Page 130 of Unlocked

It was him, and he was standing behind the bar of a pub in the west of Ireland in faded jeans and a black t-shirt with a curl on his forehead. He was alive. She had spent two months knowing he was dead and he was alive.

Her mind was doing several things at once. The part of her that was a lawyer and had always been a lawyer was assembling the facts in order. The river. The shot. No body recovered, which she had told herself was because of the current, which she had told herself was just what happened. Armand arranging everything. Armand, who had known, who had told her today, right after the meeting, and had arranged a jet and a passport with a name that was half Archer's and a pub in Ireland where her paperwork was waiting.

Her paperwork.

Of course, that wasn't all that was waiting. She pressed her other hand flat on the table, too, and breathed.

The red-haired woman had noticed her and said something. The man at the bar, the man with the green eyes and the dark curl and the black t-shirt, looked up and across the room at her.

For one suspended moment, she thought he saw her. Really saw her. That something in his face would shift the way it had always shifted when he looked at her, that particular quality of attention, the one she'd felt the first time it landed on her and had never forgotten.

He looked at her the way anyone looked at a new customer. Pleasantly. Professionally.

"I'll be with you in a moment," he said.

His inflection was different. The accent was thick and Irish and entirely convincing, a different cadence, a different music to the words, nothing like the precise clipped tones she had known.

But it was his voice.

It was his voice, and he was alive and standing six feet away from her behind the bar of a pub called The Crooked Fiddle on a narrow street in the west of Ireland. And she was sitting at a table with both hands flat on the wood and her coat still on and her bags still by the door and two months of grief doing something in her chest that she didn't have a name for yet.

She looked at him.

She waited.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Declan O'Sullivan had set down the bottles he’d gotten from the back room.

He knew before he looked up. He didn't know how he knew, some combination of the particular way the door opened and the quality of the silence that followed it and something older and less rational than either of those things, something that had been waiting for two months in the back of every quiet moment he'd had in this pub, in this village, in this life he was rebuilding from the ground up.

He looked up.

She was standing just inside the door with two bags at her feet and her coat still on and her hair down around her shoulders. Her face was thinner than he remembered, and there were shadows under her eyes that hadn't been there before, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his entire life.

He pulled a pint for one of his regulars and set it down in front of his customer.

The man at the bar said something. Declan didn't hear it.

She had found a table. She was sitting at it with both hands flat on the wood, her coat still on, not moving, just looking at him the way a person looked at something they were trying to decide was real. He understood that look. He had worn it himself the first time Armand had told him she was out of the coma, that she was going to be all right, that she was recovering. He had sat in the kitchen of this pub at four in the morning with a cup of tea going cold in front of him and felt the relief of it move through him like something structural, like a beam settling into place, the whole building exhaling.

He had worn that look for two months.

She was wearing it now.

He finished the pint. He pulled two more for the table by the window, carried them over, and came back to say something to Maura about taking a break. She looked at him, then looked at the woman at the table, and back at him with the expression of a woman who had known him since he was seven years old and was not going to say anything because she had never said anything in her life that wasn't worth saying.

"Go on then," Maura said.

He went.

He crossed the pub floor, aware with every step that her eyes were on him and the effort she was making to hold her expression together, and he wanted to cross the distance in half the steps it was taking him. However, he made himself not do that because she needed a moment, and he had learned, slowly and at considerable cost, that Tatum Wellington needed moments even when she didn't think she did.

He stopped at her table.

"You must be Ms. Grayson," he said. The accent was thick and natural and entirely his own, the one he'd spent twenty years carefully dismantling and had spent the last two months putting carefully back together. "Follow me. Your cottage is around the back."

She looked up at him.