Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (125 page)

She filled an old stone gin jar with water that was bubbling away on the Aga. The nights were turning cold, and she couldn’t seem to warm of her own volition these days.

She turned off the lights as she walked through the house on her nightly journey. The route a map of comfort, lodestones on the roads and streams and mountains of a life—here in the half-whittled lark Casey had been working on before Lawrence’s death, there in the ashes of the fire they’d talked beside when the summer nights had begun to cool. In his mug still in the sink, because she could not bear to wash it and put it away. In the telescope lenses, coddled on a velvet cloth, that he and Lawrence had been painstakingly grinding together. In the stairs they climbed together at night, talking the small pre-sleep talk of a married couple, or the times they barely made the door before tumbling to the bed, mute with need.

She stood now in the dark of their bedroom, wondering if it was possible that she had been so happy only six weeks ago. How had their world burned down so quickly? Leaving them to stand in the charred ruins without a clue of how to act, or speak or breathe.

She slid the gin jar down between the sheets. The heat released the smell of soap and lemons from the smooth cotton. She got in, pulling the blankets up around her ears, sticking her feet on the small warmth of the jar.

The house was so quiet she could hear her pulse thudding against the walls of her skin, deep and heavy, feeding the small life within. This tiny being that tethered her to her own mortality, that made her feel both comforted and more alone than ever, all at the same time.

In his pen beside the shed, Paudeen gave a long
mehhhh
. The poor thing was lonely and made his disconsolation clear several times a day. She turned in the bed with a sigh, toes curling tighter to the gin jar. There was no way she was going out into that dark misty night to comfort him. He was tucked up snug with a new bale of hay, he’d just have to cry himself into exhaustion like the rest of them had been doing of late.

She sat up in bed a minute later, all senses on alert. Paudeen’s bleat had been cut short and she could hear the squeak of his pen gate. Someone was in the yard. She got out of bed, legs shaking and went to the window.

A man was walking across the yard below. His head was bowed, hair too dark to be distinguishable in the moonless night, but she knew the line of that body and the long strides that ate up the yard in a few steps.

She got back into bed, feeling suddenly breathless, hands and feet cold with panic. She was torn between the desire to rush down the stairs and the desire to stay firmly put and avoid what he may have come to say.

She heard him murmur to the dog and then the sound of his tread on the stairs. It was the step she’d waited for all these weeks and now lay frozen in a welter of blankets, hearing it. Had he come to get his things, to say goodbye? To tell her they could no longer be a family, or grow old together. He was here though, perhaps that in itself was a good sign. He was, however, not a man to avoid unpleasantness, and would tell her to her face if he’d decided to make their separation permanent. But surely not in the middle of the night, creeping up the stairs like a thief?

The door creaked open, and a tall form stepped in. She could hear him take a deep breath and the tiny hairs on her body rose in expectation.

“Pamela, it’s me,” he said quietly, “are ye awake?”

She turned toward him, sheets rustling with her movement. “Yes, I’m awake.” Her voice was high and tight with a mix of fear and anticipation.

She could make out his outline. Tall and broad-shouldered, but even in the dark the lines of fatigue were evident. He still wore his coat, though he’d climbed the stairs in his stocking feet. For a moment they simply stared at one another, wordless with grief. Finally Casey cleared his throat and spoke.

“May I stay the night?” he asked, his voice smoke-soft with weariness.

She nodded, pinpricks of tears gathering in a flood behind her eyes.

“Of course you can.” She put a hand to her eyes, pressing against them to still the tears.

She could hear his clothes drop to the floor, heard him bend to pull off his socks. Then there was just the smooth slip of skin against sheet, the feel of his body settling to rest beside her. The skin, the weight that shifted behind her, the movements more familiar to her than her own. He’d come in through the pine copse, she could smell the sharp clean tang of it on him. And wasn’t entirely sober if the underlying note of whiskey was anything by which to judge.

All that she could manage was, “Why?”

“Pat told me ye’d not slept well since I left,” he said simply, “I thought if I came to lie with ye, ye might be able to rest.”

“Pat knows where you are?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “no one does.”

She wanted to ask if he would be there come morning, if his presence here in the bed signaled the beginning of a thaw, but was afraid of what the answers might be and so the questions remained stuck in her chest, like a big cold ball of ice that threatened to choke her with uncertainty.

“Casey, I—” she began, but a finger touched her lips softly in the dark.

“Hush
macushla
, there’s no need for words tonight. Just sleep, I’ll bide.” He settled an arm around her, pulling her tight to the comfort of his body. Despite the painful gulf that stretched between them, their skin understood another language altogether and her body relaxed instinctively into his own. Much as she longed to speak, to beg him to put an end to this self-imposed exile, she knew he wasn’t ready to listen. She derived some small comfort in his calling her
macushla.
The literal translation was ‘my pulse’, or ‘my heartbeat’, but the common usage meant ‘my beloved’. He couldn’t have decided to leave her permanently if he still loved her enough to speak an endearment he’d only used previously in the most tender of moments.

With the warmth of his skin against her, the steady beat of his heart echoing in her own blood, sleep came readily, her exhausted mind and body slipping into a deep and dreamless slumber.

Somewhere in the wee hours when the light was ashy, she heard him murmur, but was so lost to sleep she couldn’t make out the words. But the hand that traced along her neck and cheek was gentle and the voice was that of a man whose heart was broken in two.

She awoke late in the morning, the sun shining warm and thick on the blankets and her shoulder. She turned over in the bed, hoping against hope.

But Casey was gone.

THE FEELING OF SOMETHING CRAWLING across his face was the first thing that demanded Casey’s attention. He swatted irritably at whatever it was and rolled over. He was tired and was certain it could be no more than half-five in the morning. He wasn’t due at O’Connell’s farm until half-seven. Though to be sure, the idea of digging potatoes for twelve hours straight didn’t sound too appealing right now, not when his head felt as though someone had replaced it with molten lead during the night. Once his consciousness truly awoke, though, he found that unremitting, mind-numbing physical labor was the only thing that could wipe thoughts of Pamela from his mind. He’d been working for the O’Connells as an odd jobs man for a month now. He’d promised them another two weeks at the least.

Something tweaked his ear none too gently. He cursed and flipped over on his back. What the hell sort of bug had that kind of a grip to it?

He squinted through the haze of what promised to be a particularly brutal hangover. Someone was sitting by his bedside, someone who even at this ungodly hour looked entirely composed. Casey swore again. This time, though, the epithets had a direction.

“My, your language is almost as foul as your smell,” Jamie Kirkpatrick said, one long leg canted over the other, while he tapped a pair of gloves against his flannel clad shin. “Now get up.”

“What? Ye have a nerve comin’ in here—”

“Get up,” Jamie repeated, voice cold as ice. His tone sent a shiver of warning down Casey’s spine. The man had not come to play.

Casey sat up, hands clutching his head to stop the room spinning. A crash brought his head up, nausea surging at the back of his throat and pain breaking like an anvil across his skull.

Jamie had quite deliberately tipped over the table, which had been loaded with a stunning variety of empty bottles.

“Hey, what the hell was that for?”

Cool green eyes, without a hint of a thaw, met his own.

“For behaving like a perfect jackass for the last month. I gave you that long, thinking even a thick-headed bastard like yourself would have to come to his senses, but apparently I,” he gave a glittering smile that was not friendly, “underestimated the depth of your stupidity. Now get up.”

The man had stood at some point himself, and though his pose was relaxed, Casey knew Jamie was coiled and ready to strike.

Casey stood, a small cauldron of anger beginning to brew in his stomach along with the nausea. Jamie’s left hand came up so quickly that Casey felt a jarring pain through his face before he realized what had happened. He blinked, feeling like a dazed owl, hand coming away from his lip smeared with blood.

“Ye hit me,” he said in shocked indignation.

“Well at least you’ve the faculties left to state the obvious,” Jamie replied dryly, flexing his fingers as though they were merely cramped from the blow. He looked about the room in distaste. “Is it too much to hope that you’ve coffee hidden somewhere in this sludge pile?”

“Aye,” Casey said, still gingerly dabbing at his rapidly swelling lip, “it’s in the cupboard above the stove.”

Jamie moved about the small area swiftly, scooping coffee into the filter, tipping a pile of rubbish into the garbage, stacking bottles under the sink and rinsing the coffee pot several times before he was happy with the condition of its interior.

“Now,” he said, voice like shattered crystal, gleaming and razor-sharp, “I’m going to pour coffee into you until I’m satisfied you’re sober and then I’m going to lay a proposal before you.”

“What sort of proposal?” Casey asked warily, not liking the look on the man’s face at all, at all.

“The sort that requires an action either in the negative or positive, and those aspects I’ll leave entirely to your own judgement, but without gray areas.”

“Listen, if ye’ve come on behalf—” Casey began, words fading away under Jamie’s glacial look.

“I’ll talk and you’ll listen. When I’m finished you can make any comment you like, realizing in advance that nothing you say will change the course of action I’ve chosen.”

A moment later Casey found himself with a mug of coffee in hand that bore an unpleasant resemblance to tar, and a strong feeling he wasn’t going to like the words he was about to hear.

“I’ve not come on behalf of your wife. I daresay she wouldn’t like to think of me here, she’s not even spoken your name.”

Casey flinched visibly. “Point taken man, there’s no need for cruelty.”

“Isn’t there?” Jamie asked coolly. “You didn’t seem to mind being cruel a month ago. Perhaps you can imagine what these days have been like for Pamela. Then again, perhaps that’s why you did it.” He paused to take a drink of his own coffee, green eyes never leaving Casey’s face. Eyes that had all the warmth of a dissecting scalpel, and all the mercy.

“What lies between my wife an’ myself is none of yer concern,” Casey said, some fine thread of anger beginning to run through his veins.

“Isn’t it? You once told me that though she was your wife and lay in your bed, you still weren’t so big of a fool as to not know you were sharing her with me. I’ve always been careful not to take advantage of that particular fact. I find I’m not inclined to be quite so generous anymore.”

Casey uttered a short bark of laughter. “Christ, Robin once said ye were the most ruthless bastard any of us was likely to be acquainted with, but I told him no, ye were too civilized for it. I see he was a better judge of character than I.”

“You’d do well to remember his words, perhaps then you’ll take what I have to say seriously.”

“So what is it ye feel ye have to say to me?” Casey asked with no little belligerence.

“You’re not the first man to deal with a wife’s infidelity.”

Casey felt as though he’d been hit hard in the chest. “Christ, ye waste no time in comin’ to the point, do ye? Did she tell ye?”

Jamie shook his head. “No, but I’m not a fool. It’s been obvious to me she’s been carrying a secret that was eating her up since the two of you came back to Belfast. It wasn’t terribly hard to piece it together. I daresay you knew on some level yourself. Every time the woman looked at you, it was as though she was afraid you were going to break.”

Casey nodded, granting the man that much. “Aye, I knew something was wrong but I didn’t want it to be this. Do ye know that she also arranged to have the man killed when she was done with him?”

Jamie eyed him calmly. “I rather think she didn’t have much choice in the matter. I think she saw it as either him or you. Not much in the way of choosing there.”

“Ye say it so calm-like, as if it’s of no great surprise to ye.”

“What is it you know about her now that you didn’t before? That she’s capable of killing to protect the people she loves? Can you honestly tell me you didn’t know that before? She’s your equal in all things, man, and you’re more fool than I suspect if you didn’t know it on some level. I knew.”

Casey took a breath and gritted his teeth. The last two words were intended as pure provocation, and as determined as he was not to rise to the man’s bait, he could feel the pure need to choke the bastard quickly getting the better of him.

“I know what she’s capable of, I have always seen the echo of yerself in her. An’ the echo of my own self and what I am capable of doing. I’d have done no less, and yet—” he stumbled on the words, because the truth was he still could not bear the thought of another man touching her, using her in such a fashion, because of the mistakes he had made.

“So what is it, then, that you cannot face?” Jamie asked, tone slightly softer but still edged with razor sharpness.