The Last Bride in Ballymuir (15 page)

“
I’ll be going straight to
the studio. And you can keep an eye on Roger for me,” she added
over her shoulder as she hurried from the room.

Michael felt a wet nose nudge his ankle. He
looked down and could have sworn the little dog was smirking at
him.

Several hours and many
failed recipes later, Roger wasn’t smirking anymore. In fact, he
lay under
the
kitchen table, belly distended and a replete expression on his
furry face.

“
Lucky for you I got it
right this time, or you’d be exploding, you little glutton.” Hating
to see anything go to waste, no matter how misshapen or gelatinous,
Michael had offered his disasters to the dog. Whatever internal
mechanism a canine should have to tell him when he’s eaten his fill
was sadly lacking in old Roger. Confirming that, the dog let loose
a resounding belch.

In a case of survival of the simplest, the
meal for Kylie had come down to roast chicken, salad, and a platter
of fresh fruit for dessert. Rather sparse for what Michael was
personally tagging as their Last Supper. He hoped that she would
accept his offering in the spirit it was given. One of
desperation.

“
Drink, then talk,” his nan
had always said. But Kylie had taken no more than a sip of her
drink that rotten night at the pub. And though he hadn’t much
experience to base it on, Michael didn’t think he was a drinker
himself. Tonight was to be “Eat, then talk.” If the food was good
enough, maybe she’d later overlook one or two of his
sins.

As Kylie watched Michael’s car pull up, she
thought she must have been crazed, agreeing to see him alone, out
here in the middle of nothing much. If she believed even a fraction
of what they said in town, she should be seeking armed guards. The
best she had was Breege down the road, God bless her soul.

But justified or not, Kylie had faith in
Michael. Whatever sins he might have committed, she believed he’d
never harm her. Her common sense, the only thing she’d ever
possessed in overabundance, seemed to have taken flight.

Kylie drew in a sharp breath. So impossibly
tall, square-shouldered, and handsome, Michael walked toward the
house. When she was little—before she knew better—she would often
dream of bold and daring heroes, a sugar dusting of fantasy sifted
over the old legends learned from her mother. And now, looking at
Michael, his serious eyes stormy green and his jaw set firm, Kylie
wondered, had she somehow foreseen this man? For when she dreamt,
her heroes had all looked like him.

Mindless of the cold that hammered its way
in, she opened the door well before he reached the stoop. As
yesterday, the need to touch him shimmered over her.

“
May I take that from you?”
she asked, hands extended outward to grasp the hamper he carried,
hoping for even the brush of his fingers against hers.

He stepped in, hand still possessively
wrapped around the basket’s wooden handle. “I have it.”

She couldn’t help but smile. “I know I
haven’t made much of an impression on you with my cooking, but I
don’t think I can harm the meal by carrying it.”

“
I’ll be taking the blame
for this one,” he said as he
set the basket
on the counter, then shrugged out of his jacket. Kylie noticed how
much smaller her tiny home seemed with a man in it. It pleased and
surprised her that she found this intimacy appealing; she’d always
been concerned that she was damaged beyond repair.

She took his jacket and
quelled the impulse to hold it to her face and breathe deeply the
scent of him. She wanted to fix this moment in her memory, to hold
it since she couldn’t hold him. Turning away, she carried the
jacket to the rack by the front door and allowed herself one
fleeting brush against rough
wool that
smelled faintly of cigarettes and more of an
honest male scent.

She turned back and watched with interest as
Michael slipped a covered container into the oven, then set the
temperature. “You look comfortable, there in the kitchen.”

“
I’ve had some practice
today,” he said.

“
And before
today?”

“
None.” His blunt answer
left no room for exploration. As if sensing the sting she felt, he
came to her and cupped her face in his hands. “We’ll get there. I
promise we will.
But
I need some time to work into this. It’s not an easy thing for
me, talking or thinking about where I’ve been. And what I’ve done.
Give me this meal with you, and then I’ll give you my
past.”

It was a small thing to ask.
At her nod of assent, he
gently followed
the line of her jaw with his fingertips, then set back to work in
the kitchen.

Kylie pulled her only linen tablecloth from
its place in the sideboard. One of the few links she had to her
past, the tablecloth had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s
before that. As she shook out the heavy ivory fabric crisp with
starch, she gave them a silent plea to send her the wisdom she’d
need this night. She fancied she felt a soft caress against her
cheek. Comforted, a warmth burgeoned in her heart.

The meal itself—simple, delicious, and a
touching gesture on the part of this quiet man—passed quickly.
While they finished washing up the dishes and then went to settle
together on the couch, Kylie was wise enough to give Michael his
silence. This was his moment, and should be done in his way.
Promising herself that she’d listen and accept with an open mind,
she pushed away everything but the faith she had in Michael
Kilbride.

“
I
don’t suppose there’s any sense in delaying the inevitable,”
Michael said, though he was thinking that delay did hold a certain
amount of appeal. He would sell what was left of his soul for a few
more minutes of Kylie looking at him with no accusation in her
beautiful blue eyes, no hatred on her face. He wasn’t fool enough
to think that even her generous heart could hold him after this
night was done.

“
When I was twelve, my
parents sent me away to boarding school in Dundalk. It was a
third-rate place, filled with pretentious little assholes who
weren’t bright or well-connected enough to go to Queenstown, or
someplace like that. No matter, though. I’d been sent off more out
of expediency than any aspirations my parents had for me. See, I’d
become a bit of an ass myself, making trouble in town, judging just
how far I could push things at home. Getting thrown out of a school
or two before Dundalk.”

He paused and gave a brief
smile in spite of himself. “Judgment... I’ve always seemed to have
trouble with
that.
Anyway, each summer I’d come home
and
show them all what a sullen little
beast I’d learned to be. And everyone believed it. Everyone but Vi,
that is. No matter what I’d do, she’d just look at me with those
grown-up eyes she had, and say I wasn’t fooling her one bit. That
she knew me and loved me for who I was.”

Kylie’s laughter warmed him. “Then she hasn’t
changed at all, has she?”

“
Oh, she’s changed all
right. She’s got the years and the size to go with the attitude,
now. But even back then, I knew she was the only one in my family
who really cared. When I was away at school, I’d write her every
chance I got. She was—and is—my only true friend.”

“
I’d like to think that I’m
your friend,” Kylie offered in a husky voice. The sound of
her
pulled him back from
those lonely school days.

“
Wait until we’re through
this. Then decide.”

Her answering look held mild reproach, as if
he should know better than to doubt her.

“
By the time I was fifteen,
my parents had found a
way to be rid of me
when school wasn’t in session, too. A second cousin of my mam had a
farm outside of Dundalk, and it was arranged that I’d work for him
over the summers.” Michael tipped back his head and gazed blankly
at the ceiling. He could still see the old bastard in perfect
detail, and smell the stench of his rotting teeth.

“
You couldn’t tell me from a
slave, those days. I hardly left the farm all summer long, and had
no mates to come visit.” In retrospect, it had been fine practice
for his years in prison.

“
And you didn’t get word to
your parents about this?” Kylie sounded so incredulous that Michael
knew for all her father’s faults, at least he’d paid attention to
her.

Michael shrugged. “I didn’t
see the point. They’d stopped listening to me long before. And at
least it
made the prospect of classes each
fall one hell of a lot
more tolerable. And
then, my last year in school, I met someone. Her name was Dervla
McLohne and she was several years older than I.”

Not that Dervla had had any idea that first
night she’d come up to him in the pub. With his size, he’d easily
passed for a man in his mid-twenties, a fact he’d used to his favor
in more than one late-night excursion off school grounds. It was
only when he’d turned into a red-faced stammering fool over one of
her more explicit comments that she’d asked his age. He’d been too
distracted by his pounding erection to even think to lie.

“
So she wasn’t a student?”
Kylie asked with a guilelessness that Dervla couldn’t have matched
even when still in nappies.

“
No, she was a clerk at a
store in town. The set she
ran with was
intense, wild. Brawls over political matters I’d never spent a
second thinking about. Affairs... break-ups...” He trailed off,
then bitterly finished with, “I was so damn thrilled to be a part
of all this adult life.”

She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her
ear. “It seems to me that you’d have been thrilled to be a part of
anything.”

“
I suppose,” he replied,
knowing that no matter how lonely, Kylie would never have permitted
her
self to be drawn in the way he was. She
possessed too
much integrity.

“
Dervla and I became more,
ah, involved. And it just so happened that my father, in the only
stroke of generosity I’ve ever witnessed from him, got me a car as
an early graduation gift. That made it all the easier to slip away
and spend time with her.

“
One weekend, I met a man
she said was her brother Brian, down from Derry. He was the first
of the group who made me genuinely uncomfortable. He teased Dervla
about being with me, but he didn’t really seem to be joking. There
was too much malice to it.” He paused, shifted his weight on the
threadbare sofa. “After that, when Brian came visiting, she didn’t
invite me over. Two or three times that spring, though, she did ask
me for a ride north. Since I was in my last year at school, there
weren’t any particular restrictions on where I went. On Fridays,
I’d pack into Dervla’s flat with everyone else staying there, then
early in the morning we’d cross the border and visit her friends in
Belfast or wherever. I didn’t much like her friends.”

Kylie’s head tipped to a quizzical angle.
“Then why did you agree to go with her?”

“
I was eighteen, thought I
was in love, and knew I wanted her. I’d have agreed to do about
anything she asked.”

Kylie’s cheeks grew bright crimson. She
stared down at her hands, primly folded in her lap. “I see.”

Judging by her color,
Michael figured she did. “On
the last
weekend before I was to take my Leaving
Certificate and be done with school, Dervla asked me
to drive her north to see her brother. I agreed,
of course. The trip was nothing out of the ordinary.”

Without even closing his
eyes he could see the two
of them in
the
front seat of that car, Dervla
distracting
him from the road, and from
thinking at all, with her hand moving upward to toy with the button
on his
jeans.
We’ve been waiting so long, Mickey, and Brian’s
promised me you and I will have a room of our
own.

“
We got to her brother’s
house. It was in the thick of
the
projects, and I was sure my car would be stripped
and put to use for local political causes by morning. That night,
there was a party. I still don’t know if I just drank too much or
if something had been slipped into my drink. All I know is I woke
when the front door was kicked in and a group of men stormed into
the room.”

He didn’t tell Kylie about watching Dervla
and Brian being dragged naked from the bedroom. Her brother who was
no brother at all.

He didn’t tell her how at
the cost of a broken nose
and
jaw, he’d fought the officers who’d tried to grab
him. Not because he feared whatever was to happen next, but because
he’d wanted to kill. Kill Brian. Kill Dervla.

Not that he’d had the chance.

He didn’t tell Kylie of the
gunfire from the kitchen,
of Dervla with
the top of her head gone and a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer
drowning in his own
blood. He carried the
brutal scene with him every step
of every
day, but that wasn’t why he was certain he deserved death
himself.

Michael fixed his gaze on an
idyllic print above the
fireplace. Ireland
through the eyes of a tourist, he
decided.
And while he told the rest of his story, he kept
his eyes pinned to that idyllic green and placid
place.