Ian turned to her, concern darkening his expression. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Gotta go.” She raced to the bathroom. She swung the door shut behind her and leaned over the sink, her hands biting into the rim until her knuckles were as white as the porcelain.
She dragged frantic breaths into her lungs, struggling to calm her breathing and her pounding heart. My job. Everything she’d worked for. It had been a mess these last ten years, ever since she’d failed to find the book, but it was all she had. All she worked for. All she really wanted.
It was her life, as it had been her father’s before her. Becoming a Failte had ruined it for her, but still, she needed this job. It was what she’d been fighting for, just as much as she’d been fighting to find the book to save herself from her father’s fate.
Now they would try to take it from her?
Knocking sounded at the door.
“Just a minute.” Fiona was horrified to hear the tears in her voice. She glanced up at the mirror and saw them streaking down her face.
Oh shite. She scrubbed at her face, but it only made her look redder and wilder.
Ian knocked on the bathroom door again. The muffled sounds of her tears echoed through the door.
“Fiona, let me in,” he said.
“Just a minute.”
Damn it, no. Just no. He couldn’t stand on this side while she was distraught on that side. For the last hundred years, he’d been kept from what he wanted by prison walls. Now he wanted to comfort her, and he was separated by a damned bathroom door.
“I’m coming in.” He twisted the doorknob. When the lock didn’t catch and she didn’t slam a hand against the door to stop it, he pushed it open and squeezed into the tiny bathroom behind her.
Fiona was leaning over the sink, her long hair pulled out of its knot and falling around her face. She stiffened when she sensed him behind her, then shook her head and turned to face him.
Her face was set, her eyes hard, and her lips firm. Suddenly he doubted whether or not she even needed him here to comfort her.
Then her lower lip trembled.
“Ah, Fiona.” He opened his arms wide and pulled her into an embrace.
“I’m fine.” Her words were muffled against his shoulder.
“Aye, ’course you are.”
“I am.” Her voice hitched.
“Come on, to the living room.” He removed his arms and pushed her gently out of the bathroom. They sat on the couch. Unable to help himself, he wrapped an arm around her. She stiffened, then turned so that her back was pressed to his side and her face turned away from him.
She didn’t remove his arm from where it wrapped around her shoulders and the top of her chest, though. She drew her knees up and her breath shuddered.
She scrubbed a hand over her cheeks and said, “Gods, I’m never like this.”
“That, I believe,” he said. From what he’d seen of her in the last twenty-four hours, he had a feeling this was the first time a tear had escaped her in decades.
“I haven’t cried since my father was sent away to prison. There’s no point in it,” she said.
“Course there is. You feel better now, do you no’?”
“No’ really.”
“Well, it was bound to happen. This is a hell of a lot of stress for any one person. This is no’ about just getting your old job back. You’re trying to rewrite your fate and save yourself.”
She turned to face him. “Aye. Exactly.”
“You’re more than just your fate, Fiona. Everything I admire about you has nothing to do with your fate. You’re strong and determined and hard working. You have a noble purpose and goal. You work to save the past for others. I’ve never had that kind of goal. Just working to survive, to stay out of the poorhouse and now out of prison. Most people are like that. But no’ you. You’re so driven and skilled that you’ll find the book, no matter what your fate says.”