He turned his head to look at her and she grinned. And they were both smiling.
“Not that it really matters,” she said, “but I want you to know that I don’t usually go around blabbing out my life story to complete strangers.”
“Or kissing them,” he said.
“That, too.” She broke off a clove. “Must be something about Ireland.”
He scooped the garlic in his hand, dropped it in the melted butter. Kate drifted over to stand beside him and they stood shoulder to shoulder, the smell of butter and garlic filling the air. A wisp of smoke curled slowly upward and then suddenly she was gone and back with a handful of chopped onions. As she dumped them in the pan, fat splattered and hissed. Bits of onions flew all over the place. Her elbow in his ribs, she shoved him aside and grabbed the spatula from his hand.
“God, we’ve chopped enough vegetables for an army and now you’re standing there communing with the butter.” She started stirring the onions. “At this rate it will be midnight before I ever even see dinner.”
Niall laughed as he stood aside to watch her. Sleeves rolled up above her elbows, she stirred with a look of grim determination. After a minute or two, apparently satisfied things were back under control, she shot him a look.
“Green peppers.”
“Right away.” Quickly, he scooped the pieces of pepper into his palms and brought them over to her. Leaning over her shoulder, he dropped them into the pan. “All right?” He stayed there, close enough to feel the warmth of her back against his chest. “Is this a takeover attempt, then?”
“You could call it that, I guess.” Her hands on the spatula had gone very still. “Or you might think of it as a lifesaving rescue to avoid death by starvation. Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” he said truthfully. “Would it make any difference if I did?”
“None at all,” she said, imitating his accent. “What are we doing about the stock?”
“Stock?” He locked his arms around her waist, kissed the side of her neck.
“For the bouillabaisse,” she said, leaning back into him. “And you’re making it very hard for me to concentrate.”
“That’s my intention.”
“No, your intention is to make bouillabaisse. At least I thought that was your intention.”
Niall smiled at her. He’d spent just a few hours with her, but it seemed like an age. He knew nothing about her, yet it seemed he knew everything. He thought he could easily fall in love with her.
He took her face between his hands and kissed her. Minutes passed, then he kicked out a chair and pulled her down on his lap and they kissed with an urgency that blotted out everything but heat and sensation. She moved to sit astride him, her hands in his hair, her mouth open to his tongue. Finally, she drew back.
“What are we supposed to be doing?”
“Do we care?”
“Yeah, I think we do.” She got up from his lap, lifted the hair off her neck and went over to the stove. “Fish. You were getting fish.”
He handed her several paper packages from the refrigerator. “Shrimp, mussels, a couple of different kind of fish. Swimming a few hours ago.”
“Great.” Without looking at him, she opened one of the packages. “They’ll be really fresh.”
He shook his head to clear the fog of sexual desire. “There’s a Provençal saying,” he told her. “Something about eating your fish while it’s fresh and marrying off your daughter while she’s young. My French isn’t that good, so I can never remember whether I’m saying, marry your fish or—”
“Eat your daughter.” Kate gave a little laugh. “So what’s the plan here? Dinner, then we mosey up to the bedchamber?”
He took a breath. “Actually, I hadn’t thought that far ahead. What do you think?”
She brushed past him to gather another handful of chopped onions, dumped them in the pan and stood back as they splattered in the hot grease. “I think that I can’t believe I just said that. In fact, I should probably leave.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“No.”
“Why then?”
“I think if I stay I’ll end up going to bed with you.”
“And that’s not what you want to do?”
“Actually it is, but I think it would be a mistake.” With thumb and forefinger she retrieved a large piece of onion from the pan. “This needs to be chopped some more. The problem is my body would like a fling, but my head is nixing it.”
“How can we get your head to shut up?”
“It won’t.”
“Hmm.” He buried his chin in her shoulder. “Is your head ever likely to give your body permission?”
“Eventually, I’m sure. The thing is, Niall, I don’t want to sleep with you and then make a bunch of promises about staying in touch when we both know that’s not going to happen.” Spatula in hand, she turned around to look at him. “Besides, it would ruin my objectivity.”
He struggled to keep a straight face.
“Jerk.” She hit his arm with the spatula. “I’m usually very objective.”
“I’m sure you are.” Heat from the stove had turned her face pink. He wanted to kiss her again. “I think we should do all we can to preserve your journalistic integrity, so as much as I’d like to accommodate your body, I’m going to agree with your head. No jaunts to the bedchamber and no more kissing.”
She grinned at him.
“I mean it. Kissing is verboten. Try it and I’ll throw you outside.” He flapped his hands at her. “Get over there, far away from me. You’re a corrupting woman and I’ll have none of it. Go on, move. After we’ve eaten, I’ll show you my pictures. That should cool your ardor.”
“A MAN OF MY WORD,” he said, as he pulled a large cardboard box from the drawer of a heavy old dresser. “See, I really am just like all the other men you mentioned, I love to talk about myself.” He dumped the pictures on the floor between them. “Or at least my work.”
Kate studied the picture he had handed her. An old man, his face heavily seamed. Behind him, a simple white cottage. A distant view of the sea.
“One of a dying breed,” he said. “He has a farm on one of the western islands. A very hard life, it is. I was out there recently. Years ago, when his father started farming, the old fellow told me, the ground was so rocky, he literally had to make the earth. They’d haul seaweed and sand on donkeys and spread it out over the land. It was too hard for his sons, they went off to America.”
She nodded, remembering the stories from her childhood. “My grandfather left Clare as a young boy and he used to tell me how difficult life was. He said that when a family emigrated, the neighbors kept turf fires burning for the day they would return.”
“There were an awful lot of turf fires burning in these parts.” He put the picture aside. “A lot of people went to America from all these western counties. Galway, Clare, Mayo. Ireland lost more people from here to emigration than to the potato famine. It’s always been a difficult place to make a living.”
“Is that something you’ve ever thought of yourself?” she asked. “Leaving Ireland?”
“I never have, no. I’ve been to America, but it’s not for me. For a while, I lived in England and France, but I’d never leave this country. I’d never leave the west, for that matter.”
As she took another picture, she stifled a pang of disappointment at his answer. What did she expect him to say? “Now that I’ve spent a few hours with you, I’m ready to throw it all up. Let’s buy a condo in Santa Monica and start having children.”
“Annie feels the same way about Ireland,” she said after a moment. “She’s horrified that I’ve moved around so much. According to her, the reason I’m not married is that I don’t know who I am or where I belong.”
He laughed. “What do you think?”
“I don’t really think that has anything to do with my single state. But it might be nice to live in a little village like Cragg’s Head, where a person really feels as
if he belongs. To have the kind of rootedness you and Annie have.”
“But I know what it’s like not to have that,” he said. “I went to boarding school in England for quite a few years and I was always this Irish boy. The accent, attitudes, everything. I never quite belonged. I’d pine away for home, go back to Ireland and feel just as out of place. I still do, really. It’s the land more than the people that keeps me.”
“I have that disconnected feeling about California,” she said. “I have this idea that life is probably more real somewhere else.”
“But that’s the image of California, isn’t it?” he said. “Movies and Disneyland, that sort of thing. Nothing quite real. I was there some time ago. Around Christmas and it was very hot. Eighty-five degrees, and people had on shorts. The Christmas trees were wilting in the shopping centers.”
“Yeah, I know. We all have our illusions, right?” She glanced at the picture he’d handed her. A young girl at the edge of a cliff looking out to sea. A strand of long pale hair had blown across her face, and she’d raised her hand as though to brush it away.
“She’s beautiful.” Jealousy tugged at her. “Someone you know?”
“Beautiful and very young and naive.” Niall took the picture from her, looked down at it. “Actually, she’s a student in a class I teach at Galway College. Or at least she was. She hasn’t been to classes for a few days.” He put the picture on top of the one of the old man. “You’ve not met her then? Elizabeth Jenkins? She’s the daughter of Annie Ryan’s friend.”
Kate reached for it again. “This is Elizabeth?”
“It is. I was to meet her on the cliffs, the night I saw you,” he said. “But she didn’t turn up.”
“She still hadn’t when I left tonight,” Kate said. “Annie didn’t seem too worried, though. Apparently, Elizabeth has done this kind of thing before.”
“I’m not surprised. She’s a bit of a wild girl,” he said.
Kate watched him for a moment—his expression preoccupied now—and wondered whether Elizabeth was more to him than a student. The question lingered in her brain as they went through the rest of the pictures. And then she looked up to see him watching her, a quizzical look on her face.
“I promised these would drive lascivious thoughts from your mind,” he said. “I didn’t realize they’d send you to sleep.”
“They didn’t.” She smiled, formal and polite. “They’re good. You’re very talented.”
“Something cold just came into the room,” he said.
Kate looked at him. He sat on the floor facing her. His eyes steady on her face. She turned away first.
“Five minutes ago,” he said, “it wasn’t here.”
“Maybe it was the White Lady.”
“Or maybe it was fear.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I think you do,” he said. “Just now, you suddenly went very quiet. Were you telling yourself to run for your life?”
“You’re losing me.” She focused on a spot beyond his shoulder. “Run from what?”
“From what you’re feeling. Or, rather, what you’d feel if you let yourself.”
“I always hate it when guys tell me what I’m feeling. It’s so damn arrogant.”
“You’re right, it is. Tell me yourself then.”
She shrugged. “I’m attracted to you. Other than that, I don’t really know much about you, so what else could there be?”
“But something’s happening, isn’t it? I know I feel it and I think you do, too. And what’s more,” he added, “I don’t think it was just a random thing that you first interviewed Moruadh and that you came to Ireland and we met the way we did,” he said. “I have a sense that somehow it was meant to happen.”
She said nothing, but the idea sent a small thrill of excitement through her. And then the cynic spoke up. Get real. He wants to get you into bed.
“Some things can’t easily be explained,” he said. “You try and reason them out and sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes you just have to trust, even though you don’t understand.”
“Want to hear my theory?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“I come to Ireland to write an article about your wife. I’m on the way up to the castle to see you and we run into each other. Cragg’s Head is a small village, it was inevitable that we meet. There’s this really strong mutual attraction, and I’m thousands of miles from home so it suddenly it seems okay to be a little more impulsive than I would normally be. We kiss.” She shrugged. “It’s a vacation fling.”
“A vacation fling,” he repeated. “I thought you told me you don’t do this kind of thing?”
“I lied.” She grinned at him. “Happens all the time.”
“Is that so?”
“No. It’s never happened before.” She stared into the fire. “The bottom line is that I live in the States and you live here. So whatever we tell ourselves now, nothing can change that fact.”
“But you’d fight it anyway, wouldn’t you? Even if we’d met in America.”
“Probably.”
“Because, like all men, I’m a self-serving bastard who wouldn’t recognize a genuine emotion if it bit me in the arse.”
She laughed. “Something along those lines. I haven’t been wrong so far.”
“You could single-handedly reduce your country’s divorce rate,” he said. “Hire yourself out. Anytime you meet someone in love, you give them your philosophy. No one would ever get married again.”
“You can laugh, but it’s true.”
“Well…” His eyes didn’t leave her face. “Here’s a theory. Maybe every man you’ve met so far hasn’t been the one for you. After all, you’re a bit young to have built a whole body of evidence against love. Maybe it just hasn’t happened yet.”
Self-conscious suddenly under the intensity of his gaze, she looked away. “Maybe,” she conceded.
He laughed. “Ah, Kate. What’s to become of you?”
“I’m wondering about that myself.”
“What about the next few days? Are they completely filled?’
“Oh, I can probably fit you in.”
He reached across and pulled at a strand of hair that had fallen over her shoulder. His fingers brushed her face and she felt an electric edge of desire so strong, her breath caught. A moment passed. He sat up and swung her legs under him so that they lay face-to-face on the floor.
“Hi.” With her finger, she lightly traced his eyebrows and lashes, drew a line down the bridge of his nose to his mouth and chin. “You probably hear this all the time, but you have unbelievable eyes. Pale as fog. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”
“You have one freckle on the very tip of your nose. It’s very sexy.”
“Yeah, right.” She grinned at him. “Cover Girl’s begging me to be in their ads.”
He smiled.
“I’ve been thinking…” she said.
“Always a dangerous practice.”
“…that perhaps kissing wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“But I made you a solemn promise.”
“Break it. I won’t tell.”
He kissed her forehead.
“Nice, but not quite what I had in mind.” She kissed him on the mouth, felt his lips open under hers. His body pressed hard against her own, and the kiss became harder, more insistent. After a while, he pulled her on top of him, and they kissed until she thought she would swoon. Her mouth wet from his, she pulled away for a moment. Niall’s face was buried in her neck, his head covered by her hair.
“Was that more like that?” he asked, his voice muffled against her skin.
“I’m not sure. Do it again and I’ll tell you.”
He did.
“Yeah, definitely.” She lay above him, raised her head slightly to smile into his eyes. “But it’s like potato chips. Once you start…”
He slid out from under her, flipped her onto her back and pressed his mouth
to the band of exposed skin between her sweater and pants. “I want to carry you up to my bedchamber and ravish you. What do you say?”
“A bedchamber would definitely be a new experience.” She lifted her hand to stroke his back, felt his lips move on her body.
“What about ravishing? Would that be new, too?”
“I’m not sure. That word is kind of open to interpretation.” His tongue circled her navel and the sensation sent a spasm through her. Breathing ragged, she pulled him on top, wound her legs around his. His erection pressing into the crotch of her jeans, she writhed beneath him. His hands, under her sweater now, fingers beneath her bra.
Niall was the first to hear the front door open.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN A FLASH, Niall was up on his feet, eyes heavy lidded as though he’d just woken. Kate sat up, tugged at her sweater, raked back her hair with her fingers. A tall blond woman in a long dark coat stood in the doorway, a little uncertainly, like an actor who’d missed a cue and arrived on stage at the wrong time.
“Today at three?” She looked ostentatiously at her watch. “The bank? The second time we’ve missed our appointment? Women distract Niall so easily,” she said with a glance across the room at Kate. “Last time it was an art student, this time it’s…” A taut smile briefly appeared on her face. “Sorry, I don’t know your name. I’m Sharon Garroty, Niall’s business partner. Or ex, I should say.”
“Obviously you didn’t get the message I left in the studio,” Niall said, his face dark. “I said I was canceling the appointment with the bank.”
“Did you?” The smile flashed again. “Well, obviously I missed it. Oh well, there are some things I need to talk to you about, anyway.” She pulled off her coat, revealing a formfitting black dress beneath it, then she started for the fireplace.
“Sharon.” Niall caught her arm. “Now isn’t a good time. Why don’t you ring me tomorrow?”
Kate stood, her heart banging against her chest. Her legs shaky, she mustered all the poise she could and walked across what seemed like miles of flagstone floor. From a row of hooks on the wall by the door, she retrieved her parka. In her peripheral vision she could see Niall and the woman standing together. The tension between them seemed to suck the air from the room.
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