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Boyce looked surprisingly serious and compressed his lips. ‘I got into something hot and heavy with a girl. It was hard to deal with at the time, but it’s all done and dusted now.’
At that point, while Harriet was stifling her curiosity and wondering if she dared ask for more details, the doorbell sounded. It was a special delivery and she signed for a small parcel. The gift card bore Rafael’s signature. Surprise gripped her, along with a surge of helpless anticipation and excitement. Carefully she removed a jewel case from the padded delivery pouch. Whatever it was, she was giving it right back.
She flipped open the lid to reveal an emerald and diamond-studded gold horseshoe brooch. The jewels were so bright they dazzled her. It was a truly gorgeous thing. Returning it was going to hurt, but she felt that to accept so costly a gift on so short an acquaintance was absolutely out of the question.
‘Bling-bling!’ Boyce decried, with a chuckle of amusement as he peered over her shoulder. ‘A horsy brooch and, what’s even worse, one chosen with a shocking lack of good taste. Fake jewels should never be so obviously bogus.’
‘Yeah.’ Harriet shut the case again fast, happy for him to continue in that assumption and save her from the humiliating necessity of explaining the whys and wherefores of her own recent behaviour.
‘Still, I guess you’re the type of woman who really goes in a big way for horsy brooches.’ Sensitive as always, Boyce misunderstood his sister’s tension and pulled a comical face of apology. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to be so tactless. I’m glad you’ve got a bloke in your life again.’
‘I haven’t…er…this is only a little friendly gift from someone who took me to the races the other day,’ Harriet mumbled evasively.
Boyce spent most of the following day in bed, catching up on his sleep. Harriet had heard Rafael take off in the helicopter at eight that morning and it was very late that evening when she heard him return.
Monday dawned with the drenching sunlight of a hot summer day. Harriet withstood the strong urge to phone Rafael at an inexcusably early hour just to hear his voice as she explained that, while she very much appreciated the brooch and didn’t want to offend him, she just couldn’t accept it. She decided that a face-to-face meeting would be friendlier, and less open to misinterpretation than a phone call.
*
While Harriet was still agonising over the delicate matter of how best to approach Rafael without giving him the impression that he was being chased or encouraged in any way, he was picking up Una from her half-sister’s home in the village. He should have been in Rome, but he had been forced to cancel his meetings. Una had panicked when he told her about the appointment he had arranged for her with an educational psychologist in Tralee. He had swiftly appreciated that if he did not want to risk the teenager going missing again she would need his personal support before she could face the prospect of sitting any type of test.
Una clumped into the Range Rover in big heavy boots. Rafael stared: she looked seriously scary. She was clad from head to toe in gothic black. Her eyes were heavily coloured in a variety of plum and purple shades, her lips were crimson against her pale skin. She was a dead ringer for a vampire from an old movie. He wanted to laugh, but was too shrewd to make the mistake.
‘Did you know that Harriet’s got back with her ex?’ Una demanded.
Rafael went very still. ‘Her ex?’
‘Luke. A neighbour runs a taxi service to the airport and he saw Harriet picking up a blond bloke yesterday. She was hugging and kissing him…yeuk!’ Una confided in a revolted tone. ‘I called Fergal to ask him, and apparently he interrupted their big celebration meal at the cottage. So it’s true. But I can’t believe it. I thought she had more pride. Are you annoyed?’
‘Why would I be?’ Rafael fielded, and his half-sister subsided into silence.
He began to reverse the four-wheel-drive back on to the road. He felt nothing. He never felt anything. Messy reactions were for other people, and not something he could identify with eit
her. He had still been a child when he had learned absolute control of his emotions. Forced to witness Valente’s cruelty, and powerless to intervene, Rafael had switched off his human responses: it had been a simple matter of sanity and survival.
*
Harriet and Boyce enjoyed a hearty breakfast before making use of Tolly’s hand drawn map to go and find the house where Eva and generations of Gallaghers before her had been born. The property was called Slieveross, and was every bit as remote in location as Tolly had warned. Although the land lay only a couple of miles out of Ballyflynn, they had to trek up a long steep lane across the lower slopes of a mountain. The hedgerows were bright with the lanterns of the fuchsia bushes that grew wild. They stopped several times to catch their breath and enjoy the spectacular panorama of the jagged coastline. Far below them the white foam of the Atlantic breakers battered the steep cliffs. The little farmhouse was a ruin in the lee of the hill.
‘What a place this would be to get away from it all,’ her brother breathed, in a tone of awe and longing that took her by surprise. ‘Look at that view. It’s out of this world. There’s not a soul in sight. I can’t even see the road. Can you hear that silence? I can’t remember when I last heard silence. I’d pay a fortune for the chance to buy and restore this place.’
‘But Mum would go mad!’ Harriet was torn by simultaneous dismay and hope. She knew that she would get the blame if Boyce, who was Eva’s pride and joy, put down roots in Ireland. Yet there was nothing that would please her more than the luxury of seeing a little more of him.
‘Perhaps it’s time she got over that. I don’t see why it should influence me. I’d like a base where I could write music, unwind…Here I could just be an ordinary guy.’
Boyce had always been a mover and a shaker. On the way home he made her call in at the auctioneers in Ballyflynn, to see if she could find out who now owned Slieveross. That party’s identity confirmed, and after a further visit to Mr McNally, the solicitor, Boyce returned to the cottage with plans to get his business manager on the phone to discuss the pros and cons of acquiring a home in Ireland.
‘Did you make my bed for me before we went out?’ Boyce called from the guest room while she was whipping up a quick lunch.
‘No. I’m your sister, not your housekeeper!’
‘Well, someone did,’ he declared.
Harriet lodged in the doorway. ‘You must have done it without realising it.’
Boyce spread emphatic hands in denial. ‘I didn’t!’
‘Well, maybe we have fairies—and long may they stay under this roof if they like to tidy up!’ Harriet teased.
