven months later, he came to me and told me he was dissatisfied. That's the word he used. 'Jude, I'm dissatisfied with our marriage.' I think I said, 'Oh, I'm sorry.'"
She closed her eyes, let the humiliation settle along with the whiskey in her stomach. "That grates, knowing my first instinct was to apologize. He accepted it graciously, as if he'd been expecting it. No," she corrected, looking at Aidan again. "Because he'd been expecting it."
It was hurt he felt from her now, quivering waves of it. "That should tell you that you apologize too much."
"Maybe. In any case, he explained that as he respected me and wanted to be perfectly honest, he felt he should tell me that he'd fallen in love with someone else."
Someone younger, Jude thought now. And prettier, brighter.
"He didn't want to involve her in a sordid and adulterous affair, so he requested that I file for divorce immediately. We would sell the house, split everything fifty-fifty. As he was the instigator, he would be willing to give me first choice in any particular material possessions I might want."
Aidan kept his eyes on her face. She was composed again, eyes quiet, hands still. Too composed, to his thinking. He decided he preferred it when she was passionate and real. "And what did you do about it?"
"Nothing. I did nothing. He got his divorce, he remarried, and we all got on with our lives."
"He hurt you."
"That's what William would call an unfortunate but necessary by-product of the situation."
"Then William is a donkey's ass."
She smiled a little. "Maybe. But what he did makes more sense than struggling through a marriage that makes you unhappy."
"Were you unhappy in it?"
"No, but I don't suppose I was really happy either." Her head ached now, and she was tired. She wished she could just curl into a ball and sleep. "I don't think I'm given to great highs of emotions."
He too was drained. This was the same woman who'd thrown herself lustfully into his arms, then wept bitterly in them only moments before. "No, you're a right calm one, aren't you, Jude Frances?"
"Yes." She whispered. "Sensible Jude."
"So, being such, what set you off today?"
"It's stupid."
"Why should it be stupid if it meant something to you?"
"Because it shouldn't have. It shouldn't have meant anything." Her head snapped up aga
in, and the glitter that came into her eyes didn't displease him in the least. "We're divorced, aren't we? We've been divorced for two years. Why should I care that he's going to the West Indies?"
"Well, why do you?"
"Because I wanted to go there!" she exploded. "I wanted to go somewhere exotic and wonderful and foreign on our honeymoon. I got brochures. Paris, Florence, Bimini. All sorts of places. We could have gone to any of them, and I would have been thrilled. But all he could talk about was-was-"
She circled her hand, as words momentarily failed her. "The language difficulties, the cultural shocks, the different germs, for God's sake."
Furious all over again, she leaped out of the chair. "So we went to Washington and spent hours-days-centuries-touring the Smithsonian and going to lectures."
He'd been fairly shocked before, but this one did it. "You went to lectures on your honeymoon?"
"Cultural bonding," she spat out. "That's what he called it." She threw up her hands and began to stalk around the room. "Most couples have impossibly high expectations for their honeymoon, according to William."
"And why shouldn't they?" Aidan murmured.
"Exactly!" She whirled back, her face flushed with righteous fury. "Better to meet the minds on common ground? Better to go to an environment that is recognizable? The hell with that. We should've been having crazy sex on some hot beach."
A part of Aidan was simply delighted that that hadn't occurred. "Sounds to me like you're well rid of him, darling."
"That's not the point." She wanted to tear her hair out, nearly did. Jude's Irish was up now, bubbling, boiling in a way that would have made her grandmother proud. "The point is, he left me, and his leaving crushed me. Maybe not my heart, but my pride and my ego, and what difference does it make? They're all part of me."
"It makes no difference at all," Aidan said quietly. "You're right. No difference."
The fact that he agreed, without a second's hesitation, only added fuel to her temper. "And now, the bastard, he's going where I wanted to go. And they're having a baby, and he's thrilled. When I talked about having children, he brought up our careers and lifestyles, the population, college costs, for Christ's sake. And he made a chart."
"A what?"
"A chart. A goddamn computer-generated chart, projecting our finances and health, our career status and time management over the next five to seven years. After that, he told me, if we met our goals, we could consider-just consider-conceiving a single child. But for the next several years, he had to concentrate on his career, his planned advancements, and his stupid portfolio."
Fury was a living thing now, clawing viciously at her chest. "He decided when and if we would have a child. He decided should that eventuality take place there would be only one. If he could have managed it, he'd have decided on the sex of the projected baby.
"I wanted a family, and he gave me pie charts."
Her breath hitched, and her eyes filled again. But when Aidan rose to go to her, Jude shook her head frantically. "I thought he didn't want foreign travel and babies. I thought, well, he's just set in his ways, and he's so practical and frugal and ambitious. But that wasn't it. It wasn't it at all. He didn't want to go to the West Indies with me. He didn't want to make a family with me. What's wrong with me?"
"There's nothing wrong with you. Nothing at all."
"Of course there is." She dug out his handkerchief as her voice rose and fell and broke. "If there wasn't, I'd never have let him get away with it. I'm dull. He was bored with me almost as soon as we were married. People get bored with me. My students, my associates. My own parents are bored with me."
"That's a foolish thing to say." He went to her now, taking her arms to give her a little shake. "There's nothing dull about you."
"You just don't know me well enough yet. I'm dull, all right." She sniffled, then nodded for emphasis. "I never do anything exciting, never say anything brilliant. Everything about me is average. I even bore myself."
"Who put these ideas in your head?" He would have shaken her again, but she looked so pitiful. "Did it ever occur to you that this William with his bloody pie charts and cultural whatever it was is the boring one? That if your students weren't enthusiastic it was because teaching wasn't what you were meant to do?"
She shrugged. "I'm the common factor."
"Jude Frances, who's come to Ireland on her own, to live in a place she's never been, with people she's never met and to do work she's never done?"
"That's different."
"Why?"
"Because I'm just running away."
He felt both impatience and sympathy for her. "Boring you're not, but hardheaded you are. You could give a mule lessons. What's wrong with running away if where you were didn't suit you? Doesn't it follow you're running to something else? Something that does suit you?"
"I don't know." And she was too tired and achy to think it through.
"I've done some running myself. To and from. In the end I landed where I needed to be." He bent down to press a kiss to her forehead. "And so will you."
Then he drew her away, rubbed a tear from her cheek with his thumb. "Now, sit down here while I go clear up a few things in the pub. Then I'll see you home."
"No, that's all right. I can walk back."
"You'll not be walking in the rain and the dark and when you're feeling sad. Just sit and drink your tea. I won't be long."
He left her alone before she could argue, then stood on the stairs for a few minutes to get his own mind in order.
He was trying not to be angry with her for not telling him about the marriage. He was a man who took such commitments seriously, because of his faith and his own sensibilities. Marriage wasn't something you wound in and out of as you pleased, but something that cemented you.
Hers had crumbled through no fault of her own, but she should have told him. It was the principle of it.
And he'd just have to get by it, Aidan warned himself. He'd also have to do some careful treading over the sensitive areas of her that circumstance had rubbed so raw. He didn't want to be responsible for pinching where it already hurt.
Jesus, he thought, rubbing the back of his neck as he headed down to the pub. The woman was a bucket of work.
"What's the matter with Jude?" Darcy demanded the minute he stepped into the kitchen.
"She's all right. She had some news from home that upset her is all." He picked up the receiver on the wall phone to call Brenna.
"Oh, not her granny." Darcy set down the order she'd just picked up, and her eyes were full of concern.
"No, nothing like that. I'm going to call Brenna and see if she can cover for me a couple of hours. I want to drive Jude home."
"Well, and if she can't, Shawn and I will manage."
Aidan paused with the phone in his hand and smiled. "You're a sweetheart when you want to be, Darcy."
"I like her and I think she needs a bit of fun in her life. Seems to be there's been precious little up to now. And having her husband leave her for another woman before her bridal bouquet was dry is bound to-"
"Wait now-hold on a minute. You knew she was married?"
Darcy lifted a brow. "Of course." She hefted the order, sauntered toward the door with it. "It's not a secret."
"Not a secret," he muttered, then with gritted teeth dialed Brenna's number. "The whole village likely knew, but not me."
CHAPTER Twelve
By the time Aidan came back and they walked down to his car, Jude had time to calm down, and to review.
Mortification didn't begin to cover it. She had burst into the pub, then had sexually assaulted the man in his place of business. Perhaps in time-twenty or thirty years, she estimated-she would find that particular memory fascinating, and even amusing. But for now it was just humiliating.
Then she had compounded that by raging, weeping, blubbering, and cursing. All in all, she couldn't think of anything she might have done that could have shocked them both more unless it was stripping naked a
nd dancing a jig on his bar.
Her mother had congratulated her on maintaining her dignity while under terrible stress. Well, Mother, she thought, don't look now.
And after all that, Aidan was driving her home because it was dark and rainy, and he was kind.
She imagined he couldn't wait to be rid of her.
As they bumped up her little road, she tried out a dozen different ways to smooth over the embarrassment, and every one sounded stilted or silly. Still, she had to say something. It would be cowardly, and rude, not to.
So she took a deep breath, then let it out in a rush.
"Do you see her?"
"Who?"
"In the window." Jude reached out, gripping his arm as she stared at the figure in the window of her cottage.
He looked up, smiled a little. "Aye. She's waiting. I wonder if time stretches out for her, or if a year is only a day."
He switched off the engine so they sat with the rain drumming until the figure faded away.
"You did see her. You're not just saying that."
"Of course I saw her, as I have before and will again." He turned his head, studied Jude's profile. "You're not uneasy, are you, staying out here with her?"
"No." Because the answer came so easily, she laughed. "Not at all. I should be, I suppose, but I'm not the least bit uneasy here, or with her. Sometimes-"
"Sometimes what?"
She hesitated again, telling herself she shouldn't keep him. But it was so cozy there in the warmth of the car with the rain pattering and the mists swirling. "Well, sometimes I feel her. Something in the air. Some-I don't know how to explain-some ripple in the air. And it makes me sad, because she's sad. I've seen him too."
"Him."
"The faerie prince. I've met him twice now when I've gone to put flowers on Maude's grave. I know it sounds crazy-I know I should probably see a doctor for some tests, but-"
"Did I say it sounded crazy?"
"No." She released another pent-up breath. "I guess that's why I told you, because you wouldn't say it. You wouldn't think it."
And neither did she, not any longer.
"I met him, Aidan." She shifted on her seat, her eyes bright with excitement as she faced him. "I talked to him. The first time I thought he was someone who just lived around here. But the second, it was almost like a dream or a trance or- I have something," she said following impulse. "I'd like to show you. I know you probably want to get back, but if you have just a minute."