Page 129 of Unlocked

Katherine Grayson.

Armand had told her in the car on the way to the airport, sliding the passport across the seat to her with the unhurried ease of a man who had done considerably more complicated things in his life and considered this relatively straightforward. Katherine Grayson. New Zealand-born, according to the documentation, which explained the accent she didn't have and provided enough geographic distance to make casual verification unlikely. Everything else was in order, he'd said. Everything she needed would be waiting for her at the pub.

She had looked at the name on the passport for a long time.

Katherine. She could live with Katherine. It was her grandmother’s middle name. Kate, maybe, in practice. Something clean and simple, and not obviously connected to anything that had come before.

Grayson.

She had looked at Armand, and he had looked back at her with those dark, perceptive eyes and said nothing, which was its own kind of answer. The touch of Gray. She had pressed her lips together and looked out the window of the car, and had thanked him in a voice that was steadier than she'd expected.

She had not cried. She had decided, somewhere in the two months of recovery and slow, methodical work and performing amnesia for her mother, that she was done crying for a while. She had done enough of it in private, and she was going to do something else now. She wasn't sure yet what that something else was going to be, but she was going to Ireland to find out.

The passport was in her bag. She touched it now, through the leather, just to confirm it was still there. Then she looked back out the window at the clouds, and the gray-green land emerging beneath them, and thought, not for the first time and probably not for the last, about a man who had always dressed impeccably and had always been prepared.

She was naming herself after him. She knew that. She was doing it deliberately, and she was not going to apologize for it or pretend it was something else.

Katherine Grayson was going to carry a piece of him with her wherever she went. That was the decision she had made, and she was at peace with it.

The plane landed.

The pub was called The Crooked Fiddle.

It sat on a narrow street in a village small enough that the street itself seemed to be the main event, two rows of buildings facing each other across a stretch of road that had been there long enough to have its own opinions about things. The pub occupied the corner, a low stone building with dark green paint on the woodwork and a sign above the door that had weathered enough seasons to have gone pleasantly illegible at the edges. Window boxes with something hardy and purple growing in them. A cat on the step looked at her luggage with the profound indifference of an animal that had seen tourists before and held no particular opinion about them.

The driver who'd collected her from the airport had been cheerful and uncurious, which she appreciated. He helped her carry her bags to the door, and then drove away. She'd stood on the step beside the cat for a moment, two bags at her feet, passport in her bag, the damp Irish air on her face.

She pushed the door open and went in.

The inside of The Crooked Fiddle was exactly what a pub that had been standing for three hundred years looked like when nobody had tried too hard to make it look like anything. Low ceiling with dark beams. Stone floor, uneven in the way of floors that had been walked on for centuries and had given up on level as a concept. A fireplace at the far end with something burning in it despite the time of day, because this was the west of Ireland, and damp was a condition of existence rather than a weather event. Dark wood everywhere, tables and chairs and the bar itself, all of it worn smooth by use and time. Bottles lined the shelves behind the bar in the particular organized chaos of a place that knew where everything was and didn't feel the need to prove it. A few framed photographs on the walls. A hurling stick mounted above the fireplace. The smell of turf smoke, old wood, and something cooking somewhere, which made her realize she was hungry.

Three people at a table near the window, locals by the look of them, a conversation going in the relaxed, unhurried way of people who had been having the same conversation in the same place for years and had no particular interest in finishing it.

A young woman behind the bar, red-haired, efficient, glancing up at Tatum with the practiced assessment of someone who managed rooms above a pub and could tell at a glance whether new arrivals were going to be trouble.

Tatum set her bags down just inside the door and looked around for someone who might be expecting her, who might have an envelope from a large Frenchman, who might be able to tell her which room was hers.

The door at the back of the bar opened.

A man came through it, carrying a crate of bottles, moving with the easy economy of someone who had done this particular thing many times and knew exactly how much effort it required. He set the crate down behind the bar without looking up, said something to the red-haired woman that made her laugh, and then straightened and turned to reach for a bottle on the shelf.

Tatum wasn't aware of having stopped breathing. She was simply standing inside the door of The Crooked Fiddle with her bags at her feet and no air in her lungs and her entire nervous system doing something she didn't have a word for.

Faded jeans, worn at the knee and molded to the man in the way of jeans that had been lived in rather than bought that way. A black t-shirt that did nothing to conceal the breadth of his shoulders or the particular quality of stillness that certain people carried in their bodies even when they were moving. A few days of dark growth along his jaw. His hair was longer than she had ever seen it, long enough to curl slightly at the ends, and a curl had fallen forward over his forehead in a way that looked entirely natural and entirely unlike the Archer Gray she had known, who had never had a hair out of place in his life.

And then he turned to say something to a man at the bar, and she saw his eyes.

Green.

The greenest eyes she had ever seen in her life.

She sat down.

She didn't choose a table. She didn't look at the menu or take off her coat or do any of the normal things a person did when they entered a pub after a long journey. She simply found the nearest chair and sat in it because her legs had made a unilateral decision, and the rest of her was catching up.

She sat, and she stared, and she pressed one hand flat on the table in front of her because she needed something solid to press against.

It was him.