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‘That’s as may be. But now that she’s got me, I’d kinda like it if she hung on. At least when your workaholic butt was here she got to see me.’
‘It’s about time you did something, right enough. I couldn’t keep carrying the both of us for ever.’
Laughter sounded down the line. It wasn’t true, and they both knew it. Eamonn had struck gold when he’d met Pete. Fourth generation Irish, the gentle giant had taken the newly arrived, wet behind the ears Eamonn under his wing in the big city. Without his help and his contacts Eamonn might never have made it. And he would never forget that.
‘You couldn’t carry me if you had a truck.’
Eamonn smiled. ‘I have the info here on the Queens project. I’ll look it over and e-mail you back any thoughts I have—okay?’
‘No problem, buddy.’ There was a pause, then, ‘You doin’ okay?’
‘Course I am.’ But even as the words came out he was asking himself if they weren’t a lie. He didn’t know what he was.
‘Can’t be easy, missin’ your dad’s funeral and all.’
Eamonn took a breath, moved the receiver from one ear to the other. No, that part wasn’t easy. The least he could have done was be there to pay his respects. To say sorry for not having come back sooner. He’d always thought there would be time—that the bridges that had started to mend through phone calls would be the first steps towards him seeing his father again face to face. Instead he’d had to make do with a silent vigil by a graveside under a grey sky that had wept tears he couldn’t shed himself. Weeks after his father had been buried. It didn’t make him feel like much of a man.
‘I have a couple of issues to work through. But I’m fine, Pete. Really. You don’t need to worry.’
‘Well, look, I hope the visit home does you good. You’ve been restless a while now.’
Wasn’t that the truth? He’d tried burying himself in work for years, had made a clean fortune out of it. But that hadn’t been enough. He’d dated—stunningly beautiful women, as it happened—but nothing that had lasted. And he’d travelled, seen parts of the world he could only have dreamed of when he’d been growing up in the wilds of Ireland.
But he was still restless.
And now he was rearranging his life to continue a visit that should have taken only a few days, to take care of someone who really didn’t want his help.
He took another breath. ‘I’ll send this stuff through in a while, Pete. E-mail me anything else that comes up, and we’ll work that way ’til I get back.’
Pete took a similar breath and gave up. ‘Right. Okay, then. I’ll talk to you soon.’
‘Send my love to Marcy.’
‘Sure I will. If I ever get to see her again.’
Eamonn set the receiver down and stared at the laptop screen for a long while, his eyes not even focusing on the e-mail. What was he doing?
The next time he saw Colleen he was going to have to have more belief in her strength and tell her why he’d come back. What it was he wanted to do to sever his ties for good.
It just would have been easier if she’d been in a position to buy him out. If he hadn’t thought that telling her his plans might be the one thing to break the thin hold she had on what she obviously cared about the most. The thing he needed gone, so his last link to Ireland was severed. And he’d never have to come back again.
It was just business. That was all.
Colleen avoided him for as long as she could. But eventually the growling in her stomach refused to be ignored. And though on her own she could have coped with hunger, she wasn’t eating just for herself. As if somehow sensing she was being stubborn about it, the baby leaned on her again. Hard.
She smoothed a hand against the protruding bump. ‘All right, I hear you. We’ll go now.’
Eamonn was already in the large old kitchen when she came in through the door, his laptop open on the huge wooden table.
He glanced up at her, his eyes studying her face for a long moment. ‘You feeling okay?’
Colleen quirked a brow. ‘Are you going to ask me that every time you see me?’
His mouth twitched, eyes sparking. She was just so defensive sometimes, so determined to challenge him, that it amused him. How else was a man supposed to react to a woman so gloriously large with child? It was his job to be considerate, even if he wasn’t the father. That was what the good guys did.
What amused him more was that being around her had him thinking of himself as a good guy. Being a bad boy around women had always worked for him better.
She tilted her head and continued. ‘I have to go to the toilet the second I finish a cup of tea, my back aches, but not as much as my feet, and the baby has been trying to push a hole through my stomach all day. But apart from that I’m just grand. Is that enough information for you, or should I go into a bit more graphic detail?’
A low whistle sounded between his teeth. ‘Man, but you’re testy, aren’t you?’
‘Testy?’ She blinked at the word. ‘As soon as nature organises it for men to carry the babies you can talk to me about being testy.’
‘The human race would die out.’
‘You’re damn right it would.’
When he grinned, a dimple appearing in full glory on his cheek, she smiled back. It was a rare flash of acquiescence. But she couldn’t hold his gaze for long, though, and felt a flush building on her neck. Instead she nodded at the fridge. ‘I came to get something to eat. Have you had lunch?’
‘No, I haven’t.’It wasn’t a big surprise. He’d always been one of those people who could get through from breakfast to dinner so long as there was coffee. But he was irritated he hadn’t thought of Colleen. So much for being a good guy.
He pushed his chair back from the table, the legs screeching on the slate floor. ‘Sit down. I’ll rustle something up for us.’
Colleen shook her head, reaching a hand up self-consciously to tuck a long curl behind her ear. ‘You’re doing it again. I can make a sandwich—thanks anyway.’
Glancing at her with a spark of warning in his eyes, he pointed a long finger at the table. ‘Sit.’
With no idea why she did it, she sat down as she was bid. But she eased her annoyance with herself for obeying by pouting. And then felt childish. Damn him.
‘Is there anything you can’t eat?’
She folded her arms defensively across her breasts. ‘Is that a dig at my size?’
There was brief moment of tense silence, and then he laughed at her deadpan expression, the oh-so-male sound echoing around the cavernous room. ‘No-o. It was a query in case anything I made would make you sick.’
Her mouth pursed momentarily in thought, before she sighed dramatically. ‘Not really. I’ve been past all that stuff for a while. But if you put a pickled anything in it, it would taste one heck of a lot better.’
Inside a few minutes he had made sandwiches, with pickled onions on one side of hers, and two steaming mugs of tea. To distract herself from watching him move around the kitchen, Colleen allowed herself to glance at his laptop screen. It had no effect on her pulse whatsoever.
He pulled up a chair beside her. ‘It’s work.’
Flushing slightly at having been caught looking at what could have been private information, she avoided his gaze. ‘No rest for the wicked, eh?’
‘Apparently not. In which case I must have been really bad at some point.’
Concentrating on her sandwich for a moment, while her mind did outrageous translations of ‘really bad’, she then risked a sideways glance at his face as she raised the sandwich to her lips. ‘Sharon Delaney being a good example, I suppose?’
Eamonn’s eyes widened a fraction. ‘You knew about that?’
‘Half the village knew about it.’
‘Nothing actually happened.’ There was no reason for him to explain that to her, but he continued. ‘Staying out all night got us in enough trouble.’
‘Oh, I remember.’
Eamonn’s attention was drawn from the teasing light in her blue eyes to her mouth as she bit into the sandwich. He watched her lips close around it, watched as she licked bread-crumbs away with the tip of her pink tongue. It was one of the most sensual things he’d ever witnessed. Who knew that a sandwich could have such an effect? It never had before that he could recall.
‘What else do you remember?’
Colleen turned her face away from his intensive gaze, her voice dropping. ‘I have the memory of an elephant.’ She smiled. ‘Size of one at the minute too.’
‘You keep on doing that. You’re not all that big. You’re having a baby, and that’s one of the most amazing things a woman can do.’
The softly spoken words touched a chord in her heart. She looked over at him, but he had turned his face away, leaving only his profile to her inquisitive gaze as he bit into his own sandwich.
It was one of the nicest things anyone had said to her of late. And at a time when she could stand a compliment or two. Waddling around every day certainly didn’t make her feel amazing.
But her guilt was still present, and she just didn’t know how to answer him because of it. She didn’t deserve compliments from him.
While she thought, Eamonn was doing some thinking of his own. Without changing position, he stared straight ahead and asked, ‘How long since he left?’
In a split second the warm glow from his words disappeared and was replaced by an icy chill. ‘Six months.’
Out of his peripheral vision he saw her head bow, her attention back on her food. So he turned his face towards her and watched the slow flutter of her long lashes against her cheeks. ‘What happened?’
Setting her sandwich back on the plate, she reached for the warmth of her mug, wrapping cold fingers around it. ‘He left with one of the stable girls. They’d been carrying on for a while.’
Eamonn might be many things, but slow wasn’t one of them. Maybe that was part of the reason she’d been so defensive earlier, when he’d been talking to the girls? It had brought back bad memories for her. But he let it go. One step at a time, Eamonn. Pushing Colleen didn’t always have the desired result, after all.
‘You had no idea it was going on?’
‘I think I knew, deep down. But I’m stubborn, remember? I thought it would all work itself out.’ She spoke over the rim of the cup, shrugging her shoulders. ‘He could be very charming, and I think a part of me was swept off my feet by him. At least at the start. So I could hardly blame some naïve girl for falling for him.’
She touched her mouth to the mug, hesitated, and glanced briefly at Eamonn’s face. ‘We see what we want to see sometimes, I guess.’
‘Did he know you were pregnant?’
‘Yes. No man who’s about to be a father shouldn’t know, don’t you think?’
Eamonn tilted his head and nodded briefly as she sipped out of her mug. ‘I’d want to know if you were having my baby.’
Colleen almost choked on her tea, her eyes watering as she forced it to go down the right channel without too much fuss. Dear Lord. Had he any idea what that statement did to a mind already full of night-time images? If he’d said something like that to her when she’d carried all those unrequited dreams before…
‘But then if it was mine I would never have left.’
Oh, c’mon! Her eyes widened at the statement as she turned to look at him. Why did he have to say things like that? Why did the words just have to roll off his tongue as if he was discussing the weather? Had he really no idea of the dreams she’d had as a teenager? Had he no idea at all that hearing parts of them spoken aloud now was like a kick in the teeth to a woman who had so seriously managed to pick the wrong man to be father to her child?
When she found words, they were almost a plea for him to understand how ridiculous his own words had been. ‘Right—that’s what you’d do. Even if it meant staying in a place where you hated being. That makes a lot of sense.’
‘I didn’t hate it here.’
She made a small snort of disbelief.
But his voice remained steady. ‘I just didn’t feel like I fitted in, and I was young—I thought there was more to life. That I should have a go at finding out.’
‘And was there?’
There was a brief electric pause as he looked her in the eye. Then he shrugged. ‘I’ve made more money in the States than I would ever have done here, that’s for sure.’
‘And is that enough? Are you happy, Eamonn?’
The sound of his name in such a soft tone caught him. Without thinking, he brought his gaze back to her mouth, and he stared for a long moment, mesmerised, before forcing himself to look up. He blinked—once, twice. Then, still not thinking it through, he reached a finger out and tucked the ever-errant strand of hair behind her ear again, before pushing his chair back, his voice low. ‘I’m not so sure it is enough.’
Looking down at her stunned expression, he smiled wryly. ‘And, just for the record, that’s the first time I’ve said that out loud.’
Chapter Five
A GROWN, mature woman, in charge of her faculties really shouldn’t feel shyness. But it was like being fifteen all over again when she ventured into the house after dark.
All afternoon—while she’d made phone calls, arranged for vet visits, ordered wormers and checked feed store levels—her mind had been obsessed by one fleeting touch and a softly spoken confession.
Which had led her to ask several silent questions. The main one being: what had happened to him since he’d left?
Surely someone who looked the way he did hadn’t been lonely? At least not for long. Colleen remembered vividly how girls had gravitated towards him. She’d hated every single one of them back in the day.
And yet the look on his face when he’d spoken had reflected a deep sense of loneliness, almost of need. The part of her that had cared so much for him so many years ago desperately wanted to understand why. Not that there was anything she could do to help beyond listening—if he would deign to talk.
It was a complication she could have done without. One that held her own confession back when it really should be something she got out into the open. Sooner rather than later. Avoiding it just made it worse.
As she kicked off her boots at the back door an unfamiliar noise greeted her ears. And as she worked her way through the kitchen and along the hall it got louder, positively deafening by the time she reached the family room at the front of the house.
When she peeked around the half-open door she couldn’t help but smile.
Eamonn’s head was nodding up and down in time to the music, his hand absentmindedly playing an air guitar with one hand as he looked through the dusty box in front of him with the other.
And then his voice sounded, loud and distinctly off-key, as he joined in with the music.
Colleen hid her mouth behind her hand and giggled. She couldn’t help herself.
But he obviously hadn’t heard her. He shook his head again, the curls on his dark cap of hair shifting, and then he raised both hands above the box and drummed in time with the bass beat.
With her hand still covering her mouth she let her eyes move over him from her position of safety. From the shifting curls, down past his wide shoulders to his tapering waist and the rounded curve of his behind. And deep inside of herself a mischievous imp prayed he would wiggle it. Just the once. Please.
Of course he chose that moment to turn and look directly at her.
Her eyes shot up and met his.
Slowly, ever so slowly, his hands lowered to his sides, and he smiled a little ruefully before moving over to the old record player and turning down the volume.
