by JoAnn Ross
He stroked her hair as she wept, murmuring tender words, encouraging her to let it all out.
And when she’d finally wept herself dry, he cupped her face between his large and gentle hands and kissed away the salty tears from her cheeks.
“Poor you.” She lifted his hand to her lips.
“Why poor me?”
“Because you no sooner escaped having to comfort grieving women than here you are again, stuck in that same situation.”
“Not the same at all,” he corrected. “Because being with you is no hardship.”
“And isn’t that a lovely thing to say?” She sat up and glanced over at the clock. “I’ve nearly slept the day away.”
“You needed it. Even without what you’ve gone through the past forty-eight hours, I didn’t let you get any sleep the night before we got the call from Nora.”
“That night was certainly no hardship,” she tossed his words back at him. “Where’s the family?”
“They’ve gone into town to arrange for Fionna’s stone.”
“Ah. Da bought his own before he died.” She sighed. “Although Nora was upset that he’d spent the money, I always thought the real reason she got angry at him was she didn’t want to think about him dying.”
“Perfectly understandable.”
“True. I wonder if he had a premonition.”
“Oh, perhaps your mother gave him advance warning.”
She couldn’t tell from his expression whether he was teasing or serious. But his words did bring back what her grandmother had told him.
“About Mam sending you to me,” she said.
“Yeah. I was thinking about that while you were sleeping.”
Terrific. Now he’d think they were all crazy. “And?”
“And I was trying to figure out how to thank her.”
Even if he didn’t mean totally mean it, it was the perfect thing to say.
“Are you up for a ride?” she asked. “Because there’s something I’d like to show you.”
“I’m willing to go anywhere you take me.”
Since she assured him she was rested, and the only experience he’d ever had driving on the left side of the road was a few days in London, he didn’t argue when she got behind the wheel. As they drove through the countryside, J.T. drank in the scenery—the stone fences, the fields, the meadows splashed with purple, white, and yellow wildflowers. Nearly every crossroads—and there seemed to be hundreds for such a small area—boasted a statue of the Virgin Mary in a small stone grotto, often adorned with seashells.
After parking the car on the side of the road, they began walking up a narrow trail, where they passed a cemetery, high Celtic crosses standing like sentinels over rounded stones covered with green moss. After continuing up the twisting mountain trail, they came upon a mound of earth blanketed with yellow poppies and decorated with more shells and stones.
“It’s a cairn,” Mary said. “Built about five thousand years ago. We have quite a few in this part of the country. They’re like a tomb, but since the ancients believed in an active afterlife, they were often buried with tools, weapons, and household goods.”
“Which saved them from having to go shopping to get stuff for their new life,” he said.
She smiled for the first time since she’d received the phone call. “Aye. The ancients didn’t have the benefits of Target or the Internet.”
J.T. had grown up hearing stories about the Grand Dérangement, the forced expulsion of the Acadians from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, which had resulted in his family settling in Louisiana. You couldn’t live in Shelter Bay without hearing the story of that town’s founding. Yet both events were like yesterday when compared with this land that had, in many ways, remained unchanged for millennia.
They left the trail, and were climbing over ancient, rounded mountains that were on the way to crumbling back to dust. Next they came to a towering hedge covered with shocking pink flowers. The thick greenery extended in both directions as far as the eye could see.
“There’s a secret passageway that leads to the lough,” she told him.
J.T. followed her through the bright, fragrant passageway, stopping in his tracks to look down into a valley that appeared to belong in an illustrated book of fairy tales.
A lake, surrounded by feather-crowned reeds, was a bold splash of brilliant sapphire on a mottled green carpet. Two swans—one white, the other black—that looked as if they’d just flown in from Sleeping Beauty’s castle glided serenely on the water. On the far bank of the lake a stone castle, slowly crumbling, was painted gold and crimson by the setting sun.
“It’s stunning. And very peaceful.”
“It is now,” she agreed. “We Irish have a saying: ciunas gan uagineas. It means ‘quietness without loneliness,’ which I’ve always thought suits the scene.”
J.T. agreed.
“This is also the lake where the Lady is supposed to live.”
The one Quinn Gallagher had written about. The movie she’d first appeared in. “I recognize it from the film.” He hadn’t seen it at first, because, he supposed, he hadn’t really expected anything so stunning to exist in real life.
“But I didn’t bring you here to tell you the story, which you mostly know from having watched the film, although Quinn does admit to taking liberties.”
“As it seems most storytellers do.”
“True. Myself included…This place wasn’t always so peaceful,” she said. “The truth is that this land my family has lived on for centuries was the scene of many battles.”
Perhaps because he’d spent so many years in war zones himself, J.T. could picture them. And hear them. The clash of swords, the shouting, the confusion, the battle horses.
And suddenly, inexplicably, this place, which he’d never before seen, became very familiar.
“This is where we are together when I dream of you,” she said. “There’s a battle raging behind you and you come striding out of the smoke, with your armor and your sword, and take me.” She glanced down at the flower-strewn meadow. “Right here.”
Hell. It was probably his own imagination, but…
He shook his head. “It’s impossible.”
“Aye, it is.”
But he knew she believed it. And the crazy thing was, thinking back on those spirits at Little Bighorn, J.T. did, too.
He took her in his arms. Not to arouse, nor soothe, but to be close. “I want to give you what you deserve,” he said against her hair. “What you want.” Because this might be one of the most important conversations he’d ever had in his life, he had to be honest with her. “But I can’t.”
When she would have pulled away, he tightened his arms around her. “Not now,” he said.
She looked up at him, hope warring with pain in those remarkable eyes that were exactly the hue of the lake.
“When?”
And wasn’t that the question he’d been asking himself for the past twenty-four hours?
“Give me two weeks. Then I promise, we’ll meet back here.”
Although there was a sheen of tears in her eyes, the lips he could taste in his sleep turned up, ever so slightly, at that.
“At least you’re not making me wait until New Year’s Eve,” she said.
“I’d never make it that long,” he admitted. “But as you undoubtedly figured out, I’ve been drifting since I came back home. There are some things I need to settle before we talk about the future.”
She sighed. Heavily. With resignation. “Fortunately for you, Fionna was right when she told you we Joyce women would never be happy with a man we could push around.”
“Two weeks,” he repeated. “Then you can push me around all you want.”
“That may be the first lie you’ve told to me, J. T. Douchett,” she complained. “But two weeks it is. And not a day longer.”
“I promise.” He touched his mouth to hers as the sun set behind the castle ruins. “A chuisle mo chroi,” he murmured against her lip
s.
Mary’s head came up so fast, it hit beneath his chin, causing his teeth to bang together. “What did you say?”
He had been as surprised as she looked to hear those words coming out of his mouth. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t speak Irish?”
“Not a word.”
“Yet you called me the pulse of your heart.”
“Well…it definitely fits. Because you are.”
“But how did you know that?”
He smiled, a slow, satisfied smile, as he gave himself up to this place. To her. “Easy.” He took her lips again, this time taking the kiss deeper. Longer. “Magic.”
47
Coastal Community College was set up on a bluff high on a hill overlooking the harbor. While certainly not the largest college in the state, it was one of the most charming, set in a grove of fir trees, its buildings painted lighthouse white and topped with a red cedar shake roof.
Inside, colorful Native American art lined walls painted the same buttery yellow as the hospital in Castlelough, the color designed to bring in sunshine during the darkest of rainy Pacific Northwest days.
J.T.’s meeting his first morning back in Shelter Bay was with the president of the college, the vice president of instruction, the human resources director, the dean of college relations, and the director of the college foundation.
“Well,” the president, a dark-haired woman who appeared to be in her late forties, said, after going through the file he’d brought with him, “your credentials are definitely impressive.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“Which makes me wonder,” the human resources guy broke in, “why, after teaching at the War College, you wouldn’t consider a community college a step down.”
“That’s not the case at all,” J.T. said. He’d had plenty of time to think about it on the long flight home from Ireland. “As your brochure states, community colleges are the way forward into the future. Especially these days with so many people out of work, they offer the opportunity for a quality education close to home. In the community, thus their name.”
“Yet what’s to prevent you from getting bored and moving on to greener pastures?”
“I like the pastures just fine, here,” J.T. said easily. “This is, after all, my hometown. I have family here. Three generations of connections.”
“We have a great many ROTC students.” The vice president of instruction pointed out what J.T. had already unearthed for himself online. “I have no doubt that you’d be a great help preparing them for any deployments they may experience.”
“I like to believe my wartime experience would prove helpful,” J.T. said. “But there’s more to fighting wars than what happens on the battlefield. I believe a strong grounding in war history also helps in decision making. Both at the command level and on the ground.”
“Well put,” the director of the foundation said. “I was with III MAF at Khe Sanh.”
Although the Marine Amphibious Force had landed in the tactical victory column of the Vietnam War, what became known as the hill battles, J.T. knew it had been a hairy time.
“Then you’d know that Marines don’t quit.”
Although he was responding to the director, he shot a look at the HR guy.
“I also believe that military history serves everyone,” J.T. added. “Not just those fighting our wars.”
“Well put,” the fellow Marine, who was obviously on his side, said. Semper Fi.
The rest of the interview went well, and thirty minutes later, J.T. left the administrative building an employed civilian.
His next stop was at Take the Cake bakery. Not because he was in any need for a cupcake, although he had to admit the German chocolate was the bomb, but Sax had said that, having been a CPA before turning to sweets, the baker was the best person in town for financial advice. Which turned out to be true.
“So, what do you think?” he asked his brothers, as they stood on the piece of property overlooking Moonshell Beach.
“I think you’re going to be teaching a lot of classes to pay for this,” Cole, always the pragmatist, warned.
“You guys know there’s not a lot to spend your money on when you’re deployed,” J.T. said. “I could cover the land. And the cottage.” He pointed toward a small cottage he’d decided he and Mary could live in while building their own home. Then they could turn it into a guesthouse for when her family visited from Castlelough.
“Have you even asked her if she wants to live here?” Sax asked.
“Not yet. But Sedona—and thanks for telling me about her, because she’s brilliant—said that since this is a buyer’s market, the seller would give me time to change my mind if she doesn’t go along with the deal. It’s been on the market over a year and I’m the first bite the seller’s gotten.”
“The cottage is, to put it mildly, a wreck,” Cole pointed out.
“It just needs a little TLC,” J.T. argued. “I figured we could do the painting and repairs, while our women took care of the inside. Getting furniture and all that decorating stuff.”
“Which will probably cost more than a new roof.” Cole glanced up at the moss-covered roof in question.
“I can handle it,” J.T. said yet again. Sometimes it sucked being the youngest brother. Especially when Cole got into elder mode.
“Well, then,” Sax said, giving his brother a one-armed man hug, “I’d say, since you promised Mary you’d be back in two weeks, we’d better get our asses in gear.”
48
While setting a romantic meeting place and time might work very fine in the movies, Mary was finding, yet again, that the movies were far different from real life.
After her agent returned home from Peru with the revelation that she’d once been an Inca queen who’d lived in a mountain city above the clouds—which had immediately had Mary thinking of the Neil Young song—she’d gone on to confirm that although Pressler could hire writers to create a mermaid/vampire story, he could not use either her world or her characters.
Which was a relief on more than one level, since Mary had only ever seen the story as a trilogy, from the first. To her mind, once her selkie queen gave up her kingdom to live on land with the human she’d chosen to mate with for life, the story had its happy ending.
So, trying not to go crazy while she was waiting for J.T. to return to Castlelough, and her, she began work on the story of the fisherman and the selkie that had been stirring in her mind for so many months. And while writing somewhat took her mind off the stubborn Marine she’d fallen in love with, the problem was that since she’d told the story to him that day on the boat when he’d first kissed her, it did nothing to ease the need that was growing exponentially with every passing day.
Then finally, it was time.
After tiring of her pacing a path in the floor, Nora had finally shooed Mary out of the house, causing her to arrive at the lake early.
Where she waited.
Then finally(!) he was coming over the hill, his hair as dark as a moonless night over the Burren, eyes the color of rain. But much, much warmer.
He was striding toward her on long, determined legs that ate up the ground.
His jaw was wide and square, his rawboned face as chiseled as the stone cliffs into which the lake had been carved by glaciers eons ago.
Although clad in jeans and an Aran Islands sweater, he was still every inch a warrior.
Having grown up in a country that had suffered centuries of hostilities from battling factions, Mary still hated war.
But she loved him.
He stopped in front of her, eyes so warm as they looked down into hers, she felt her body melting, like a candle left out too long in the summer’s sun.
“Do you have any idea how much I’ve missed you?” he asked.
“And wasn’t that your own doing?” she countered, placing her hands on her hips when she wanted to fling them around his neck.
He laughed. “Your grandmother was right. Yo
u Joyce are strong-willed females.” He skimmed the back of his hand down the side of her face. “And ooh-rah for that.”
“We’re also known for getting straight to the point,” she reminded him. “So, what have you decided?”
“What I’d already decided before I left. That I want you.”
“Leaving was an odd way of showing that.”
“I needed to get a life back. A life I could ask you to share.”
This was still not the romance she’d been hoping for. But he was getting closer.
“First I need to know something.…Are you going back to Malibu?”
“No.” She’d already decided to return to making the films she loved. The films that had first garnered her an audience. Which might be smaller, but her work would be her own.
“What would you say to spending part of the year in Shelter Bay?”
“I’d say, if you’re asking me to be spending it with you, yes.”
“Okay.” He let out a long breath, and suddenly she realized that she wasn’t the only one who’d come here today with nerves all in a tangle.
“I have a job. Teaching history at the community college. Most of the students will probably be ROTC, on their way to the military, who I think I can help. As for the others, who’ll be going into civilian life, I still believe it’s important for them to know more about their country’s past, too.”
“Coming from a country with a great deal of past, you’ll be getting no argument from me there,” she said.
“And I bought a house. Well, not exactly a house. But some land with this cottage I thought we could live in while we built one large enough for our family. And then we could use the cottage for a guesthouse for your family. It’s on the coast. Overlooking Moonshell Beach.”
“Our beach?”
“Yeah. Our beach. Because I knew, after making love to you there, I’ll never be able to think of it any other way.”
“That’s so lovely. And romantic. And where would we be spending the rest of the time?”
