For a second—a stupid, fleeting second—I felt something stir in my chest. Like a flicker of heat, there and gone before I could make sense of it. But I shoved it down, locked it away.
“I think fierce is just his way of saying that I’m impossible to deal with,” I chimed airily. “I am, too, you know,impossible to deal with.”
He grinned, and feckin’ hell, but the man was potent.
Warn a lass, will ya?
“I don’t think so.”
His eyes looked bluer, and I had to look away and act busy.
Ronan and Saoirse, my server, had probably already opened the doors while I was here chatting away with Mr. Professional Golfer, so there was work to be done.
I shrugged. I didn’t care what Jax thought of me. He wasn’t staying long enough for it to matter.
I headed back to the bar, trying to shake him from my head, but the truth was, I couldn’t. His voice lingered. His face lingered. Hisbloody dimpleslingered.
It’s just that I’d had some dry days… months… fine. It had been two years.
Two years since Maggie got sick. Two years since I became her nurse instead of her sister. A year and a half since I held her hand in the bedroom we grew up in and felt it go slack in mine.
After she was gone, I couldn’t stay on the farm. Not in that house. Not in the room where the air still felt like it remembered her last breath.
So I moved above the pub, where the walls weren’t steeped in ghosts, and let Ronan take the farm when his girlfriend kicked him out, and he needed somewhere to land.
But distance didn’t fix a thing.
Grief followed me.
Maggie’s laugh still found me when the nights were too quiet.
Her smile lived in the back of my mind, a constant reminder of what I’d lost.
Now I was afraid of losing more.
Keeping the pub afloat was hard enough—arguing with whiskey suppliers who sent rubbish stock and fighting off greedy developers who saw Ballybeg as a blank slate for their overpriced golf resort.
“I hear you’ve got a boarder.” Saoirse pulled beer for Angus, who’d come as he always did with his dog, Finn, as soon as we opened.
They were old and, as Angus liked to joke,circling thedrain. He didn’t like being home, not since his wife passed, and now both man and dog came to The Banshee’s Rest and stayed all day until it was time for bed. He read and played cards with some others who also came as he did.
What would happen to all of these people if the pub were gone? They couldn’t afford some fancy resort, and honestly, they wouldn’t go. Ballybeg would become something else, not what it was today.
“Aye.”
“Heard he’s a Yank,” Angus commented.
“Aye.”
“Drives a Porsche.” Saoirse wiggled her eyebrows. “It’s sitting pretty in Paddy’s garage. Heard he’s aprofessional golfer.” She stressed the wordpro.
“Down, lass, he’s too old for ya.”
The girl was only eighteen. I shook my head and went behind the bar.
“He’s rich enough to be as old as he likes,” she quipped airily, waving the dishrag she carried like a kerchief as if she were royalty.
Angus looked up from his pint. “How rich would I need to be?”
