Chapter 41
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Declan O'Sullivan had set down the bottles he’d gotten from the back room.
He knew before he looked up. He didn't know how he knew, some combination of the particular way the door opened and the quality of the silence that followed it and something older and less rational than either of those things, something that had been waiting for two months in the back of every quiet moment he'd had in this pub, in this village, in this life he was rebuilding from the ground up.
He looked up.
She was standing just inside the door with two bags at her feet and her coat still on and her hair down around her shoulders.
Her face was thinner than he remembered, and there were shadows under her eyes that hadn't been there before, and she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen in his entire life.
He pulled a pint for one of his regulars and set it down in front of his customer.
The man at the bar said something. Declan didn't hear it.
She had found a table. She was sitting at it with both hands flat on the wood, her coat still on, not moving, just looking at him the way a person looked at something they were trying to decide was real.
He understood that look. He had worn it himself the first time Armand had told him she was out of the coma, that she was going to be all right, that she was recovering.
He had sat in the kitchen of this pub at four in the morning with a cup of tea going cold in front of him and felt the relief of it move through him like something structural, like a beam settling into place, the whole building exhaling.
He had worn that look for two months.
She was wearing it now.
He finished the pint. He pulled two more for the table by the window, carried them over, and came back to say something to Maura about taking a break.
She looked at him, then looked at the woman at the table, and back at him with the expression of a woman who had known him since he was seven years old and was not going to say anything because she had never said anything in her life that wasn't worth saying.
"Go on then," Maura said.
He went.
He crossed the pub floor, aware with every step that her eyes were on him and the effort she was making to hold her expression together, and he wanted to cross the distance in half the steps it was taking him.
However, he made himself not do that because she needed a moment, and he had learned, slowly and at considerable cost, that Tatum Wellington needed moments even when she didn't think she did.
He stopped at her table.
"You must be Ms. Grayson," he said. The accent was thick and natural and entirely his own, the one he'd spent twenty years carefully dismantling and had spent the last two months putting carefully back together. "Follow me. Your cottage is around the back."
She looked up at him.
Her eyes were doing several things at once, and all of them were familiar to him.
The sharp intelligence as she worked through what she was seeing.
The emotion running underneath it that she was managing with the particular discipline of a woman who had been managing things her entire life.
And beneath both of those things, something else, something that he recognized because he felt it himself every time he thought about her, which was constantly, which was every quiet moment and most of the loud ones too.
She stood.
She picked up one of her bags. He picked up the other without asking, and she let him, which told him something. He led her through the back of the pub and out the door into the gray Irish afternoon and around the side of the building to the cottage.
It was small and stone and had been there as long as the pub had, which was long enough ago that it had stopped apologizing for its size and simply gotten on with being itself.
Window boxes. A blue door. A view from the back window of the field and beyond it the edge of the Atlantic, which on a day like this was the color of pewter and entirely magnificent.
He unlocked the door and stood back, and she went in ahead of him. She set her bag down and stood in the middle of the small sitting room, and looked around. He set her other bag down and closed the door, and that was as long as he could manage it.
He crossed the room and put his arms around her.
He pulled her in and held her and pressed his face into her hair and just breathed for a moment, just that, just the fact of her being here and being alive and being in this room, which was a fact that he had not been entirely certain he would ever get to experience and had thought about in the dark of more nights than he could count.
For a moment, she just held on, her hands in his shirt, her face against his chest, and he felt the tension of two months of everything she'd been carrying run through her and begin, very slowly, to ease.
Then she stepped back.
She put her hands on his chest and pushed, gently but with intention, and he let her go because she needed to and he had promised himself he would always let her do what she needed to do, even when every instinct he had was pointing in the opposite direction.
She looked at his face.
He looked back at her and let her look, let her take whatever time she needed, and tried to be patient about it even, though patience had never been his strongest quality and was currently being tested more severely than usual.
"You're alive," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"I thought—" She stopped. Her jaw tightened. "Two months, Archer."
"Declan," he said quietly.
Some emotion moved across her face. "Declan," she said, and the word sounded strange from her mouth, familiar and foreign at the same time.
"My name," he began. "My actual name is Declan O'Sullivan.
" He watched her process that. "Archer Gray was an identity I built a long time ago.
A way out of something I needed to get out of.
" He paused, choosing what to say and what to leave for later.
"I grew up not far from here. Difficult circumstances.
The kind you don't talk about until you're ready, and I was never ready.
" He met her eyes. "I needed to become someone else for a while, so I did.
I became Archer Gray. And I was Archer Gray for a very long time, and I don't regret any of it.
" He paused again. "But this is who I actually am.
This is where I'm actually from. I've owned this pub for years.
I'd come back now and again to make sure it was running properly and then go back to being Archer. Now I've come back properly."
She was watching him with those sharp hazel eyes that had always seen more than he was comfortable with.
"You've been here," she said. "This whole time. While I was—" She stopped. "While I thought you were dead."
"Yes," he said. "I'm sorry for that. I am genuinely sorry for that, and I know sorry isn't enough. I promise I'm going to spend considerable time making it up to you."
"You're sorry," she said.
"Very," he said.
"Why Ireland," she said. "Why here specifically?"
"Because it's home," he said simply. "Because Archer Gray could die in the East River and Declan O'Sullivan could come home to his pub in Clare, and nobody would ever connect the two.
Because I needed to disappear properly and this was the only place in the world where I knew how to do that.
" He looked at her. "And because Armand knew where to send you. "
She was quiet for a moment. He watched her work through it, the layers of it, the way her legal mind assembled and assessed and reached conclusions with the speed and precision that had always made him slightly breathless if he was being honest with himself.
"You planned this," she said.
"Parts of it," he said. "The exit strategy.
The pub. The identity. Those I planned." He paused.
"I did not plan on you. You were not part of any plan I made, and you got past every defense I had.
I have been completely unable to do anything about it since the first time I really looked at you, and I stopped trying a long time ago. "
She looked at him.
"You'll love it here," he said. "I want you to know that.
The village is small, but the people are good and the light in the evenings is extraordinary, and there's a beach twenty minutes down the road that will take your breath away.
Will you let me show you all of it? I want to show you everything. " He took a breath.
She crossed her arms over her chest, which he recognized as the posture of a woman who was not yet ready to concede the argument, even if she was considering it.
"How do you know I'll stay?" she said. "How do you know I won't walk back through that blue door and get on the first flight to Florence? "
"I don't," he conceded. "You might. You are the most stubborn person I have ever encountered in a life that has involved a considerable number of stubborn people, and if you decide to go, I cannot stop you.
But I will go with you. I will follow you to the ends of the earth.
" He took a step toward her. "But I'm asking you not to go. I’m asking you to stay. "
She raised an eyebrow. "You're asking."
"I am," he said. "Which is not something I do often, and I'd appreciate it if you took it seriously."
The corner of her mouth twitched. He watched it and felt the warmth of it move through him.
"Tatum," he said, then swore. “Kate,” he started again, then stepping forward he took her face in his hands, tipping it up the way he'd done a hundred times and had thought about ten thousand times since, looked at her directly and let her see everything he usually kept below the surface, all of it, without the careful composure or the managed distance or any of the hundred ways he'd spent twenty years protecting himself from exactly this.
"I am never letting you go. I want you to understand that.
Not now, not ever. You are mine, and I am yours, and I have been yours since long before I was ready to admit it, and I am done, completely and permanently done pretending otherwise.
" He paused. "You are stuck with me. I'm Irish, and I'm stubborn, and I own a pub, and I love you, and that is simply the situation. "
She looked at him. Her eyes were bright, and her chin was tilted up. Her hands had come up to rest against his chest. She was fighting a smile and losing.
"That's the situation," she said.
"That's the situation," he confirmed.
"Declan," she said, and it sat differently in her mouth this time. Easier. Like something she was trying on and finding that it fit.
"Yes," he said.
"You are the most impossible man I have ever met in my entire life."
"I know," he said. "I'm working on it."
And then he kissed her.
Not gently. Not carefully. He kissed her the way a man kissed a woman when he'd thought he'd lost her and then she'd walked into his pub on a gray Irish afternoon and sat down at his table and looked at him with those eyes, the way a man kissed a woman when he was done being careful and intended to stay done.
She kissed him back.