by Amy Olle
“The Black Pit? You’re making this up, right?”
“No. Be quiet. In his misery, the boy banishes himself to the desert to live out his days. He will not eat or drink, and soon he becomes emaciated. His heart full of grief and his body malnourished, he loses his mind and comes to be known as Madman, or Fear Buile.
“One day, a peasant happens upon him. Having no use for the bread in his pocket, the Fear Buile gives it to the peasant. In gratitude, the peasant insists on handing over his only possession in the world, a tarnished silver cup.
“It’s no ordinary cup, mind you. It’s a magical vessel, and with it, the poor boy amasses great wealth. He gathers an army and sets out to free his love from her father’s dungeon, but when he arrives, the pit is empty. For many days and nights, he searches the land until he finds his love living alone in a cottage in the woods. He kisses her, and she weeps with joy at his longed-for return.”
Noah’s hand roamed over the dip of Mina’s waist and upward to the swell of one large breast.
“They stay in bed for days, loath to ever part again.” He nipped her earlobe and smiled when gooseflesh rippled over her arms.
“Their time is limited, for she had recently escaped the pit and run away to the woods rather than be married to the man her father picked for her, and her father’s warriors are hunting her. The king’s men find them, and a battle ensues, the fighting so fierce and so bloody its tale lives on even today.
“I never heard—”
He cut her off. “In the end, the poor boy is triumphant. He marries his girl and takes her away from the people who would do her harm. They live out their lives traveling from village to village, seeing all the places she dreamed of while confined to La Fosse Noire, and he is happy, for she is by his side.”
He toyed with the hair at her temple. “The end.”
Mina traced tiny circles on his chest, above his heart. “That’s an interesting story.”
“It’s a classic tale.”
The spot over his heart grew warm beneath her touch.
“He banished himself?”
“Yep.”
“Because of her?”
“He had some other stuff going on.”
“What other stuff?”
“Family stuff.”
Three more circles fell from her fingertips. “How young were they?”
“Teenagers.”
“That is young. Did you say he loved her?”
He tucked a strand of her hair behind one ear. “She was hot and looking at her made him hard. To a teenage boy, that’s love.”
She pinched his side. “That’s so romantic.”
In one fluid motion, he pinned her beneath him and held her wrists above her head. His face near to hers, he inhaled deeply so her heady scent filled his senses. “She was a smartass, though, so he had to take command early on.”
He covered her mouth with his to cut off any protests, but he swallowed only her yielding giggle. He gentled the kiss, taking his time to lick and savor, until finally, out of breath, he pulled back.
“Why did you tell me that story?”
He picked his words carefully. “I guess I wish things had gone differently for us. I wanted you to know that.” He dropped a kiss on the tip of her nose and rolled off her.
She rested her chin on his chest and peered up at him. “You never told me what happened. Why did you quit school?”
“My dad... He and I didn’t get along.” The air squeezed from his lungs with the memories. “I needed to leave town for a while.”
After a long silence, she asked, “Did he hit you?”
Noah stared into the darkness above them. “Only when I pushed him too far.”
Mina pushed herself upright and shifted to sit with her legs crossed in front of her. “What does that mean?”
Noah shrugged. “I pissed him off a lot.”
She seemed to chew on his words. “You did it on purpose?”
“I did.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, unsure how to explain the reasoning of a child. “At first, I just wanted to get a reaction out of him. Put something other than that blank look in his eyes.”
Lured by the cover of darkness and Mina’s soft inquiries, the old wounds reopened. He recalled the fear as the peacefulness of sleep transformed into chaos. His head slamming against a wall. His dad’s fist connecting with his face.
“But he took to it, and then, I did it to keep his focus off the little ones. The hitting stopped about the time Shea turned sixteen and started fighting back.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered.
He began to speak of things he’d never spoken of before. “My mom’s death changed him. Before she got sick, he was more like a normal dad. He went to work and came home for dinner. We played ball in the backyard, did fun stuff together.”
Noah scratched a phantom itch on his shoulder. “Her death changed him. He stopped coming home, or he’d drop us at a friend’s house or leave us with family we’d never met, and disappear. He might be gone for a few days or a few months. When he did show up, he wasn’t our dad. He was angry. Mean.
“One day, after being away for almost two months, he suddenly showed up. He was sober and well dressed, and he took Shea and me for a walk, just the three of us. He bought us a Coke.”
A stupid fucking pop and Noah had thought everything was going to go back to the way it had been.
“I was standing there, drinking my Coke and feeling like a fucking king, when the storefront across the street exploded.”
“What do you mean it ‘exploded’?”
“A bomb went off.”
Her sharp intake of breath carried through the dark.
“The Irish Troubles made things like bombs and assassinations part of life for a while, so it wasn’t all that unusual,” he explained. “Senseless and appalling but not unusual. The building was on fire, and people were running in every direction. Screaming. It was chaos.”
Mina’s small hand squeezed his. When had she taken his hand in hers?
“There was so much blood,” he heard himself say.
Her warm lips pressed to the palm of his hand.
“I just stood there,” Noah said. “I couldn’t move. I remember watching this kid. He was about my age at the time. His face was covered in dirt and blood. He sat in the street, next to a woman’s body. She was dead.”
Noah swallowed past the dryness in his mouth. “He didn’t cry. He just sat there holding her hand, with this awful expression on his face.”
He untangled his hand from hers and smoothed it over the soft skin of her calf. He grasped her ankle.
“Not fear or anguish, like I felt after my mom died. All I saw on that kid’s face was hate.” He’d turned to his dad, certain he’d see on Daniel’s face the revulsion he felt, but there was nothing, and Noah recalled thinking how peculiar that was.
Absently, he rubbed his thumb over her anklebone, back and forth.
“Fourteen people died that day. Ordinary people, families, going about their lives.”
The antique clock on the mantel in the living room chimed three times.
His throat tight, he pushed out the next words. “He didn’t flinch.”
Mina’s silence filled the space of several fractured heartbeats. “Who?”
“My dad. When that bomb went off, he didn’t flinch. He took us there, and waited. He knew what was going to happen, and he took Shea and me to see it.”
Noah swallowed, recalling the way the pop had turned to chalk in his mouth with the knowledge. The irreparable horror. The panic. The certainty that nothing would ever be right again had left him choked and hollow.
“Five days, I lived with it. I understood my dad sympathized with the Irish Catholics in their fight against the British, but I don’t remember him being a zealot. Maybe it was just convenience. He was mad at the world and lost without my mom, and he wanted to vent his pain.”
Noah broke off. For several l
ong, quiet moments, he listened to the soft whoosh of Mina’s breathing, in and out. He’d come this far. He might as well finish it and tell Mina the truth about who he was.
He couldn’t quite keep the waver from his voice when he said, “On the sixth day, I skipped school and went to my uncle’s house. He was a retired cop.”
He’d circled the block four times before ringing the bell.
“I told him what I thought. That my dad was somehow involved in the attack on that store.”
They’d come for Daniel that night, and soon after, Noah and his brothers had been ripped from their home, the last remaining fragment of their old life before their mom had died, and sent to the States to live with their mother’s brother, Father John.
“I turned traitor to The Cause and violated the Irish code of silence.”
The mattress dipped when Mina shifted closer to his side.
“I don’t know if my dad ever found out I was the one who squealed, but he knew I didn’t approve, and he never forgave me for that.”
Noah tried to let go of the shame. Daniel had been sick. His twisted mind couldn’t distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, love from hate. Noah wanted to believe he’d done the right thing by turning Daniel in to the authorities, but doubt remained. Why hadn’t he kept his mouth shut? How could he send his own dad to prison? Damn his brothers to a life an ocean away from their home, orphaned and disgraced?
Since that fateful afternoon, something inside Noah had changed, hardened. He didn’t cry or show emotion, or fall in love. Even in defiance, he was not confrontational, and his quest for answers, for absolution more often led him to his next bottle of liquor than brawling.
Though no matter how much he drank, it never changed the fact that his own father had despised him.
In the end, Daniel had served only three years before a ceasefire agreement had led to his pardon. An ex-con with nothing and no one, except a few “friends” still active in the fight, he’d followed his sons to a new life overseas.
No matter Daniel had no interest in starting anew. He picked up where he left off, distraught and adrift. Living just to breathe. And spread misery.
“You blame yourself, don’t you?”
Lost in the past, Noah pulled back at the edge in her tone.
She heaved a disgusted sigh at him. “The good ones always do.”
A smile pulled at his lips when he recognized his own words.
Before he formed an adequate smartass reply, she pressed her lips to his. “You’re amazing,” she whispered against his mouth.
I’m a traitor. He bit back the words.
She touched the side of his face. He flinched, not knowing her intention in the dark, but relaxed under her feather-light touch. A shuddering sigh escaped him.
“How old were you?”
“Ten.”
“Just a baby.” She placed her palm over his heart.
A wave of longing gripped him. He wanted to stay in the moment forever, where she gazed at him with understanding and love, tempting him as no one ever had.
The realization ricocheted around in his head. His pulse thrummed in a frantic rhythm. He wanted to stay.
“How did you become so good?” she asked.
He grasped her ankle and tugged. “Oh, man, you are such a sucker.” He moved over her as she slid to her back. “A hussy and a sucker. How did I get so lucky?” He nuzzled that sweet spot below her ear, where her scent was strongest.
He used his knees to part her thighs.
“You are good,” she said, a defiant tilt to her tone.
It wasn’t true, of course. Just ask the brothers he’d betrayed.
“Your dad was wrong.” Her words tried to wrap themselves around his heart.
Noah fumbled for a condom. Her body easily surrendered to his when he pushed inside her.
“He was lost and confused, Noah, and you deserved better than that.”
A guttural groan ripped from his throat as her wet hollow clamped around him.
Chapter Twenty-One
Mina dragged her aching body from bed and arrived at the main house, coffee in hand, as the crew set up for their workday.
When she’d arrived at the house on Monday morning, she’d spent more than ten minutes looking for Sam before she’d recalled this was his week off. A vigorous hunt turned up Eddie in the kitchen with the others, their attention riveted on Ethan as he recited a raunchy joke.
“Good morning,” she’d said brightly.
The men had dispersed. For Eddie’s part, he’d grunted and shouldered a straight path in the opposite direction.
Now, she shuffled through the main floor, keeping an eye out for Eddie but knowing she wouldn’t catch a glimpse of him. Another yawn racked through her and made her eyes water.
Embroiled in a heated debate, Joe and Ethan ignored her.
“You cannot be that stupid,” Joe spat. “You can’t miter the corners in a house this old. It’ll look like shit. You have to cope them, dumb ass.”
“Fine.” Ethan pitched a hefty section of wood molding to the newly refinished hardwood floors. “I didn’t know you were a fucking expert. Why don’t you do it?”
Overtired and under-caffeinated, Mina retreated. The last time she’d gotten between two fighting men, it hadn’t ended well for her.
She grabbed a putty knife and a container of spackle and absconded to the second floor to prep the bedroom walls for paint. A housefly buzzed around her. She swatted it away with the putty knife. As the nights grew colder, the pests sought the warmth inside the house and squeezed in through every crack and crevice they could find. Which, unfortunately, there were plenty of.
From the first floor, Joe continued to bark and snarl at the other men. Mina didn’t recall hearing such verbal abuse when Sam was in charge.
The fly buzzed around her again. Another one chased her across the hall, and several greeted her when she set up in the next bedroom.
“Hey, Tyler,” came Joe’s obnoxious bellow. “How’s your sister?”
Tyler’s muffled reply didn’t carry through the house, but Mina detected aggravation in his tone.
“Oh, yeah?” Joe called. “That’s what she said.”
The pesky fly bounced off her cheek.
Near noon, Mina grabbed some lunch at the carriage house, but before she headed back to the main house to work, she hunted up a flyswatter.
She made her first kill within moments of entering through the kitchen door. Mina flicked the bug’s carcass into a trash bin and moved into the dining room.
She tracked another housefly across the hall and into the front room, where Ethan and Ben measured windows for replacements and Joe and Tyler worked on laying floor trim.
“Get your head out of your ass,” Joe snapped at Tyler. “You can’t do it like that or it won’t be flush.” He yanked a length of trim from Tyler’s hand and dropped to his knees.
While Joe demonstrated the correct technique to Tyler, Ben and Ethan abandoned their work and wandered off, no doubt escaping the tension in the room.
Mina sighted another fly but swung and missed. She stood stock still, until she spotted the little beast. She crept closer.
Joe climbed to his feet but stumbled when his heel caught Tyler’s toe. A curse shot from his mouth, but he kept his feet under him.
He pointed at the floorboards. “You think you can handle it, or are you too stupid?”
Thwack!
Joe flinched away and rubbed the spot on his arm where she’d struck him.
He glared down at her. “What the hell was that for?”
“Can you be quiet for, like, ten minutes?” she said. “You’re giving us all a headache.”
Joe opened his mouth.
She lifted the flyswatter, and his jaw snapped shut.
Her arm relaxed.
“But he—”
Mina cut him off. “I saw him try to trip you.” She turned to Tyler. “Do not encourage him. Please.”
Tyler du
cked his head and focused on the strip of trim in his hand.
Joe’s smirk irritated her.
Thwack!
He gaped at her in disbelief. “What was that for?”
“I said ten minutes. No talking.”
The fly buzzed by her head and she chased the pest into the hall.
Ethan’s slow clap greeted her. “Halle-fucking-lujah.”
A small smile touched her lips before she chewed it away.
Another hard frost delayed Noah’s plan to spend the entire day at the site. His time was growing short to finish extracting the earth’s secrets before winter descended over the island and interrupted the excavation work.
He’d spent the night at Mina’s again, so instead of heading out, he settled at her dining table with his laptop and a steaming cup of coffee. Since falling into her bed, he’d neglected work, and a throng of emails filled his inbox when he logged in.
He scheduled office hours with a struggling student, downloaded a journal article for later reading, and lined up a visit from a professor of history at the University of Chicago who specialized in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century American settlements.
Noah stood, cracked his back, and, though the hour approached noon, went to refill his coffee. Mina had yet to appear. A migraine had forced her to crawl into bed the previous afternoon. She’d woken late and only long enough to eat some of the lasagna he’d made before retreating to the bedroom for the night.
The long hours were catching up with her.
As he poured from the carafe, the thought struck him that when he was back in Ireland, he’d miss this cramped, girly-girl apartment.
The bedroom door opened, and Mina stepped through it, a rumpled, half-clothed sexpot.
“How did you sleep?”
She rubbed her eyes. “Terrible. I had an insomniac sex fiend in my bed.”
His feet carried him to her. “Sorry about that,” he murmured, his hands seeking warm skin.
She leaned into him and sighed. “I forgive you.”
His fingertips found the hem of her sleep shirt and slipped beneath.
His train of thought derailed. “You’re not wearing any underwear.”
“I thought you were gone.”
His hands circled round to smooth over her bare behind. “Do me a favor—never put on underwear for my benefit.” He drew her snug against his body and backed her toward the sofa.
