Chapter Nine
Liam
“Hand me up the hammer,” I called down to Niall at the bottom of the ladder. He refused to climb up to attach the banner hooks from the trees since he didn’t have a head for heights. It must be a recent affliction as he spent summers climbing trees and helping his dad build a treehouse. They weren’t generally found on the ground. My lips twitched at the thought of him bungee-jumping into a ravine.
His girlfriend kept staring at me like I was a strange creature that needed deciphering. She was starting to give me the creeps. I tended to stay away from clingy women who wanted more than I was prepared to share. She fell into that category, probably already visualising her wedding dress and how many children they’d have.
Callum was hanging out a window from the house, attaching one end of a rope to a hook he’d put under a window ledge. There were times I swore my brother was half monkey with the way he was able to contort his body.
I grabbed the hammer to finish attaching hooks into strategic places in the tree. We were only meant to be helping, but it was beginning to look like we were the only ones working .
Oonagh wandered out of the house with a tray filled with cool drinks. I nearly fell from the branch I was perched on when she turned around and set the tray on the coffee table. Those leggings should be illegal the way they clung to her ass and legs. Gone were her slender limbs and in their place were curves that were designed for my hands to rest on. An image of her on her hands and knees in the lighthouse, staring at me over her shoulder as I thrust into her fluttered through my head.
Fuck! My dick was definitely paying attention to the visual. I couldn’t remember the last time I had an erection in public. Probably back when Oonagh was in my life.
She seemed to possess some sort of voodoo magic that made my dick stand to attention to salute her as she walked past. Her ass in those leggings had the power of a snake charmer, blowing his pipe to make a snake dance. She could definitely blow my pipe any time she wanted. Wiping my brow with my arm, I navigated back to the ladder. Every minute in Oonagh’s presence was driving me insane.
Callum disappeared through the window and reappeared a few minutes later through the back door, just as I was making my way back toward the house.
Oonagh gasped as she went to hand us glasses, her eyes on Callum’s face. “What happened?” she whispered as if she was blaspheming in church.
My gaze moved to Callum’s frozen expression. I never saw the scar on the side of his face anymore, it was just part of who he was. The maniac who attacked him all those years ago had been carrying a knife and hadn’t been afraid to use it. He’d stabbed several people that night, but Callum received the worst of the attack as he tried to stop him.
“I was stabbed at the end of summer ten years ago,” he replied, lifting the offered glass from her hand. “We’d finished a construction job and went out for drinks to celebrate when a mad man with a knife decided he wanted to remodel me.”
Her brow furrowed. “Ten years ago?” Her gaze darted to me before focusing back on Callum.
“Yeah, Liam sat at my bedside for days watching them resuscitate me several times. The nurses joked he refused to let me die.” I was tempted to slap Callum because he was taunting her with the details of where I went the night I disappeared. My brother was nothing but a paradox—wanting me to get the girl I’d always wanted but at the same time needing to punish her for the way she’d treated me.
Oonagh blinked, her face neutralising into the expression she wore when she was desperately trying to hide her emotions. I took the other glass from her hand to sip the sweet drink.
“When Liam got home his life was destroyed. Our brothers had been taken into care and everyone he cared about had walked away and left him alone. Better to have your face cut than your heart.” Callum walked past Oonagh in the pretence of chatting to Niall.
I felt her eyes boring into the side of my head, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn and face her. Everything felt too raw at this moment, Callum’s words evoking all the memories of the day that my life fell apart .
Even now, I refused to relive that day because there were times I didn’t think I’d find the strength to go on. I wrote to Oonagh every day for weeks and never got a response. One day, a bundle of letters were returned unopened. They still languished in a drawer in my studio. I never opened them since I’d written them.
“Liam?” Her voice was nothing more than a caress on my skin.
My eyes met hers and I slowly shook my head. Her eyes widened slightly as she took in the significance of the conversation with Callum. This was not a conversation I could start right now. Words were peculiar things. They had the power to elevate you to the heights of heaven. The flip side of that double-edged sword was once they were spoken, you couldn’t reclaim them again. In that respect they had the power to destroy and corrupt.
The fact that I was shouting at Oonagh in my head didn’t bode well for what could tumble out of my mouth. I wanted to grab her and shake her, scream and ask her why could she not wait for me, why she’d believed those girls when she knew how I felt about her?
Instead, I calmly sipped my fruit juice while keeping everything I wanted to say locked in my head where it couldn’t do anyone any harm.
Oonagh stood beside me silently, and the tingles that always emerged when she was near prickled along my skin. My body would recognise her in a room filled with people because she was the only one who I reacted to the way I did. We were attuned in a way that went beyond reason and explanation .
“Aoife didn’t like the rhubarb rock,” Oonagh said, changing the topic of conversation.
Niall’s girlfriend looked over at the mention of her name. “I didn’t buy them for her,” I replied. Really, I wanted to say I didn’t give a fuck what Aoife liked or disliked.
“I haven’t eaten sugar candy since I was a child,” Aoife interjected, raising her chin toward us in defiance. “I doubt any adult would enjoy it.”
My eyebrow arched. “You’d be surprised what most adults enjoy. They just tend to lie about it in the light of day.”
I knew Aoife’s type very well. She pretended to be refined, wanting a husband to display to the world and provide her with a big house and beautiful, intelligent children. What she desired was someone who’d own her body and take her on a trip to the rough side of passion. She’d screw her nose up at woman who openly read books on BDSM while secretly reading them on her Kindle in bed with the lights down low.
An artic frost descended on her expression and her eyes bored into mine. “We move in different social circles, don’t presume to speak for everyone.”
She’d seen me in my jeans and riding my bike and decided I was nothing more than a mindless idiot.
“Aoife!” Niall barked. “There’s no need to be rude. Liam has won awards for his architecture and can name his fee from companies that want him. He’s not one of the juniors in our office.”
Oonagh practically vibrated with bad temper beside me, her back straightening and head rising. “He’s a person, just like everyone else. Education doesn’t define you and make you a better person.” She paused to glare at Aoife. “There is no one in this world who has the right to speak down to anyone.”
Callum slowly clapped. “You always did like to champion the underdog.”
“No.” Oonagh shook her head. “I just didn’t like to see people judged by the ill-founded beliefs of others.”
Aoife stormed into the house, her cheeks flushed and hands in fists at her sides.
“And yet,” I said in a low voice, “you did that anyway.”
Before she had the chance to reply, I moved back to the box of decorations and pretended to rummage through the banners for the hooks on the trees. Niall followed Aoife into the house, rolling his eyes at me to say he was growing weary of her temper tantrums.
“Liam…” Oonagh appeared beside me, the tips of her fingers touching my wrist.
“Don’t,” I bit out. “I can pretend we’re the people we were before that last summer. Put a smile on my face for the world until this is over. Just don’t ask me to talk about it or listen to an apology that doesn’t mean anything ten years later.”
“I didn’t know.”
My furious gaze met her wide eyes. “You were the one person in this world who should have known I would never do what you accused me of. Our first test of trust and you walked away from me.”
Her mouth fell open as she took a step back like I’d slapped her .
“Just leave it, Oonagh. I’ve spent too long believing in something that was never real. Let’s just finally draw a line under us and move on.” I stepped away, even though my body begged me to stay beside her, to tell her everything would be okay. That was the problem—unless she could turn back time, it never would be. The boy who loved her turned into a man who loved the memory of her. The truth blew those memories apart.
There had been women who begged me to take a chance on them and I never did. I could be married with a family of my own instead of fantasising about a memory. The revelations came to me when painting this morning. I’d loved who I thought Oonagh was, not the person she proved herself to be in the end. The afternoon passed with Callum, Niall, and me laughing and joking as we began the transformation of the garden into something that would look like the birthday faery had vomited cheesy sentiments and flags everywhere.
“Thank fuck we don’t do this shit,” I muttered to Callum.
His grin transformed his face from the sombre big brother to the man who had always loved to play practical jokes. “Yeah, you’d be a real grumpy git.” He stared at me for several seconds. “That was harsh earlier. I never heard you talk to Oonagh like that before.”
“Declan was right all those years. I wrote to her every single day for over a month and received no reply. I’ve blamed myself, never once realising that Oonagh walked away because she believed those bitches who lived next door. I spent most of my teenage years turning the bitches down because I was obsessed with Oonagh. ”
Callum’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Don’t be too hasty. Fuck, every year you spent ages picking out all the sweets Oonagh loved as a child to send to her for her birthday. Feelings like that don’t evaporate just because you discovered one sinful secret from long ago. You were both vulnerable kids.”
I stared at the old oak tree that still housed the treehouse from so long ago. We used to race across the lawn and climb the tree as fast as we could to get the back corner where your legs didn’t dangle out. In a treehouse, position was everything because the person at the door had to go to the kitchen for snacks.
“We were kids, but we knew how we felt about each other.” I paused for a moment. “At least, I thought we did.”
I reverted into the persona that I hid behind when out with colleagues—the fun guy who joked and laughed but was emotionally dead inside. Only this time I wasn’t dead because I was aware of Oonagh’s presence, felt her as an extension of me wherever she went.
The kitchen was the central part of this house, the heart that made it a home. The places were set at the table for dinner and Niall was in charge of the barbeque. To make myself useful, I was wandering in and out to carry stuff to the table outside. Callum stood chatting to Niall with a bottle of beer in his hand and a smile on his face.
My fingers gripped the countertop as I struggled to contain the avalanche of suppressed emotions that was bubbling inside me.
“Liam?” Oonagh stood watching me, her face paler than usual, making her freckles more pronounced .
I slowly turned to face her because there was nowhere to hide and no one to pretend to talk to.
“I know you’re upset with me, but we all have hidden wounds from that time that we carry with us. We need to talk about what happened, somewhere private.”
Taking a deep breath, I closed my eyes and prayed for divine intervention. “What is there to say?” I asked. “We were kids hopelessly in love with the idea of being in love.”
She took a step toward me until our bodies nearly touched. My stomach clenched and every nerve in my body became acutely aware of her. She was my kryptonite, the one woman in this entire world who could bring me to my knees.
“There’s a lot to say, Liam. Tell me you can’t sense me the way I sense you, that every neuron isn’t demanding that you touch me, every muscle trying to sway toward me. It’s always been this way, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
My eyes narrowed until all I saw was her face staring at me, her eyes pleading with me. “I gave you everything and it wasn’t enough.”
She didn’t reply, merely taking another step forward until our bodies touched. My teeth bit into my bottom lip to suppress the moan that wanted to break free from my chest. I watched as she slowly stood on tiptoes, her hands grasping my waist to support her.
Her lips were soft against mine, her tongue tracing the seam of my mouth. Years melted away with every brush of her lips on mine until I was back to being sixteen again, kissing her for the first time on the beach under the moonlight. Over the years, I’d kissed a lot of women on my quest to forget and to fill the void inside me. None of them felt like this, none of them contained the unique flavour of Oonagh.
Voices echoed into the kitchen, but she’d released the beast that dwelt inside me. I grabbed Oonagh by the waist and lifted her into the pantry, pushing the door closed. Her back hit the wall, her legs wrapping around my waist as her arms snaked around my neck.
Gone were the soft kisses she teased me with in the kitchen. In their place was raw sensation that gave voice to all my emotions. My tongue demanded entry to the recesses of her mouth, my hands on either cheek, angling her head back to give me full control.
A few years ago, I stopped kissing the women I picked up. It was too personal, and this proved my point. Our lips smashed into each other, our mouths devouring every word that we wanted to speak, our tongues fighting for dominance. There was no love in this moment, only mindless passion that demanded a release.
I propped Oonagh up on the counter, my hands tugging that vest top over her head. One hand descended on her left breast while the other held her right as I sucked her nipple until her legs contracted around my waist. My teeth grazed her nipple and her back arched in response, fingers tight in my hair to hold me closer to her.
My dick was on fire, straining against the zip that felt like it was ready to cut me in half. I wanted to bury myself so deeply inside her that she knew exactly who she belonged to.
“Liam? Oonagh?” Niall’s voice sounded in the kitchen.
Both of us froze, our eyes locking .
“You guys in here?” His footsteps moved to the corridor before he shouted for us upstairs.
Without a word, I lifted her top from the floor and tugged it over her head. Her lips were swollen and her cheeks flushed. There was nothing more I wanted than to finish what we started, but there was no lock on that door.
“Maybe they went down to Mr. Wilson’s?” Callum suggested. “Those two were always wandering off and talking gibberish. Your burgers are burning out there.”
If there was one thing that Callum understood, it was causing a distraction. He knew better than anyone that my emotions were raw and explosive tonight.
“I think we have something we need to talk about,” Oonagh said in a small voice.
Groaning, I slammed my fist into the wall. Anyone else would have jumped, but Oonagh lifted my fist and kissed it. “Please, Liam.”
There was that word that made me her slave every time she used it. I wanted to say no, to walk away and never look back, but her eyes were huge blue orbs that pleaded with me.
Fuck it all to hell, but how was I ever going to resist her?
***