My Life in Shambles(40)

“I remember,” I say carefully. Maybe she forgot the time she caught us together.

“Well, she was studying abroad, art or something exotic like that, and then decided she wanted to come back home to Shambles. Frankly, I think she ran out of money. All the girls in that house seem to come back home for a wee while. I’d gone over there to get some eggs from their hens and she was looking for a job and there ye have it. She’s our new maid.”

“Oh,” I say. “That’s good.” Gail and I had a rather tumultuous time in our teens. You know how it is when you’re sleeping with one of the girls next door. I didn’t really see her much when I started playing professionally but she’s always been weird around me. Hopefully she’s gotten over it by now.

“Yeah, she’s a real help she is. She makes breakfast in the mornings so I can have a wee break, cleans the rooms, does the guests’ washing. And in the evenings she’ll come over for dinner, help with serving the guests if there are any, and help your dad on over. He can walk fine, he just needs a little support some days and ye know how he is, he won’t dare rely on his mother-in-law.”

She clears her throat and spears me with her gaze as she starts to hack away at the carrots. “Now, enough about that. Tell me about her. Valerie.”

“What do you want to know?” I don’t like talking about her when she’s not here. It’s hard to keep our stories straight.

“She’s a looker, she is. Real beauty. If yer mam were with us instead of looking down at us, she’d say she’s like a fine Irish winter day. An old-fashioned kind of woman. Fair play to ye, Padraig. You did good.”

“So ye like her?”

“Very much. She passed the test dealing with me at any rate. She’s smart. Soulful. I trust her with yer heart and that’s the most important thing. You can never be too careful, ye know. Yer successful and handsome, despite those ugly tattoos on yer body and that frightful beard covering yer face. You have money and fame. A lot of women are only after those things, not ye heart. But Valerie … she’s after yer heart and nothing less. And you deserve it, my boy.”

My own heart seems to skip clumsily in my chest, like it’s slowly waking up from a long hibernation. I want what my nan is saying to be true. I want to be able to trust Valerie, not just in this charade but beyond that. But it doesn’t seem possible, not with the way things are laid out before us.

We’ve come back to my hometown to live out a lie.

How can anything real spring from that?

I spend the next couple of hours with Nan, helping out even though she keeps trying to shoo me away, or snacking on her cut-up vegetables, which she smacks out of my hand. I ask about how people in town are since the only people I keep in touch with is my mate Alistair who runs a pub down the road, and she talks and talks. She’s always had the gift of the gab.

Before I know it, the food is cooking away and she’s telling me I better go wake up Valerie so she can come down for dinner.

I finish setting the dining room table for us, then head up the narrow stairs to Valerie’s room.

I knock on her door softly and don’t hear a response.

“Valerie?” I say. If we were actually engaged I would just barge right on in there, but because I’m not sure how comfortable she is with me yet, I don’t want to impose.

“Hey,” I hear her groggy voice. “Come in.”

I slowly open the door and peer inside the dim room.

She’s lying on top of the bed, her scarlet hair spilled out all around her, trying to push up onto her elbows. “My god. I could sleep forever.” She squints out the window and sees the deepening twilight. “What time is it?”

I walk over to her and flick on the bedside light. “It’s almost dinnertime. But if ye need to sleep more, then that’s no problem. I’ll tell them it’s jet lag.”

“Jet lag?” she says. “I thought I’ve been here since before Christmas.”

Oh right. Shite. That would have been a disaster if I’d mentioned that. Already our stories are hard to keep straight.

“Forgot. But I can say you’re sick. I have to say, you’re making it mighty hard not to get into that bed with ye.”

She grins at me, looking both bashful and flirtatious at once.

“I wouldn’t complain,” she says.

Then she bites her lip and that makes me want to do the same.

I lean in and kiss her softly, capturing her mouth with mine.

The feel of her lips goes right through me like a burning arrow and I’m immediately hard as sin, my erection pressing against my fly.

I kiss her with more hunger now, wanting, needing, craving her. How quickly my brain shuts off, along with the charade and the logic, and I just have this undeniable urge to get inside her again. I climb on top of the bed, the mattress creaking under my weight, and prowl over her.

She whimpers as I kiss her, and for a moment I think I’m being too forward, too pushy, that the one-night stand was all that we had. Then she takes her hand and presses it against my cock, as if she’s greedy for it.

“Fuck me,” I gasp out hoarsely, my kiss deepening, hot and wet and starving, my hands going underneath her jumper and squeezing her tits, my desire for her becoming something uncontrollable. In the tiny lizard brain I have at the moment, I’m trying to calculate how we can quickly fuck without anyone noticing.