* * * *
Shannon Airport, 1975…
“Are you sure you’ll be all right?” Gauging by his expression, Bartley wasn’t.
“Right as rain.” Whatever that meant. “Now you go on and do your thing, and let me do mine. I can take care of myself.” Sharon pasted a reassuring smile on her face. “Good luck in your fight tonight—even though I know you won’t need it.” Stretching up on tiptoe, she pulled his head down to hers and kissed his cheek.
“Good luck yourself, dear—for it’s afraid I am that you will be needing it.” Bartley bruised her ribs in a bear hug, then started away with strong lithe strides, a carryon knapsack, his only luggage, slung over a burly shoulder. “I’ll be looking you up soon, Sharon O’Shaughnessy!” he promised, glancing back for an instant and doffing his tweed cap to her.
“You do that, Bartley McCarthy!” she called after him.
“Okay…now what do I do?” she asked herself aloud.
Several minutes later found her seated in a corner of the airport restaurant, sipping a cup of hot tea. “When faced with a large task,” she quoted her grandmother, “step back and view it from a distance. It’ll look smaller.” Seeing as how the checked baggage hadn’t been unloaded from the plane yet, there wasn’t much else she could do anyway. Slumped forward, elbows resting on the table, she brooded over her tea, so lost in a tangle of thoughts she scarcely heard the tinny-sounding voice over the intercom the first time it paged her.
“Will Miss Sharon O’Shaughnessy please report to the information desk,” it summoned again.
Bewildered, she rose to her feet, hitched up her jeans, smoothed down her sweater, and slowly made her way toward this new, unexpected development. She wondered if maybe Bartley had returned, looking for her. But when she reached the information booth, all she saw was a tall, dark haired young man in brown slacks and a green jersey. He leaned against the counter, impatiently drumming his fingers on it.
“You’re Sharon O’Shaughnessy?” he demanded.
A baritone voice that might have been attractive if it hadn’t been soured by agitation. His tone set her teeth on edge.
“In person, not a picture.”
He winced. “Saints preserve us…”
From what?
Why did she attract weirdoes?
“Well, come along with you then—we’ve a long drive ahead of us.” He grabbed her arm and dragged her toward the baggage-claim area. “Come on, girl, stop dillydallying!”
Who was this jerk?
“Whoa!” Sharon dug in her heels and wrenched free. “Just who the hell are you?”
She scrambled backward several steps as he advanced on her with upraised hand.
“For shame!” He waggled an accusing finger under her nose. “Nice young ladies do not say naughty words. You’d better mind your manners or the Long-toothed Hag will get you.”
“The what?” Sharon was so jangled, she didn’t notice the underlying sparkle in his dark eyes—and wouldn’t have been much comforted even if she had.
“Ah, come on now, don’t be telling me that your grandmother never once threatened you with the Long-toothed Hag when you were a wee colleen,” he said with an irritating display of disbelief.
The guy was a nutcase, demented and dangerous.
Sharon spun about to flee, but was pulled up short by the blond braid hanging down her back. “Let go of me, or I’ll scream.”
This was insane, impossible. How could a girl be abducted right in the middle of a crowed airport?
“Hush!” The madman released her hair to grip her arm again, hauling her along beside him. “One peep out of you, and I’ll give you something to really scream about.”
What, precisely, he didn’t specify, which made the threat sound all the more sinister. Sharon almost swallowed her tongue, choking on outrage.
“There now, that’s better,” her captor said calmly. “If you hadn’t gone flying into a dither, I’d have introduced m’self before. Stop making such a frightful grimace, or your pretty face might freeze like that, and you’ll be doomed to resemble a sorrowful banshee the rest of your natural days,” he added with a mocking lilt. “I’m Rory Egan. Your Great-Aunt Deirdre was my grandmother. Step-grandmother. She married Johnny Egan, a young widower with a little boy. I’m the son of Johnny’s son by his first wife.”
Sharon frowned. “Which makes us what to each other?”
“Absolutely nothing. Second-cousins by marriage, maybe, but definitely not blood-kin.”
“Thank God for small favors,” Sharon muttered.
“My feelings exactly,” Rory said, an inscrutable look on his face.
Sharon yanked her arm out of his grip. “Why didn’t you tell me all this at the start? You could have saved us both a lot of aggravation.”
“Well now, I didn’t realize you were such a high-strung, easily spooked little filly, now did I?” He chuckled.
She bristled. “It’s not funny.”
“Gamogeen.”
Gaelic for “silly little fool”… Sharon recognized the word, and because she hadn’t heard it since her grandmother passed away, it brought the sting of tears to her eyes.
“Ah, now don’t go weeping on me.” His breath blew out in a harsh sigh. “I meant no harm.”
“Oh, don’t flatter yourself that I’d be crying over you.” She rummaged through her purse, looking for a tissue.
“Over what then?” Rory pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and offered it to her like a white flag of truce.
Reluctantly, Sharon took it and wiped her eyes. “Forget it.” She sniffed, sounding angry because she was—at herself for letting him see her tears. “It was just a little thing. It doesn’t make any difference.”
“Suit yourself.”
The air temperature seemed to drop several degrees.
Neither of them spoke again until they’d collected her luggage and were wrestling the bags into Rory’s car. No mean feat. The car was small. The bags weren’t.
“It looks to me like you’ve brought enough for a three-year voyage around the world,” Rory grumbled.
“Not that it’s any of your business.”
“It is when I make it mine.”
“Oh, go to hell.”
“Faire, shame on you, Sharon!” he reprimanded her in both Gaelic and English.
She wasn’t impressed. His antiquated hang-up about girls cursing was not only tedious in the extreme, it was absurd. She knew lots worse words than “hell.” He hadn’t heard anything yet.
“If it’s any more swearin’ I hear from you, girl, I’ll put you over my knee.”
“In your dreams.” Sharon glowered.
Rory’s eyes half hooded.
“Mmm, there’s that, too,” he murmured.
Meaning?
Honestly, she couldn’t avoid feeling a grudging gratitude to him for coming to pick her up, but he was so insufferable, he ruined what his “help” might otherwise have meant to her. The prospect of being cooped up with him for the next several hours was as appealing as root canal work.
Girding her loins for probable battle, Sharon climbed into the car and slammed the passenger door. It was going to be a godawful drive to Galway.