by Nora Roberts
"You're happier without him then," Brianna said complacently. "And that's what's important."
A little surprised at how simple it was, Shannon raised a brow. "Yes, you're right." Just as it was a great deal more simple than she had supposed to sit back and enjoy the evening.
O'Malley's pub. It was, Shannon decided as she stepped inside, an old black-and-white movie starring Pat O'Brien. The air faintly hazed from cigarettes, the murky colors, the smoke-smudged wood, the men hunkered at the bar over big glasses of dark beer, the laughter of women, the murmuring voices, the piping tune in the background.
There was a television hung behind the bar, the picture on some sort of sporting event, the sound off. A man wearing a white apron over his wide girth glanced up and grinned broadly as he continued to draw another brew.
"So, you've brought the little one at last." He set the pint down to let it settle. "Bring her by, Brie, let us have a look at her."
Obliging, Brianna put Kayla, carrier and all, atop the bar. "She's wearing the bonnet your missus brought by, Tim."
"That's a sweet one." He clucked Kayla under the chin with a thick finger. "The image of you she is, Brianna."
"I had something to do with it," Gray put in as people began to crowd around the baby.
"Sure and you did," Tim agreed. "But the good Lord in his wisdom overlooked that and gave the lass her mother's angel face. Will you have a pint, Gray?"
"I will, of Guinness. What'll you have, Shannon?"
She looked at the beer Tim O'Malley finished drawing. "Something smaller than that."
"A pint and a glass," Gray ordered. "And a soft drink for the new mother."
"Shannon, this is Tim O'Malley building your Guinness." Brianna laid a hand on Shannon's shoulder. "Tim, this is my... guest, Shannon Bodine from New York City."
"New York City." With his hands moving with the ease and automation of long experience, Tim beamed into Shannon's face. "I've cousins to spare in New York City. You don't happen to be knowing Francis O'Malley, the butcher."
"No, I'm sorry."
"Bodine." A man on the stool beside Shannon took a deep, considering drag from his cigarette, blew out smoke with a thoughtful air. "I knew a Katherine Bodine from Kilkelly some years back. Pretty as fresh milk was she. Kin to you, maybe?"
Shannon gave him an uncertain smile. "Not that I know of."
"It's Shannon's first trip to Ireland," Brianna explained. There were nods of understanding all around.
"I knew Bodines from Dublin City." A man at the end of the bar spoke in a voice cracked with age. "Four brothers who'd sooner fight than spit. The Mad Bodines we called them, and every man son of them ran off and joined the IRA. That'd be back in... thirty-seven."
"Thirty-five," the woman beside him corrected and winked at Shannon out of a face seamed with lines. "I went out walking a time or two with Paddy Bodine, and Johnny split his lip over it."
"A man's got to protect what's his." Old John Conroy took his wife's hand and gave it a bony squeeze. "There was no prettier lass in Dublin than Nell O'Brian. And now she's mine."
Shannon smiled into the beer Gray handed her. The couple were ninety if they were a day, she was sure, and they were holding hands and flirting with each other as if they were newlyweds.
"Let me have that baby." A woman came out of the room behind the bar, wiping her hands on her apron. "Go, get yourself a table," she said, gesturing Brianna aside. "I'm taking her back with me so I can spoil her for an hour."
Knowing any protest was useless, Brianna introduced Shannon to Tim's wife and watched the woman bundle Kayla off. "We might as well sit then. She won't let me have the baby back until we leave."
Shannon turned to follow, and saw Murphy.
He'd been sitting near the low fire all along, watching her while he eased a quiet tune out of a concertina. Looking at her had fuddled his mind again, slowed his tongue, so he was glad he'd had time to gather his wits before Gray led her to his table.
"Are you entertaining us tonight, Murphy?" Brianna asked as she sat.
"Myself mostly." He was grateful his fingers didn't fumble like his brain when Gray nudged Shannon into a
chair. All he could see for a heartbeat of time were her eyes, pale and clear and wary. "Hello, Shannon."
"Murphy." There'd been no gracious way to avoid taking the chair Gray had pulled out for her-the one that put her nearly elbow to elbow with Murphy. She felt foolish that it would matter. "Where'd you learn to play?"
"Oh, I picked it up here and there."
"Murphy has a natural talent for instruments," Brianna said proudly. "He can play anything you hand him."
"Really?" His long fingers certainly seemed clever enough, and skilled enough, on the complicated buttons of the small box. Still, she thought he must know the tune well as he never glanced down at what he was doing. He only stared at her. "A musical farmer," she murmured.
"Do you like music?" he asked her.
"Sure. Who doesn't like music?"
He paused long enough to pick up his pint, sip. He supposed he'd have to get used to his throat going dry whenever she was close. "Is there a tune you'd like to hear?"
She lifted a shoulder, let it fall casually. But she was sorry he'd stopped playing. "I don't know much about Irish music."
Gray leaned forward. "Don't ask for 'Danny Boy,'" he warned in a whisper.
Murphy grinned at him. "Once a Yank," he said lightly and ordered himself to relax again. "A name like Shannon Bodine, and you don't know Irish music?"
"I've always been more into Percy Sledge, Aretha Franklin."
With his eyes on hers and a grin at the corners of his mouth he started a new tune. The grin widened when she laughed.
"It's the first time I've heard 'When a Man Loves a Woman' on a mini accordion."
"'Tis a concertina." He glanced over at a shout. "Ah, there's my man."
Young Liam Sweeney scrambled across the room and climbed into Murphy's lap. He aimed a soulful look. "Candy."
"You want your mum to scrape the skin off me again?" But Murphy looked over, noted that Maggie had stopped at the bar. He reached into his pocket and took out a wrapped lemon drop. "Pop it in quick, before she sees us."
It was obviously an old routine. Shannon watched Liam cuddle closer to Murphy, his tongue caught between his tiny teeth as he dealt with the wrapping.
"So, it's family night out, is it?" Maggie crossed over, laid her hands on the back of Brianna's chair. "Where's the baby?"
"Diedre snatched her." Automatically Brianna scooted over so that Maggie could draw up another chair.
"Hello, Shannon." The greeting was polite and coolly formal before Maggie's gaze shifted, narrowed expertly on her son. "What have you there, Liam?"
"Nothing." He grinned over his lemon drop.
"Nothing indeed. Murphy, you're paying for his first cavity." Then her attention shifted again. Shannon saw the tall dark man come toward the table, two cups stacked in one hand, a pint glass in the other. "Shannon Bodine, my husband, Rogan Sweeney."
"It's good to meet you." After setting down the drinks, he took her hand, smiling with a great deal of charm. Whatever curiosity there was, was well hidden. "Are you enjoying your visit?"
"Yes, thank you." She inclined her head. "I suppose I have you to thank for it."
"Only indirectly." He pulled up a chair of his own, making it necessary for Shannon to slide another inch or two closer to Murphy. "Hobbs tells me you work for Ry-Tilghmanton. We've always used the Pryce Agency in America."
Shannon lifted a brow. "We're better."
Rogan smiled. "Perhaps I'll look into that."
"This isn't a business meeting," his wife complained. "Murphy, won't you play something lively?"
He slipped easily into a reel, pumping quick, complicated notes out of the small instrument. Conversation around them became muted, punctuated by a few laughs, some hand clapping as a man in a brimmed hat did a fast-stepping dance on his way to the bar.
<
br /> "Do you dance?" Murphy's lips were so close to her ear, Shannon felt his breath across her skin.
"Not like that." She eased back, using her glass as a barrier. "I suppose you do. That's part of it, right?"
He tilted his head, as amused as he was curious. "Being Irish you mean?"
"Sure. You dance..." She gestured with her glass. "Drink, brawl, write melancholy prose and poetry. And enjoy your image as suffering, hard-fisted rebels."
He considered a minute, keeping time with the tap of a foot. "Well, rebels we are, and suffering we've done. It seems you've lost your connection."
"I never had one. My father was third- or fourth-generation, and my mother had no family I knew about."
That brought a frown to her eyes, and though he was sorry for it, Murphy wasn't ready to let it go.
"But you think you know Ireland, and the Irish." Someone else had gotten up to dance, so he picked up a new tune to keep them happy. "You've watched some Jimmy Cagney movies on the late-night telly, or listened to Pat O'Brien playing his priests." When her frown deepened, he smiled blandly. "Oh, and there'd be the Saint Patrick's parade down your Fifth Avenue."
"So?"
"So, it tells you nothing, does it? You want to know the Irish, Shannon, then you listen to the music. The tune, and the words when there are words to hear. And when you hear it, truly, you might begin to know what makes us. Music's the heart of any people, any culture, because it comes from the heart."
Intrigued despite herself, she glanced down at his busy fingers. "Then I'm to think the Irish are carefree and quick on their feet."
"One tune doesn't tell the whole tale." Though the child was dozing now in his lap, he played on, shifting to something so suddenly sad, so suddenly soft, Shannon blinked.
Something in her own heart broke a little as Brianna began to quietly sing the lyrics. Others joined in, telling the tale of a soldier brave and doomed, dying a martyr for his country, named James Connolly.
When he'd finished, Rogan took the sleeping boy into his own lap, and Murphy reached for his beer. "It's not all 'MacNamarra's Band,' is it?"
She'd been touched, deeply, and wasn't sure she wanted to be. "It's an odd culture that writes lovely songs about an execution."
"We don't forget our heroes," Maggie said with a snap in her voice. "Isn't it true that in your country they have tourist attractions on fields of battle? Your Gettysburg and such?"
Shannon eyed Maggie coolly, nodded. "Touché."
"And most of us like to pretend we'd have fought for the South," Gray put in.
"For slavery." Maggie sneered. "We know more about slavery than you could begin to imagine."
"Not for slavery." Pleased a debate was in the offing, Gray shifted toward her. "For a way of life."
"That should keep them happy," Rogan murmured as his wife and brother-in-law dived into the argument. "Is there anything you'd particularly like to do or see while you're here, Shannon? We'd be pleased to arrange things for you."
His accent was different, she noted. Subtly different, smoother, with a hint of what she would have termed prep school. "I suppose I should see the usual tourist things. And I don't suppose I could go back without seeing at least one ruin."
"Gray's put one nearby in his next book," Murphy commented.
"He did, yes." Brianna glanced behind her, trying not to fret because Diedre had yet to return the baby. "He did a nasty murder there. I'm just going to go back and see how Kayla's fairing. Would you have another pint, Murphy?"
"I wouldn't mind. Thanks."
"Shannon?"
With some surprise, Shannon noted her glass was empty. "Yes, I suppose."
"I'll get the drinks." After passing Liam to his wife, Rogan rose, giving Brianna a pat on the cheek. "Go fuss with the baby."
"Do you know this one?" Murphy asked as he began to play again.
