A Woman's Heart

All the men in the room laughed on cue. The tension dissolved.

A tall glass was placed in front of Quinn. Brady raised his own. “Slainte! To your health!” he translated helpfully.

“Slainte,” Quinn returned the toast. As the hum of conversation resumed, he took a long swallow of the lacy-headed, velvety dark brew and felt the headache that had escalated during the brief confrontation with Cadel O’Sullivan begin to ease.

Brady next launched into a long introduction of his drinking mate, Fergus, that went back several generations and included an ancestor alleged to be a silkie—one of the seal women of Irish myth. Quinn listened, surrendering to the alchemy of the Guinness.

* * *

Although she was not a worrier by nature, Nora grew concerned when the evening passed with no sign of Quinn Gallagher or Brady. She wasn’t all that surprised about her father; after all, the pub didn’t close for another hour. But most of the Americans she’d met over the years appeared wed to the clock. It seemed unlikely that the writer would be so late without at least trying to notify her.

Rory and Celia had gone to bed some time ago. Mary, who’d finally stopped her weeping, seemed to have fallen asleep, as well, and the faint sound of music drifting from John’s room suggested that her brother was studying, as he did late into every night.

She’d finally taken the stew off the stove and put it in the refrigerator, and now she was pacing the floor of the small front parlor, stopping every so often to peer through the rain-streaked window at the well of darkness surrounding the farmhouse.

“His plane landed hours ago,” she told Fionna after she rang the airport. “And Ellen down at Flannery House said that several of the Americans who arrived at Shannon on the same flight checked in this afternoon.”

Fionna glanced up from her knitting. “Perhaps he went sight-seeing.”

“Perhaps.” Nora frowned and wondered if she should put more peat on the fire or just go upstairs to bed. “But you’d think that he would notify us if he’d changed his plans.”

The click of needles didn’t stop as the older woman continued working on the thick sweater destined to go to university in the fall with John. The sound provided an accompaniment to Waylon Jennings’s deep voice coming from the radio upstairs, the steady tick-tick-tick of the mantel clock as it counted off the minutes and hours, and the rat-a-tat-tat of wind-driven rain against the windowpanes.

“The man is certainly starting off on the wrong foot,” Fionna allowed. Her expression turned thoughtful. “Do you think he could have had an accident on the roadway? After all, Americans aren’t accustomed to driving on the left-hand side of the road, and what with all this rain…”

“I hadn’t thought of that.” A tiny shiver of icy fear skimmed up Nora’s spine. “I wonder if I should ring the hospital?”

“Or the Garda, perhaps,” Fionna suggested.

Although Nora was not at all eager to involve the police, she was headed for the phone again when she saw a flash of headlights through the leaded front window.

“Finally!” She ran to open the front door. The porch light cast a yellow, rain-shimmered glow on the white car with black markings parked in the driveway. “It’s Sergeant O’Neill.”

Fionna tossed her knitting aside and hurried to stand beside her. “I’m certain it’s nothing, darling. The sergeant probably found the American broken down alongside the roadway and—”

“It’s Da.” Nora watched Brady stagger from the back seat of the police car.

“Oh dear. It’s been a while since he drank too much to drive,” Fionna said with a sigh.

“I hope he didn’t crash the car.” It would take more eggs than even her musically stimulated hens could lay to buy a new one.

“Good evening to you, Fionna.” The sergeant touched his fingers to the brim of his dark hat. “Nora. My cousin Brendan was working the bar at The Rose and rang me up to say that Brady and his friend needed a ride home.”

“His friend?”

“The writer. As I told Brendan, I was happy to oblige. We wouldn’t want a famous Yank crashing his car his first day in the country, now, would we?”

Nora watched as a second man climbed out of the back seat. Straightening his back, he began walking toward the house with the exaggerated care of someone who was drunk to the gills.

“No,” she agreed faintly, “we certainly wouldn’t want that.” How in the name of heaven had the American and Brady met up? “Thank you, Gerry, for bringing them home.”

“No problem, Nora.” Gerry O’Neill put the bags he’d fetched from the American’s car inside the open door. “I was just doing my job. Good night, all.” Touching his hat again, the policeman folded his tall lean body into the car, backed up and drove away into the night.

“Evenin’, Nora darlin’,” Brady greeted his daughter. He laid a hand on her shoulder and bestowed a sloppy kiss on her cheek.

Then he grinned at Fionna. “Evening, Mam.”

“Don’t ‘Evening, Mam,’ me,” Fionna shot back, her hands on her hips. “Not when you come home from the pub weaving like a salley tree in the wind.”

“Would you not have me properly welcome our guest to the land of his ancestors?” Still using Nora for ballast, Brady waved his free hand toward the much taller man who’d come up beside him. “This fine fellow is none other than the famous American writer, Quinn Gallagher. Quinn, may I present my sharp-tongued but endearing mother, and my darling lovely daughter, Nora.”

“It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Mr. Gallagher,” Nora said politely to her guest—her paying guest, she reminded herself.

Only an alert listener would have been able to detect the note of irritation in her voice. To think that he hadn’t been lying near death in some hospital emergency ward, that after all her worrying he’d merely been getting drunk in The Irish Rose pub with her father!

“We were concerned you may have driven off the cliff on the way here from Shannon.”

“I’m sorry.” Quinn’s words were far more slurred than Brady’s. “I never meant to cause anyone any concern.” His gaze moved from daughter to grandmother. “And I have no excuse for my inconsiderate behavior. Other than the fact that I lost track of the time.”

“That’s likely enough, once my son begins spinning his tales,” Fionna allowed. “At least you had the good sense not to get behind the wheel.”

With those words of absolution, Fionna turned and went back into the house. If Nora’s nerves hadn’t been so frazzled, she might have enjoyed watching the two men follow as meekly as newborn lambs.

When she joined the three in the sitting room, Nora studied Quinn Gallagher more closely. Despite his appropriately contrite words, she thought that he was a hard, tough man. His face—all sharp angles and lean hollows, narrowing down to a firm unyielding boxer’s jaw—could have been roughly chiseled from stone. Too harsh to be considered lived-in, it revealed an arrogance and a remoteness that were in decided contrast to his outwardly penitent tone. A faint white scar on his cheek added a menacing touch.

His deeply set eyes were as dark and unrevealing as midnight. Despite his glower, the photograph on the back of the book covers in the window of Sheila Monohan’s store had made the novelist appear intelligent and sophisticated. However, there was nothing sophisticated about this man.

He was rangy, like a long-distance runner, all sinew and lean muscle clad in black jeans, a black T-shirt and black leather jacket. She’d known larger men, but none so physically imposing. The sense of tightly coiled male energy emanating from Quinn Gallagher and the way, even as inebriated as he obviously was, he made a woman all too aware of being female, had Nora suddenly wanting to throw him out of her house.

Kate’s earlier remark about Nora’s mother sending her a husband suddenly seemed more threat than promise.

Tell me this isn’t your doing, Mam, Nora begged silently as nerves tangled themselves into a knot inside her stomach.

If Eleanor Joyce had searched the entire world over, she couldn’t have found a more unsuitable husband and father candidate than this man clad all in devil’s black.

For a fleeting moment Nora envisioned the writer as an old-time gunfighter, standing on some dusty Western street with six-shooters drawn, facing down a gang of train robbers at high noon. It was a scene she’d seen a hundred times in American movies—with one difference. This time, in her mind’s eye, it was Quinn Gallagher who was wearing the black hat.

Dear Lord, she was getting every bit as fanciful as Fionna and Brady!

“You’ll be wanting to go directly to bed, I imagine.” Nora was pleased when her calm voice revealed none of her inner turmoil.

As if giving up his attempt to stand erect, Quinn leaned back against the white plaster wall. She forced herself to hold her ground as his dark eyes swept over her again.

“Now there’s an idea,” he murmured for her ears only. His voice was like silk, wound through with a thread of sarcasm. Wicked intent gleamed in his gaze and played at the corners of his mouth.

“As drunk as you are, I suspect even the idea would be more than you could handle, Mr. Gallagher,” she said under her breath, grateful that her father was currently distracting Fionna with the story of how he and the Yank had happened to meet up.

“I wouldn’t bet the farm on that, sweetheart.”