Page 66 of Bargaining with the Devil

Quinn smiled as he handed Rachel over. “’Tis not a need I can help her with. Or she’d be very confused if she tried it.”

Isobel laughed. “Yes, I am sure she would.”

Nathaniel rose. “I’ll come with the two of you, love.” He slid an arm around Isobel’s waist as they left the room.

Quinn had slouched back against the settee again but was looking keenly at her. “You have a fiddle of your own here?”

“Yes.” She hoped she could leave it at that.

But of course Quinn couldn’t let anything just drop. “I haven’t noticed it in the cottage.”

“No. I’ve left it here in this cottage. In that corner, in fact.”

“Will you show me?”

Why on earth did he have interest in seeing her violin? He kept surprising her, defying her expectations and assumptions in small ways—which was likely more a reflection on her than on him.

She laid her knitting aside and collected her fiddle from the low shelf where it sat most of the time, bringing it over to where Quinn was lounging. She opened the case and gently ran a finger along the scroll. How many times had she done this in the past year and a half? More times than she could count. She took it from the case regularly to care for it. She’d even tucked it under her chin a few times, then tightened the bow hair and poised the bow. But always she had stopped short of making that first pass on the strings, the one that revealed the violin’s soul, because it had always seemed to her that playing revealed a piece of her soul as well.

And she didn’t want to uncover whatever hers looked like anymore.

She remembered well the day that Da gifted her the fiddle. It had been his mother’s. She’d apparently been quite the toast of Glasgow in her youth as well as being a talented fiddler. Da himself loved to play but was the first to admit that his love for fiddling far exceeded his skill. Not that he couldn’t play, but he always said he never found his way to the instrument’s heart the way his mother did. And, he told Lucy when she was quite young, she too had the gift. Perhaps even more than her grandmother had.

She remembered even as a little girl feeling that this fiddle belonged to her in some way although she never admitted that to anyone. And yet she suspected Da knew anyway. When she was twelve, he gave it to her. Not just to use but as her very own, forever.

The fiddle was hers, but now she couldn’t touch it, couldn’t look at it, without thinking of family. Now it made her think only of loss.

One last stroke along the edge of the ebony fingerboard, and then she gently closed the case.

“Why don’t you play any longer?” Quinn asked quietly. “’Tis on your face that you miss it.”

A valid question. “It feels as though the light inside me has gone out. The light that allowed me to play from the heart and not merely by rote.”

He was direct, as always. “So find the light again.”

It wasn’t that simple. He couldn’t possibly understand. She said nothing.

“The light isn’t gone, a mhuirnín,” he said gently. “Darkness never lasts. ’Tis inside you yet, the light, just waiting for you to uncover it. Find your light again.”

He made it sound easy when it wasn’t easy at all. Then again, Quinn had likely never had a cowardly moment in his life. He seemed utterly fearless. Nearly invincible.

She was afraid to search, because what if the light truly was extinguished? What then?

She’d thought herself a different woman on Heston. Had thought she’d be one still, back on the mainland. Had begun believing she was.

But perhaps she wasn’t after all given she still couldn’t bring herself to play her violin.

’Twas a grand céilí at the Arms; it reminded him of when he was young back home in County Dublin, the community all gathered together to share some food and drink and conversation, to enjoy music and dancing.

Lucy didn’t bring her fiddle. She was attending with the Blackmores, however, so it followed that he’d come along too. Partly to watch the crowd and make what observations he could, but mostly to be near Lucy.

’Twas the job, sure, but ’twas also a great deal more than that by now.

There was no more sleeping on her floor in a blanket. Truth be told, there also wasn’t much sleeping in the bed at times. She’d curl herself up in his arms after, till morning.

He cared for her wounds too. She wouldn’t let her sister do it because then she’d have to explain the other injury, the one made by his knife. She wasn’t ready to do that yet—mayhap never would be—so he tended it along with the crease from the pistol shot. Both were healing well.

Compton had done more than mark her. He was sure of it, but he didn’t pry. She’d lost some of her reserve and a lot of the distance in her gaze. ’Twasn’t gone entirely, and he wasn’t fool enough to think that a few raw conversations and a few pleasurable tangles in bed with him were enough to heal her. But she was coming alive again: Lucinda Muir as she was meant to be. Not as she’d been before—no one ever went back to the old version of themselves after life turned ragged for a stretch—but drawing on who she truly was.