A Woman's Heart

“I manage.”

“Of course you do, dear.” Sheila paused, giving Nora the impression she was choosing her words carefully. “Devlin had other news.”

“Oh?”

“He’s engaged. To a young woman he met in veterinary school.”

The older woman’s gaze had turned so intent Nora felt as if she were standing at the wrong end of one of those telescopes all the lake-monster trackers inevitably carried.

“I’m so happy for him,” she said. “You’ll have to give me his address so I can write him a note.”

“You don’t mind?”

“Of course not. It’s been over between Devlin and me for a long time. I’m pleased he’s found someone to share his life with.”

So much for her mother’s perceived matchmaking.

“Here’s my list.” Not wanting to discuss her love life—or lack of it—any longer, Nora handed the piece of paper to the storekeeper. “I hope you have some of those Spanish oranges. Rory loves them, and they’re so much better for his teeth than sweets or biscuits.”

“You’re a good mother, Nora Fitzpatrick,” Sheila said. “And no one can fault the job you’re doing with the children. But it’s easier on a woman to have a man around the house. Sons, especially, need a father’s firm guiding hand.”

As the older woman began plucking items from the wooden shelves, Nora almost laughed as she thought how much Sheila Monohan sounded like her mother. Which made sense, she decided, since the two women had been best friends.

“Brady brought in your eggs this morning, in case you’re wondering,” Sheila offered as she began adding up Nora’s purchases on her order pad. “I gave him a credit.”

Nora had worried her father might have forgotten to sell the eggs before heading off to the pub for a day of storytelling and gossiping. She was also grateful Sheila hadn’t paid cash for the eggs. Da could make coins disappear faster than the magician she’d seen at last year’s Puck Fair in County Kerry.

“Thank you.”

“No thanks necessary. They were good-size eggs, Nora. A lot bigger than Mrs. O’Donnel’s. We’ll get a good price for them.”

Nora smiled at that. “John says it’s the Nashville music he’s started playing in the henhouse. Perhaps I ought to write a letter to Garth Brooks and ask if he’d be interested in paying me for a commercial endorsement.”

Although Nora still refused to believe that the piped-in tunes had any effect at all on the hens, she couldn’t deny that since her seventeen-year-old brother’s latest science experiment, they’d begun laying more—and larger eggs.

“Brady said you were thinking of joining the cheese guild,” Sheila said after laughing at Nora’s suggestion. Her sentence tilted upward at the end, turning it into a question.

“I’m considering it. The man from the guild assures me I could increase my profits by twenty percent. He suggested Cashel blue.”

“That’s one of our most popular cheeses,” Sheila agreed. “And a twenty-percent profit increase is certainly nothing to scoff at.”

“I know. And it’s not as if we couldn’t use the money.”

Which was, of course, the only reason Brady had arranged to rent out her bedroom. Her father had informed Nora—after the fact—that the American novelist, Quinn Gallagher, would be staying in their house, and Nora had no option but to agree. Besides, the man was paying an amazingly generous price for a bedroom, shared bath, and morning and evening meals.

She’d almost resigned herself to moving the children to Galway and taking that job as a bookkeeper to a land developer, a former schoolmate who’d become wealthy refurbishing the bay waterfront for tourism. Now she could allow herself to think she might actually be able to turn down the offer.

“Money’s always something we could all use more of,” Sheila said with a sigh.

Yes, Nora thought, it wasn’t easy resisting the lure of the city with its high-paying jobs. And traffic congestion, and polluted air, and so many people a body couldn’t take a breath without invading the private space of her neighbor.

Nora knew that her brother John and her sister Mary longed for the bright city lights, but she supposed that was natural when you were seventeen and sixteen. Not that she herself ever had. Conor, who’d certainly enjoyed the fast life, had accused her of having the green fields and rich black peat of the family farm in her blood. Nora had never denied it. It was, after all, true.

Chapter Two

Forty Shades of Green

From the air, Ireland was a panorama of field and hedgerow, patchwork valleys set amidst abrupt mountains. Quinn Gallagher thought he’d never seen so many shades of green in his life—sage, olive, beryl, jade, emerald, malachite, moss, sea green, bottle green—the list seemed endless.

“Christ, it looks just like a postcard,” he murmured as he looked out the window of the Aer Lingus jet.

“It looks like a gigantic bore,” his seatmate in the first-class cabin countered. “We haven’t even touched down yet and I’m ready to go home.”

Home. The word had never had any real meaning for Quinn. Home was a place you wanted to go back to, a place where people would take you in. Welcome you. The roach-infested apartments and ramshackle trailers where he’d spent his hardscrabble early years certainly didn’t fit that description.

Neither did the succession of brutal foster homes until, weary of working on farms from sunup to sundown and being beaten for his efforts, he’d run away at sixteen, lied about his age and joined the navy. And while the navy had, admittedly, represented the most stability he’d experienced in his life, the ships on which he’d sailed around the world certainly hadn’t been home.

The sun reflecting off the water below was blinding. Quinn shaded his eyes with his hand as he took in the sight of the farmhouses looking like tiny white boats floating on a deep green sea.

“Boring’s relative. I think it looks like God’s country.” As soon as he heard himself say the words, Quinn wondered where the hell they’d come from. He also immediately regretted having said them.

Laura Gideon’s trademark sexy laugh revealed she was every bit as surprised by his statement as he was. “Strange words from a card-carrying atheist, darling.”

Quinn forced a reluctant laugh as something indefinable stirred inside him, something that resisted his writer’s need to analyze and label.

“Okay, so I overstated. But you have to admit, it does look beautiful.”

“Of course it does,” the actress agreed. “You said it yourself. The quaint little scene looks like every postcard of Ireland you’ve ever seen. Heaven help us, I have a horrible feeling that the entire country might turn out to be a living cliché.”

Shuddering dramatically, she linked her fingers with his, a familiarity that came from being a former lover.

“Perhaps it’s something else.” She turned toward him, her eyes gleaming with the wicked humor Quinn had always enjoyed. “Perhaps it’s your ‘auld sod’ roots calling to you.”

“I strongly doubt that.” He might be one of the hottest horror writers in the business, but even Quinn couldn’t think up a more terrifying idea.

“Roots tie you down, Quinn, baby,” he remembered his mother saying. “They wrap around your ankles so bad you can’t never get free.”

It was the only thing Angie Gallagher had ever told him that Quinn had taken to heart. Twenty-four hours after making that boozy proclamation, Angie was dead. Quinn had gone to her funeral in the company of the Elko County sheriff and his tearfully sympathetic wife, watched the rough-hewn pine coffin being lowered into the unmarked grave and wondered if his rambler of a mother had known she was fated to spend the rest of her life in Jackpot, Nevada, population five-hundred and seventy, not counting the cows.

The memory, which he usually avoided revisiting, was not a pleasant one. Quinn fell silent as he watched the verdant landscape rush closer. Laura, busy repairing her makeup before facing the press at Shannon Airport, didn’t seem to require further conversation.

The wheels touched down with a thud. As the jet taxied toward the terminal, Quinn felt his entire body clench—neck, shoulders, chest, legs.

Enter, stranger, at your own risk, an all-too-familiar voice hissed in some dark lonely corner of his mind. Anxiety coiled through Quinn like a mass of poisonous snakes, twining around phobic pressure points, reminding him of that awful endless summer of his ninth year when he’d slammed the secret doors on his psyche—and his heart—and nailed them shut to keep out the monsters.

He forced a vague unfocused public smile, heard himself exchanging farewells with the first-class flight crew, even watched himself sign an autograph for the captain’s seventeen-year-old son who was, the silver-haired pilot assured him heartily, his “number-one fan.”

It would be all right, Quinn told himself firmly. He would be all right.