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tight-ass.
“Which, Jude F. Murray, is exactly what you are. A neurotic tight-ass. You couldn’t just open your idiot mouth and say something like, ‘I’ll see what I can do. I like looking at you, too.’ Oh, no, you just stand there like he’d shot you between the eyes.”
Jude stopped, holding up both hands, shutting her eyes. Now she wasn’t just talking to herself. She was scolding herself as if she were two different people.
Taking deep breaths, she calmed herself and decided she really wanted another of those little frosted cakes, just to take the edge off.
She marched into the kitchen, ignoring the prissy little voice in her head that told her she was compensating with oral gratification. Yeah, so what? When some gorgeous man she barely knew had her hormones erupting, she was damn well going to comfort herself with sugar.
She snatched up a cake with pale pink frosting, then whirled around at the loud thud against the back door. At the sight of the hairy face and long teeth, she cut loose with a squeal and the cake sailed up, bounced off the ceiling, then landed with a plop—frosting side down—at her feet.
It took her only the amount of time the cake was airborne to realize it wasn’t a monster at the back door but a dog.
“Jesus! Jesus Christ, what’s with this country? Every two minutes something’s coming to the door.” She dragged her fingers through her hair, setting curls free, then she and the dog eyed each other through the glass.
She had big brown eyes, and Jude decided they looked hopeful rather than aggressive. Her teeth were showing, true, but her tongue was lolling out, so what choice did they have? Huge paws had already smeared the glass with mud, but when she let out a friendly woof, Jude caved.
As she moved to the door, the dog disappeared. But there she was when Jude opened it, sitting politely on the back stoop, thumping her tail and gazing up at her.
“You’re the O’Tooles’ dog, aren’t you?”
She seemed to take this for an invitation and shoved her way in to clomp around the kitchen, spreading mud. Then she did Jude the favor of cleaning up the dropped cake before walking to the fire and sitting on her haunches again.
“I didn’t feel like starting the fire in here today.” She walked over, holding out her hand to see what the dog would do about it. When she sniffed it politely, then gave it a nudge with her nose so it landed on her head, Jude laughed.
“Clever, aren’t you?” Obligingly, she scratched between her ears. She’d never had a dog, though her mother had two ill-tempered Siamese cats that were pampered like royalty.
She imagined the dog had visited Old Maude regularly, had curled up by the kitchen fire and kept the old woman company from time to time. Did dogs feel grief when a friend had died? she wondered, then remembered she’d yet to keep her promise to take flowers to Maude’s grave.
She’d inquired about the location in the village the night before. Maude was buried east of the village, above the sea, beyond the path that ran near the hotel, and back to the ruins and the oratory and the well of Saint Declan.
A long and scenic walk, she mused.
On impulse, Jude pulled the flowers she’d put on the kitchen counter out of their bottle, then cocked her head at the dog.
“Want to go visit Old Maude?”
The dog gave another woof, got to her feet, and as they walked out the back door together, Jude wondered who was leading whom.
It felt very rural and rustic. As she hiked over hills with the yellow dog, flowers in her hand for an ancestor’s grave, Jude imagined it as part of her weekly routine. The Irish country woman with her faithful hound, paying respects to a distant cousin.
It would be something she would make a habit—well, if she actually had a dog and really lived here.
It was soothing, being out in the air and the breeze, watching the dog race off to sniff at God knew what, catching all those glorious signs of spring in the blooming hedges, the quick dart and trill of a bird.
The sea rumbled. The cliffs brooded.
As she approached the steeply gabled oratory, the sun shot through the clouds and splashed over the grass and the stone. The three stone crosses stood, casting their shadows, with the well holding its holy water under them.
Pilgrims had washed there, she remembered from her guidebook. And how many, she wondered, had secretly poured a bit of water on the ground for the gods, hedging their bets?
Why take chances, she thought with a nod. She’d have done both herself.
It was a peaceful place, she thought. And a moving one that seemed to understand life and death, and what connected them.
The air seemed warmer, almost like summer despite the wind, with the fragrance of flowers that scattered through the grass and lay on the dead suddenly wild and sweet. She heard the hum of bees and birdsong, the sound of it clear and musical and ripe.
The grass grew tall and green and just a little wild over uneven ground. A handful of small, rough stones, she noted, that marked ancient graves settled into it. And with them, the single new. Old Maude had chosen to be buried here, nearly alone, on a hill that looked over the gameboard-neat village, the blue skirt of sea, and the roll of green that led to mountain.
Tucked into a stone shelf in the ruins was a long plastic pot filled with deep red flowers. The sight of them touched Jude’s heart.
So often people forgot, she thought. But not here. Here, people remembered, and honored those memories with flowers for the dead.
“Maude Alice Fitzgerald,” the simple marker read. “Wise Woman” had been carved under her name, and below that the dates of her long, long life.
It was an odd epitaph, Jude mused as she knelt beside the gentle slope. There were flowers there already, a tiny clutch of early violets just beginning to fade. Jude lay her bouquet beside them, then sat back on her heels.
“I’m Jude,” she began, “your cousin Agnes’s granddaughter. The one from America. I’m staying in your cottage for a while. It’s really lovely. I’m sorry I never met you, but Granny used to talk about the times you spent together, in the cottage. How you were happy for her when she married and went to America. But you stayed here, at home.”
“She was a fine woman.”
With her heart leaping into her throat, Jude jerked her head up and looked into deep blue eyes. It was a handsome face, young and smooth. He wore his black hair long, nearly to his shoulders. His mouth tipped up at the corners in a friendly fashion as he stepped closer to face Jude across the grave.
“I didn’t hear you. I didn’t know you were here.”
“One walks soft on a holy place. I don’t mean to frighten you.”
“No.” Only half to death, she thought. “You just startled me.” She pushed at the hair the wind had loosened and sent dancing around her face. “You knew Maude?”
“Sure and I knew Old Maude, a fine woman as I said who lived a rich and generous life. It’s good that you’re bringing flowers to her, for she favored them.”
“They’re hers, out of her garden.”
“Aye.” His smile widened. “That makes them all the better.” He laid his hand on the head of the dog that sat quietly at his side. Jude saw a ring glint on his finger, some deep blue stone that winked in a heavy setting of silver. “You’ve waited a long time to come to your beginnings.”
She frowned at him, blinking against the sun, which seemed stronger now, strong enough to make her vision waver. “Oh, you mean to come to Ireland. I suppose I have.”
“It’s a place where you can look into your heart and see what matters most.” His eyes were like cobalt now. Intense, hypnotic. “Then choose,” he told her. “Choose well, Jude Frances, for ’tisn’t only you who’ll be touched by it.”
The scent of flowers, grass, earth whirled in her head until she felt drunk from it. The sun blinded her, shooting up fiery facets that burned and blurred. The wind rose, a sudden, dazzling burst of energy.
She would have sworn she heard pipes playing, rising notes flyin
g on that fast wind. “I don’t know what you mean.” Woozy, she lifted a hand to her head, closed her eyes.
“You will.”
“I saw you, in the rain.” Dizzy, she was so dizzy. “On the hill with the round tower.”
“That you did. We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting? Who?”
The wind stilled as quickly as it had risen, and the music faded away into silence. She shook her head to clear it. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”
But when she opened her eyes again, she was alone with the quiet dead and the big yellow dog.
FIVE
AIDAN DIDN’T OBJECT to paperwork. He bloody well hated it.
But three days a week, rain or shine, he spent an hour or more at the desk in his upstairs rooms laboring over orders and overhead, payroll and profits.
It was a constant relief to him that there was a profit. He’d never concerned himself overmuch with money before Gallagher’s had been passed into his hands. And he often wondered if that was part of the reason his parents had pushed it there. He’d had a fine time living from hand to mouth when he’d traveled. Scraping by, or just scraping. He hadn’t saved a penny or felt the need to.
Responsibility hadn’t precisely been his middle name.
After all, he’d grown up comfortable enough, and certainly he’d worked his share during his childhood and adolescence. But mopping up, serving pints, and singing a tune was a far cry from figuring how much lager to order, what percentage of breakage—thank you very much, sister Darcy—the business could bear, the juggling of numbers into ledgers, and the calculation of taxes.
It gave him a headache every blessed time, and he had no more love for sitting inside with books than he had for having a tooth pulled, but he learned.
And as he learned, he realized the pub meant more to him because of it. Yes, parents were clever creatures, he decided. And his knew their son.
He spent time on the phone with distributors trying to wangle the best price. That he didn’t mind so much, as it was a bit like horse trading. And something he discovered an aptitude for.
It pleased him that musicians from Dublin, from Waterford, from as far away as Clare and Galway were not only willing but pleased to do a turn at Gallagher’s. He took pride in knowing that in his four years at the head of it, he’d helped polish the pub’s reputation as a place for music.
And he expected the summer season, when the tourists flowed in, to be the best they’d had.
But that didn’t make the adding and subtracting any less a chore.
