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He leaned over to tap on her open page. “Fewer questions. More reading.”
If her book had been thicker, she might have been tempted to bring it down on his hard head. Instead, she gritted her teeth and allowed herself to be silenced. Simpler while she came to grips with her embarrassment over last night. Though Brendan’s apparent unconcern made it easier.
They sat together in silence, flipping pages and taking notes, the clock’s hands circling its face, sunlight from the open window moving over the floor. The noise of a fine spring afternoon an upbeat tempo to the companionable quiet within the study.
At one point, she glanced up from her reading. He sat bent over his book, long fingers plowed into his dark, unruly hair, the sweep of downcast lashes against his cheek. Girl’s lashes. Thick. Black. He chewed the end of his thumb as he read. Shifted in his chair. His shoulders moved on a deep breath.
No tension in the set of his jaw. No silence fraught with bitterness. No shadows from the past dimming the beauty of those finely hewn features. It eased her apprehension. She could make herself believe all was as it should have been. This was where she was supposed to be. Who she was supposed to be with. That her life had not veered disastrously off course.
“Unless I have broccoli sprouting out my ears, you need to stop staring and get back to work,” Brendan griped, never lifting his eyes from the page he was reading. “The answer won’t jump up and bite you.”
Elisabeth pursed her lips against a giggle. Considerate? Brendan? Hardly. Yet, there was something genuine about all his acerbic sarcasm that no amount of sugary sweetness could rival. It made her want to prove herself. Gain his grudging approval.
Either that or she’d simply lost her mind.
She dropped her gaze back to the book.
All this reading, no doubt.
Brendan stared with sinking heart at the roped-off ruin. A blackened chimney speared the gray sky, birds flitting in and out. Weeds sprang tall and scraggly amid enormous piles of debris. Broken tiles, heavy charred beams, the cracked and melted arms of a chandelier. Water stood in oily black pools. He dragged in a breath laden with a sour stench of soot and mildew.
Ducking beneath the rope, he kicked through the rubble. Plucked up the charred crackling remains of a book, its pages glued and soggy. Tossed it aside. Dug free a mud-caked shard from what might once have been a bowl or pitcher. A dim metallic shine reflecting off a bent and pitted candlestick.
Hours cooped inside, analyzing obscure essays by scholarly theorists with Elisabeth’s tantalizing presence a few frustrating feet away, had finally driven him to clear his head with a long stroll. A few more seconds of breathing in that perfume of hers and he’d have completed last night’s seduction on the library table. To hell with his noble intentions or Helena’s furniture.
How he’d ended up here, he couldn’t say. He’d never realized where his walk had led him until he looked up to see the charred lot. And then he’d been unable to simply pass by without pausing as if it meant nothing.
“You there! Can’t you read? Sign says no trespassing!” A somber, official-looking character eyed him from the pavement.
“Just poking about.”
The constable’s scowl deepened. “No trespassing means no poking.”
Brendan allowed himself to be shepherded away from the ruin. “Must have been quite a fire.”
“Went up like a torch, it did. Lit the sky from the Liffey to Mountjoy Square. I was workin’ that night, and seen it meself.” Pride rang in his voice. “You know the family what lived here?”
“A long time ago.”
“Word is they’re accursed. Old earl murdered by his own son. New earl in queer street, with the creditors on his tail. I’d not be one of them for any amount of blunt.”
Was it true? Were the Douglases cursed? He drew a breath, seeing once more Aidan’s face among the dead, the king’s warning carried on an acrid thread of wind , Sabrina’s weeping as she fought to save the man she loved, and the imagined vision he carried with him always—Father’s execution at the hands of the Amhas-draoi. The final moments when the truth of his son’s betrayal was made clear. When love twisted in his chest with the same killing force as the blade that felled him and he died damning Brendan’s name.
Would Aidan, like Father, go to his grave believing Brendan had betrayed them all?
He hurled the candlestick back into the blackened ruins, where it landed with a ping and a flash of gold before sinking out of sight forever.
Then, swinging away, he strode back down Henry Street and away from the charred hulk that had once been Kilronan House.
“Madame Arana said you’ve been out here for hours.”
Brendan’s voice behind her slid along Elisabeth’s nerves like a spark to a fuse. The flush of awareness simmering just below her skin. Her stomach tightening with pleasure.
She looked up from the book in her lap, relieved to put aside the brain-snarling confusion of the thesis she’d been reading. Something about time travel and the effects of past and future on the present. It might as well be ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs for all the sense it made. But she was trying. That should count for something.
Brendan stood haloed by a late afternoon sun, gold threading his dark hair, the rest of him left in shadow. All but his eyes which, as always, burned polished amber. He leaned down to slide the book from her hands, reading the title.
“Ouch. If you’re trying to bore yourself to sleep, you couldn’t have chosen better.”
