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If he didn’t want her there, was she going to make things worse?
She plugged a disc into her PPC and played back the message he’d left on her home office ’link while she’d still been at Central clearing the way to leave.
“Well, I hope you’re sleeping.” He smiled, but he looked so tired, she thought. Worn out tired. “I should’ve called before. Things got . . . complicated. I’m about to go to bed myself. It’s late here. Early, more like. I can’t seem to remember the time change—imagine that. I’m sorry I haven’t spoken with you today—yesterday. What the hell.”
He gave a half-laugh, pinched the bridge of his nose as if to relieve some pressure. “I’m punchy, need a couple hours down, is all. I’m fine, no need to worry. Things aren’t what I expected here. Can’t say what I expected. I’ll call you after I’ve slept a bit. Don’t work too hard, Lieutenant. I love you.”
He wasn’t supposed to look so tired, she thought on a sudden spurt of anger. He wasn’t supposed to look so befuddled, so damn vulnerable.
Maybe he didn’t want her there, but he was just going to have to deal with it.
Dawn was shimmering over the hills when Roarke stepped outside. He hadn’t slept long, but he’d slept well, tucked up into a pretty, slanted-ceiling bedroom on the top floor, one with old lace curtains on the windows and a lovely handmade quilt on the wide, iron bed.
They’d treated him like family. Almost like a prodigal son returned home, and they’d served roast kid and pandy as the Irish version of fatted calf.
They’d had a ceili, packed with food and music and stories. People, so many people gathering around to talk of his mother, to ask of him, to laugh. To weep.
He hadn’t been quite sure what to make of it all, or them, the uncles and aunts and cousins—grandparents for God’s sake—that had so suddenly come into his life.
The welcome had humbled him.
He was still unsteady. This life they lived, and the world in which they lived it, was more foreign to him than the moon. And yet he’d carried a part of it, unknowing, in his blood throughout his life.
How could he resolve, in a matter of days, something so enormous? How did he understand the truths buried more than thirty years under lies? And death?
With his hands in his pockets, he walked beyond the back gardens with their tidy rows of vegetables, their tangled cheer of flowers, and fingered the little gray button he carried.
Eve’s button. One that had fallen off the jacket of a particularly unattractive suit the first time he’d seen her. One he’d carried like a talisman ever since.
He’d be steadier if she were here, he was sure. Christ, he wished she were here.
He looked across a field where a tractor hummed along. One of his uncles or cousins would be manning it, he supposed. Farmers. He sprang from farmers, and wasn’t that a kick in the ass?
Simple, honest, hard-working, God-fearing—and everything the other half of him wasn’t. Was it that conflict, that contradiction, that went into the making up of what he was?
It was early enough that the mists snaked up from the green, softening the air, softening the light. A snippet of Yeats ran through his head—where hill is heaped upon hill. And so it was here. He could see those hills rolling back to forever, and smell the damp of dew on grass, the loamy earth beneath it, the wild rambling roses above.
And hear the birds singing as though life was a singular joy.
All of his life—certainly all of it after he’d escaped the bastard who’d sired him—he’d done as he wanted. Pursued the goal of success and wealth and comfort. He didn’t need a session with Mira to tell him he’d done so to compensate, even defeat, the years of misery, poverty, and pain. And so what?
So the fuck what?
A man who didn’t do what he could to live well instead of wallowing was a fool.
He’d taken what he needed, or simply wanted. He’d fought for, or bought, or in some way acquired what made him content. And the fight itself, the hunt, the pursuit were all part of the game that entertained him.
Now he was being given something, freely, something he’d never considered, never allowed himself to want. And he didn’t know what the hell to do with it.
He needed to call Eve.
He looked across the field, across the silvered mists and gentle rise of aching green. Rather than pull out his pocket-link he continued to toy with the button. He didn’t want to call her. He wanted to touch her. To hold her, just hold her and anchor himself again.
“Why did I come without you?” he murmured, “when I need you so bloody much?”
He heard the muscular hum, recognized it for what it was an instant before the jet-copter broke through the mists like a great black bird breaks through a thin net.
And recognized it as one of his own as it skimmed over the field, startling cows, and causing his uncle—cousin—they were all a blur of faces and names to him yet—to stop the tractor and lean out to watch the flight.
