The Last Bride in Ballymuir (19 page)

It had been close to the time that Gerry
Flynn was to pick her up for a special birthday dinner.

When she’d first arrived in
Ballymuir, he’d been
her protector,
fighting off the childhood bullies who’d
been pleased to have a shy outsider for a new target.
Later, they’d started dating. He’d been the first
to kiss
her, the first—and last—to say he
loved her.

That night, which she’d been
certain was going to be magical, she’d even put on her mother’s
pearls.
She wanted Gerry to see her looking
like the princess
he always called
her.

“
When they got back to the
house, Da was barely able to stand he’d had so much to drink. I
helped him upstairs and got him settled in, something I’d done
plenty before. I figured Mr. Keefe, that man, would
be gone by the time I got back downstairs. He
wasn’t,
though. I tried to usher him along,
but he just poured himself a drink and stood there watching me. He
asked me if I knew of my father’s financial difficulties. I said,
yes, I knew something about it.”

Kylie paused to draw in a bit of courage. “He
moved closer and put one finger under my chin, bringing my face up
to his. I noticed that his nails were all polished and smooth, just
like the rest of him, and for some reason this frightened me.”

She had sensed that something was terribly
wrong. She’d considered running out of the house, but she was so
unaccustomed to the heels she’d put on, she knew she wouldn’t make
it far. Glancing at the grandfather clock ticking away in the
corner, she had comforted herself with the fact that Gerry would be
there any minute now.

“
He
told
me how pretty I was. Then he told
me how wealthy he was, and how he’d like to help my father out,
given the proper incentive. I was so naive, I had no idea what he
was saying, at first. When he made himself plainer, I was furious.
I refused him, and he shrugged, telling me that my father’s fate
would be on my conscience. I told him I didn’t see that as being
any worse than what he proposed. He smiled then, and said that
willing or not, I’d be having the chance to compare those
sins.”

She had turned on her toes and run toward the
door to the enormous salon. Feet slipping on the parquet floor, she
wasn’t fast enough. As the ability to fight was brutally stripped
from her, she’d heard the sound of her mother’s broken strand of
pearls pinging against that hard, hard floor.

“
He forced me,” she
finished.

“
God. Oh, God,” she heard
Michael whisper just beneath his breath as he drew her onto his
lap. He held her so rightly that it seemed he tried to absorb her
body into the strength of his.

Gerry had eventually arrived, late as always.
She had tried to scream for him, but could get no sound past the
hand that made her teeth cut into the tender skin of her mouth. She
heard him calling for her, heard his footsteps on the marble entry
hall, then the wood of the salon floor. Then she heard his
inarticulate cry, and his footfalls clip away when Keefe ordered
him to get out.

He had left. Simply left.

Kylie burrowed even closer
to Michael. “I know you’re not Keefe, and that I’m no longer a
stupid lit
tle girl.” She quickly silenced
Michael’s objections to
what she’d called
herself. “But last night...last night was the first time since then
that a man’s done more than kiss me.”

Curled up on him with the
sound of his heart drumming beneath her ear, she felt brave enough
to tell him what he needed to hear. What she needed to say. “When
you touched me, I gloried in it. I wanted
you to touch me, and I wanted so very much to touch
you. I still do, but some last bit of guilt and
fear over what happened that night has gotten wrapped up in all the
good feelings.”

“
Guilt?” he interrupted,
sounding almost angry.
“Guilt?” His arms
came even tighter around her. “You
haven’t
a thing in this world to feel guilty over.”

She smiled sadly into the
rough fabric of his
jacket. “I know, and
the first thing I had to learn to do
was
forgive myself. It was the hardest thing, too. I
kept thinking if he hadn’t caught me gawking at
him,
if I’d been more sensible about having
a stranger in the house—”

“
If your bastard of a father
hadn’t passed out,” Michael offered. “Have you considered that
one?”

Kylie nodded. “I have, and I’ve managed to
forgive him. He doesn’t know what happened, and God willing, he
never will.”

Michael didn’t comment, then after a silence
asked, “What happened next?”

“
I took myself to a clinic
in Tralee that night, and was home well before Da rejoined the
world. Keefe, of course, was gone. Other than the people who’ve
treated me, I’ve never told anyone.”

“
I’m thankful you’ve told
me,” he murmured into
her hair. “I’d take
it all back for you, if I could. If I had
known you then, I would have protected you. I’d have never let
you come to harm. And even now, I’d like to hunt down the son of a
bitch and give him what he deserves.”

Another stone on his cairn.

Kylie felt a primal surge of emotion, pure,
hot, and so close to lust. All of Father Cready’s talk of
forgiveness had carried only so far. Though it was wrong, she
wanted Keefe damned, wanted him to suffer. And she still felt a
horrible, heartbroken pain over Gerry Flynn—the boy who’d said he
loved her and then left her there in her own blood and shame.

“
It’s in the past,” she
said, willing it to be so. Willing the moment’s hatred that had
seized her to slink back into the darkness.

“
It is,” Michael agreed in a
soothing voice, his hand making a broad sweep over her back. “And
now I’ll keep you safe.”

“
And I’ll do the same for
you,” Kylie replied, at first meaning it a joke, a way to lighten
the moment. But the words had no sooner escaped into the night than
she was overwhelmed by a fierce protectiveness. She’d face down
anyone—even the specter of Keefe—for this man.

Laughter rumbled in Michael’s chest as he
stood, staggering slightly, moaning about the cold, and holding her
tight against his body. “I’m sure you will, Kylie O’Shea.”

He let her slide down the
length of him until she found her feet. “Laugh if you will,” she
admonished
him in her best schoolteacher’s
voice. “But believe in
me, too.”

“
I do,” he said as he
brought his mouth to hers. “I do.”

He kissed her then, his broad hands cupping
her face, his mouth firm and wonderful. Wrapping her arms around
him, Kylie gave herself up to his strength. And in doing so, she
found a strength of her own.

Moonlight flowed over them, blessing them,
she thought. Even when a car drove very slowly past, its headlights
adding to the wash of the moon, she didn’t stop kissing him. Fate
owed her nothing, but if it was kind, it would give her this
man.

Chapter Twelve

When the dance is at its hottest, that’s the
time to stop.

—
Irish Proverb

Kylie had just turned onto
the main road toward Gaelscoil Pearse when she noticed a Garda’s
car rapidly closing on her. She glanced at the speedometer, then
recalled it had given up the ghost weeks before. Still, it
didn’t
feel
as
though she were speeding. Just to be sure, she slowed and drove as
sedately as she did when taking Breege to Sunday Mass. No easy task
since she was scarcely going to make the morning bell as it
was.

She hummed to herself and
studiously tried to avoid looking back in the mirror. Then a short
burst of siren gained her attention. The Garda was right
behind her—certainly close enough to be
recognized.

“
Gerry,” she groaned, then
drew to the side of the road.

His face was set in hard
lines as he came to her car
door. Since the
window crank was also still broken, Kylie stepped out.

“
Was I doing something
wrong?” she asked, knowing full well she hadn’t been.

“
You didn’t come to a
complete stop before turning.”

“
A complete stop for whom?
In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s no one around.”

“
I’m around.”

She gave in to exasperation.
“If what you’re look
ing for is a confession
that I counted only to two-and-
a-half
instead of three before proceeding, you won’t be getting
one.”

He looked down at the road beneath their feet
then back up at her. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

Jolted by the mixture of anger and some other
indefinable emotion blazing across his face, Kylie backed off a
step, bumping against her car.

“
What do you mean?” she
asked in a carefully neutral tone.

He jutted out his jaw. “I mean the men you
choose.”

In an instant she recalled the prior night,
and the car that had slowly passed by as she and Michael kissed. It
had to have been Gerry. “You certainly are around, aren’t you?”

His face turned a bright crimson at her
sardonic words, but he didn’t retreat. “You could have waited and
had a good man, a man such as—” His jaw flexed as he cut off
whatever he’d been about to say. “You could have had a man who’d
honor and marry you, but instead you let that... that evil bastard
touch you!”

Time seemed to be playing
fast and loose with more than just Kylie. She drew in a slow
breath. In the years since that horrible night, they’d never
discussed it. She’d heard nothing at all from him for
months. Then had come the calls while she was
away
at school. He’d never said a word—just
hung up— but she’d known it was Gerry. And since she’d been back in
Ballymuir, he was always there—visible, but just far enough away
she couldn’t precisely say he was watching her. She could feel it,
though. And feel his anger. An anger she simply couldn’t
understand.

“
Are you referring to the
night of my eighteenth birthday dinner, or to last night with
Michael Kilbride?”

He shook his head slowly, reminding her of a
fighter reeling under a ringing punch. “I mean Kilbride!”

“
Do you really? Somehow I
doubt it.” She looked somewhere over his shoulder, off into rolling
fields
where the morning mist still clung
like a silvery blan
ket. “You know,” she
said in a low voice, “I’ve spent a lot of years wondering how you
could have done that.
How you could have
left me there with that man.”

“
I don’t want to talk about
it.”

Sheep dotted the high slopes. At a whistled
signal from an unseen farmer, a dog crept low and stealthily toward
the flock. “Of course you don’t. After all, what’s the point in
dredging up the past? You turned away from me that night, and
you’ve never shown a moment’s remorse.”

“
Turned away from you? I’ve
always watched
over you. Always! Even when
you were away at uni
versity—after your
father proved to be the thief he is—I got word of how you were
doing. You don’t know what I felt then, or what I’m feeling now.
But look at me!” He pulled her face toward him when instead she
tried to keep her one link to the here and now, that dog earning
its day’s feed.

“
I said, look at
me!”

Unwillingly, Kylie did.

Gerry
waved a hand at his dark uniform. “I have official
responsibilities, now. I have duties to uphold and a reputation to
preserve.”

Her laugh was bitter. “Gerry
Flynn, member of the
Garda
Siochana,
a guardian of the peace. That’s
hardly a fitting title. You didn’t guard me with much care that
night.”

It was his turn to look away. His hands were
pulled into tight, white-knuckled fists. “That night, you were
willing. I know you were.”

Kylie let the sight of him
drift off. The dog had turned the flock back down the hillside. She
watched its every move as if her life depended on it. And in some
odd way, she knew that it did.
Forgiveness,
echoed the old refrain
in her head.

“
It helps you, believing
that,” she eventually said, once she was able to draw breath
without the stabbing pain of that old wound. “Well, I won’t
deprive
you of your comforts. I know too
well what that feels
like.” Then the
fierceness that had been born last night came back to her. It was a
pure, primal feeling, and she embraced it. “But I will tell you to
leave
Michael and me alone. We’re none of
your business.”

He ignored her warning with the same
unblinking determination that he ignored the truth of their past.
“He’s killed people, did you know that?”

“
He’s no
murderer.”

“
Ripe for an easy line,
aren’t you? He’s killed and who can say he won’t do it
again?”

“
I can.”

“
Don’t be a fool. You’ve
made a proper, decent life
for yourself.
And now you’re going to toss it away, aren’t you?”