“There has to be a way to protect him if there’s sunlight.”
“Easy for you to say, Red.” Cian rose to get a glass of whiskey. “Your delicate skin may burn a bit in strong sunlight, but you don’t go to ash, do you?”
“Some sort of block, Hoyt,” Glenna began.
“I don’t think SPF-forty will do the trick,” Cian countered.
“We’ll figure it out,” she snapped back. “We’ll find a way. We haven’t come this far to give up, to leave you behind.”
Blair let them talk, argue, debate. The voices just buzzed around her. She didn’t comment, didn’t contribute. When Hoyt finally harangued Cian into giving him a sample of blood, she left them to their magic.
He didn’t try to sleep. A half dozen times he started to go to her room. To offer what? he wondered. Comfort she didn’t want, anger she didn’t need?
She had suffered a terrible loss, and a hard, hard shock to her heart. She hadn’t, perhaps couldn’t turn to him. Not even, he thought now, as a fellow warrior.
He couldn’t soothe hurts she refused to let him see, or reach wounds she closed in to herself.
She had loved the man, that much was clear. And there was a small part of himself, an ugliness he could despise, that was jealous of the brutalized dead.
So he stood at the window, watching the sun rise on his last day in Ireland.
When someone knocked, he assumed it was Moira. “Bi istigh.”
He didn’t turn when the door opened, not until Blair spoke. “My Gaelic’s pre
tty crappy, so if that was go to hell, too bad.” She hefted the bottle of whiskey she held in one hand. “I raided Cian’s supply. Going to get a little drunk, have a wake for an old friend. Want to join me?”
Without waiting for an answer, she walked over to sit on the floor at the foot of the bed, resting her back against it. She opened the bottle, poured a generous two fingers into each of the glasses she’d brought in.
“Here’s to just being dead.” She lifted the glass, tossed back the contents. “Come on, have a drink, Larkin. You can be pissed at me and still have a drink.”
He walked over, lowered to the floor to sit across from her. “I’m sorry you’re hurting.”
“I’ll get over it.” She handed him the second glass, poured more whiskey in her own. “Sláinte.” She tapped the glasses together, but this time she sipped instead of gulped. “Attachments, my father taught me, were weapons the enemy could use against you.”
“That’s a hard and cold way to live.”
“Oh, he’s good at hard and cold. He walked out on me on my eighteenth birthday. Done.” She leaned her head back and drank. “You know, he’d hurt me so many times before, cut my heart out, I thought, just by not loving me. But it was nothing, nothing that happened—didn’t happen—before came close to what it did to me when he walked away. That’s how I got this.”
She turned her wrist over, examined the scar. “Going out while I was still reeling, trying to prove I didn’t need him. I did need him. Too bad for me.”
“He didn’t deserve you.”
She smiled a little. “He’d completely agree with that, but not the way you mean. I wasn’t what he wanted, and even if I had been, he wouldn’t have loved me. Took me a long time to come around to that. Maybe he’d have been proud. Maybe he’d have been satisfied. But he never would’ve loved me.”
“And still you loved him.”
“Worshiped him.” For a moment, Blair closed her eyes as she let that part of her go. That part was over. “I just couldn’t rip that out and turn it to dust. So I worked, really hard, until I was better than he’d ever been. But I still had that need inside me. To love somebody, to have them love me back. Then there was Jeremy.”
She poured more whiskey for both of them. “I was working at my uncle’s pub. My aunt, my cousins and I took shifts. Hunting, or working the bar, waiting tables, just taking the night off. My aunt called it having a life. Work as a family, share the burden, have some normal.”
“Sounds like a sensible woman.”
“She is. And a good one. So I’m riding the stick—working the bar—when Jeremy comes in with a couple of friends. He’s just copped this big account, and they’re going to hoist a few. He’s a stockbroker.” She waved that away. “Hard to explain. Anyway, he’s good looking. Great looking, actually. So, he hits on me—”
“He struck you?”
“No, no.” Finding that wonderfully funny, she snorted out a laugh. “It’s parlance, slang. He flirted with me. I flirted back because he gave me the buzz. You know what I mean? That little zzzz you get inside?”