The Last Bride in Ballymuir (28 page)

Kylie welcomed him, his tongue even hotter in
contrast to the cold hands cupping her face. His taste was
indisputably Michael, singular and elemental, and she wanted more.
Her tongue stroked his, ventured to taste more, and still it
wasn’t enough. On the kiss spun until she finally realized she’d
forgotten to breathe altogether.

Kylie ended the moment and drew in a ragged
breath. She didn’t let go of him for fear of sinking to the wet
earth. He curved his hands on the backs of her thighs, just beneath
her bottom, and tugged her closer.

“
You loosened my tongue, all
right. Straight into your mouth,” he murmured into her ear. “A damn
lot more fun than being shaken, too.”

She froze at this—the first blatant sexual
banter she’d ever shared.

“
Good, now,” she said, not
quite brave enough to meet his eyes, “since that tongue of yours is
nice and loose, perhaps you’re ready to tell me what’s got you
flinging rocks and scowling at nothing in particular.”

“
I can think of other things
I’d like to be doing with
my tongue.” He
bent closer and whispered words so intimate and delicious that a
resounding
yes!
echoed though her imagination even as she pushed
away.

“
Just a thought,” he said in
an offhand way that
didn’t at all match the
hot sexual intent of his expres
sion.

Kylie turned from him and rubbed the slight
grit that had transferred from her face to her fingertips. She’d
underestimated him, and it had nothing to do with his size. One
whispered picture and all thought of getting to the bottom of his
unhappiness flew. Sharp man, Michael, she thought, then turned back
to face him.

“
A thought you’d best be
saving for later. Now talk.”

He wore the look of a
hunted
man.
“You
won’t be letting this go, will you?”

She shook her head.

“
Right, then . . .” Instead
of continuing he gazed off into the countryside, miles and miles
unbroken by town or tree. He cleared his throat, glanced at her,
then looked back to the horizon. “The summer I was fourteen, I
asked my mam if I could be apprenticed to a furniture maker in
Kilkenny. I was sick to death of the boarding school she’d pitched
me into, and
they
were damned sick of me, too. And the furniture maker, I’d
gravitated to his shop from the time I was old enough to slip away
from home. He made a fine living of it, and you see his pieces in
glossy magazines these days. But you’d have thought I’d asked to
work in the sewers the way she acted. Why couldn’t I plan to go
into business with my father, she wanted to know.”

He jammed his hands into his
jacket pockets even though the day was warm. “Insurance.” He spat
the
word
like an
oath. “Can you imagine me in a suit and
tie, cell phone attached to my ear, spouting actuarial
tables?”

She couldn’t. He belonged to
a solid, simpler time,
one that had ended
long ago.

“
Anyway, Mam refused to do
it, and my da—as usual—wouldn’t cross her. As it turned out, it
didn’t matter. There was no great calling for woodworkers in
prison.” His smile angled sharp with irony. “For some reason they
found it inadvisable to equip terrorists with awls and
screwdrivers and the like.”

“
So I’d guess.” She marveled
that he could find any humor—even the painful sort—in his past.
Unfortunately she also saw where this was leading, and her heart
ached for him.

“
I got myself fourteen years
of book education, the best Her Majesty offers her prisoners. I can
tell you about Homer and Plato and formulae and business plans,
not that anyone would hire me. Fourteen damn years and the only
useful thing I walked out with was a one-hundred-pound clothing
allowance.
I’ve got no skills, Kylie,
nothing to offer.”

‘
That’s not true. I know the
work you’re doing now isn’t as grand as you’d wish, but it’s a
place to start.”

“
A place to start,” he
echoed bitterly. “I’m thirty-two years old. Actually,
thirty-goddamn-three soon enough.” He paced away in long, angry
strides, then
swung back to her. “A place
to start! I’ve got no place
to go! I could
start here, then throw every rock in Kerry. I might as well die
doing it because that’s all I’m good for.”

He closed the distance between them and
gripped her by the shoulders. “You ask me what’s the matter. I want
what I can’t have. I want...”

His fingers tightened convulsively, then he
let her go. Still his pain closed around her heart, squeezing until
she couldn’t draw a breath.

“
... and I’ve got no
business to be wanting.”

She reached out her hand, needing to touch,
to comfort.

He stepped back. “Don’t. Just... don’t.”

That hurt more than anything else he could
have done.

He scrubbed his hand over his face, then
stared at the ground. “I’ll be going. I’m sorry.”

Without answering—without knowing how to
answer—Kylie turned and walked to her house.

He’d made an absolute mess
of that, Michael admitted
to himself as he
retreated to town. He hadn’t meant to
say
anything at all, but the woman had a way of working under his
defenses. He’d tried to sidetrack her with
talk of lovemaking, something neither of them could
ever have enough of, but even that hadn’t worked.
No,
she’d pushed him until what words he’d
managed to scrape together were the wrong ones.

Silence. God—if there
happened to be one—as his
witness, he’d
stick to silence from now till the bitter end. And bitter it would
be. Bitter to see her marry another, and laugh and love with him.
Most bitter of all to see her one day grow round with another man’s
children.

Michael clenched the
steering wheel tighter, thinking he’d like to rip it from the dash.
He wanted
to howl at the injustice of life,
but knew better than to
bother. When it
came to Kylie, he was a beaten man, and had been from the start of
the race.

He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw
that Gerry Flynn had taken up his appointed position. No point in
making the effort to be angry.

Gerry drove slowly by as Michael pulled his
car alongside the curb in front of Vi’s house. Michael trudged to
the front door, swung it open, then leaped back from the wave of
sound blasting at him.

“
What the
bloody hell—” he began, then Vi reached out and
hauled him into the house. That he’d managed to miss the music
before he’d reached the door only showed what a damned mess he was.
Though he wasn’t quite sure he should close off a means of quick
escape, he shut the door behind himself.

“
Bruce Springsteen,” she
shouted over the driving rhythm, then spun off into a dance that
looked nothing short of pagan.

“
That much I knew,” he
muttered, well aware no one could hear him. Not that anyone other
than his sister seemed to be at this party. Roger, too, he amended,
watching the homely dog bound after his owner, trying to grab onto
the fringe from the purple shawl-thing she waved about like a harem
veil.

Vi stopped to gulp from a
glass full of some bubbling neon orange stuff. “Dance with
me!”
she
urged
after wiping the back of one hand across her mouth.

Michael inspected the
contents of that glass instead. He sniffed it once, then again. No
scent of
liquor. He took a sip, winced at
its cloying sweetness,
then set the glass
back down.

“
It’s orange drink, you big
ninny. Orange Crush, all the way from America.”

If his sister had to pick a vice, he supposed
this one was harmless enough, though not as satisfying as a good,
thick pint.

She shimmied in front of
him, and he came damned close to being embarrassed. “I’m
celebrat
ing. Sold myself today. Lots
of
lo-o-o-vely
Yank dol
lars will be flying my way,”
she announced while Bruce sang about someone named Rosalita jumping
a little higher.

It seemed that his sister was quite high
enough. He took her by the elbows and tried to still her, not that
he had much luck. She danced out of his grip and planted a great,
smacking kiss on his cheek.

“
I’ll be designing fabrics
for them,” she said, lean
ing close enough
to be heard. “We’ve been talking on
and off
for a year, but I never thought anything would come of it. But they
want me, and they’re paying fine for the honor, too!”

“
You’re worth it,” he said,
then wrapped Vi in a hug she suffered for all of two seconds, then
spun away.

Half-breathless from her dance, she blurted,
“Oh, I forgot you had a call today, too. Said he was an old friend
of yours, but wouldn’t leave a name. Not from prison, I hope.”

Michael’s stomach lurched. It sure as hell
was none of his fellow “political” parolees, though he was quite
certain they’d made a point of keeping track of him. They
specialized in embracing their enemies.

Who, then? He’d written the correspondence
teacher from his last business courses and told him where to
forward his remaining tests and papers, but the man wasn’t the sort
to pick up a phone. Which left Michael hearing Gerry Flynn’s
insidious words about Brian Rourke, who surely wasn’t fool enough
to have returned home.

“
You might as well quit
scowling,” his sister ordered. “If the man calls back, he calls
back. And if he doesn’t, you’ve wasted a perfectly good
dance.”

She grabbed his hand and forced him into some
semblance of moving with the pounding beat. He started out stubborn
and intractable as any mule, but soon enough was pulling off his
jacket and setting aside thoughts of matters he couldn’t control.
It felt good to let go to the music, though he couldn’t call what
he was doing dancing, exactly. And it felt beyond good to share in
his sister’s happiness, to push some of his own woes out of the
way.

Then trouble came slamming through the front
door.

After pounding over the din
until her knuckles throbbed, Kylie gave up on good manners
and
marched into Vi Kilbride’s house. She
decided it must
be a genetic flaw, this
Kilbride madness. She paused for an intriguing instant to watch Vi
move about in a
way that shocked her, and
made her more than a little
envious. Vi
waggled her fingers and mouthed a silent
“hello,” then danced on. Michael had stilled as soon as he saw
her. His face lost its rare smile and took on that
cornered expression she’d already seen once
today.

Well fine, because he was a hunted man. She
stalked toward him, and he froze in place.

“
You go slinking off in a
sulk, then not half an hour later I find you dancing like you’re
auditioning
for
The Full Monty!”

The corners of his mouth curved upward almost
as if he were pleased at the thought. “I saw that one, you
know.”

“
I wasn’t meaning it as a
compliment,” she hissed.

“
But I’ll take it as one.
And I’m shocked that you’d know about a movie like that, exotic
dancers and all.” His deep voice carried easily over the music, and
Kylie felt all the more frustrated because she could scarcely hear
herself.

“
I’m not here to talk about
naked men!” she shouted, then winced as the last two words echoed
around her. Fine timing Vi had in turning down her
stereo.

“
No naked men? Pity, that,”
Vi commented, then flopped backward onto the sofa.

Kylie spared Vi an annoyed glance. Vi laughed
in return. The woman looked as though she’d settled in to watch a
show. Much as she wanted to ask Vi to leave her own house, Kylie
knew better than to take on both Kilbrides at once.

She turned to Michael. He was grinning, too.
“I suppose I should be happy you’ve given up on the self-pity,” she
said, not quite willing to give up on the good—and totally
justified—anger that had fueled her drive into town. “It was
getting a little wearing, all that ‘poor me, I want and can’t have’
noise.”

His eyes narrowed. “Don’t start—”

“
Don’t you dare be telling
me what to start or not start, Michael Kilbride! This time you
won’t stop me with either your threats or your... your
suggestions.”
She could
feel the color rising in her cheeks, but refused to acknowledge
exactly how those “suggestions” had rattled her. “I’m sorry you
didn’t get apprenticed to the furniture maker years ago, but
what’s stopping you now? In case you failed to
notice,
there’s a fine one next to your
sister’s studio.”

“
He turns bowls and
candlesticks. Not quite furniture.”

“
And a fat lot better than
nothing,” she shot back,
then took a deep
breath and tried to calm herself. “At
least
you had noticed, even if you’d done nothing about it. There’s a
certain lack of... ah, what’s the word I’m looking for
here?”