LITMIR.BIZ

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anyway.

      “Prince Mahail’s proposal came very shortly after my Beloved died. Ronan, it felt so much easier to get swept along in all the excitement than to feel what I was feeling. Bereft. Lonely. Pathetic. A woman whose deepest love had been for a cat.”

      But he didn’t see it as pathetic. He saw it as something else: a woman with a fierce capacity to love, giving her whole heart when she decided to love, giving it her everything. Would the man who finally received that understand what a gift it was, what a treasure?

      “Will you tell me something about you now?”

      It was one of those trick questions women were so good at. She had shared something deep, meaningful. She wasn’t going to be satisfied if he talked about his favorite soccer team.

      “I wouldn’t know where to begin,” he said, hedging.

      “What kind of little boy were you?” she asked him.

      Ah, a logical place to begin. “A very bad one,” he said.

      “Bad or mischievous?”

      “Bad. I was the kid putting the potatoes in the tailpipes of cars, breaking the neighbors’ windows, getting expelled from school for fighting.”

      “But why?”

      But why? The question no one had asked. “My Dad died when I was six. Not using that as an excuse, just some boys need a father’s hand in their lives. My mother seemed to know she was in way over her head with me. I think wanting to get me under control was probably motivation for most of her marriages.”

      “Marriages? How many?” Shoshauna whispered, wide-eyed. This would be scandalous in her country where divorce was nearly unheard of. It had been scandalous enough in his own.

      “Counting the one coming up? Seven?”

      “You can’t be responsible for that one!”

      Still, he always felt vaguely responsible, a futile sense of not being able to protect his mother. When he was younger it was a sense of not being enough.

      “What was that like for you growing up? Were any of her husbands like a father to you?” Shoshauna asked.

      And for some reason he told her what he had never told anyone. About the misery and the feelings of rejection and the rebellion against each new man. He told her about how that little tiny secret spark of hope that someday he would have a father again had been steadily eroded into cynicism.

      He didn’t know why he told her, only that when he did, he didn’t feel weaker. He felt lighter.

      And more content than he had felt in many years.

      “What was your mother’s marriage to your father like?” she asked softly.

      He was silent, remembering. Finally he sighed, and he could hear something that was wistful in him in that sigh. He had thought it was long dead, but now he found it was just sleeping.

      “Like I said, I was only six when he died, so I don’t know if these memories are true, or if they are as I wish it had been.”

      “Tell me what you think you remember.”

      “Happiness.” He was surprised by how choked he sounded. “Laughter. I remember, one memory more vivid than any other, of my dad chasing my mom around the house, her running from him shrieking with laughter, her face alight with life and joy. And when he caught her, I remember him holding her, covering her with kisses, me trying to squeeze in between them, to be a part of it. And then he lifted me up, and they squeezed me between them so hard I almost couldn’t breathe for the joy of it.”

      For a long time she was silent, and when she looked at him, he saw what the day had given her in her face: a new maturity, a new ability to be herself in the world.

      And he heard it in her voice, in the wisdom of what she said.

      She said, “Once your mother had that, what she had with your father, I would think she could not even imagine trying to live without it. By marrying all those men, she was only trying to be alive again. Probably for you, as much as for herself. It wasn’t that she wanted those men to give you something you didn’t have, it was that she wanted to give you what she had been before, she saw you grieving for her as much as for him.”

      It was strange, but when he heard those words, he felt as if he had searched for them, been on a quest that led him exactly to this place.

      A place where, finally, he could forgive his mother.

      Ever since he’d left home, it was as if he had tried desperately to put a lid on the longing his earliest memories had created. He had tried to fill all the spaces within himself: with discipline, with relentless strength, with purpose, with the adrenaline rush of doing dangerous things.

      But now he saw that, just like Shoshauna, he had been brought to this place to find what was really within himself.

      He was a man who wanted to be loved.

      And deserved to be loved.

      A man who had come to know you could fill your whole world, but if it was missing the secret ingredient it was empty.

      With the fire warm against their faces and the blanket wrapped around them, they slept under the winking stars and to the music of the crashing waves. He had not felt so peaceful, or so whole, for a long, long time.

      But he awoke with a fighting man’s instinct just before dawn.

      For a moment he was disoriented, her hair, soft as eiderdown, softer than he could have ever imagined it, tickling the bottom of his chin, her head resting on his chest, her breath blowing in warm puffs against his skin.

      The feeling lasted less than half a second.

      He could hear the steady, but still far off, wop-wop-wop of a helicopter engine, beneath that the steady but still-distant whine of powerboats.

      He sat up, saw the boats coming, halfway between the island and the mainland, three of them forming a vee in the water, the helicopter zooming ahead of them to do reconnaissance.

      The fire, he thought, amazed at his own stupidity. He’d been able to see the lights of the mainland from here, how could he have taken a chance by lighting that fire?

      Because he’d been blinded, that’s how. He’d forgotten the number-one rule of protection, no not forgotten it, been lulled into believing, that just this once it would be okay to set it aside. But he’d been wrong. He’d broken the rule he knew to be sacred in his business, and now he was about to pay the price.

      He knew that emotional involvement with the principal jeopardized their well-being, their safety. And he had done it anyway, putting his needs ahead of what he knew was right.

      He’d acted as if they were on a damn holiday from the moment they’d landed on this island. Instead of snorkeling and surfing, he should have spent his time creating a defensible position: hiding places, booby traps, a fallback plan.

      He felt the sting of his greatest failure, but there was no time now for self-castigation. There would probably be plenty of time for that later.

      He eyed their own boat, the tide out, so far up on the sand he didn’t have a chance of getting it to the water before the other boats were on them, and he didn’t like the idea of being out in the open, sitting ducks. He could hear the engines of those other boats, anyway. They were far more powerful than the boat on the beach.

      “Wake up,” he shouted at her, leaping to his feet, his hand rough on her slender shoulder.

      There was no time to appreciate her sleep-ruffed hair, her eyes fluttering open, the way a line from his own chest was imprinted on her cheek. She was blinking at him with sleepy trust that he knew himself to be completely unworthy of.

      He yanked her to her feet. She caught his urgency instantly, allowed herself to be pushed at high speed toward the cottage. He stopped there only briefly to pick up the Glock, two clips of ammo,

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