The Last Bride in Ballymuir (31 page)

“
So, love, what is it you’re
wanting of me?”

“
Oh, I’m working on that,”
she answered, her hands going to the fastening at the top of his
denims. He didn’t ask or argue. He simply let her be the aggressor.
And for that gift of power, so healing to her soul, she loved him
all the more.

She had him gloriously
undressed in no time at
all.
He was so hot and alive and wonderful that
Kylie
knew unless she was part of him,
she’d never have enough.

“
I was thinking ...” she
began, then paused, her courage still a fledgling thing. “I was
thinking that I want you sitting on that bench and that I want to
take you inside me.”

His chest rose and fell hard beneath her
palms. He stepped back and sat. “Come here, then.”

Their lovemaking wasn’t free
of awkward moments, but that only brought a sweetness that
Kylie knew she would cherish forever. Soon
enough,
she was just where she wanted to
be. Michael holding her, in her, and she holding him, legs and
arms wrapped tight, her body his shelter.

This time, her private world held two. They
swayed and surged to a primal dance, his large hands settled on her
hips, but letting her set the pace. Kylie thought it incredible,
the absolute freedom in an intimate moment of dependence. Together
they found the center of that world, their cries echoing to the
rafters of the little barn. Then, boneless, replete, they held onto
each other until the chill of the air became too much.

Michael groaned his protest
as she unfolded herself from him, and he left her. He promised
delights
almost too tempting to refuse, if
she’d just come back
to him.

She made an apologetic
little noise, then staggered,
half
love-drunk, toward her panties. Somehow, she
managed to get back into them. Wrinkling her nose at
her stockings—too much work—she moved on to
her
brassiere.

Having given up on luring her back, Michael
stood and began to dress, too. Shirt gripped in one hand, and pants
still unbuttoned, he came to her.

“
So there’s no persuading
you to stay?” he asked while trying to tease her fingers away from
her skirt’s zipper.

She wrapped her arms about his waist. “It
would be grand if we could be Adam and Eve,” she said, then sighed.
“But we both have things to get back to. And Martin isn’t exactly
the first creature I’d want in my Garden of Eden.”

Michael’s laugh was drowned by a raucous
scream. They both jumped and held tighter to each other.

“
I’ll make stew of the bird
yet,” he muttered. “Bloody thing’s louder than an
alarm.”

A flash of a movement drew Kylie’s attention
to the doorway. In that instant, everything changed. She clung to
Michael, suddenly thankful for the peacock’s shrill interruption.
Peering around the muscled strength of Michael’s arm, she locked
eyes with Gerry Flynn.

Cloaked in gray evening twilight, he stood in
the entry, battery-powered light in hand. She looked away from the
angry hunger that had pulled his face into a drawn mask. She didn’t
want to think about how long he’d been standing there.

“
Just leave,” she said in a
low, trembling voice. “Go on, now.”

Michael chuckled and cupped the back of her
head with a broad hand, almost as if he were protecting her.
“It’ll take more than that to get the damned bird out.”

Flynn stepped all the way
into the barn. At the sound of his footfalls, Michael swung around,
taking
Kylie with him. She held fast, fear
for Michael’s reac
tion overriding any
instinctive modesty.

“
Get out, Gerry,” she cried
as Michael snarled something far stronger. He didn’t let go of her,
though, and turned her back around so that his body shielded her
from Flynn’s eyes.

Michael edged closer to his shirt. “Put that
on, then get in your car.”

“
Not a bloody chance.” She
snatched up his shirt and tugged it on. By the time she was
adequately covered, Michael had started advancing on
Flynn.

“
What are you doing
here?”

Flynn held his ground. “I saw the light and
knowing that Mrs. Flaherty wasn’t here, stopped to have a
look-see.”

“
And when you saw my car—and
Kylie’s. What then, Gerry? And why are you still standing here,
unless you’re looking for that lesson on the extent of your
official duties I promised you?”

“
You’ve no right to be here,
yourself,” Flynn shot back, though Kylie noticed a certain thinness
about his voice.

“
I have all the right I
need. I’m setting up business in here.”

Gerry pointed the beam of
light at Michael. It
shone on the ridges of
muscle across his flat abdomen,
on the
rope-like strength of his arms. Michael’s mouth
quirked into a smile. He didn’t appear in the least
uncomfortable with his lack of clothing. And he shouldn’t have
been. He was a man at the peak of his
physical prowess, a fact that set Gerry at obvious
dis
advantage.

Flynn moved the light around
the barn. “Business?
You? We’re too
peace-loving to be needing your services.”

Michael stiffened. “Kylie,
love, go on home now,”
he said almost
gently. “Flynn and I have matters to settle.”

“
I told you I won’t be
leaving,” Kylie answered in a voice every bit as calm as Michael’s.
Quite an accomplishment, considering the way she trembled. “Unless
you come with me.”

He shook his head, but kept
his gaze on the officer.
“I can’t do that,
darlin’.”

Kylie knew he was slathering on the
endearments to goad Flynn. It was working, too.

“
Unless you can show me
proof of Mrs. Flaherty’s permission to be here, you’ll both leave
now,” Gerry snapped. “Or I’ll arrest you for trespass.”

Michael laughed. “Fine threat, but hollow.
Everyone knows Breege is staying with Kylie, and that trespass
charge would have you laughed out of town. Go on your way,
now.”

Gerry looked Kylie up and down. “Payment for
services rendered, is it? You tend to Breege so you can use the
barn to f—”

Michael had his hand about Gerry’s throat so
quickly that Kylie couldn’t have cried out if she had wanted to. He
forced the Garda backward and slammed him into a wall. Gerry clawed
at Michael’s hand. He would have had better luck at digging his way
through the rough stone of the wall.

“
This is between us,”
Michael said. “I keep telling you that, and you keep cocking up.
What you said there, Gerry, that was the greatest cock-up of all
time, and I think it’s going to have you swallowing some teeth.” He
raised his fist.

Kylie jumped onto Michael’s back and wrapped
her two hands around his single large one. “No! You’re doing just
what he wants. He loses a tooth or two, and you lose your freedom.”
The words rushed out in a burst of pure terror. “Let him go. It
doesn’t matter what he said. Don’t let him hurt us like this.”

“
Ah, love, but it does
matter what he said.” He frowned at Gerry, who was panting and
looked pinched and white about the mouth. “It matters very
much.”

Michael glanced over his shoulder at her. She
still clung to him.

“
You won’t be leaving
without me?” He sounded almost teasing.

“
No,” she said as fiercely
as a flea on a lion’s back
could manage.
“Perhaps an apology will do?”

Michael pondered the matter while Flynn still
squirmed within his grip. “You can get down now, love,” he finally
said to her.

Kylie unwrapped her legs and stood, her heart
beating far too quickly with residual fear and dawning relief.

“
On your knees, little man,”
he said to Flynn, en
forcing the words with
a shove that sent Gerry sprawl
ing. “You’ll
give Kylie the apology she deserves, and tell her that you’re
nowhere near fine enough to stand
under the
same sun she does. Then you’ll hurry your
pasty white arse out of here before I change my mind
and knock your teeth out. Understood?”

Gerry did exactly as told,
his words strangled, ugly,
almost
frightening to hear. The message delivered was one of reprisal, and
Kylie shuddered with it.

In the silence that followed Gerry’s
departure, Kylie unbuttoned Michael’s shirt and slipped back into
her own, using the mundane task to calm her nerves. Michael
dressed, switched off the radio, then stood staring out the
doorway.

After twisting her hair back into some
semblance of dignity, she joined him.

“
We made an enemy
tonight.”

Michael brought her hand to his mouth and
brushed a rough kiss on her knuckles. “No, love, you’re just
finally seeing him as one.”

Kylie closed her eyes to whatever else in her
life she’d missed. It was simply too much.

Chapter Nineteen

A shoulder without a brother is bare.

—
Irish Proverb

Michael saw Kylie safe up
the road to her home,
then went back to the
barn to work out the rage he hadn’t been able to spend on Gerry
Flynn’s face. While the radio blared one of those mindless chat
shows, he mucked out the already clean cow stall, swept the main
floor, and would have taken on fixing the sagging window if it
weren’t so damned dark.

Still fighting a gut churning with anger, he
flung the broom into a corner. The peacock squawked in protest.
Michael quickly checked to be sure he hadn’t accidentally struck
the creature. The only one he wanted to hit was Flynn.

No, that wasn’t true. He was
pushing back the same thoughts he’d been righting to ignore all
day.
He also wanted to hit someone he
hadn’t seen in over
fourteen years, but was
pretty damned sure he’d heard from the night before. Another phone
call had come, and this time he’d been there to pick it
up.

“
Settled in, are
you?”
the man had said.
“Got some
thing
—
or someone
—
to lose?”

Nothing more. But certainly enough to make
him sick.

Threats weren’t unfamiliar to Michael. In
prison, they’d been common currency among padmates and guards. He
still saw them in the eyes of people like Clancy and Spillane in
Ballymuir. But his caller— whether it was Rourke himself or one of
his compatriots—had struck to the quick.

For now he had much to lose.
A sister. The begin
nings of work. And most
of all, Kylie.

He hadn’t been trying to
frighten her with bleak
talk of the future.
He’d been trying to ease her expec
tations.
Michael knew he couldn’t stop living over threats, but he couldn’t
go to the local authorities, either. His personal prejudice against
the justice sys
tem aside, any office that
held Flynn was of no use to
him.

Faceless, nameless threats. How to fight back
against someone he couldn’t see?

“
Another day, another thing
to be learned,” he said
to the peacock, who
appeared to believe he knew it all, already. Leaving the door open
just enough that Martin could escape, Michael headed
home.

Vi’s back was to Michael
when he walked into the
house, not that it
stopped her from bossing him about.

“
Shh-h-h,
you’ll wake them.”

He looked around. Only Roger
was in the room, and there was still just one of him. He moved
between his sister and what seemed to be consuming her attention.
She simply stretched out further on the electric-blue sofa and
continued staring at the flames
licking
bricks of turf in the fireplace. Her brows were
arched fiercely together, and her green eyes dark and fixed.
Enough to scare the bejeezus out of most men living, his baby
sister. Not him, though.

“
Communing with the spirits,
are you?” He opened his arms to encompass the small living space.
“What have you got going here—a regular convention of banshees,
pooka, and ghosties?”

She rolled her eyes. “No, it’s your little
brothers upstairs, fast asleep.”

He took a second to swallow the thought.
Here, and... “In my bed?”

She swung her legs around and sat up. “Don’t
you yell at me, Michael Kilbride. Where else was I to put
them?”

“
In your bed,” he snapped.
It was a selfish answer, but an honest one. The thought of Patrick
and Danny snuggled into the bed he’d come to think of as his own
was too much to take, especially after the series of atrocities
recently inflicted on his privacy. “You asked them here, let them
drool on your pillows!”

Vi gave a hoot of laughter.
“They’re not infants any
more. Closer to
giants, I’d say, and looking to be a bit
beyond the drooling stage.” She combed her fingers
through her hair and shook it out all wild.
“Besides, I
didn’t ask them here...
exactly,” she added.