6. Tiernan
TIERNAN
I cook when I can’t fix a thing, which has been most of the time lately.
That’s the trade, with me. Ronan carries what can’t be carried and Cormac watches what can’t be watched, and me, when there’s a thing in this house I can’t charm or talk or fight our way out of, I make a meal.
It’s not nothing, feeding people. It’s the one promise you can actually keep on a bad night, that nobody under your roof goes to bed hungry, and on the nights when every other promise has gone to ash it turns out to be the only one I can get my hands around.
My mother cooked the same way, God rest her, banging pots at two in the morning the year before everything went wrong, and I used to think it was nerves.
I know better now. It was the only wall she had left to put up, and she put it up one supper at a time.
It was past midnight and the house was the bad kind of quiet, the kind that isn’t peace, the kind that’s just everyone lying awake in separate rooms pretending the others are asleep.
Ronan was somewhere being the head of the family at a wall, doing sums in the dark that didn’t have answers.
Cormac was somewhere being a wall, which is a different and lonelier thing.
And Sienna had gone up hours ago with that letter still sitting behind her eyes, that single cold M she wouldn’t talk about, and I’d watched her climb the stairs like a woman climbing toward a fight instead of a bed, spine too straight, hand too tight on the rail.
I’d known she wouldn’t sleep. I’d known there was not one useful thing I could do about the man called M, or the ghost named Mulryan, or the eyes living in our own walls.
So I went down to the kitchen and I cooked, because the kitchen is the one room in this whole grim house that’s actually ours.
Cormac swept it first. Of course he did.
Before the bedrooms, before the studies, before his own room even, he’d gone over this one stone by stone and sworn it clean, and I’ve thought since about what it means that the coldest man I know made the warm room his first priority.
Because Cormac understands a thing the other two only half do.
People need one place they’re not performing.
One square of the world where the face can come off.
Everywhere else in Dunraven we’re a show now, every hour of every day, a bride softening right on schedule and a family folding up like we’re meant to, all of it staged for a man watching through a hole in the dark.
It’s exhausting in a way I don’t have words for, being a lie all day in your own home.
But in here the cameras don’t reach. In here a person can set the performance down on the counter next to the knives and just be tired, just be frightened, just be theirs.
Cormac built us that. He’d never say it was a gift.
It was the kindest thing anyone’s done in this house in years.
I had the radio on low and a pan of onions going soft and sweet and I was singing along badly to something I half knew, because nobody who loves me has ever once asked me to sing well, and that’s how I knew she was there before she said a word.
The singing. She let me get through a whole verse of being terrible before she spoke.
“That’s a war crime,” she said from the doorway.
I turned around with the spoon still in my hand.
She was in one of my shirts, the navy one, sleeves shoved up, her hair down and her face scrubbed of all the careful management she wears like armor, and the stitches at her hairline from Galway had healed to a thin silver line that caught the light when she tilted her head.
Bare feet. Arms crossed. Trying to look annoyed and landing somewhere closer to undone.
“You’re meant to be sleeping,” I said.
“Can’t.” She came in and pulled out a chair at the table and dropped into it, all that trained economy gone loose and tired. “Brain won’t quit.”
“I can hear it from here.” I gave the onions a stir and turned the burner down. “Sounds like a tin of wasps.”
“Thanks.”
I looked at her properly then. Head bowed, shoulders curled in, staring down into her own lap like the answer to all of it was written on her knees.
Sienna Madigan does not bow her head. I’d watched this woman fold a man over the bonnet of a car and pour a drink without spilling it in the same minute.
The sight of her hunched small over a kitchen table did something to my chest I didn’t have the patience to examine, so I crossed the room and crouched down in front of her instead and took the spoon out of the equation and took her hands.
“Hey.” I waited until she looked at me. “Whatever that letter’s telling you, it can wait till morning. It’ll still be there. He’s not getting in here.” I tipped my head at the room, the swept safe square of it. “Not this room. Not while I’m in it.”
She gave me a tired version of a smile, which was better than no version.
“And I’ll tell you something else,” I said, and got my finger under her chin and lifted it, because I couldn’t stand the bowed head one more second. “You hang that head in here and I’ll have to do something about it.”
The smile ticked up at one corner. “Something.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Kinky,” she said, and there it was, the dry flicker, the real her surfacing through the exhaustion like a stone through water.
“You’ve no idea.” I dragged my thumb across her lower lip, slow, and felt her breath change under it. “You can’t shut that brain off on your own, fine. I know a few ways. Consider it a public service.”
She huffed something that wanted to be a laugh. But she didn’t pull back, and her eyes had gone from tired to something darker and more awake, and when I traced my fingers down the line of her throat she shivered, a full-body thing she tried to hide and couldn’t.
“Tiernan.”
“That’s my name.” I stood, and brought her up with me, my hand spreading between her shoulder blades, and she came easy, melting against me in a way the daytime Sienna would never allow herself.
That was the thing about this room. In here she let herself be held.
“Has anyone told you,” I said into her hair, “that you’re the best thing in this whole grim house. ”
“You’re smelling the onions.”
“I’m not smelling the onions.” I put my nose to the warm skin behind her ear and breathed her in and felt the goosebumps race down her neck, felt her hands come up and fist in my shirt. “It’s you. It’s only ever you.”
She made a soft broken sound, and I caught it with my mouth, and I kissed her the way I’d been wanting to all day and hadn’t been able to, because all day we’d been on his stage, all day she’d had to perform a woman being slowly broken, and the only thing I’d wanted since the card turned over was one room where I could remind her she wasn’t.
I lifted her onto the counter and stepped between her thighs and pushed them wide with both hands, and she let me, knees falling open, which was its own kind of gift. The most controlled woman I’d ever known coming apart at the seams in the one room she didn’t have to hold herself together in.
“Go slow,” she breathed against my lips, and it wasn’t a command, it was almost a question, the kind she only ever asked in here.
“Slow,” I agreed, and dragged her shorts down her legs and dropped to my knees in front of her. “I’m going to have you on my tongue before I have you on my cock. And you’re going to sit there and take it, because in here you don’t get a vote.”
She opened her mouth to say something smart and I licked up the length of her cunt in one slow stripe and whatever it was died in her throat on a moan.
“Christ, you’re soaked.” I spread her open with my thumbs and looked at her, glistening and swollen and ready, the lean muscle of her thighs already trembling on either side of my head.
“All that worrying and your pussy’s been waiting for me the whole time.
Good girl.” I dipped my tongue into her and she jolted. “That’s it. Let me taste what’s mine.”
I ate her like I had nowhere else in the world to be, because I didn’t. I licked into her and sucked her clit between my lips and felt her hand fist hard in my hair, and I groaned against her and the sound made her hips buck up off the counter into my mouth.
“Tiernan.” Wrecked already. “Tiernan, fuck.”
“Mm.” I pulled back just enough to talk, her slick all over my mouth.
“Look at you, riding my face like you can’t help it.
Filthy thing.” I slid two fingers into her cunt and worked them deep and fast and watched her whole body arch.
“There. Feel that? That’s me telling that brain of yours to shut the fuck up.
Now come on my hand. Let me feel it, pretty girl.
Don’t be shy, nobody can hear you but me. ”
She came with my name and a curse and a sound I’d have given a year of my life to hear again, her cunt clamping down around my fingers in hard wet pulls, her thighs locked around my head, her heel digging into my back.
I worked her through every second of it, fingers buried deep, tongue flat and steady on her clit until she was shaking and shoving weakly at my forehead, too sensitive, fucked-out and gasping.
“Up,” she managed. “Get up here and fuck me or I’m telling Cormac you left me hanging.”
“God, not Cormac.” I stood, wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and got the rest of my clothes off while she watched me with dark, hungry, half-blown eyes.
She reached down and wrapped her hand around my cock and stroked, slow and tight, that satisfied little tilt to her mouth saying she knew exactly what she was doing to me, and I let her have it for a few strokes before I caught her wrist.
“Keep that up and this is over before it starts.” I lined the head of my cock up against her soaked entrance and dragged it through her, coating myself, bumping her clit until she swore. “Bossy little thing. You want it?”
“Tiernan.”
“Say it.”
“Fuck me. Now.”
I drove into her with one deep roll of my hips and we both made a sound. She was tight and hot and dripping and she took every inch of me with that low unmuffled moan she only let herself make in here, and I bottomed out and held there, jaw clenched, my mouth pressed to her jaw.
“There you go,” I said, rough. “Look at you, taking all of it. Made for me, this.” I pulled back and snapped my hips forward and she cried out. “Say it’s mine.”
“It’s yours.” Her nails raked down my back. “God, it’s yours, move.”
I moved. I fucked her deep and slow and filthy with the cold pan of onions forgotten beside us and the radio still playing low, one hand fisted in her hair and the other dropping to where we were joined, working her clit in tight circles until she was sobbing my name into my shoulder, her cunt fluttering around my cock.
“I can’t,” she gasped. “Again, I can’t, it’s too much.”
“You can.” I kept the pace relentless, lips at her ear. “You’re going to come on my cock and you’re going to soak this whole counter doing it. One more, pretty girl. Give it to me. Be a good girl and let go.”
She broke apart a second time, clamping down around me in long hard pulses that dragged me right over the edge with her, and I buried myself to the hilt and spilled into her with her name in my mouth and my arms full of the only thing in this house worth more than winning.
After, we stayed tangled on the counter a while, both of us breathing, the radio still going low and the onions long since gone cold in the pan. Her hand found the back of my neck and rested there, warm and deliberate, that specific way she has.
“He had me chasing a ghost when I was eleven,” she said, to my shoulder. “I keep thinking. Every soft thing I’ve ever felt, he’s already counted on. Even this. What if even this is something he”
“No.” I lifted my head and made her look at me, because this one I wasn’t letting her carry.
“Listen to me. Whatever that man arranged, whatever your fathers shook hands on, this part was never on his board. You hear me? Nobody handed us this.” I pushed a damp strand off her forehead.
“You didn’t lose a husband fifteen years ago, Sienna.
You lost a whole house. Your people, your table, the noise of a family around you.
One man can’t hand that back. A family can.
And that’s the joke of it, the good joke for once, because the fire that took your house gutted ours too, left three of us rattling around a cold pile of stone with all our dead, and you walking in put both wrecked families back together in one go.
” I tipped my forehead to hers. “Ronan gives you the standing. Cormac gives you a mind that meets yours. I get to be the one who reminds you what it feels like to be wanted and home. None of that’s a contract or a curse or a thing that happened to you.
It’s the household you lost, getting built back, one of us at a time, because you chose to let it.
That’s the one card in your whole life he never got to deal. ”
She looked at me for a long moment, all the careful management gone, just her.
“You’re going to make me cry over cold onions,” she said.
“Almost certainly,” I said, and kissed her forehead, and held her in the one room he couldn’t reach, and for a little while the house wasn’t grim and the wall didn’t have eyes and there was no letter and no ghost and no aisle waiting at the end of all this.
Just her. Choosing it. Choosing us.
It would have to be enough to get us to morning.
It was.