She did as asked, letting the faint breeze off the ocean ruffle her hair and drew in a breath that tasted of moist soil and salty sea.
“Do ye feel the sun on it?”
The sun’s spring rays kissed her face with their warmth, and she nodded.
“Now open yer eyes and look out over the fields.”
She did so, staring out over the gentle knolls of rich brown earth dotted with patches of green, both of which gave way to blue ocean in the distance.
“Everything the sun touches, it’ll be ours one day.”
Tears streaked her face, and she took a step back from him, then another, until the land behind him blurred, until the towering form of her father disappeared into a swirl of brown and green and blue.It won’t be ours, Da. It won’t. Don’t tell me lies. Don’t fill me head with nonsense. Don’t make me hope for things that will never be.
But he had filled her head with nonsense anyway, and Conan’s too. Every time they worked the fields, every time they took a wagon of vegetables to the land agent to pay their rent, every time they set up a booth at the market to sell their goods. It didn’t matter how old they were, what they were doing, or the time of the year, there was one thing Da never stopped talking about?—
Crash!
Aileen woke with a jolt, the fields of her homeland slipping away as she sat up on the narrow bed and pressed a hand to her heart. It stampeded against her palm like sheep running down a hillside.
“What did you do?” A man’s voice invaded the darkness.
She froze.
“I didn’t do nothing. It fell all on its own.” Another man’s voice joined the first, this one a little deeper.
Were the men downstairs in the bakery? Her gaze found the door to her room, and she stared at the handle. The fear in her chest rose into her throat, so thick and suffocating she nearly choked.
“Clean this up, and be quick about it.”
No, the voices weren’t coming from downstairs or the hall outside her room, but from the alley. She moved her gaze to the window, and her stampeding heart slowed a wee bit. That was normal enough, wasn’t it, voices outside the window? Truly, she had nothing to be alarmed about. People could use the alley at any time of day or night.
But in nearly a year of renting rooms above the bakery, she’d never been awakened by people behind the building.
Should she go to the window and look? What if they were trying to break in?
Her heart pounded anew, and she twisted her sweaty hands in the tangled sheets.
There had been a time that the idea of strangers forcing their way into her room seemed unfathomable, but someone had broken into the bakery just this past winter. A chill swept through her despite the muggy heat filling the room. The perpetrator had been caught, aye, but another man could attempt the same.
More talking sounded from the window, where the gauzy curtains fluttered in the nighttime breeze. The voices were lower now, more secretive, more… suspicious.
Probably because they were trying not to wake half the town. Aye, that was the reason the men outside were being quiet, not because there was something sinister going on.
“Hurry before someone sees us.”
Or mayhap not. She glanced down at the sheets tangled around her lap, then at her pillow, still bearing the indent of where her head had lain. She’d not be able to sleep now. Shouldn’t she at least try to figure out what the men outside were doing? Drawing in a shaky breath, she shoved her covers down and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
Humid air, unusual for so early in the summer, surrounded her. The thrum of blood in her ears was so loud it nearly drowned out the voices as she crept toward the window. She paused by the wall, her back pressed to the white plaster, then drew in a steadying breath before she peeked outside.
The silver moon slanted a shaft of light between the buildings and into the alley, where a group of men clustered beneath her window. There were more than two, but how many? Four? Five? It was hard to tell given the way thick shadows cloaked almost everything in sight.
The men appeared to have a large crate that had somehow split open. Two of them picked up objects shrouded in shadow and set them into a second crate which appeared to be loaded onto a handcart of some sort.
It almost looked like they were dockworkers taking cargo to the warehouse. Except dockworkers didn’t work at night, and the pier and warehouse were several blocks from the bakery. There’d be no need to haul cargo this far from the beach. She attempted to swallow the lump stuck in her throat, but it lodged there, unmovable.
Two more men approached from the direction of the harbor, pulling their own handcart. “What are ye still doing here?”
Irish. Aileen sucked in a breath. That voice was unmistakably Irish.
