He sank down onto his knees. “Let me show you.”
The week that followed was strange and wonderful, a seesaw of emotional extremes. Her days were spent in the makeshift office in Liam’s living room, working, or trying to. She vacillated from wiggling her toes with manic joy and laughing out loud for no reason to worrying obsessively about her sisters, or stressing about the stairwell thugs. And missing Lucia, so sharply she could taste it. Grief left a hard lump in her throat that only Liam’s embrace could ease.
It comforted her, somehow, that Lucia had handpicked him for her. Like a benediction from beyond. Her sisters approved of him, too. One night, Vivi and Nell had driven up in Vivi’s van from the city to have dinner. Liam had impressed the hell out of them with leg of lamb, new potatoes with herbs, and a good red wine. Gooey chocolate profiterole had clinched the deal. They were blatantly rooting for him. Which was great, but it ratcheted the pressure up even higher.
Nancy and Liam ate all their meals together, and feasting on Liam’s abundant home-cooked food was having its inevitable effect. After only a few days, her jeans were noticeably tighter, to her chagrin and Liam’s unqualified approval. She’d brought an espresso pot, a bean grinder, and a sizable stash of coffee beans to his house, and with that small but crucial detail taken care of, she was in hog heaven.
On evenings when it didn’t rain, they wrapped themselves in a fluffy afghan and sat together on the porch swing, listening to birds, crickets, frogs, wind chimes. Talking about anything and everything, or sitting in a companionable silence. A fearful little voice whispered cynically to enjoy it while it lasted. And goddammit, she would.
Liam was still carrying the gun around, but after over a week had passed with no attacks upon her person, the immediacy of the threat had eased. Nancy was almost ready to broach the subject they were so carefully avoiding. Which was, what came next.
She couldn’t stay up here cloistered in his bed forever. And in any case, the time he’d taken off to work on Lucia’s house was coming to an end. He had other jobs scheduled after it. The real world beckoned.
Her fantasy was to integrate the two realities, make him a real part of her life. Part of her was cynically sure that it was too much to hope. But oh, she liked the person who she was with him.
She would make adjustments. Be flexible. He was so worth it.
He was showing her how to make soda bread in his kitchen one evening, a pot of fragrant stew bubbling on the stove, when she broke the ice and told him she needed to drive back down to New York.
A chill settled over his face, though his expression did not change.
“What for?” His voice had a strangely distant tone.
“I have to leave Moxie with Freedy’s wife, Andrea, when I go to the FolkWorld Conference next week,” she explained.
He scowled, suspiciously. “A conference?”
“It’s important,” she said. “For me and for all my artists. Freedy and Peter and Enid and Mandrake are all performing. Eoin, too. I won’t be alone for a second. I’ll be surrounded by everyone I know, in fact.”
He let out a skeptical grunt. “Is Freedy another one of your exes?”
“Yes, but it’s amicable,” she assured him. “Freedy has a showcase Friday night at FolkWorld, but Andrea has to work, so she’s staying in the city. She promised to look after Moxie for me.”
“Why not just leave her here with me?”
She gazed at his unreadable profile and gathered her nerve.
“Thank you. But that, uh, brings me to something I wanted to ask.”
“Ask away.” He did something efficient looking with milk, mixing the batter with a few competent swipes of a wooden spoon.
She took a deep breath and blurted it out. “Want to come?”
He froze, his hands buried in dough. “To the conference?”
She hastened on. “It’s in Boston, at the Amory Lodge. I’ll get you a listener’s pass. You’d stay in my room, of course. Seeing as how it’s a weekend, and you have a job scheduled for next week, I figured, maybe you could drive up Saturday.”
“Hmph.” He looked unconvinced.
“This is the thing,” she went on. “I’ve been experiencing your life since I’ve been here, staying in your house, eating your food—”
“Sleeping in my bed.”
“Yes, sleeping in your bed, and it’s wonderful. But I have my own life. I want you to get to know it the way I’ve gotten to know yours. The conference will be crazy, and I’ll be networking with agents and presenters, and probably we won’t sleep. But you’ll hear great music and meet great people. And Eoin would be ecstatic. Mandrake’s showcase will be his first performance. It kicks off their spring tour.”
He gathered the dough into a loose ball, his face thoughtful. “What night is Eoin’s thing?”
“Saturday night. At eleven-thirty, if you can believe it.”
He laid the dough on the floury countertop, still not meeting her eyes. “I was thinking of taking a few more days off,” he admitted.
“You were?” she said hopefully.
“But I was thinking along the lines of running away with you. Someplace where I won’t have to share you with hundreds of people. I know a guy on the coast who charters a sailboat. I thought, four or five days, no worries, no looking over our shoulders. No cell coverage.”
She snorted. “You do like to push your luck, don’t you?”
“To the hilt,” he said, eyes gleaming.
Nancy watched his floury fingers patting dough onto the counter. “It sounds wonderful,” she said. “But I was hoping—” She bit her lip.
“What were you hoping?” He laid the lump of dough onto a floured baking sheet. He flicked his eyes up, frowning when she didn’t answer.
“I want this thing to be real, Liam,” she said. “Right now it’s a fairy tale, totally removed from my real life. I want to pinch myself to make sure you really exist.”
He slipped his arms around her waist, careful not to touch her with his floury hands. “Let me prove to you that I exist, sweetheart.”
She swatted him. “Stop trying to distract me. I want my friends to meet you. I want you to hear my artists. I…I want this to be real.”
“How long is this conference?” he asked cautiously.
“Four days. Thursday through Sunday.”
He tapped his fingers on the counter. “How about I come Saturday night, see Eoin’s showcase, and experience your life Sunday. Then Monday morning we take off and go sailing for a few days. Deal?”
Her heart soared. “Deal.”
“Great. I’ll call the guy, make the reservation. And now, let me put this in the oven and wash my hands, so I can grab you properly.” He scrubbed and rinsed his hands and pulled her into his arms.
“I’m so glad we’re doing this,” she said softly. “It makes me feel as if there’s hope for us. For the future, I mean.”
He stood so still, and so silently, a chill of apprehension gripped her. “Sorry,” she said, through gritted teeth. “Forget I said that.”
“It’s all right,” he said in a guarded voice. “I hope it, too.”
But he wasn’t hoping too hard, from the sound of it. She buried her face against his sweater and hung on with all her strength. As if strength had anything to do with hanging on to a man. She never had gotten the knack, what with her talent for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Like the fairy tale about the girl who dropped toads from her mouth. But she would hang on to the bitter end, toads or no toads.
They would have to pry her away from this guy with a crowbar.
John adjusted the angle of the flexible head of the video camera he was threading between the slats of the heating vent, checking the monitor to be sure it would cover the whole miserable little apartment.
He was in a foul humor, and had been for days. Ever since that bruising encounter with that pain-in-the-ass carpenter who had taken it upon himself to be Nancy D’Onofrio’s champion. Knightly had been an unpleasant surprise. He’d caused John to lose still more face with his employer, which he could ill afford to do. And for that, Knightly would die. First he had to get this shitbag job behind him. But most definitely later. John planned to make the carpenter his own special little personal project.