by Dorien Kelly
And more he gave her until she was twined about him, holding fast as their urgency grew. She couldn’t get close enough, couldn’t hear enough of his words, ones of praise, desperation, and need. She returned the same in a scattered, gasping mix of her dual languages of Béarla and Gaeilge, two halves of the whole that she’d become.
This was what Vi had recalled—pleasure almost too much to be borne. She was so close to peaking that nothing seemed to be left of her will. She closed her eyes, focusing on that retreating sense of self.
Then Liam wrapped one hand behind her head, clasping her skull. “No. Look at me,” he said. “At us.”
She knew his demand for what it was. He wanted an acknowledgment that this moment was more than just hers. It was a ceding of power to give him this, but it was what honor demanded. She opened her eyes. Bracing his weight fully above her, Liam withdrew until they were scarcely joined. He lifted her head until she could see where his body entered hers, then he pushed forward. She gasped at both the intimacy and the utter eroticism of what she saw. Twice more he entered and withdrew, until all Vi could say was the truth.
“We’re beautiful, aren’t we?” she whispered.
Liam eased her head back to the pillow. “We are.” He surged fully into her, picking up and maintaining a harder rhythm.
“Come for me,” he demanded. His words were rough, on the very edge of control, but she had already passed that point. Her orgasm claimed her, making her muscles go stiff as she cried his name. She shuddered as the shock of pleasure rolled outward. Liam joined her in the moment, going rigid. He gasped her name, then held himself fixed above her, his expression one of fierce pleasure. She’d thought herself spent, but crested on another wave of emotion that nearly knocked the breath from her.
Liam folded to the pillows, leaving them still intimately joined, but much of the bulk and weight of his body just beside her.
Vi’s peak passed. Eventually, the wildness ebbed, leaving her with one exhausted man and two troubling thoughts for company. First, how had she lived without these feelings for so long? And very worst, how was she to soon live that way again?
Liam sat still naked on the edge of the mattress, drinking the rest of the glass of bottled water he’d poured for Vi after he’d recovered enough to leave the bed and take care of matters. She’d thirstily swallowed half the water, then fallen back on the pillows, claiming strength to do no more.
Changes and none, he thought. He was older, world-weary, and in many ways a chastened man. And yet when he was with Vi—in her—he felt twenty again, with the hunger to own the world and the balls to take it.
Aye, changes and none. Vi was no longer a slender, coltish seventeen. She had a ripeness to her curves and a bite to her words. If possible, he liked this Vi better than her youthful iteration, and then she had been the center of his world.
He set the empty glass on the nightstand and shifted to look at her. She was as unselfconscious as always, sprawled across the bed with no need for covers. He couldn’t say for sure that she was sleeping, but because her eyes were closed he stole the luxury of watching her unobserved.
The world had marked her, as it had him. A scar shone silvery across her belly. He hadn’t fully noticed it earlier. Then again, he’d been driven in his intent. He followed the line with his index finger, then leaned down and settled a kiss directly center.
“This is new,” he said when she stirred.
She hesitated less than a heartbeat, then stretched and sighed. “Old, actually, and quite all better, but I’ll thank you for the kiss before reminding you that it’s not kind to point out a woman’s flaws.”
Liam smiled at her nip of a reprimand. He could lose himself in this woman. It was a romantic’s thought, that. And the same thought had once been a threat to his existence. But he was older now, and sometimes wiser, too, than he’d been at twenty.
For two and a half wild months, he had indeed lost himself in Vi Kilbride. He’d let her goals become his own, her dreams consume his. In fact, he’d very nearly fallen in with Da’s plan that he stay in Duncarraig and work at the pub until he had money enough for university. Vi had been all for it, talking of how they’d backpack through Europe when he was on his school breaks. She would sing on the street corner for money, and they would make love in every ruined castle they could find. Fine dreams, at least for an ambitionless man.
So what had hauled him back to reality? In a word, condescension. Two American college girls had come to visit his cousin Brian. They were blond and pouty-breasted as a pair of overendowed laying hens. Liam had taken a nearly instantaneous dislike to them, but that was because they’d treated him as though he were the dumbest Rafferty yet, good enough to tease but not made for talk. Not that he’d ever been inclined to take them up on their half-veiled invitations for a random ride. All of which made learning what Vi had believed of him the greatest insult of all.
It was a lifetime ago, he reminded himself, and he’d be doing no good by letting it cast its shadow this long.
“Roll over and I’ll rub your back,” he said to Vi, thinking it would be a pleasurable distraction.
She moved onto her stomach, and Liam looked down at her feeling like a starving man finally at the banquet table. Vi had always been white-skinned, but never pale. No, she was milky-rich with whiteness, except for the small strawberry colored mark she’d always had just above the curve of her right cheek. He intended to work his way there and taste it…in his own time. For now, though, he would touch and recall and learn anew.
He moved to the end of the bed and grasped her long and slender feet in his hands.
“Those aren’t my back,” she murmured.
“They’re not,” he agreed.
He massaged her feet until she had relaxed to near bonelessness. Then he permitted his attention to wander north, along finely muscled calves, and slowly up the backs of her thighs. She was in his bones, so much a part of his memories, of what he deemed appealing.
Liam knew that he’d landed in Beth’s bed because she’d had a way about her rather like Vi. It had been illusory, though. He’d mistaken American assertiveness for the same certainty of spirit that Vi possessed. By the time he could discern that essential difference, it had been too late. Beth had been pregnant with Meghan, and after much persuasion, she’d agreed to marry him. Proper choice, bad results—at least with respect to the adults involved. Meghan, he’d never regret. Misunderstand, become furious with, and otherwise act like a parent toward, yes. Regret, no.
Liam ran his hands across Vi’s bottom and to the small of her back, where he circled his thumbs to either side of her spine. Once, all those years ago, they’d spent hours touching each other like this. Until she’d closed him from her world.
“Paradise,” she said, sounding nearly drunk with pleasure.
He worked his way up, kneading his fingers over her already lax muscles. When he reached her shoulders, he detoured back to her hip to kiss that bit of strawberry that had tempted him. He kissed once and nipped once, in subtle retaliation of having been deprived this particular spot for so long. Then he straightened and went to work on her shoulders, earning him more words of praise. At least he assumed it was praise, as most was given in an unintelligible Irish slurred with sleepiness.
Done with her neck, Liam took the return route down her body, then spread her legs enough that he could kneel between them and pay special attention one final time to her lower back. At least that was the noble thought he ascribed to himself. Less noble and far more human was how hard he’d grown again.
He slipped his fingers between her legs and lingered at the slick flesh where she’d held him so well. She jumped slightly at his touch.
“And that’s neither my back nor my legs,” she said, raising herself up on her arms and looking over her shoulder.
“Do you want me to stop?” he asked, hoping she’d answer no, and feeling his fierce hunger double when she did. She settled back into the pillows and he touched her as he wished.
>
Soon he felt like that near-man of twenty again, desperate to come inside her. She’d been as necessary as air to him, and he’d never been so angry and alone as when they’d parted. Starved for her, Liam was breathing as though he’d just run the Dublin marathon. Bracing his weight on one hand, he reached for the nightstand, snagged a condom, and dealt with it. Since Meghan’s unplanned creation, he’d been scrupulous about such things.
“I need to be inside you,” he said to Vi. “Now.”
“Insatiable.” She rose to her hands and knees. “Remember what this was like?”
Liam shook with the memory. If she was willing to try it again, he surely was. He entered her in one stroke, then held fast to her hips as he moved. Liam looked at her, so exposed, vulnerable, and faceless to him. She wanted him to remember. God knew he did. Love given heedlessly, recklessly…given, then ripped away. They’d made such a mess of matters.
Liam stilled. This was wrong. He needed her eyes, the assurance that it was truly Vi he made love to. Though it nearly killed him, he withdrew.
“Liam?” Vi asked immediately.
“I need to see your face,” he said.
They untangled and she lay back against the pillows, open to him, eyes, soul, and emotion. This time when they joined, he moved hard and fast. This time he would make it right. This time there would be no hiding from each other, from the truth. It would be different, for he’d not lose her again.
Gritting his teeth so he’d not cry out, Liam arched and came, then collapsed over the woman who’d stolen a boy’s heart so that he could fight to reclaim it as a man.
Vi had reached an important decision. She would never leave this bed again…especially if she could persuade Liam to bring her some food. Sadly, he seemed disinclined to move. Could she not see his back rising and falling as he lay face down in the fluffy pillows, she might think that he’d suffocated.
“Hungry?” she asked, for a woman could always hope.
“Wouldn’t make it as far as the lift,” he said. “Room service, maybe?”
“Too slow.” It was a good thing that she was accustomed to assuring her own survival. She slipped from the bed and went to the desk, where she’d left a small bag of biscuits she’d bought while off on her own that afternoon. Food in hand, she returned to the bed. At the crinkle of the biscuits’ plastic covering, he turned his head her way.
“For me, too?”
They were chocolate covered, which meant it was an especially difficult sacrifice. In the end, though, Liam was chocolate-worthy.
“One, I think.”
He sat up, pulling the covers over his hips. “How hard does a man have to work for two?”
Smiling, she handed him an additional biscuit. “Tit for tat, I suppose.”
“Kind of you.” After he’d finished eating, he said, “Vi, we have to talk.”
Damn, but how she hated that phrase. “We do?”
“About what happens after today.” He smiled. “Other than more biscuits, that is.”
“Ah, the gold…should it be found.”
He nodded. “I’m trying to be forthright with you, not make the same mistakes I did fifteen years ago.”
Which was all well and good, but Vi knew they had great, fat lot more they could make. If she could save them at least the one she sensed coming, she’d be pleased. “Before you tell me your plans, I need to give you a bit of a story,” she said.
Liam’s mouth curved into a brief smile. “I’ve heard your bits. I’d best make myself comfortable, then.” He plumped his pillow and settled in.
“Several miles out Slea Head Road from Ballymuir is an ancient stone ring fort called Dun Mor. It overlooks the Blasket Islands, and is a favorite spot of mine to go and think. Two summers ago, someone—likely a local farmer looking for more land to work, free of tourists and the like—took an excavator to the earthworks that surround the fort and removed an ogham stone at the entry.”
“Lamentable, unless you’re the land-starved farmer, I suppose.”
Vi’s frustration heated. “Whoever did it has no excuse to destroy history,” she snapped before schooling herself to a calmer tone. “I admit maybe I felt the loss too deeply, but we’ve had so much taken from us, Liam. Fast-food trash has blown from Tralee to Dingle and even here and there in Ballymuir. Scarcely anyone speaks Irish daily, even in the Gaeltachts, and our punts have been replaced by those wear-out-in-a-week euros. This isn’t the land it was when you left fifteen years ago, and I’m beginning to feel as though if we trade more of our past away, we won’t be the same people.”
He remained silent, not hostile, but not precisely the willing audience she’d hoped for, either. Vi went for the grand sum-up. “All of which is a roundabout way of telling you why I feel as I said in the lift earlier. If we find the gold pieces and sell any part of them, our buyer should be the State.”
He sat upright. “Vi, I’ve told you, there will be no ‘we’ about this.”
She didn’t want to battle when persuasion might work better. “Pity, then, for with that attitude, when I uncover the gold, it will be an ‘I,’ as in Vi.”
She’d thought her comment would eke at least the shadow of a smile, but she got nothing.
“Look, I’m in trouble,” Liam said. “I need money, and a great deal of it.”
She hesitated, sorting though the possible meanings. “This is a need and not a want?”
“It is.”
Vi lay silent thinking of Liam the youth. He’d been made of wants…wanting wealth…wanting endless things from the finest car to the grandest home…wanting to lead and never follow.
“Why?” she asked.
He shifted so that he stared up at the ceiling, and took so long before he spoke that she had begun to doubt that he planned to at all. “I’ve not said a word of this to my family, but I’m near to losing my business. My partner has screwed me royally, using our assets to steal from others. What he’s done cannot be easily undone. When all’s been repaid, I’m going to be starting anew. That is, assuming anyone will hire me for more than my deep-diving skills, and I’m getting too damn old to be doing that day in and out.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Have you many employees to be affected?”
“I do, though I’ve managed to refer some to competitors, which was another nail in my coffin. News of what Alex has done isn’t yet public, but word is already out that we’re going down and no new work is coming in.”
“Honor can be a bit of a bitch, can’t she?” Vi said.
He returned to his side and drew her close. “The worst. I spent my whole youth being ‘one of those Raffertys.’ Half my teachers couldn’t tell me from my cousins or even from Cullen, who’s three years younger. All I ever wanted was to be my own man, to be something apart from them.”
“I always knew who you were,” she said, then curved her hand against the side of his jaw. He turned his face to kiss her palm, and she closed her eyes, savoring the warm intimacy of the moment. Aye, she’d known who he was and had loved him from the start.
He took her hand and laced his fingers between hers. “I’m going to tell you something as a point of courtesy, Vi, and I’d be grateful if you’d not take my head off in repayment.”
She looked at their hands and reminded herself that she yet had one free to swing if it were as bad as he had her thinking.
“About the gold,” he said, “I’ve already put out a quiet word for collectors—”
“You are the optimistic one, aren’t you?”
“I can afford to be little else. Reparations must be made for Alex’s thefts, and I need cash beyond that to survive.” He held tighter to her hand, and his squeeze of warning translated to tension in her. “In any case, I’ve heard back from an acquaintance in Boston. The man made great money in the computer industry and collects virtually anything Irish. Including his most current wife.”
“Am I to laugh at that?”
His expression bore a mix of hope and resignation. �
��Well, smile, at least.”
Vi seemed to have misplaced her sense of humor. “And what he owns already, does he at least lend to museums?”
“No, not that I’m knowing, at least. He has rooms next to his wine cellar that house the collection.”
She tugged her hand loose and moved toward the mattress’s edge. “I don’t like this, Liam. I understand that you’re needing money, but to even think of selling the gold to someone who would take it from home and store it in their—what?—cellar?”
“And you think it would fare much better in Dublin? Vi, it could as easily be stored in one of those boxes we saw.”
She stood. “It doesn’t matter. You’re not serving honor.”
Again he sat upright. “As you pointed out, she’s a bit of a bitch, and too costly in this case, too.”
“D’anam don diabhal,” she said, thinking of a phrase Nan had used when talking of those who had betrayed self and others. “Your soul to the devil.”
Liam looked shocked. “You wish that on me?”
“No, that’s what you’re doing for yourself.” She walked the room, noting her nakedness only when a chill rippled over her skin. She plucked her robe from the floor and pulled it on. “You’d bargain away your heritage to feed your pride.”
“This isn’t about pride. It’s about who I am…what I’ve made of myself.”
“Perhaps your soul is there already if you can’t separate who you are from what you do as work,” she said as she yanked her sash tight.
“Do you? Now, answer me honestly. Are you ‘Vi Kilbride, the artist’ when you think of yourself?”
It was a hard question, especially given her current lack of self, but also a fair one. Vi took her time in answering.
“I’m Vi, the artist, but I’m also Vi the sister, the neighbor, the vegetarian, and—”
“Well, I’m Liam Rafferty, marine salvor, king of the bloody high seas, and if I’m not that, I don’t know who I am anymore.”
She’d struck a nerve, indeed. If she couldn’t sense his pain, she’d be smiling a bit at his sheer truculence. “And do you think some extra money will buy you this knowledge?”
