Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (126 page)

“I can’t face her because I cannot face myself. She bought my life for me an’ I’ve used it cheaply, I’d no notion of what she’d done. Oh, I wasn’t so blind that I couldn’t see he’d an eye for her, but after these years I’m used to men starin’ plenty.”

“You never suspected that he wanted more, that he’d do whatever he could to have her?” Jamie all but snorted. “You had good reason to know how unscrupled the man was in every area of his life. Did you somehow think he’d respect the boundaries of marriage? You left your wife at the mercy of a wolf, and you know it.”

“Aye,” Casey said in a flat voice, “I do know it. I suppose you’d have found a way to keep her out of harm’s way?”

“I’d have killed him before I let him touch her,” Jamie said softly, but Casey was left in no doubt that the man meant exactly what he said.

“Would you? Or am I naïve to ask such a question? After all, you’ve killed to avenge her before, haven’t ye?”

Jamie’s expression did not change, but Casey felt the tension in the room creep upward a notch or two. “There were four men on that train that night,” Jamie said, voice low and tight. “I know the fate of two, and the fair Reverend took care of the one both you and I really wanted dead. However, I never did manage to find the whereabouts of the fourth man. I’ve always wondered if you had taken care of that detail yourself.”

The words were not framed in the form of a question, and so Casey did not answer them. It was his opinion that the man in front of him did not rest until everything had been finished to his satisfaction, and that Jamie knew as well as anyone might what the fate of that fourth man had been.

“I guess that makes you the white knight,” Casey said bitterly. “Always there at the ready to catch her when she falls.”

“And what does that make you?” Jamie asked, voice polite but eyes alight with a fury so cold Casey could feel the prick of it along his spine.

“The fool that causes her to fall in the first place. But then ye’ve always known that. I’ve played my part admirably well, made it very easy for ye, didn’t I?”

“At times you have.”

Casey sighed. “I’ve had about enough of yer honesty for today.”

“Too damn bad. I’m going to say one more thing whether you want to hear it or not. All those times I’ve rushed to the rescue, every time I’ve fixed a situation it’s been because of her, not you. She wanted you, and so I gave her into your arms, knowing even as I did it that I’d regret it over and over.”

“And now,” Casey’s voice was tight as corded wire, “ye’ve decided to take her back, is that it?”

“If you don’t return, I see no reason not to. I’ll give her time to mend, but she still has feelings for me so I don’t think I’ll have to wait that long. You walked away from her, which ought to cut the time for guilt down considerably. Two, maybe three months, a touch here, a glance that lingers too long there, and,” Jamie shrugged, a suggestive smile on his lips, “nature will take her usual course.”

“Ye bloody bastard!” Casey rose to his feet, anger thundering along muscle and vein, in blood and marrow, the urge to kill opening and closing his fists. “Who the hell do ye think ye are to come here an’ say such things?”

Jamie looked at him sharply, no movement rustling the lines of his body, and yet Casey instinctively knew that he was as ready to spring as a cat with the scent of blood up its nose. “I think,” Jamie said slowly, each word a cut to a psyche already bruised, “the more pertinent question is who the hell do you think you are?”

“I—” Casey began hotly and then stopped seeing the point clearly that Jamie was making. “I don’t know,” he said quietly, fists uncurling to hang limply by his sides. “I don’t seem to know who I am anymore. Between findin’ out what she’d done, an’ knowin’ ‘twas me put her in that position, an’ not bein’ there when Lawrence needed me the most—” his voice cracked on this last sentence.

“No, you weren’t there when the lad needed you most, but neither were any of the rest of us who loved him. We’re all going to live with the guilt of that for the rest of our lives. Perhaps rightly so. You were his hero, though, and so you’re going to pay dearest for it.”

Casey cast his eyes about, feeling the familiar shaking start in his hands. He desperately needed a drink.

“Is that how you intend to honor Lawrence’s memory?”

Casey flinched as if Jamie had struck him.

“Don’t think it’s helping you, because it isn’t. It seems a safe place to hide from the world—I know, I’ve tried it—but one day you wake and find out your safe place has become prison walls. You need to grieve the boy, drinking won’t change that one bit. The minute you sober up long enough, it’ll be waiting for you.”

Casey staggered forward, wanting to hit the man until the cutting pain in his chest subsided. But the grief had flooded in from the edges of his consciousness and it caught him full force, taking him to his knees. Jamie caught him as he fell, going to his own knees as Casey’s weight bore him down.

“Oh—Christ—oh God,” Casey gasped, the very breath sucked from his lungs. His entire frame shook with a cold that emanated out from his core, laying waste to all it touched in its passing. Jamie took him in his arms and held him tightly as the worst of the spasms shook him like a leaf in a gale. He was oddly grateful for the man’s touch, as though it was all that tethered him within this storm of grief and rage.

The tears, when they came, were foreign, a thing he had forgotten. They burst the dam he’d so carefully constructed, overflowing and rushing forth from the great sea of things withheld, suppressed, and not allowed within his personal universe. It was this loss of control that he had always been afraid of, that once started the tears would be impossible to stop, that he would no longer know where he ended and the grief began. He was, simply, afraid of drowning in the pain.

“Let them go,” Jamie said above him, still holding him, bracing him against the flood. And so he did, knowing that, though he would carry them with him for all his days, he had held them too tightly and not given them the grief nor the joy owed to those whom we love and lose.

His father, his brother who had grown to manhood without him, his own missed youth. The boy who had been the best friend he’d ever known. Deirdre and the baby they’d lost while he was interned. Lawrence, who had been an odd mix of wise friend and son. The trust he and Pamela had known, and a marriage that now stood on shifting sands so that he felt he could not recognize the form of it, nor to whom such a marriage might belong. And, God help him, he even cried for the mother that had left him so long ago.

He lay for a time after the tears subsided, too weak and exhausted to move. The world came back to him in pieces. His jaw was throbbing where Jamie had hit it and his head still hurt like holy hell. The pain in his chest had receded a bit though, and he drew his first full breath in months. He levered himself up, aching in every joint and muscle. He felt as though he’d been mercilessly beaten.

He slumped against the bed frame. He felt terribly fragile and yet knew that somehow he had been restored to himself in the last few minutes. That Jamie had unlocked his grief and in doing so had placed the shore of redemption within sight. There was one last thing, however, that he needed to know.

“How much?” Casey said softly, voice drained of all emotion. “How much money did ye pay to buy my freedom?”

“Two hundred thousand pounds,” Jamie said. “You were far more expensive than your compatriots.”

“What?”

Jamie eyed him dispassionately. “They were only ten thousand a head, you were far more. You wanted to know and now you know. Has it set you properly free?”

“Why—why would ye do such a thing?”

“For her. I didn’t think she could bear losing you again, after she got you back. It seemed a small price to give her peace of mind.”

“To whom did ye give this money?”

Jamie raised an eyebrow. “It’s not the sort of thing for which they issue receipts.”

He sighed. It seemed he owed the bastard yet again.

“You’re going to survive this,” Jamie said gently, “something has already decided that for you. Now you have to decide how to live with it.”

And there, Casey thought, was the rub.

Jamie stood and straightened his shirt, then slung his overcoat casually over his forearm. “If you’re inclined,” he said, “to prolong your suffering and stay out here in the wilds, perhaps it will motivate you to think of her living under my roof, eating at my table, spending her mornings, noons and nights in my company.”

“Sleeping in yer bed?” Casey retorted between gritted teeth.

“If it comes to that, then yes,” Jamie replied, “sleeping and waking in my bed.”

“One question before ye go,” Casey said wearily, head throbbing like an anvil.

“Yes,” Jamie said, green eyes meeting his coolly.

“Do ye love her enough to give me a day or two to get myself together? Do ye love her enough to wait a bit?”

“I love her enough,” Jamie said quietly, “to wait forever. But you my good man have until Hallowe’en to make a decision and act upon it.”

TWO DAYS AFTER JAMIE’S VISIT, Casey looked down the laneway to see Matty’s little car humping its way through the ruts.

“Jaysus, Mary an’ Joseph,” Casey said aloud to the air. “Will they never leave a body alone?!” He heaved a sigh of frustration, and then pinned a smile of welcome on his face as Matty got out of his car. “I don’t suppose ye just happened to be passin’ through the neighborhood?”

Matty smiled, looking like nothing more than a cherubic garden gnome, laced in butterflies. “Desmond an’ I talk now an’ again.”

“Do ye indeed?” Casey said dryly, thinking Dez’s promise not to interfere had lasted about as long as it took for Casey to shut the door behind him. The man had been down to visit and proffer his own advice the week past. When Casey had enquired as to how he knew where to find him, Dez had smiled in an annoying Cheshire manner, which told Casey exactly who had given out the directions to his hideaway.

“Aye we do, an’ the both of us came to the one conclusion—that the way yer behavin’ isn’t somethin’ yer Daddy would like to see, nor would he want for ye the sort of life yer headin’ for, if ye don’t take stock here.”

Casey sighed, a breath of frustration that seemed to work its way up from his very toes. “An’ what do ye suppose the man wanted for me?”

“I imagine that he wanted for ye what most parents want for their children. That ye find happiness and someone to love. Might not seem much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s all that really matters when the day is done.”

“Mmphhm,” Casey said, in what might be grudging agreement, or outright irritation.

“Ye may think I’m meddlin’ where I’m not concerned,” Matty avoided Casey’s gaze as he said this. “But I was there after that bastard opened yer back up for ye, an’ we didn’t know for a good bit whether ye’d live or die.”

“Yer point, Matty,” Casey said impatiently.

“My point is when a man’s brought so low as that—well that’s when he knows what matters in his life, gives ye a clarity that canna be achieved in other ways. An’ my point is that ye yelled her name, even while ye were unconscious. Ye kept callin’ her over an’ over until ye were hoarse—fair drove Declan mad, ye did. I’d always heard as ye’d made a love match, but I knew what it meant after those three days. Maybe lad,” Matty fumbled with his knit cap, “ye’ll not know that doesn’t happen for everyone, in fact I’d wager it only happens to a very lucky few.”

“I do know that,” Casey said quietly, “but somehow, Matty, it only makes what she’s done that much worse. I feel like she’s gutted me.”

“I don’t know what she’s done, but I’ll ask ye—does she still love ye?”

“Aye, she does.”

“An’ do you still love her?”

“Aye, I do.”

“Then I think ye can forgive it, whatever it might be.”

“Matty, I appreciate ye takin’ the time to—”

Matty cut him off with a raised hand. “I’ve said my bit, an’ ye can take it or leave it. Now, would ye have a drink about the place, man?”

Casey laughed. “No, the bloody bastard that sent ye here—an’ I think we both know I’m not speakin’ of Desmond—poured every drop of it down the sink. I can make ye a cup of tea if ye’d like, though.”

Matty smiled. “That’d be grand, lad.”

When Casey returned with the tea, Matty was still sitting on the stone wall, face turned toward the sun, which was bright but held little warmth this late in the autumn. His wispy hair lifted in the breeze, heightening his gnome-like countenance. It struck Casey that the man was starting to look old. He wondered with a sudden tightness in his throat what his own daddy would have looked like had he lived to this age.

“Here’s yer tea then,” Casey said gruffly, handing Matty a mug that steamed in the cool air.

“Yer da’ gave me a bit of advice once that I’m goin’ to pass on to yerself today.”

“Aye?”

“He told me to go home an’ save my marriage before I found I didn’t have one. I didn’t listen, an’ I’ve had a lifetime to regret it. I’d not see ye make the same mistake. I felt I owed ye that much.”

“Ye don’t owe me anything, man.”

“Aye, that’s as may be or no, but I owed yer da’. Were he here, he’d tell ye much as I have today.”