Hot Whispers of an Irishman (33 page)

“Bloody hell.”

There was no sliver, but she’d cleaned the finish right off Nan’s work. Flecks of the cupboard’s green base paint speckled the rag. She stepped off the chair and stood at the kitchen sink, water running as she rinsed the cloth and fought down a wave of remorse. Had she not thrown the jam in the first place and had she not been so concerned about having the cupboard perfect, it would be intact. Instead, she’d ruined it.

Danny came wandering into the kitchen, just home from work.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You look as though someone’s kidnapped Roger, but he’s snoring on the sofa.”

“Can you see anything wrong with the cupboard?”

Danny glanced over at it. “Other than it’s green, which I hate, and one of the ugliest things Nan ever painted, no.”

Vi hauled him closer and pointed. “Up top. Can’t you see where the paint’s flaked down to the wood?”

“No.”

“It is, and I just did it while cleaning.”

“So then you have a distressed finish. Michael’s got customers who pay extra for those.” Danny shook his head. “You scare me sometimes, Vi. If it weren’t for the fact that you’re still a bloody slob about the house, I’d be afraid you’re turning into Mam, the way everything has to be just so.”

“I’m nothing like Mam. I’m so not like Mam that I’m the anti-Mam.”

He laughed. “You’re more like her than you think. You’re both crazed perfectionists.”

“I’m not!”

Danny snorted. “Aye, and I’m not wanting a beer.” He went to the fridge, pulled one out, then said, “The cupboard looks fine. Find something else to obsess over.”

He left the room before she could tell him to get stuffed. With nothing else to do, she glared toward the sound of his feet as he pounded upstairs. Bloody elephant.

“Obsess. Right,” Vi muttered, trying to brush off the comment. It wouldn’t leave, though, for he’d hit too close to her secret fear—that she’d be anything like her rigid, “all must be perfect or it might as well be trash” mam.

Vi pulled a chair away from the table and sat. She thought back to Liam pushing her to sell her work when she was sure it wasn’t ready. And then she considered her behavior the night of Maggie’s birth, which naturally then led to thoughts of her own physical flaws—damned imperfections—that made her unable to have a babe of her own. And when she reexamined her actions in each instance, what she saw was a woman so immobile that she might as well be encased in amber.

Could her raw, large-footed, and often emotionally oblivious brother be seeing things she’d missed? Was she so obsessed with having things right that she’d stopped moving forward altogether? A voice—not from Nan or the spirits, but from deep inside Vi—was whispering
yes.
She was harder on herself than Mam had ever been.

Vi’s palms grew clammy and her stomach unsettled. She would think no more about the way her inadequacies circled in on themselves like the knot-work her nan had painted on the cupboard. It was too personal. Too painful.

Vi stood, then stepped back onto the chair she’d been using as a stepstool and ran her hand across the area she’d been scrubbing. Again that feeling zipped though her hand. She tried to pull away, but it was as though she couldn’t. She slid her hand to the cupped and painted metal disc to her far left, the largest of the objects Nan had added. Immediately, her heart began to slam.

She was hearing that low, primal buzz of voices she’d last heard in Dublin.

At the museum.

While near ancient gold.

She pressed harder with her hand, which was shaking now. The sound grew. She couldn’t be imagining this.

Vi began to pick at disc’s surface, seeking loose paint flakes. She didn’t want to harm it, but she needed to know. Finally, she caught a poorly adhered spot, and the metal she exposed was gold.

She leapt from the chair with about the same grace that Danny and Pat showed in climbing stairs. Vi riffled through the cupboard’s drawers. God, what she wished for was a well-stocked kitchen where she’d have countless tools from which to choose. At least she had a butter knife.

It was slow work, gently winnowing the knife’s blade beneath the edge of the disc, but she was a determined woman. In time, the disc popped free. From behind it fell a small, folded wedge of paper. Rather than risk bumping the piece in her hand, Vi let the paper drop to the floor.

Holding her potential treasure in her right hand, she stepped more carefully from the chair this time, then sat before examining what she’d found. The nervous tremble in her hands became an excited shake.

“God in heaven.”

The backside of the disc hadn’t been painted and it was decidedly gold!

“Slow now,” she counseled herself. Gold in color didn’t necessarily mean gold in fact. Recalling the bit of paper that had dropped, she set the disc on the cupboard’s broad base shelf, then bent down and retrieved it.

It had been neatly folded, reminding Vi of origami. Once she’d gotten it unfurled, she began to read Nan’s familiar handwriting, which covered both front and back:

Nan had given her too much credit, as that rock was hours away and, together with the land beneath it, about to be sold.

“Danny!” Vi shouted without looking up from the paper. She heard the rumble of his feet as he pounded downstairs.

He appeared in the kitchen almost instantaneously. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Though I’ll need you to watch Roger for a day or two. I’ve a small trip I have to make.”

For Vi was going back to Duncarraig….

Better a man of character than a man of means.

—I
RISH
P
ROVERB

Three weeks later…

V
i was rich. Perhaps not pop star rich or film celebrity rich, but safely bundled in a box at the very back of Nan’s cupboard was enough wealth that if Vi were frugal, she could see Danny though university, Pat with seed money should he care to start a business of his own, and herself in oil paints and canvases and silks and Japanese rice paper. Or she could be silent rich like Nan and hide the treasure away, then live as she’d been. Aye, she was rich, and if she chose the last course, Liam never need know.

Between what the cupboard had yielded and what she had found in a metal strongbox beneath the rock in Duncarraig, she possessed a tidy stash, indeed. Once she’d gathered the pieces, she had discovered that she wasn’t quite ready to take them to Nuala Manion at the National Museum, as she’d told Liam she would. It was far more difficult to be noble when holding gold than when dreaming of the promise of gold.

Instead, she had taken the smallest of the paint-covered pieces to Simon, her silversmith neighbor at the arts village, whom she’d known for years and trusted very much. His wife was a former museum conservator from Berlin. After much hand-wringing and warning that all manner of things could go wrong, Elke had agreed to try to remove the paint. It had taken a week of painstaking work with the mildest solutions possible for Elke to work her way down to the base, but true gold it was.

And thus the deliberations of what to do with the treasure had begun. Vi had not shared her find with anyone, nor told Simon and Elke that she had more than the one piece. She had asked them for their confidentiality, and given their kind natures, estimated that she had at least a few more weeks until they succumbed to the Ballymuir bent for gossip. And if they whispered, Vi would forgive them, as she had already forgiven herself her hopefully brief onset of greed.

In fact, forgiveness had become Vi’s newest form of exercise. Just under three weeks ago, on the drive back from Duncarraig with her gold dug under the light of the moon, she’d had time to think about the expectations she’d set for herself.

It wasn’t wrong to strive for perfection, but it was poisonous not to forgive herself when she fell short. When weeks before she’d lectured Mam about forgiveness, it would have done her well to turn an ear to her own words. And with that in mind, she had since forgiven herself for having a body that would bear no children, and for having hands and a mind that would never work together quite well enough to create the shimmering perfection she could see.

Absolution granted, her first act had been to repair Nan’s cupboard. Not everything on the cupboard had been gold, so the non-gold pieces Vi had carefully reattached, then supplemented with her own work, creating an imperfect collaboration that she adored.

Tonight, though, Vi would be working on her most treasured imperfect collaboration, for Liam was returning to Ballymuir. He’d called four hours ago from London’s Gatwick Airport, where he awaited his connecting flight to Shannon Airport, still two hours off. The waiting seemed interminable, but he would be in her house—and her arms—soon enough.

Vi fully intended to take advantage of the event, too. She’d already told Danny and Pat to bunk elsewhere for the night—a mate’s floor, above O’Connor’s Pub, she didn’t care where. Roger had been well fed, coddled, and firmly lectured on the meaning of closed bedroom doors. And Vi had showered, scented, and primped more in this afternoon than she ever had for a man. A check in the bathroom mirror confirmed that her hair, while still damp, had not yet coiled to its usual Medusa-inspired state.

“Grand of you to cooperate,” she said, running her fingers through her hair one last time.

She was about to go to the bedroom and sort through her incredibly small collection of enticing garments when Roger began his madman’s—or mad dog’s—bark that signaled someone knocking up the door.

“Just a sec,” Vi called, looking down at the lovely combination of painting shirt and bare skin that she currently wore.

Roger ratcheted his enthusiasm up a notch.

“Roger, stop!” Vi shouted as she flew from the bathroom to her bedroom seeking something to wear. “I’ll be there!”

When Rog fell silent, she knew her hound well enough to sense it wasn’t because he’d finally grasped the English language.

“Is someone out there?” she called as she tore through her wardrobe, seeking one item of clothing that might cover her better. It was a pity she’d let laundry fall by the wayside these past days.

“Pat, is that you?” she called at the sound of footsteps and Roger’s happy-song. “Danny?”

She wrenched on a pair of pale green and coffee-stained yoga pants, then rushed into the front room.

“I found an open seat on an earlier flight,” Liam said to Vi while taking off his jacket and hanging it near the front door on the hook that held Roger’s lead.

“Easy, boy,” he said to Roger, who clearly believed that there was a walk in the offing. Liam bent down and picked up a small decorated paper bag that sat next to his suitcase.

“I meant to have wine ready and a fire burning,” Vi said while undoing a button or two on her oversized shirt in an effort to look more casual-sexy than casual-sloppy. “And I was going to be wearing something enticing.”

“The hell with the wine,” Liam replied as he came closer. “And the fire, too. I’m here, you’re here, and the rest isn’t needed. God, how I’ve missed you.”

He kissed her deeply, and then while her mind was still in a hungry whirl, handed her the small gift bag.

“It’s nothing grand,” he said.

Curious, Vi pulled aside the red tissue that tufted out of the top of it, then reached in and removed a slope-shouldered soft plastic bottle filled with something reddish.

“What is it?” she asked as she flipped it label-side toward her.

“Squeeze strawberry preserves,” he said, sounding a bit sheepish. “Well, actually it’s squeeze strawberry spread as the bits of fruit in preserves would muck up the works. It’s popular with children in the States, and I was in the market and saw it…and…”

She smiled, both at his gift and at the odd, uncomfortable expression on his face. “Fine joke, Rafferty.”

“It’s a joke, but it’s more than that, too. What I mean it to say is this…. I won’t be shaken this time, Vi. You can throw all you want at me, though I’d prefer you stick to plastic, if you do,” he said with a nod to the bottle he’d gifted her with.

“About that,” Vi said, knowing the time had come to see if they’d truly earned a life together. “I’ve some things I need to tell you. Will you come sit with me?” she asked, motioning to the sofa.

Feeling as though his life were starting anew, Liam joined Vi on the sofa. He smiled as she fussed with her bottle of squeeze spread. Its purchase had been a mad impulse, but also evidence that she never left his thoughts. Not when he was untangling the mess that had consumed his company, not in his bed, which was by far too empty without her, and not even while visiting Atlanta when he had walked the supermarket aisles with Meghan.

“These things you’re needing to say?” he prompted Vi while gently removing the bottle from her grip and setting it on the floor for Roger to inspect.

He watched as she drew a deep breath and then settled one hand over the other in her lap.

“We’ll start with the most important,” she said. “I love you, Liam, and as you said to me, did always and will always.”

Liam fixed his gaze on the fireplace, with its fire set, but not yet lit. Irishmen didn’t cry, at least not without a great amount of whiskey and a stirringly morose song playing from the corner of the bar. In this, he was failing his fellow men, for the sharp feeling in his throat could presage nothing but tears.

“Thank God,” he managed to reply without his voice doing anything as embarrassing as breaking.

“There’s more, and it’s not nearly as easy for me to say.”

He took her hands and wove his fingers between hers. “Vi, I’ve always loved you and I can think of nothing you could tell me that would change that.”

She closed her eyes, and the wave of pain that crossed her face seemed to ripple from her to him through their joined hands.

“I’m praying so,” she said, “for here we go…” Her gaze met his and her green eyes seemed shadowed, nearly bruised. “That night at Castle Duneen, when we made love unprotected, it hurt me terribly that you’d not remembered doing the same fifteen years before. It wasn’t till later that I accepted that the memory couldn’t possibly hold the same weight for you as it does for me.”

“How, Vi?” he asked, a sick feeling already brewing in the pit of his stomach.

“After we’d argued and parted, and you’d gone on to America, I fell ill.” She looked down at their linked hands, and he held tighter to her, fearing that she was about to pull away. “It was an ectopic pregnancy…a fertilized egg had implanted in one of my fallopian tubes. I had surgery, and—”

“You didn’t call me. I could have been there. Damn it, I
would
have been there.” He’d been given shocks before—like that of Beth being pregnant with Meghan—but he couldn’t recall this feeling of having the earth ripped from beneath him.

She nodded rapidly, almost frantically, and still clung to his hands. “Yes, I should have. I know that now, but I was seventeen and frightened I was going to die. I wasn’t thinking clearly, if at all. Mam was contacted by the hospital, and after that it’s all rather a blur, even now. I was young and rash and, well, a bit prone to drama. I blamed you for the longest time, and myself for even longer.”

Words were inadequate, embarrassingly so, but they were all he had to offer. “God, I’m so,
so
sorry.”

“And I thank you for that, but what you need to know…and to fully believe…is that it wasn’t your fault or mine,” she said. “It was just a random, very sad thing. As were the troubles I had with internal scarring after…”

Liam freed one hand to wipe away a tear tracking down her face, and she turned a bit to kiss his palm, then took his hand again.

“You’d asked me the night Margaret Mary was born if I had thought of having children,” she said. “I tried to joke away the question, but the real answer is that I think of it often, and barring a miracle, it’s likely never to happen. So if you want to step away now from what we’ve started, I’ll understand…truly I will.”

Now
she’d push him away? After they’d gotten past the worst of it? Aye, he loved her, and she needed someone like him around to remind her she was still, as she’d said, “prone to drama.”

“Jesus, Violet, are you trying to skip canonization and whatnot and move straight to sainthood? You’d
understand
if I walked away? Ha! That’s the maddest thing I’ve ever heard you say, and God knows you’ve said some wild ones. I love
you,
and not so you can be some sort of breeder, though the act leading to it has its charms.” Liam shook off that last thought, realizing he was straying. “If I came to you and told you I was sterile, what would you do?”

She hesitated. “Tell you that if we wanted children, there were other options?”

Her answer had sounded too much like a question for his taste. “You’re bloody damn right you would. And to expect less from me? What must you think of me, Violet?” He was on a roll and had no intention of hearing her answer. “I do want other children, but if we can’t have them ourselves, there’s a world filled with others very much in need of a home. And you, Vi, would be an amazing mother, if you so chose. And don’t you dare think—”

He had to stop and clear his throat, for now his voice was breaking as he considered a terrified seventeen-year-old in a hospital bed, so terribly alone. “Don’t you dare think of taking a burden such as you did by yourself, ever again. We’ve the two of us now, and there’s no turning back, you hear me?”

She nodded, smiling through the tears on her face.

“I’m no grand prize,” he said. “I’ve no job, paltry assets, and an expensive and likely futile taste to look for the treasures off this coast that I read about in Dev Gilvane’s books. But balancing all of that, I can promise you no man will ever, in all of time, treasure you more than I do, or know you better. We’ve traveled the long road here, but I want you to marry me, Violet, and I won’t be taking no for an answer.”

“You won’t be getting no, either,” his first and final love, his fire and treasure said. “Of course I’ll marry you.”

And then she was in his arms, and Liam Rafferty knew life could get no better.

Very, very late that night…

Her lover slept the sleep of the replete…and the exhausted. Vi tiptoed into the kitchen, shoveled some more kibble into Rog’s dish, then knelt in front of Nan’s cupboard.

“Where are you, love, in the kitchen?” Liam called from the bedroom.

Vi rolled her eyes. So much for the sleep of the replete.

“Yes, in the kitchen,” she called back.

“Could you bring me some water…and maybe a bit to eat?”

She smiled at his wheedling tone. “I’ll shake something loose,” she called back.

And that she would. Vi stretched her arm past the cupboard’s contents until she reached the box in the far left corner. Once she had it out, she set it on the kitchen table, opened it, and looked at the pieces within.