Warm in a way that was wrong. Heavy in a way he'd never been.Where's Mam?The tear that cut down his face told me everything before he could.Be a good girl, princess.His eyes went up past me to something I couldn't see, and then they weren't looking at anything anymore.
And the last word he ever gave me, the one he always gave me when it got bad.
Run.
I opened my eyes.
Gray stone. Gray sea. A room that faced the water in a house that had never been mine, belonging to the three men I'd spent my whole adult life keeping at the far edge of the earth, precisely so this would never come for them the way it came for us.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes and gave myself five minutes.
Just five minutes.
Then I opened my bag and got to work.
10
TIERNAN
I'd been cooking since four o'clock, which anybody who knows me would've clocked as a bad sign, and Cormac, who knows me better than most, hadn't said a word about it yet. That was him being kind. He'd get there.
Here's the thing about me. I'm not the cook. We don't have one, God help us, which is its own small tragedy. My job's the other rooms, the talking ones. Reading a face across a table. Knowing which man in the deal is lying and which one just wishes he were somewhere else. Closing the thing because everybody in the room decided, somewhere between the handshake and the whiskey, that they liked me. That's the gig, I'm good at it, and I'll tell you for free it's a hell of a lot easier than a béarnaise. But when something sits too big in my chest to charm my way around, I cook. Cooking makes you hold six things at once, the heat and the timing and the order, all of it landing on the same second or the whole thing's ruined. And for as long as that takes, there's no room left in my head for anything else.
Tonight I had a great deal I didn't want to leave room for.
Sienna Madigan was upstairs.
I'd checked. Four times, maybe five, not that I was counting, and not in any way she could've caught me at. Didn't knock. Didn't hover in the hall like some sad bastard outside a door. I was just aware of her, the way you're aware of a fire in the room. You don't stare at it. You just always know exactly where it is, and precisely how much of the house it'd take if it ever decided to.
Her light had been on since she went up.
She hadn't come down.
"You're going to reduce that too far," Cormac said from the doorway.
I checked the pan. Course he was right. Bastard's always right. I turned the heat down.
"She'll come down when she's ready," he said. He came in and leaned against the counter, arms crossed, in the posture that means he's done being wherever he was and has decided the kitchen is the better option. For Cormac, that's practically throwing his arms open. "Stop hovering."
"I'm cooking."
"You're hovering while cooking." He nodded at the stove. "What is that?"
"Lamb stew. Brown bread in the oven. Roast veg. Apple tart after."
He went quiet a beat. "You made her mother's recipe."
I kept my eyes on the pan. "Ronan mentioned once her mother used to make it. For the important occasions." I shrugged. "Figured tonight qualified."
Cormac said nothing, which is Cormac for a lot of things. This time it was the good kind. He understood the thing I'd done that I wasn't going to explain, and he didn't make me explain it. Weighed it against whatever he weighs things against and let it lie.
"Ronan's been in his study since she got here," I said.
"I know."
"He should be in here."
"He'll come when he's ready too," Cormac said. "Same as her."