The Last Bride in Ballymuir
Read The Last Bride in Ballymuir Online
Authors: Dorien Kelly
Tags: #romance, #ireland, #contemporary romance, #irish romance, #dorien kelly, #dingle, #irish contemporary romance, #county kerry
By Dorien Kelly
Copyright 2012 Dorien Kelly
Smashwords Edition
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Thank you for respecting the hard work of
this author.
This book is a work of fiction. Names,
places, characters, or incidents are products of the author’s
imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events
or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Publishing History:
Published in paperback by Pocket Books,
2003
This preferred edition ebook published in
2012
Dedicated with much love to Sean
O’Tuathal.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Your feet will take you to where your heart
is.
—
Irish Proverb
As he looked about his sister’s house, it
occurred to Michael Kilbride that he had traded up one prison for
another. With its painted silks, shiny trinkets, and mysterious
mixed fragrance of incense and spice, this place was intensely
female. It held no point of reference for a man who’d just spent
fourteen years in the enforced company of other men.
“
You’ll be having the
upstairs room,” his sister Vi said as she flung off a bright blue
woolen cloak she’d worn to protect herself from the nip of an Irish
winter. “There’s a full bath, too. You should be
comfort
able enough, but I’d have an eye to
the ceiling height.
This house wasn’t built
for a man of your size.”
“
It wasn’t built for a man
at all,” he said as he shifted uneasily from foot to foot. He knew
he sounded ungrateful and half felt that way, too.
“
True enough,” she answered
with a shrug. “This is mine, and mine alone. But you’re welcome
here ‘til you can get back on your feet.” She paused and frowned, a
crease showing between green eyes that were mirrors of his own.
“And I’m sorry for the way Mam and Da are acting.”
He reached down and fingered a jewel-bright
throw that curled along the back of a couch. “Don’t apologize for
them. It doesn’t matter.”
She gave him an impatient
look, his Vi, who’d
never been a Violet,
even when a child. “It does, and I
will
make apologies for them. But no excuses. They’re
too wrapped up in their comforts to think what you
might be feeling.”
Truth be told, he wasn’t feeling anything
much but hung-over. He longed for a bed with sheets any color but
grayish-white. He longed for the ability to sleep past five-thirty
in the morning. And he found the intimacy of this talk more than he
could stomach.
Michael snatched up the duffel bag that
contained his belongings. “Upstairs, you say.” As he made his way
up the narrow wooden steps, he heard Vi call from below.
“
I’m only having mercy
because of your miserable head. And mine, too. But you won’t be
getting out of other conversations this easily!”
Michael allowed himself a
victorious smirk as he rounded the sharp bend in the stairs to his
hideaway. Then he smacked his head straight into the
low-hung
plaster ceiling. At his snarled
obscenity, Vi’s laughter
drifted
up.
“
It’s no less than you
deserve,” she called.
To Michael’s way of thinking, it was just
another inexact measure of blind justice.
Having negotiated the last
treacherous curve of stair, he ducked until he reached the center
of
the
room with
its sloped ceiling, then surveyed his surroundings. He didn’t need
much, and virtually anything would have seemed luxurious to him.
But as always, Vi had seen to his comfort. The bedroom was bold and
cheerful, and a bathroom little bigger than a closet took up the
far end of the space.
A bed large enough for two, he noted, though
that would never be an issue—even if he weren’t in his sister’s
home. In his scant four days of freedom, he’d already discovered
that he attracted exactly the hard and bitter type of woman he
didn’t want. No great surprise there.
Michael dropped his nylon
duffel in the center of the bed. The quilt, a noisy affair with
concentric spirals of bronze and gold, hardly moved under
the
bag’s negligible
weight. All his worldly goods... One change of clothes, ten punts
fifty, plus the U2 tee shirt he’d won in a dice game last night. If
he’d drunk less and played more, today’s state of affairs might
seem less bleak. Then again, perhaps not.
He sat on the edge of the bed—so soft that he
wagered he’d end up sleeping on the floor—and slipped off his shoes
and socks. Standing again, he tugged off his gray sweatshirt and
unzipped jeans so starchy and new that it pained him to look at
them. Underwear followed. He padded to the shower, turned it on,
and stood under its needle-sharp spray until hot had run to cold. A
small luxury, but an appreciated one, to be sure.
When Michael returned
downstairs, showered and
clean-shaven but
not precisely repentant for the prior evening’s excesses, his
sister gave him an appraising look before shoving a mug into his
hands. “I’ve made a tea of anise and caraway…one of Nan’s old
recipes. What the shower and time haven’t purged from last night’s
binge, this should.”
Purged.
Michael eyed the mug suspiciously. “Think
not.”
“
You’ve drunk worse,” Vi
pointed out. “Last night,
for
instance.”
That comment was enough to eke out his first
smile of the day. “You’re hardly free of sin yourself, little
sister.”
Vi busied herself wrapping her wild red hair
into a loose knot atop her head. “Just trying to keep you company,
that was all. Now drink. I need your head clear. We’ve serious
matters to discuss.”
Michael set the mug on the
low table in front of
the fireplace. “Then
you’ll be wanting me alive, too.”
It wasn’t so much that he didn’t believe in
their grandmother’s skills, or Vi’s for that matter. His pretended
disbelief was as much a part of the ritual as drinking the tea
itself. He sprawled onto the couch and awaited his sister’s
countermove. When none came he knew that it was serious business
indeed.
Vi settled into an overstuffed chair at an
angle from him. “Dublin was a needed thing. I knew I couldn’t bring
you back here without a chance to get some of the anger out of your
system. We played and drank hard. But now we’re home. My home. And
while we’re two hundred miles south and west of Temple Bar, it
isn’t only the distance separating us. People in Ballymuir are more
conservative than Dubliners. More so than those in Vatican City,
too,” she added with a flash of a smile. “You’ll be noticed here,
Michael. Even if I say nothing at all about your past—and I plan to
say nothing—rumors will fly. I’m asking you to have care, not to do
anything to make it worse on yourself.”
So now we come to the truth of it, he
thought. “Or on you?”
Vi sat taller. “I can hold my own.”
A warrior, his sister. “As can I,” he
replied. “And the people in town, I want nothing from them. I’ll
give them no trouble, either.”
Vi scrutinized him for a moment, then nodded
her head in a business-like fashion. “Well then, we won’t be
needing to have this discussion again.” She stood and walked to a
desk. Drawing open a drawer, she said, “I’ve been keeping something
for you since Nan died.”
Michael smiled. “It can’t be another one of
her recipes or it would have gone bad long ago.”
Vi handed him a slender envelope. “I suppose
it is a recipe of sorts.” He opened it to find a bank statement in
his sister’s name. “The money was left to me, but I’ve just been
holding it for you. Nan didn’t want to upset Mam and Da by leaving
it to you directly.”
Vi gave a nod toward the paper clenched in
Michael’s hand. “She wanted this to go where it was needed. It’s
not a fortune, but it should give you a start.”
Michael focused on the statement’s bottom
line and swallowed hard at the zeros lined up soldier straight; it
beat the shit out of ten punts fifty. “I can’t be taking this.”
“
You can’t argue with a dead
woman, either.”
He stood far too fast for his aching head,
closed in on Vi, and shoved the statement back at her.
“
Then I’m left with her
living emissary.” Vi and Nan were almost one and the same in his
mind—different faces of the same woman. What was Nan’s was meant to
be Vi’s. “Take it.”
She balled the paper in one fist and grabbed
his shirt with the other. “You’re stubborn enough, but I’ve never
thought you a stupid man. Now, I’m not a believer in violence of
any kind, but I’m thinking of making an exception here. The money
is yours, as it was meant to be. If Nan hadn’t seen to you, I’d be
doing it myself. You’ll take what she left you and be thankful for
it.”
Michael plucked the paper from her fist and
ripped it into pieces. With each tug of the paper, Vi’s eyes grew
narrower and more dangerous. As the shreds fluttered to the floor,
she pushed away from him with a sound of disgust. “Fine show, but
pointless. The money is yours.”
He needed out. Michael grabbed his jacket
from a peg near the door. Turning his back on his sister, he shoved
his arms through the jacket sleeves and wrenched open the door.
“
Take a walk, then,” Vi
said. “I’ll be here waiting when you get back. And so will the
money.”
Michael slammed the door. He
walked away from Vi’s house, perched on that gray line between
country and town, then down an arrow of a road leading to the
rolling green fields beyond. For an hour and more, one foot
followed the other, nothing but time and endless sky in front of
him. Past a roadside shrine to the Virgin—a tick of a smile at that
sign of home—then around a bend ‘til the road narrowed from the
respectable track it had been to
what his
nan would have called a
bothareen.
And still
he walked.
Because he could.
It was wrong to take Vi’s
money. It pained him enough to be staying in her house and eating
her food. Still, Michael didn’t delude himself about the
possibility of finding work. True, things were far better than
they’d been fourteen years ago. But he was thirty-two, never been
to university and—though with no accuracy—had been branded a
ter
rorist by most. They’d not be calling at
his door. If he
had one.