Page 74 of Beer & Broomsticks
Wrapping his arms around her, he hugged her, tighter than he ever had before. Crushing her, really. “Mo ghrá. Mo ghrá.”He gripped her face between his hands and moved her head away to create space and meet her tearful gaze. “I thought I’d lost ya. I thought…”
“I’m sorry, Ruairí. He had my brother. I couldn’t not come.”
“I know,mo ghrá.I know.” He lowered his mouth to hers, and she felt everything he’d gone through in the last seven minutes. His disbelief, his determination to save her, his crushing fear that he wouldn’t be in time. They were all there in his frantic kiss.
“I hate to cut this short, but we need to get the fuck out of here,” Knox said, causing them to break apart. “Grab whatever you need and let’s go before your father’s reinforcements come through that door.”
She nodded, unable to speak from the thick emotion clogging her throat. A shaky caress of Ruairí’s face was all she could manage now that reality had set in and her adrenaline had worn off.
“It’s all right, Bridg,” he said hoarsely. “We’re all right.”
Again, she nodded mutely. After one last quick kiss, she bent and picked up the true Sword of Goibhniu, coldly wiping the blade across the clean part of Shane’s shirt. “If I could stab him in place of you, take away the horror of killing your father from you, I’d do it, Ruairí,” she said. “You shouldn’t have to bear that burden, love.”
“He had to die either way. And he had it coming, all the same.”
“But it didn’t have to be you,” she argued.
With a smiled that didn’t reach his eyes, he tenderly pushed the hair back from her temple. “I think it did,mo ghrá.Life always comes full circle. You and I know that, yeah?”
CHAPTER30
Eoin O’Malley landed with a thud and a savage curse as his injured hand hit the tree trunk next to him. The lush landscape behind the Black Cat Inn had grown and changed since he’d been gone these two years past. He hadn’t realized until he saw his sister, appearing out of thin air like a warrior goddess, how homesick forÉirehe’d been.
It had gone against his instincts to leave her, but the purpose in her eyes told him she’d had a plan, and anything he’d have done in an attempt to help might’ve spoiled it. Still, he felt like a fecking coward for abandoning her as he had.
Taking stock of the inn and pub, he leaned back against the oak tree in shock. Had that happened before or after Bridget appeared in his apartment?
Panic set in, superseding his shock.
His family might be under all that rubble!
Running for all he was worth, he closed the distance between the forest and the inn in less than a minute.
“Cian! Carrick!” He tore through the rubble, shoving drywall, wood, and furniture out of his way. “Roisin! Aeden!”
“They’re safe, son.”
He whirled around to see Alastair Thorne step through an opening in the outer wall. The man looked pristine, not a hair out of place, and almost exactly as Eoin remembered him from ten years before when the senior Thorne had attended his first gallery showing.
“Where are they, Alastair? My brothers, where?”
“Likely in your family’s magic room, yeah? Why don’t you show me where it is, my boy-oh, um, my boy?”
A chill encouraged his neck hair to stand on end. “Sure, and I can do that,” he lied with a smooth, practiced smile, the one he reserved for handsy art patrons. “But would ya be doing me a solid and healing my hand first?”
Silver-blue eyes narrowed, but he smiled in return. “And what happened to your hand?”
“That gobshite Shane O’Connor thought he’d get the better of me, he did.” Eoin lost his smile. “But he was wrong.Deadwrong.” In truth, he had no idea if Bridget succeeded in whatever she’d concocted, or if Shane was even now standing over her broken body and gloating like the madman he was. However, if it was truly Alastair Thorne in front of him and not an impostor as he truly suspected, the man would be able to read the truth from Eoin’s energy and internal conflict, as only a real empath could.
“Dead?” Rage curled the upper lip of the man in front of him.
With a casual scratch of his neck and a look around their destroyed home, Eoin nodded. “Aye.”
And because he anticipated the strike, he reacted accordingly, diving behind the overturned sofa just as the fake Alastair tried to firebomb him.
“Deflammo!”Cian’s sharp command echoed throughout the room, and dust particles fell down on Eoin from above. The inferno was snuffed out in an instant, and he peered over the smoking edge to see his brothers, shoulder to shoulder, in a fighting stance Cian had learned from his spy days.
“You can drop the act, whoever ya are. If you’re Alastair Thorne, I’ll be eating me feckin’ left boot,” Carrick said, edging in front of the sofa.
