Chapter Twenty-nine
I don’t like the ending scene of Gone with the Wind. Never have.
After telling Scarlett to be kind to poor old Cap’n Butler, Miss Melly Wilkes takes her last melodramatic breath. Ashley Wilkes is wandering around his shabby parlor all zombie like, clutching one of Miss Melly’s orphaned gloves, and wondering how he will live without her.
While comforting Ashley—the unworthy and highly confounding object of her affection—Scarlett has an epiphany: Ashley’s been toying with her all these years. He’s nothing but a sly, genteel cat in a frock coat and starched collar, idly batting her about like a ball of worsted yarn when all along he had his sights set on that skinny old Melly Mouse. Scarlett realizes she has loved something that doesn’t exist. The revelation doesn’t upset her though, not truly, because she also realizes she loves Rhett Butler. She leaves the honorable Ashley Wilkes wallowing in a puddle of his own high Victorian tears to run through the fog-filled post-Antebellum streets of Atlanta to Rhett. Oh, Rhett.
Rhett kicks her to the curb, y’all. Scarlett professes her love for him and he looks at her like she’s a sad old mangy stray and says he doesn’t give a damn.
Not one damn bit.
Then, as cool as a cucumber with a pencil mustache and pinstriped trousers, he picks up his carpetbag, dons his hat, and walks off into the fog.
I hate that someone as shrewd and clever as Scarlett O’Hara couldn’t see what should have been as plain as the arched raven brows on her pretty little face: that Rhett Butler loved her something fierce. Simple, simpering Miss Melly could see it—so why couldn’t Scarlett?
I have been thinking about that scene all night and I am still thinking about it, now, as I sit in Mrs. McGregor’s cozy room, zoning out on another Moone Boy rerun. Haven’t I acted like Scarlett O’Hara? First, I imagined myself in love with Grayson Calhoun, my very own Ashley Wilkes. I was so blinded by my desire to capture the cat’s attention, I couldn’t see that I was just a ball of yarn, a meaningless diversion. I have been flitting between Sin and Aidan, flirting with them like Scarlett batting her eyelashes at the Tarleton Twins throughout the Wilkes’s annual barbeque.
Sin pops his head in Mrs. McGregor’s room.
“Sorry,” he says, smiling. “I have a conference call in a few minutes. Would you mind turning the telly down just a notch?”
“Not at all, luv,” Mrs. McGregor says.
Mrs. McGregor pushes a button on her remote until Moone Boy’s theme song is a soft drone in the background.
“What are you watching?” Sin’s dark brows quirk.
“Moone Boy,” I say. “Have you seen it? It’s laugh-out-loud hilarious.”
“No, I haven’t,” he says. “It’s brilliant?”
“Absolutely.”
“Great gas,” Mrs. McGregor agrees.
“I guess you can’t judge a program by its wretched theme song, can you?”
He waves and then he is gone. I look at Mrs. McGregor beneath raised brows, my mouth hanging open, feeling like someone just said my biscuits need more butter or my pecan pie has too many nuts.
“I like this song.”
“So does Aidan,” Mrs. McGregor says.
“How do you know?”
“He was whistling it last week.”
I listen to Sin yammering in Japanese down the hall and have my own Scarlett-like epiphany. Why? Why, oh why sweet baby Jesus? Why have I wasted years pining over the wrong man? I must have been plumb out of my mind thinking I could spend the rest of my life with a man as boring and predictable as Grayson Calhoun. And I sure enough was plumb out of my mind for entertaining the notion that there was a choice between Rhys Burroughes and Aidan Gallagher? There’s no feckin’ choice.
“I have to go,” I say, leaping to my feet. “I have to go right now.”
“Now?” Mrs. McGregor glances out the window. “Are ya sure ya want to go now, luv? Me bones are—”
“God bless your wise, auld bones, Mrs. McGregor”—I move toward the door—“I don’t doubt their ability to forecast weather, but I have to go. I just have to.”
Her lips curve in an all-knowing smile.
“Go on with ya, then, and good luck.”
I am almost out the back door when I remember I don’t have a shiny Mercedes waiting for me in the courtyard outside the castle. I hurry back to Mrs. McGregor’s room.
“Mrs. McGregor,” I say, sticking my head into her room. “Can I borrow the keys to my aunt’s Range Rover?”
“Borrow? What borrow? The Rover belongs to you now, luv. The keys are in the top drawer of the desk in the library.”
“Thanks a million.”
“Where are you going?”
“To Bánánach Brew Farms. I have to see Aidan.”
“Like that?”
I look down at the blue flannel Nick and Nora pajamas Callie gave me as a Bon Voyage gift. The jammies were a good-natured gag gift meant to poke fun at what Callie called the inhumane Irish climate. They’re a size too large and printed with cartoon images of breakfast foods like cinnamon swirl toast, waffles, slices of ham, and squat pots of tea with smiling cartoon faces. They’re not very flattering, but they’re cozy and warm.
Miss Belle would pitch a cardiac arrest-inducing hissy fit if she knew I was off paying a social visit to a gentleman friend wearing flannel cartoon pajamas, but I don’t give a Fig Newton what Miss Belle thinks. I highly doubt old, prune-faced Miss Belle ever felt the way I feel right now, like I will die, just die, if I don’t tell Aidan I love him. I swear I am not trying to be ugly, but can you honestly tell me a woman who spends hours each day pondering the proper angle one should raise their pinkie while sipping tea has it in her to feel a burning, yearning, all-consuming kind of passion?
I don’t think so, y’all.
“Yes, like this.”
“Take a brolly then. It’s going to—”
“Thanks.”
I run down the hall and into the library. I yank open the top desk drawer, grab the only ring of keys in the drawer, and run back down the hall to the kitchen. I stick my feet into my shiny green rain boots and grab the umbrella off the hook.
The drive to the farm takes an eternity, down narrow, rutted roads. I don’t like driving on Irish roads on sunny days, so I sure as hell don’t like driving on them on a dark, rainy night, slamming the brakes and gripping the steering wheel at each curve in the road, praying there’s not a fat, wooly sheep around the bend.
By the time I finally pull to a stop between the barns, my flannel top is plastered to my sweaty back and my fingers ache as much as Mrs. McGregor’s arthritic auld bones.
I try the door to the first barn—the gym—but it is locked and the lights are off. I am clomping across the parking lot in my boots when it starts to rain. Raindrops as big and fat as Irish sheep that drench my flannel pajamas and cause my perfectly curled hair to stick to my face.
I swing open the door to the cider barn, expecting to find Aidan doing whatever cider maker’s do at ten o’clock at night, but he isn’t perched on a stool, stirring a vat of fermented apple mush with a big wooden paddle.
The barn appears to be empty.
I follow the yellow markings on the floor to the tasting area and die, just about clutch my heart and fall to the ground in a Miss Melly death swoon, when I see Aidan sitting at the long wooden tasting table, a fan of cards in his hands, a group of big, burly Irishmen seated around him.
Aidan looks up. His brows lift in surprise and then he laughs. The poker-playing (fill in the blank) laughs!
The other men look at me and the conversation dies. A little part of me dies, too, dies from the sheer humiliation of it all.
Oh, Miss Belle! I am sorry I didn’t heed your lessons.
Aidan leans back in his chair, crosses his arms over his chest, and stares at me.
“There’s something I need to say to you,” I whisper, painfully aware I am creating a scene. “Can we step outside, please?”
“Outside?” He stops smiling. “Ya must be joking. I’m not going out there. It’s lashing.”
“When have you ever been afraid to get wet?”
He smooths the hair on top of his head.
“I just had me hair done.”
“Your hair?”
“Yeah, yeah.” He flashes me a big toothy grin. “I have a fight tomorrow and I like to be clean on when I step in the cage.”
The man sitting beside Aidan punches him in the shoulder and then the men are talking all at once.
“Can’t be lookin’ like a dope, boy.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“That’s no joke.”
“Gorgeous Gallagher.”
I ignore the other men and focus on Aidan.
“I am not leaving here until I speak to you.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m with the lads.”
His friends snicker.
“No,” I say. “It can’t.”
His friends start talking all at once again.
“Go on then, boy.”
“Let her speak.”
“She’s a ride, that one.”
“Go on, then,” Aidan says, grinning.
“Excuse me?”
“Ya said ya want to speak to me so start talking. I’m listening.”
“Here?”
“Sure.”
He has that look on his face, that arrogant Aidan Gallagher look. It’s the same expression he had when we were kids and he challenged me to race him from one end of the beach to the other and when he dared Sin to swim across the lake. It used to rile me up, but not tonight. Tonight, it makes my heart ache in a good way.
And just like that, staring at his toothy grin and twinkling blue eyes, I find the clarity and courage to say what I want to say to him, what I have wanted to say since we were kids.
“You don’t have to wait until I am between ponces. You wouldn’t have had to wait the first time, but you were too darn pig-headed to tell me how you really felt about me. So, I went home thinking I was one of your many girls.”
The lads hoot and holler. Aidan holds his hand up and they stop cheering.
“Go on.”
I take a deep breath.
“I love you. I know it must seem fast, but it’s not, not really. I have loved you since I was twelve and you kissed me on the rocks below Tásúildun.” The lads cheer and a prickly heat moves down my body. “I told myself I couldn’t love you because you weren’t the sort of guy my daddy expected me to marry. You weren’t . . .”
“Gaylord?”
“You know darn well his name is Grayson,” I say, gritting my teeth. “But, yes, you weren’t Grayson.”
Aidan’s friends look at him questioningly.
“A ponce she nearly married.”
“He was not a ponce,” I say, defensive.
“He drinks fruity cocktails.”
The lads practically explode with laughter. I wait until they’re done having their laugh.
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is”—I look down at my feet, at my flannel pajama bottoms pooling around the tops of my rain boots—“I love you.”
“Why do ya love me?”
I look at Aidan again and tears fill my eyes. Sweet Baby Jesus, this is not going the way I imagined it would. This is mortifying! I am a sad, sorry mess, sniffling like Scarlett saying goodbye to Miss Melly.
“I love you because you give me the safety to be my real self—even if that means singing ‘Where’s Me Jumper’ in the bathtub or wearing Doc Martens instead of designer heels. You see me for who I really am . . .”
“That’s it? Ya love me because I don’t care if ya sing in the bathtub or stomp around in combat boots? No other reason?”
“You’re honest and kind and funny . . .”
“And?” Aidan prompts.
The lads are riveted.
“. . . when I look at you, I hear that Taylor Swift song playing in my head.”
“Which Taylor Swift song?”
The lads answer before I do.
The one where she jumps around in a tutu?
. . . or the one where she’s mad as a box of frogs burning her fella’s clothes?
“Shut up,” Aidan says.
I can’t see the expression on his face through my tears, which is a blessing I suppose.
“‘Everything Has Changed,’” I say, blinking back the tears. “I hear ‘Everything Has Changed’ playing in my head when I am with you, because looking into your eyes is like coming home. You used to be my friend, a silly boy who dared me to do stupid things, but not anymore.”
Aidan is a big, broad-shouldered, blonde-headed blur that suddenly comes into focus. He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him.
“I love ya, Tara Maxwell. Don’t you know I’ve always loved you, that you’ve always been my princess in the castle?”
He kisses me and the lads go wild.