Chapter Seven

The seeking of one thing will find another.

—Irish Proverb

 

Jenna was walking the hill to the arts village when the growl of costly German engineering came up behind her. One to learn from her mistakes, she took to the far edge of the sidewalk and wrinkled her nose at Dev's black convertible Porsche as it passed. He pulled his car into a spot two buildings downhill from Vi's, then got out and waited for her by his car. She didn't wave because that would send a welcome. Instead, she nodded a neutral hello, which better suited her ambivalence.

Today he'd dressed less like an executive and more like a regular human. The change suited him. He was the sort of man who could make a pair of blue jeans look like art. As she neared, she noted the wariness in his blue eyes and the tight set to his mouth. A mouth she now knew was hot and intoxicating. There was no turning back, either from that awareness or from him. She could just slip by, though.

As she passed, he pulled in step beside her. "Inventory done and lists made, I take it?"

Jenna's stride faltered. It was a Monday, and she'd forgotten. For the first time in almost two years she'd fallen out of the routine that was her savior.

"Yes, they're done," she lied.

"What a comfort that must be."

She didn't appreciate the edge to his voice. "Do you want something, Dev?"

"A great many things, actually. Though at the moment what I most want is for you to stop running away from me."

"I'm not running, I'm walking."

"Do you plan to pretend that last night didn't happen?"

"No."

He laughed. "Ah, well then, that explains your hurry."

She swung in front of him and jabbed her finger toward the low-slung building before them. "This is my friend Vi's studio. I'm going inside and you're not."

Vi had her crimson half-door propped open, no doubt for more light, which she craved the way Jenna did calm. It seemed that Vi stood a better chance of attaining her desire. Jenna stepped inside after giving Dev a threatening look.

He followed, of course.

Vi was digging through the drawers of an old apothecary's chest. Based on the jumble of ribbons, feathers, and seashells that were scattered across the worktable, Jenna couldn't begin to imagine what she was seeking. Vi looked up as they entered.

"This is an unexpected sight." She tilted her head and appraised them. "A fitting one, too."

Dev stepped around Jenna, who'd been doing her futile best not to let him venture farther.

"And this," he said with a broad sweep of his hand, "is an amazing sight."

Jenna had been coming to Vi's studio for so long that while she wasn't blind to its exotic treasures, she tended not to focus on them as much as she once had.

Vi had taken what was once a plain, white cottage-like building identical to the other five in this government-funded enclave and put her stamp upon it. She'd had four large skylights installed so that even on a cloudy day, the space never seemed dim.

Silk banners adorned with her bold Celtic designs waved in the breeze sneaking in the front door. On one table were displays of the bead and shell jewelry and vivid stationery that Vi made when the whim struck her. Baskets brimming with hand-painted scarves and panels of fabric were tucked into every available nook, and large paintings—again, mostly on silk—decorated the walls. It was not a subtle setting, but Vi was not a subtle woman.

Jenna watched as Dev walked from place to place before stopping to lift a scarf from a basket and let it slip between his fingers. One corner of his mouth briefly curved upward as he fingered the silk. He looked her way, and the spark of heat in his eyes made her pulse jump. She glanced away. She needed no reminding that he was a sensual man, and she'd be better off recalling that he could also be a devious one.

"You're a woman of many talents," he said to Vi.

She laughed. "A lack of focus is what it's called by those who think they're in charge of me. But I like what I do well enough."

"As you should," he said. "Your work is incredible."

Vi positively shone. If she was susceptible to Dev's flattery, what chance did the rest of Ballymuir stand?

Jenna needed to cut this short. "Time is money," she said. "So unless you're planning to spend a whole lot of cash, get out."

"Jenna, that's hardly hospitable," Vi said. "Whatever's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

Vi looked skeptical. "Perhaps a cup of chamomile tea. Or one of my nan's purges," she added with a nip of asperity.

Some best friend. "Thanks, but no."

Dev settled his hands on Jenna's shoulders, part caress, part controlling measure, and wholly unwanted.

"I kissed Jenna last night," he said to Vi, "and I'd very much like the chance to kiss her again or at least talk to her, but she seems intent on—"

Jenna escaped from his grip. "Outside. Now."

"My pleasure," he replied and then favored her with a smile that was slow, sexy, and incredibly irking.

"Very fitting, indeed," Jenna heard Vi say as she marched out the door with Dev trailing behind.

She made it exactly three steps past the stoop before losing the rest of her temper. "It's not fair of you, dragging Vi into this."

To the left of the studio door was a graceful wooden bench that Vi's brother Michael had made. Dev sat and stretched out his long legs before saying, "Fair? An interesting concept, that. The real thing's rarer than a unicorn, too."

"What do you want?" she demanded.

"For you to come for a drive with me."

"Why?"

"For the pleasure of it, of course. There's no rain threatening, it's warm, and you're lovely."

She crossed her arms over her ratty Chicago Bears T-shirt. "You had me going until the 'lovely' thing."

"If you think you're not, then someone's done you a disservice."

She looked away and heard his impatient sigh.

"And if I haven't already given you reason enough," he said, "let's not be forgetting that we have matters to discuss."

Very true. Rules needed to be established. Still, she had other obligations. "I'm meeting my sister here. I need to drive her home."

"I'll give her your keys," offered a meddling friend lurking somewhere just inside her open door.

Dev laughed, apparently content to have Vi interfere when it suited his purposes.

"She can't drive," Jenna called. "And would you mind giving me some space?"

"I'll run her home, Dev can bring you back to your car, and yes, I would very much mind giving you some space. You don't seem to be able to handle this on your bloody own."

Dev stood. "I'd say that's settled." He pulled his keys from his pocket, tossed them in the air where they jingled brightly, and then caught them.

"I'll be back to visit, and with plenty of cash," he said to Vi, who had given up any pretense at affording them privacy and joined them outside.

Vi shooed Jenna along. "Well, go on."

Jenna could have held her ground on sheer principle, except somewhere beneath her mistrust of Dev Gilvane, there grew a desire for his company. She was, in fact, even more susceptible to his charm than Vi.

She fired the Irishman her best scowl. "Fine, then. Move it along, Gilvane."

 

Once Jenna became certain that Dev didn't feel the need to test the limits of his expensive vehicle on the Dingle Peninsula's challenging roads, she relaxed as much as she was able to in his presence. The wind pushing through her already curly hair was going to give her rasta-girl dreads that would put Maureen's arrival hairdo to shame. Jenna didn't care. She was thankful, though, that she'd taken the sweater Dev had offered for a little extra warmth. They didn't talk, other than Dev asking if there was anyplace she'd like to go and Jenna directing him inland.

When they crested a rise in the road, it felt to Jenna as though she could simply lift her arms and fly. She laughed with the exhilaration of the moment. Dev looked over. When their eyes met, she was drawn into something even more intimate than the kiss they had shared, and her heart flew with the rest of her.

She glanced away and realized that their turn was fast approaching.

"This left!" she cried.

Up for the challenge, he wheeled the Porsche onto the narrower lane she'd indicated.

"Would you mind parking just up ahead?" she said, pointing to their right. He did as she asked.

The first time Jenna had seen the ruin of Kilmalkedar church, the wild fuchsia lining the road had been in brilliant, glorious bloom. She'd been wandering, newly broken-up with Claes, her boyfriend, who'd been a glib, wealthy man—pretty much the Swedish version of Dev. Claes and she had become engaged after a brief and incredibly intense courtship. Jenna had been sure it was fate. He'd decided otherwise when he discovered that just because she carried the Fahey name didn't mean he'd be welcome in her father's inner circle. Ireland had been Jenna's refuge and rescuer.

On this Beltane Day, fuchsia plump unto bursting still draped over the stone walls enclosing Kilmalkedar, breaking only where a gate had been cut for entry to the churchyard. So much else about her life had changed, though. Claes had faded to a memory, not even one with which she associated much pain. She had carried forward a measure of caution, though. She glanced at Dev, who had turned off the car and was looking around as though searching for some good reason to be there.

"Let's walk," she said.

They left the car, and Dev pocketed his keys. Now that they were no longer on the road, the May warmth had caught up with them. Jenna pulled off the sweater he'd loaned her. When she'd just finished wrestling with the oversize garment, she caught him looking at the swathe of skin exposed where her T-shirt had pulled away from her jeans.

"That's me, the whitest girl on Earth," she said to cover her awkwardness.

He merely smiled. That alone was enough to make her pulse trip. She tossed the sweater onto the car seat before leading him toward the churchyard. In the field just across the lane, sheep were bleating. At the gate stood two elderly men dressed in the utilitarian clothes of serious farmers. They chatted in Irish. Jenna loved the exotic sound of the language, though she'd been an abject failure at learning it herself. She gave them a friendly hello and received one in return. The sharp gravel of the lane gritting beneath their feet, she and Dev walked to the break in the wall surrounding the ruined church.

"Come on in," she said to him as she climbed over the high stone threshold that, at least in theory, was supposed to keep out livestock.

"Cheerful spot," Dev commented, raising a brow at the graveyard surrounding Kilmalkedar.

"You should see it on a foggy day. It's like something out of a horror movie."

He laughed. "And you sound so very pleased."

She shook her head, and then absently combed her fingers through her tangled curls. "It's not just the graves and the ruin. You need to look closer...to feel the place."

"Starting with the sheep manure just in front of us?"

Jenna smiled in spite of herself. "Are you sure you're even the smallest bit Irish? Where's that dark, contemplative nature?"

"Pounded out of me in a fine British public school," he replied. "Though I still have the occasional desire to martyr myself for a hopeless cause—which I have mostly ignored."

"Well, indulge me here, Gilvane. Be a tourist in your motherland. Have a look around."

And before he could blow away her hopes for a relaxing afternoon, Jenna ventured off. She walked carefully, for as warm and lovely as the day was, the tall grass was still wet and slick, and the pathways hard to find.

There had been a funeral sometime recently. Wooden folding chairs were stacked and waiting under the eaves of the small, crumbling church for return to a drier place. Here and there modern gravestones, polished black with gold lettering, sat in well-tended sites. Mostly, though, there were markers so lime-encrusted, rough, and ancient that nothing was left to read in what could be seen through the shaggy grass holding them captive.

But everywhere was a sense of collective power, a primal hum just beneath the range of hearing, vibrating in the bones, filling the mind. It was this that brought Jenna back to Kilmalkedar.

She walked to the tall ogham stone that aligned neatly with the church's gaping entry—no coincidence she was sure. Kilmalkedar's founders had been her kind of people: practical, efficient souls building on a site that had likely held meaning before Christianity. Out of habit, she ran her hand up the rough, timeworn lines and slashes chiseled into the stone's side. The rock was cool and damp under her palm.

Dev had joined her. "Can you read it?"

"No," she admitted.

He chuckled. "Then I don't want to know what you're doing."

She patted the admittedly phallic rock. "Feeling somewhat insignificant by comparison?"

He grinned. "Actually, no, except as it pertains to finding the lure of your pet ruin. I'm trying hard enough, but I'm afraid I'm just not seeing it."

"Doesn't it give you a sense of belonging? As though we're all working toward some common purpose?"

"To all be buried here, then? I'd had my heart set on a grand memorial in the center of London, perhaps with myself in full naval regalia."

"Go ahead, tease me. I still think there's something beautiful about this place."

"In a bleak, you'll-be-needing-antidepressants-soon sort of way, yes," Dev conceded.

She laughed. "Thanks."

In addition to the hum that she wouldn't raise with Dev the Unbeliever, the evidence of family, even lost ones remembered, appealed to Jenna. Maybe because her family, though powerful for generations, had bizarrely little sense of past. There was no ancestral home handed down, but a series of places where Faheys had formerly lived and a handful of places where they did now. There were no portraits of long-departed relatives, no family anecdotes, no communication among the living.

She walked a ribbon-thin path around to the back of the church. She could hear Dev following behind. To her right lay an enclosure of several stones protected by a rusted iron rail. A statue of what she supposed had once been the Virgin but now looked more like a ghost, drew her. She stopped when she saw the surname on a marker at the figure's feet.

Jenna looked back to Dev. "Connelly. Isn't that your mother's people?"

He frowned. "How would you know that?"

"The same way I hear about anything else—in town, of course."

"They all know who my mum is? I told only Muriel."

"Well, there you go..."

He shook his head. "No one's said a word to me."

"They probably figure you've already met your mother."

He gave her a sketch of a smile before leaving the path. Dev circled the enclosure, the wet grass slowing his pace. "I suppose it's possible these could be relatives. My mum hasn't spoken much about her past. A mention or two, but nothing more."

Something wasn't playing right.

"And yet you decided to look for a house in Ballymuir. Why?"

In the number of times they'd talked, which were few when viewed in light of last night's kiss, she'd never seen him this uncomfortable.

He began to speak, paused, and then started again.

"It seemed a good place," he finally said.

The diplomatic thing would be to let this go, except she was no diplomat. "But why? You had to have had a reason."

"Did I?" he shot back.

She'd provoked him. The thought pleased her. Why should his life be free of turmoil?

"Most people do. It can't be some sort of longing for your roots. You're not exactly a frequent visitor."

"What, more gossip in town?"

"Of course. Other than attending parish hurling matches, it's the local pastime. So why Ballymuir, Dev? Are you planning to grow old and gray there?"

His anger was nearly palpable. Ignoring the tall grass, he walked toward her in long strides. "I had a thought, the time, and the money, so here I am...for the pleasure of it."

He moved even closer. With the uneven ground behind her, Jenna couldn't step back.

"Is there nothing you do for pleasure?" he asked.

She wanted to run, a ridiculous impulse. She was miles from her car and had only this angry man to get her there.

"I, ah..."

What did she do for pleasure? It seemed to have drifted from her life. That both he and Maureen would have asked her this today frightened her. She was accustomed to no one looking beneath her unremarkable, capable exterior.

"Nothing, Jenna?"

"Don't change the subject."

"Ah, but I haven't. I told you I'm here for the pleasure of it." He reached out his right hand and followed the curve of her jaw, then the line of one cheekbone.

Even as she steeled herself to resist this diversion he offered, she could feel her eyes closing.

"Pleasure," he whispered, his mouth just brushing hers. He kissed her forehead, the very tip of her chin. He teased her mouth and the sensitive skin of her throat. One broad hand settled at her nape and with a slight pressure urged her to him.

Alchemy, she thought. Passion from anger.

"God, I love the taste of you," he said, then followed thought with deed.

The low hum that was so much a part of this place vibrated through Jenna, filling her, echoing so loudly in her head that it masked the mad rush of her heart. She twined her arms around Dev's neck and held fast in the storm.

Endless open-mouthed, hungry kisses, life demanding to renew itself, power seeking release, her world shook with it. She had never known a sensation like this. Dev's hands moved down her sides, one sweeping low on her back to hold her closer. The hum grew more distinct.

Jenna wrenched away. "I can't." She was panting.

Dev's chest rose and fell no slower. "Let me take you back to your house. Let me make love to you."

"No." The word escaped as a hoarse whisper.

"Pleasure, Jenna. Just for pleasure. No promises, no entanglements."

She had no skill at this. And no desire to risk her heart and expose her inadequacies all in one precipitous act.

"Nothing is just for pleasure." She looked away and repeated, "Nothing."

"But it can be," he said. "If you'd let it."

"I don't know how. And I don't want to, either," she quickly added when she realized the opening she'd left him.

Smiling, he shook his head. "Saint Jenna of the Rules. I'm thinking you're more Irish than both sides of my family combined."

He mocked...and he hurt. Jenna smoothed her shirt, erasing all evidence of his touch. Rules guided, they protected when no one else cared enough to.

"It's time to go." She walked away, leaving him little option but to follow.

 

Ballymuir waited just over the next rise, too close to be ignored. Though Dev was relieved to be gone from that unsettling ruin with Connellys planted deep in its soil, the village sounded no more inviting. She'd told him to take her to her car by O'Connor's Pub. Once there, Jenna would flee. Her intent was clear in the way she braced herself against the car's movement, fighting force and gravity with the same stubbornness—and ultimate futility—that she fought the attraction they shared.

Before he spoke, he needed to reason his way through this knot he'd found himself in—both physically, he thought with a rueful downward glance, and otherwise.

Jenna had asked him the one question he wasn't prepared to answer: Why Ballymuir? And in evading that, he had found himself faced with another unanswerable query: Why Jenna Fahey?

He wanted to feel the clasp of her body with a primitive intensity that shocked even him. Despite his current state, a few truths remained apparent. He knew enough of Jenna to recognize that she would not separate business from pleasure with any amount of grace. For her, everything funneled into a single path. He supposed that was a common enough female trait. He'd just never before wanted a woman whose needs extended past wanting him, too.

He slowed until he could nearly count the buds on the wild roses next to the road. "I'll be leaving for a few days...three at the most. But when I come back, I want your time, Jenna. I want your attention. I want you."

She gazed out the windshield as though he hadn't spoken.

Dev tried again. "There's no avoiding this. Something is happening between us."

"I don't want you."

Her denial angered him more than even those prods at his past—dead kin and attachments to the land he chose not to die in. She wanted him; he was sure of it. He had felt it in the beat of her heart, tasted it in the wildness of her kiss, and already he hungered for more.

"It's a rare talent you have for fighting the inevitable," he said, willing himself to grip the steering wheel less tightly.

"There's nothing inevitable about us." The color high on her cheeks told him that she had begun to suspect otherwise.

"There is, but until you want to deal in truths, I won't be touching you."

She sat mutinously silent. He looked away from the road long enough to catch a glint of something new in her hazel eyes. Fear? Curiosity? He could only hope it was the latter. That, at least, he could work to their mutual advantage.

"Ah, but when you're ready," he said, "I'll have had time to think about all the ways I want to bring us pleasure. And this isn't arrogance speaking, but certainty. Looking at you is a pleasure, tasting you, an even greater one. Feeling your skin against mine...learning your secrets..." He paused, starved for air, starved for her. But he wouldn't give her the power of this knowledge. "No martyring yourself, Jenna. When you come to me, no games. Just sheer pleasure."

He'd said all he could without giving too much of himself away. Blessedly, they were in front of the pub. Dev pulled to the curb. Jenna scarcely waited for him to come to a halt before opening her door.

"Don't come back, Dev. Please don't do this," she said, and then left.

Dev shook his head as she marched down the sidewalk and climbed into her little silver car. She was a fine runner, Jenna Fahey. In time she'd face reality. They were both well caught.