Amused, he stepped toward her, and when his fingers grazed her wrist her skin hummed under his touch.
He said nothing, merely uncuffed her wrists, and opened the door. There was power in silence, she mused, and realized it was something that he understood too.
“What are you doing?” Rory asked surprised as she strode out free.
“Sending her home,” Kilian said as he grasped Ron by the shoulder.
“You're going to arrest Ronnie?” Rory demanded, as her father wrapped a protective arm around her shoulder.
“I have to,'' Kilian said with a sigh, “He's drunk. We can't go around harassing women.Ronniecan sleep it off in a cell tonight,” Kilian said, and rolled his eyes at the nickname.
Grace fought to keep them within hearing distance as she stepped out through the small crowd of people still in the pub, and out into the parking lot.
Kilian hadn't bothered to park his police cruiser, she noted. It was still running in the middle of the road.
“Why didn’t you tell me they were coming to town?” Kilian asked, and she felt certain he was talking about her and her father.
She paused outside her car and turned to face Rory, Kilian, and Ron.
“I was going to,” Rory said over the rain, “I haven't had time. We'll discuss it later.”
Nodding his head, she watched as Kilian pushed Ron into the back of his squad car and gave her one last look.
She jerked her head away, embarrassed to have been caught eavesdropping, then followed her father back toward his car. It seemed that they would have a lot to discuss too.
3
Hot water randown the center of Kilian’s back, soothing the aching muscles in his upper body. Lifting his hands over his head, stretching out the length of his spine underneath the flowing water, he groaned.
What a long day, a longer night, who the hell even knew that was possible. He didn’t get home until four in the morning, and by that point he was too tired to do anything but grab an ice pack and collapse on the couch. He was out almost as soon as his head hit the cushion. He knew that he really should have gone to the ER for his nose, but he just didn’t have the energy.
Adjusting his shoulders under the hot spray, he felt a series of pops in his spine that were as painful as they were pleasurable. Tilting his head to the side to stretch his neck, he sighed.
He hadn’t expected the Walsh girl to be that fierce of an opponent—a mistake he was sure that his body, especially his nose, would never let him forget. He couldn’t remember a time in recent history that his body had felt this worn-out—not since he’d first started learning to fight from his older brother Liam, and his father.
Gingerly testing his nose, he winced and shut his eyes tight against the pain. It wasn’t the first time that it had been broken, that happened on the playground when he was eight years old. He’d made the mistake of telling little Caitlin Murphy that she was the abandoned child of a leprechaun, which was why her fiery hair looked like a rat’s nest.
He grinned at the memory now, thinking of the way those emerald eyes blazed as she lifted the stick from the ground, and swung up, hard and fast.
Oh, yes, he learned that day never to underestimate Cait, but more than that, not to push too hard at a crush, else the feelings would never be reciprocated. He paused for a moment as he reached for the body wash; it had been twenty years since he’d thought of his childhood crush on Cait, and the thought of it made him grin. He doubted she ever knew, and it was for the best since she was now marrying his baby brother.
Amused at the thought, he rubbed the body wash over lean, tired muscles, and allowed the beads of hot water to flow through his dark waves of hair. As the warm water ran over the deep purple and red bruising on the bridge of his nose and underneath his eyes, Kilian’s mouth fell open in a silent, pained groan. He definitely should have called the doctor, or at least gone to his mother to patch it up.
Making a mental note to call her first thing in the morning, he pushed open the shower curtain and stepped onto the damp tile floors.
Now standing in front of the mirror, Kilian really looked at himself for the first time in a while. His face looked thinner than before—far from hollowed or unhealthy, but there was a noticeable difference in the angularity of his face. His cheekbones and jawline stood out more, giving his face more than a strong definition, but a hardness that he hadn’t had throughout most of his life.
He turned his face in front of the mirror, pointing his chin up towards the lights to inspect the severity of the bruising. He’d barely been able to get an ice pack on the thing when he crawled into bed the night before. Luckily, the swelling had gone down for the most part—the only raised part of the injury now was the skin around the edge of the cut on the bridge of his nose. Inspecting it closely, Kilian was relieved to see that the cut was free of any discoloration—only the flushed pink of freshly-irritated skin grinned back at him in the mirror’s reflection. He wondered how Ron was doing, and just where the hell Grace Walsh had learned to fight like that.
Few women, Caitlin included, knew how to handle themselves that way, and even in their line of work, it was surprising. Sure, his mother and Sophie knew self-defense, and they had used it a time or two, but Grace, she was something different entirely.
Reaching for a bottle of aspirin from the counter, he frowned at the large, violet splotch that was threatening to spread from nose to cheekbone.
“Damn,” he muttered as he threw back the aspirin and turned his face toward the harsh bathroom lighting. He could only imagine the things that his brothers would say when they saw him, especially when it eventually came out that the Walsh girl had been the one to knock him back.He’d never hear the end of it.
Deciding it was best to keep the truth about last night to himself for as long as he possibly could, he yanked the towel from the rack and wrapped it snugly around his waist.
Word would get out eventually. It was a small city, and the Irish loved a good story. More than that, he was sure that the little spitfire would take the first chance she could to brag about it, especially if she could see the way his face looked now—a sneer pulled at the top of his lip as he imagined how the contacts would react during their next drop.
