by JoAnn Ross
“You would,” he said simply and, she knew, absolutely honestly, “make me a very happy man.” Then winked. “Though I’m not going to deny that the gigolo gig definitely has its own appeal.”
The lovely morning peace was shattered as soon as Mary and J.T. walked out of the elevator into the lobby, where the press, seeming to have arrived en masse during the night, descended on them.
They shouted out her name, jockeying for position, microphones and cameras raised.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said over and over again as microphones were shoved into her face and camera flashes blinded her. “But I have a schedule to keep to. I’ll speak to you all after the awards and the screening.”
It should have been enough. It was certainly more than she’d planned. But, unsurprisingly, with the scent of a juicy celebrity scandal in the air, her offer didn’t satisfy.
Voices rose as J.T., his arm around her shoulders, guided her through the horde of entertainment reporters.
When a microphone boom hit her head, he stopped.
“That’s enough.” He didn’t even have to raise his voice. Amazingly, the din immediately stopped, like water being turned off at the tap.
“Ms. Joyce has an event to attend. She’ll speak to you all later. So long as you behave professionally and not like a shiver of feeding sharks.”
“May I ask who you are?” a voice from somewhere in the middle of the pack asked.
“I’m Captain J. T. Douchett. U.S. Marine Corps. And I’m the guy tasked with getting Ms. Douchett to her venue on time.”
Glancing up at him, Mary saw, for the first time, the warrior from her dream. His eyes were as hard as stone. As dangerous as a grenade. Not only did an absolute hush fall over the lobby; the crowd parted, reminding her of the iconic scene of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments.
“That was very good,” she murmured as he drove the few blocks to the Orcas Theater. “I also just realized something. That first day, when so many fans showed up in Portland and Eugene, that was your doing, wasn’t it?”
“Why would you think that?” he said, evading her question with one of his own.
“Because it makes sense. Your mission, as you pointed out, was to keep everyone away from me. So somehow you spread a rumor that sent people off on a wild-goose chase.”
“People should know better than to believe everything they read on the Internet,” he said mildly.
“Admit it. It was you.”
Again he neither confirmed nor denied. “You’ve never heard that old saying ‘The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand’?”
“I may be Irish, but I am an expert on American cinema,” she reminded him. “And the line has appeared in three movies that I can think of off the top of my head: Doubting Thomas, 1935; What Price Glory, 1952; and a shortened version in Cocoon, 1985.”
He shot her a surprised look. “You weren’t kidding about being an expert.”
“I wasn’t. Plus, I have an excellent memory and I clearly remember your claiming to be a former Marine.”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong about that, because there’s no such thing,” he said as he pulled up in front of the parking space that had been set aside for them. “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”
And with those six little words, Mary realized that he was on his way back from that dark place he’d been, in the same way tending to his farm in Castlelough had proved her brother’s salvation.
She’d turned her phone off during the awards presentation, which went well. Even the losers had presented excellent entries. So much so, during the brief break between the awards and the screening of Selkie Bride, she’d approached the screenwriters, telling them that she thought they’d be good fits for her production company and would love to see more of their work. Needless to say, they jumped at the offer.
They’d just reached the part in the movie where the selkie was about to give up her kingdom for the man she loved, when the mayor suddenly appeared in the aisle next to Mary’s seat.
“I’m so sorry to disturb you,” she murmured, so as not to interrupt the film at such a vital moment. “But your sister’s on the phone. From Ireland. She says it’s an emergency.”
Mary’s blood, which had been so warmed by J.T.’s arm around her shoulder in the dark, turned to ice.
Memories flashed through her mind. A vague one of when her mother had died giving birth to her sister Celia. Another, more recent one, of her grandmother being nearly blown up in a shopping mall bombing in Ulster. And worst of all, her father dying of a heart attack on the way to the Rose, where he could always be found enjoying his Guinness and spinning his colorful, fanciful tales for the pub’s patrons.
Emergencies were never good news.
She rose quickly, trying not to run up the aisle to the lobby, J.T. right beside her, as he’d been since she’d first arrived in Shelter Bay.
She took the phone the concerned-appearing mayor handed to her.
“Nora?”
“Oh, Mary.” Nora’s voice trembled. It sounded, Mary thought, as if she’d been crying. Please God, she prayed, don’t let anything have happened to Quinn or the children.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s Gran.” There was a pause. She heard her sister draw in a deep breath. “She’s in hospital. With pneumonia, and although John and Erin have been doing all they can, it doesn’t look good.” There was another pause. Her older brother John and Erin, Michael’s wife, were both doctors, who’d set up a practice together in Castlelough. “You’d best be coming home, darling. As soon as you can.”
“I’ll leave right away.”
Not wanting to waste time with particulars now, she hung up and turned to J.T. “It’s my grandmother,” she said, handing the cell phone back to the mayor. “She’s gravely ill.”
“We’ll go back to the hotel and pack,” he said, going immediately into Marine mission mode. “I’ll call the airlines and get us on the first flight out of Portland.”
“Thank you. Here’s my credit card.” Her hands trembled as she reached into her bag and pulled out her platinum card.
He immediately squared his shoulders, and as she watched, something that looked a lot like anger glittered dangerously in his steel gray eyes. The same eyes that had managed to quiet an entire hotel lobby of shouting journalists.
“Because you’ve a very good reason to be upset, I’m going to forget you said that, chère.”
Again, those eyes didn’t miss anything. Including her slight shudder at his tone.
He cursed.
“I’m sorry.” He smoothed his hands over her shoulders. His voice and his eyes softened. “But this one’s on me.” When she opened her mouth to point out that it was her family, her problem, and she could certainly afford the tickets more easily than he could, he put a finger to her lips. “Arguing will only waste time,” he said reasonably. Gently. “So let’s get going.”
Bemused, and still reeling from that phone call, Mary wondered if this was how he’d taken care of all the other women he’d known. With that beguiling combination of tenderness and strength.
Needing the tenderness, and knowing he was right about arguing being a time waster, Mary leaned on him, both physically and emotionally, as they walked out of the theater.
42
Although J.T. had been on several flights through Shannon Airport on the way to Iraq, he never got over the panoramic sight of fields and hedgerows and patchwork valleys set amid abrupt mountains.
“It looks like a postcard,” he told Mary.
“Aye,” she said. “Isn’t that what everyone says?” She was already getting back into her native Irish lexicon, but her voice lacked the lilt he’d come to expect.
Her hands were clutched so tightly together he had to pry her fingers apart to take one in his own hand. Even as he rubbed his thumb against her palm, it remained stiff and cold.
“She’ll be all right.”
“No.” She shook her
head. “I have this horrible feeling she won’t.”
“It’s natural to think the worst—”
“Not for me.” She tugged her hand loose from his and pressed her fingers against her closed eyes. “What if Kate’s right? What if I do have some bit of the sight? After all, didn’t I dream of you before I’d even arrived in Oregon?”
“What? You never told me that.”
“I did, too. I told you I’d dreamed of us making love.”
“I thought you meant that first night. After we met.”
“I did that night,” she said. “But for longer. Even before I received the invitation to come to Shelter Bay.” She met his gaze, her own eyes more tortured than argumentative. “How would you be explaining that, J.T.?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I just looked like some guy—”
“No. It was definitely you.”
“They say everyone has a double.”
“Did you not hear me?” she asked on a flare of heat he found far more encouraging than that sad silence she’d sunk into during most of the flight. He hadn’t been able to talk her into eating on either of the flights, or their layover in New York.
“I said I dreamed of you. Not some faceless man. Not some double. You. And then, suddenly, there you were. Which makes me wonder if Kate could be right about me having the sight.”
He wasn’t even going to attempt to address that here, now, while she was so upset and he honestly had no answer.
“Did you dream about your grandmother?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I’ve been thinking about her a lot the past few days.”
“Which couldn’t have come from your meeting my grandmother?”
“I suppose so,” she said as she turned back to look out the window again. The thatch-roofed cottages looked like small white boats on an emerald green sea. “I’m just so worried. I should have been here.”
“You couldn’t have known,” he said, repeating what he’d told her time and time again.
Unfortunately, it hadn’t helped.
Her brother-in-law, pulling strings from overseas, had arranged for the both of them to be taken from the arrival gate at JFK and whisked away to a private lounge where they could wait without her having to deal with adoring fans.
Fortunately, J.T. was nobody famous, and with her sunglasses, jeans, sweater, and flats, Mary could have passed for any attractive woman. Having been requested not to give away her identity, the flight attendants treated her the same as their other first-class passengers, giving no indication she was a celebrity.
Faith had given her a packet of sleeping pills to help her on the overseas trip. Although at first she’d refused them, J.T. had guilted her into taking one by reminding her that she had to be rested in order to be strong for the rest of her family.
So, although it had taken a while, sometime after they’d passed over Nova Scotia, she’d crashed and spent the last part of the flight snuggled up against him, her head on his chest, while he put his arm around her, holding her close.
If it hadn’t been for the reason they were on the flight in the first place, J.T. would’ve found it a near perfect way to spend the night.
Since she was an Irish citizen, they were separated into different lines for the customs and immigration process. Afterward they went to the terminal coffee shop, where Mary’s sister Nora Gallagher and her husband were waiting.
Nora was tall, curvier than her younger sister, with long flame-colored hair and kind eyes the hue of polished emeralds. Her husband, whom J.T. immediately recognized from his face on the dust jacket of his books, had the lean, rangy build of a long-distance runner. His face was harshly cut, his jaw square, his eyes dark. A scar marked his cheek, and the shots of silver at his temples added drama to the black jeans, boots, sweater, and leather jacket he was wearing.
“Oh, darling.” Nora rushed forward and gathered her sister into her arms. “It’s so good to have you home. I’m just so sorry it had to be under these circumstances.”
Mary held on tight, then backed away slightly when the flash of a camera revealed she’d been recognized.
“Why didn’t anyone call sooner?” she asked.
“There honestly wasn’t time,” Nora said. “It all happened so quickly.”
“Why don’t we discuss this in the car?” Quinn Gallagher suggested, nodding toward the crowd that was beginning to gather over by the take-out counter. He offered a hand to J.T. “Quinn Gallagher.”
“J. T. Douchett.” As he shook the older man’s hand, they exchanged a look. Gallagher’s was one of sharp appraisal. In turn, J.T. gave him that Marine stare Kara had wanted him for. In the brief, silent exchange, both men were measured. And found each other acceptable.
“The car’s not far,” Quinn said. He picked up Mary’s bag before J.T. could grab it. Deciding this was no time to get into a pissing match, J.T. shouldered his own duffel bag and followed them out to the black sedan waiting at the curb. It occurred to J.T. briefly that if Mary ever did decide to put vampires in any of her stories, she could certainly find inspiration in her own brother-in-law.
“I knew you’d want to get to the hospital as soon as possible,” Nora said. “So I packed some tea and biscuits.”
“The first morning I was here, Nora’s father, Brady, told me that her tea was stout enough to trot a mouse across,” Quinn said.
“Now, there’s an idea,” J.T. murmured.
Despite the seriousness of the reason for Mary’s trip home, Quinn laughed at that. “That’s exactly what I said when he told it to me. But it’ll definitely give you one helluva caffeine jolt.”
It turned out he wasn’t kidding.
As they drove north along the River Shannon estuary, through rolling pasturelands that had once been inhabited by cattle barons and, in times long past, ancient Celtic kings, after welcoming him to Ireland, Nora explained, as best she could, what had happened to Fionna Joyce.
“She’d only had a wee bit of a cold,” she said. “When she refused to go to the doctor, Erin came to the house, examined her, diagnosed bronchitis, and gave her an antibiotic. Given her age, both Erin and John wanted to hospitalize her, but she insisted that since she’d had too many friends go into hospital only to die, she refused that, as well.”
“She’s so damn stubborn,” Mary complained.
“Aye,” Nora said. “But isn’t that how she finally succeeded in getting Sister Bernadette canonized?”
“Your grandmother got a nun canonized?” J.T. asked.
“She did,” Nora answered. “Tell him the story, Mary.”
He could tell Mary was frustrated by the way her sister had sidetracked the conversation, but apparently not wanting to start an argument, she complied. “The entire time I was growing up, even before I was born, she pretty much dedicated herself to getting Sister Bernadette Mary—a Sisters of Mercy nun who’d worked to bring about peace during the Anglo-Irish War for independence—declared a saint. Sister Bernadette had been killed by the Black and Tans.”
She’d been looking out the window during the drive, but now she turned toward him. “How much do you know about the sainthood process?”
“I must’ve missed catechism class the day that was taught, so pretty much next to nothing.”
“Well, an important part of the judicial process is to document a candidate’s life, holy works, and, most importantly, to provide proof of two miracles.”
“While the first two parts were easy, it was the miracles that were difficult,” Nora said. “Especially since the bishop at the time was no fan of women becoming saints and kept refusing to pass Gram’s documents to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. She used to always complain that the only thing that would impress him would be a modern-day repeat of the wine-at-the-wedding miracle.”
“She’d always said if Bernadette could only make whiskey flow out of the bishop’s water tap, he’d recommend her before you could say Bushmills malt,” Mary remembered.
A
nd although her eyes were still heartbreakingly sad, that memory caused a faint curving of her lips. She reached over and for the first time since that phone call from Nora, it was she who took J.T.’s hand.
“But she finally got her second one after a person in Ulster, who’d claimed to have been cured of leukemia, went thirteen years without a relapse.” Nora jumped back into the conversation. “Apparently ten years is required to even be considered for a cancer cure.”
Although J.T. found that all a little bit off-the-wall, no way was he going to criticize what sounded like a good woman taking on a David-versus-Goliath cause, which had to take a lot of guts.
“To tell the truth, I think the real miracle was getting Gran’s case past all those men in the Vatican,” Mary said, showing that, once again, their thoughts were going in the same direction. “And getting back to her illness, how did bronchitis end her up on life support?”
“Apparently it turned into some sort of viral, fast-acting pneumonia that’s resistant to antibiotics. But why don’t we let John and Erin explain that?” Quinn suggested mildly. “Since they’re her doctors.”
Although he could tell Mary wasn’t happy with that idea, neither did she argue. Instead, she just leaned back against the seat and looked out the window as silence settled like fog over the car.
As the road twisted through a maze of hedgerow-separated fields, over narrow stone bridges, past whitewashed, slate-roofed houses, peat bogs, and cottages, which, even in these modern times, still possessed iconic thatched roofs, J.T. understood why Sax had always been so charmed by the country of their mother’s roots.
They passed the sign welcoming them to Castle-lough—home to the legendary Lady of the Lake. A second sign proclaimed the village to be the sister city of Shelter Bay, Oregon, America.
The tidy, medieval town of Castlelough, with its brightly painted shops reflecting optimism in this land of soft days and rainy nights, reminded J.T. of his hometown. If he and Mary had been here for any other occasion, he would have been charmed.
The hospital had, Nora told him as Quinn pulled into the car park, once been a workhouse. Before Quinn had settled in Ireland, townspeople had been required to drive to the district hospital in Enniscorthy. Apparently scaring the bejesus out of people with his horror novels paid very well, because the author had provided the seed funds for Castlelough to have its own medical facility. Taking in the gleaming white building with its tall Palladian windows, J.T. decided Mary’s brother-in-law undoubtedly also contributed a bunch to its operation.