Page 97 of Bargaining with the Devil

“You’re very . . . damp,” she said as she slid her arms around his neck. “And rather . . . smelly.”

“Complaining, a ghrá?” He touched his nose to hers. “I don’t recall caring about the cockles, some months back.”

“No,” she whispered. “Not complaining. Not so long as you’re holding me.”

His chest expanded with surely the first full breath he’d drawn since that chilly February morning leaving Kirkcudbrightshire, and his heart made two great thumps. Beating again, finally.

“I’ll hold you, sure.” And this time he didn’t mean to let go.

Lucy didn’t say outright why she’d come, and he didn’t ask. But she’d come, alone, and that meant something. And she’d brought a valise with her—and her fiddle. There was a trunk too, back at the inn in Dún Laoghaire, but she’d not brought that to seek out his mam’s cottage. He’d retrieve that for her after the Lughnasadh céilí; ’twas in the same place, with the bonfire not far off on the village green.

Mam and his sisters—the ones still at home—clucked over her and got her settled in for conversation. ’Twas no doubt evident to all of them that she was the reason he’d been uninterested in local lasses. Some of that had to do with him having barely let go of her hand once he’d got his shirt back on.

And every minute her hand stayed tight in his, her fingers threaded through, the more he believed in the truth of her having come across the sea to find him.

Eithne and Siobhán took to her right away. When she announced that she’d need to return to the inn to change into something finer for the céilí, they begged to accompany her. She looked both bemused and pleased, accepting the company, one to either side of her as they struck off down the lane after some tea at Mam’s hearth.

“So she’s the one,” Mam said once they’d left. With Aisling gone over to Aoife’s, ’twas just the two of them for a rare minute.

No reason to pretend otherwise. “Aye.”

Mam nodded. “’Twas serious between ye afore?”

“I left when I did wanting to be here for Aoife’s wedding.” He debated how much more to tell Mam. “But aye, if ’twas a different set of circumstances in her life this winter, I’d have offered for her. But ’twasn’t the time for it then.”

“And now?” Mam was smiling.

“Now she’s here. And my own feelings on the matter haven’t changed.”

Wanting her hadn’t changed. Not just sexual urges but everything else—wanting her in his sight to be sure she was well, wanting her against him to feel her every breath, wanting to wake up with her curled in his arms, to hold her through tears and laughter and everything in between. And wanting the rest of it: a life together.

Didn’t take him long getting ready once he’d washed up, and then he and Mam struck out for Dún Laoghaire.

He settled Mam with friends and sought Lucy. He found her just stepping outside the public room at the inn with his sisters behind her.

She’d been an ice maiden touched by the Cailleach when he’d come upon her in Kirkcudbrightshire that frigid January day. But now, befitting Lughnasadh, she was a late-summer goddess all done up in warm colors, touched by Brìghde’s hand.

She’d changed into something a bit fancier, a dress with a sort of gauzy bronze layer over top of a cream underdress. Beneath her short puffed sleeve, her scar just peeked out, the one where the gunpowder mark had been. She wasn’t hiding it.

In the slanting afternoon light, her hair was all shades of dark honey and amber. One of his sisters, Siobhán probably, had braided it up for her and tucked bits of white wildflowers in it. Meadowsweet, when he got close enough for the heavy, sweet fragrance to reach him.

She smiled at him, and the bottom of his stomach dropped out.

He searched her expression for hesitation and found none. Mayhap some nerves there, but her gaze was calm and steady as he closed the last couple of steps. In her face was nothing but light and joy and warmth.

“’Tis a beautiful sight, you standing here waiting for me, Lucy Muir.”

She smiled. “You’re not a bad sight yourself, Ciarán Quinn.”

He’d become accustomed to hearing his given name again, back in County Dublin for several months now. Still, ’twas never what she’d called him more than once or twice. “’Tis still just Quinn.” Quinn was still his own name or near enough since he was called that in the army from the age of twelve onwards.

She touched his face. “I don’t know,” she said softly. “There’s far more to you than a single name. And it’s the whole man I came here for.”

“Aye?” He smiled at her, had her biting her lip.

“Before you left, you said that one of us settling was no way to live. You were right about that. So you should know: I’m not settling, I’m choosing.”

“And what is it you’re choosing, a ghrá?”