Three swallows of beer did nothing to cool me off or to clear my head.
“You can’t hide that smile,” he said. “Even when you try.”
“Oh, yer a romantic one, aren’t ye?” I answered him.
He cocked his head at me. “Aye,” he replied, his accent horrible. “That I am, lass.”
I broke into a small chuckle. “That’s awful. It’s like a form of racism or something. I ought to slap ye for it.”
He proffered his cheek.
Instead of slapping him, I reached out and let my fingertips and palm caress the stubble there. His eyes remained locked on me. The intensity pounded in my head, tingled in my chest and loins. The effect was overwhelming.
“What’s your name?” he asked me.
“Shae,” I answered, without thinking. Gone was Angela Quinn. Gone was Tara Kelly.
He reached up and covered my hand with his own. “Shae,” he asked. “Do you want to get out of this place? Go somewhere that we can be alone?”
I thought about it for the barest of moments. What if we were some kind of cop? Not a chance. IRA? Not likely.
I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know anything about him.
And I didn’t believe in love at first sight.
I didn’t have time for any crushes, either.
Go with the flow, lass.
Did I want to be alone with him?
“Aye, Laddie,” I said. “I do.”
I had the sense to go to his motel room instead of my own, though even that much thought process was a struggle. We burst through the door and were on each other with deep, frantic kisses. Clothing fell away, some gently, some torn. The hungry, selfish, grasping caresses of a first time were all we knew.
The world outside grew small, then disappeared. That motel room became the world.
The physical and the emotional melted into each other.
His skin tasted so good.
My breath caught.
Pleasure washed over me.
And again.
Time passed. Stood still.
We were one.
Inseparable.
Later, we lay on the bed on top of tangled sheets. He made a joke about wishing he still smoked. I thought it was the funniest thing ever said.
“My mother warned me about this,” he said.
“What’s that? Meeting strange women and deflowering them?”
He smiled. “Somehow I don’t think any deflowering occurred tonight.”
“Perhaps not. What did she warn ye about, then?”
He adjusted his body position, turning on his side to face me. “You have to understand. My father, he was German and Hungarian. Very practical. Always a planner. Very organized and disciplined. But my mother, she was mostly Italian. She was the romantic.”
“She teach ye that pick-up line?”
His face fell. “That was no line.”
I kissed him. “Sorry, Laddie. I was just playing with ye.”
He nodded that he understood. “She did teach me about romance, I suppose. Mostly I took after my father. He always used to tell me that all of the love songs on the radio were really just part of a government conspiracy.”
“Conspiracy?”
“Yeah. According to him, all of those songs were secretly designed to make us fall in love and get married so that the government could get you to pay more taxes.”
I laughed. “That sounds like something a government would do.”
He smiled. “It does, doesn’t it?”
“Especially the English,” I said.
A question formed in his eyes, but he left it unasked. “The thing is,” he said, “my mother didn’t agree. She said that the love songs were there to remind us why we got married in the first place. Why we fell in love.”
“Ah. A true romantic, she.”
“She was. And she warned me that someday, when I least expected it, I’d be hit by the thunderbolt.”
I smiled. I didn’t have to ask what that meant. My mother had never warned me about such things, but I sure as hell knew it when it happened.
After that, the words just spilled out of both of us. There was no pretense. No filter. As much as we rushed to know each other physically, our conversation roamed far and fast in an effort to know each other factually.
I learned he was an American from River City, Washington. He had no family left. I told him where I was from in Ireland and that only Uncle Terry remained in my family. We shared childhood stories. Dreams. We danced slowly up to the present day, nary a lie between us.
“Did ye find work here in Canada?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “I got in a little bit of trouble, so I had to leave town.”
“Law trouble?”
He shrugged. “It wasn’t really illegal. Just a little bit…funny.”
“Laddie, people don’t leave town over something that’s only a little bit funny.”
“They don’t, huh?”
“No. And they definitely don’t leave the country over it, either.”
“No? How about an entire continent? Do people do that?”
I was silent for long moment. Then I took a deep breath and I told him everything. I told him about growing up Catholic in the Northern Counties. About my mother getting sick when I was nine and dying at the hospital while my father and I were on the train to come and see her.
I didn’t stop there. I described the day I waved goodbye to my father. He waved goodbye from the street, his hat cocked on his head in that jaunty way he wore it. He smiled at me like only a father can smile and only at his daughter, at that. Then a car drove past with two men in it. The passenger leaned out and called his name. When he turned away from me, there were two sharp cracks. His head jerked back. His body pitched to the ground. The car accelerated away, leaving me alone with my own screams.
“That’s awful,” Laddie said, squeezing my shoulder. “Who did it?”
I shrugged. “I never knew for certain. Could have been the English. Could have been Sinn Fein, thinking he was collaborating with the English. Or any number of other possibilities.”
“What a mess,” he whispered.
“We have a saying in Northern Ireland,” I told him. “It says that where the Troubles are concerned, if ye’re not confused, ye don’t know what’s going on.”
“I believe it. Did you ever find out who the men were? Did you get them back?”
I shook my head. “No. Don’t go looking for a happy ending, Laddie. This is real life. And it’s an Irish story, not a Canadian one.”
“I’m American.”
“Even worse. You and your Hollywood.”
We fell silent, both lost in our own thoughts.
“You want something to drink?” he finally asked me.
“That’d be grand.”
He sat up and pulled on his jeans. “I’ll get some ice.”
I watched him grab the plastic bucket. The silhouette of his body seemed familiar to me somehow. Comforting.
“Be right back.” He slipped out the door, propping it open slightly with the swinging lock fixture.
I lay in the darkness, the smell of sweat and sex hanging over me. I wanted to berate myself for falling into bed with this strange man, and an American at that. But it felt too right. Too perfect. So I tried to convince myself that it was only a one-night stand. A night to forget. Or to remember but not speak of.
That didn’t work, either. I knew the same thing lying in bed that I knew standing in the bar the moment I met him. I was his until I died. And he mine.
I cursed in Old Irish and rubbed my eyes.
The door rattled and a black silhouette stepped through.
“Good,” I said. “I’m dying of thirst.”
He’d taken the two strides to the bed before I realized it wasn’t Laddie. “You greedy bitch!”
The voice had the barest hint of brogue. Probably a cousin of someone back home, I thought absently.
“How’d you find me?” I asked coolly.
“What? You think you’re so smart? Think we couldn’t follow you here to Vancouver? You think you can hide in a big city like this? After what you did?”
He was an amateur. A pro would have already shot me and been out of the room. He must have picked me up at the airport somehow. Someone figured out I was headed to Vancouver. But who?