Chapter Two
Nick
Two things were immediatelyapparent about Miss Erin Walsh.
First, she'd seen some shit. She shrouded herself in too much rough assertiveness to be a simple-hearted scientist. She'd lived through a time or two, and it showed.
And second, her eyes made me forget everything I'd ever known.
Green green green.
Green like sea witches and summer. Green like the holiest of pagan rituals. Green like the inside of a secret.
Right there, with Erin's name rolling off my tongue and her hand still shaking mine, I accepted that I'd be violating several articles of the Ex-Girlfriends and Sisters Code for Guys this weekend. I'd ask forgiveness from Matt—and Patrick, Sam, and Riley, too—at some point in the future because fuck asking permission. Even if she was their little sister, Erin was a grown woman, and she'd be the only Walsh granting permission here.
Meeting Erin tonight brought on the oddest sense of déjà vu, all hot and prickly on the back of my neck. Within a single breath, she looked everything like Shannon but nothing at all. Same autumn red hair. Same pale skin spattered with freckles. Same petite build. Same emerald eyes that could cut down grown men with little more than a glance. They were like identical twins, who—despite being genetically fucking identical—were so different in personality and nature that it appeared to alter their features.
I'd seen photos of her, plenty of them. Matt showed off her expeditions like the proud stand-in papa he was, but those images only told me that she was a pint-sized ginger with no concern about getting up close and personal with literal pits of fire.
Never once did those images flatten me with eyes that saidI know things you can't begin to comprehend.
It wasn't as simple as attraction, not even close. Attraction boiled down to looking and liking, and I knew all about that. Looking and liking had been my preferred mode of operation for years, and it had never once grabbed me by the gut and saidDon't let that woman go.Lust wasn't the culprit either. It was something else, something that resided past the bounds of language and fully in the land of intuition.
That left me staring at her while she examined long-lost family heirlooms with sad eyes that worked hard at blinking back tears. She watched Shannon's every move, but Shannon wasn't returning the favor. I wasn't ignorant of the issues, though. Anytime the Walsh boys congregated around an ample supply of liquor, the topic of Shannon and Erin's holy war was bound to come up. Something really fucking foul had gone down between them, and it was far from resolved.
Yeah, Erin had lived through a time.
Before I could ask her to get a drink with me, she was gone. Dragged back into the rattle and hum of Matt and Lauren's wedding weekend. She was passed around like the family Bible, everyone borrowing the chapter and verse that suited them best.
So I waited. This wasn't my ballgame. Not even my league. But I needed to see her. It was wild and illogical, and in the right light it was manic. I just didn't care.
It didn't help that my head was a fucking mess. This woman—this week—had a throb of confusion vibrating in my every breath and sent me on a long, aimless walk around the inn. I lacked both destination and plan, and knew only that if I kept moving, I'd find what I needed.
And what—who—I needed came bustling out of the inn's front door, a gray cardigan that looked too soft and threadbare to be anything more than symbolically warm over herMoby-Dickt-shirt.
She was wearing different jeans now too, the traditional cut, not the stretchy, close-fitting kind from earlier in the evening. They looked good on her, as if she'd worn them long enough for the fabric to know her as well as she knew it. In place of her flip-flops were scuffed and scarred boots.
Nothing about her saidnew. Of course not. Her soul was centuries older than her skin.
"Hey. Nick?" She pushed her cat's-eye glasses up her nose—those were too fucking cute for life—and said, "Were you leaving? Can you get me out of here?"
"Sure thing, darlin'," I said. She remembered my name. I was taking that as a sign. "Where're we running to?"
"Just…anywhere," she said, looking into the wooded darkness behind me. "Away from here."
I brought my hand to her shoulder, and steered her toward my SUV. "Easy enough," I said. "What do you need?"
This was cool. It was friendly. I wasn't creeping on her personal space because I had an unbelievable need to touch her. Completely cool and friendly, and I wasn't thinking about stroking her hair. Not at all.
"Thanks for this," she said. "I could use a beer. Maybe some fresh air, too."
No sense mentioning our stone's-throw proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, or the availability of beer here either. The lady wanted to leave and thus I was fulfilling her orders.
Her eyebrow ring glinted in the moonlight as she settled into the passenger seat. It was a tiny piercing, just past the midline of her left brow. I leaned back in my seat, gripping the steering wheel harder than necessary to remind myself that climbing on top of her and exploring the feel of that ring against my tongue wasn't the polite way to start a conversation.
She drummed her fingers on the armrest, and I stared, completely caught in her spell. If this was the same curiosity that sent Odysseus sailing straight into the Sirens, then someone needed to tie me to the motherfucking mast because I was going in.
"I was thinking about getting a little farther away than the parking lot," she said. "What do you say?"
