Chapter 2 Declan
DECLAN
Amelia York isn’t what I expected.
The recruitment agency included a photograph with her application file, but it didn’t do her justice. It was a head-on, passport-style image. Amelia’s hair was tied back into a ponytail, she wasn’t smiling, and the lighting was so stark that it made her cheeks look gaunt and her skin sallow.
The real Amelia York is quite a different story.
Her caramel skin is flawless. Her long curly hair is deep brown with honey tones, and she has a smattering of freckles across her nose and cheeks.
She didn’t say much, but she didn’t need to.
Her aura spoke for her. It’s full of life, and color, and the kind of vitality that we haven’t seen in this house in a long while.
Heading back downstairs, I feel like the villain of my own story, trapping the fresh young heroine in the gloomy home in the middle of nowhere.
This house has never been the same since my wife Niamh died. She was the light that kept our home glowing. Without her, I saw only the emptiness. The giant hole through which I let her go,
With two young sons, it should’ve been easy to keep the light burning.
But a part of me flickered out and died with her, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t rekindle that flame.
The boys kept me going, of course they did.
They’re my flesh and blood. My greatest achievements.
My reason to get out of bed in the morning and keep the family business going.
But I guess I just continued to exist in this house. I stopped seeing it as our home, the home that my wife and I created for our sons and allowed it to become a shrine to her. Because everything in it reminds me of Niamh. Still.
Will Amelia last as our housekeeper?
I guess only time will tell. There must be a reason why she came to Ireland to get a job, and maybe that will be incentive enough for her to stay.
I don’t know why, but I get the feeling that she might be good for us. Good for this home, for my sons, perhaps even for me. Maybe it’s time for me to hand over to Ruairi, my eldest son, and take a step away from the business.
Who knows, perhaps Amelia is the catalyst that will set in motion a whole load of changes that have been a long time coming.
Once I’ve filled the coffee machine in the kitchen, I find Orla, my mother-in-law, in the conservatory.
“The new housekeeper has arrived,” I say, poking my head around the door.
Orla immediately rises and sets aside her knitting. I’ve noticed that she is slowing down a little these days, her movements slower, stiffer, than they used to be. Fine lines have formed around her eyes and mouth, but she is still an attractive and determined woman.
“I’ll make coffee.” She doesn’t trust me to make it to her standards.
“Stay there, Orla. I can manage.”
“Of course you can manage. I’ve never doubted it for a moment. But we want to make a good impression.”
I smile. “She’s going to be doing our laundry, and making sure that we eat our vegetables, Orla. She’ll think that we brought her here under false pretenses if you’re doing everything for her.”
“You know I always helped Mary.”
“And I’m sure that she was extremely grateful. But you should be getting out of the house more, meeting your friends for a tipple in the local bar, not clearing up after me and the lads.”
Her eyes grow watery. “How would I fill my time if I didn’t have you and the lads?”
“You’d be doing things you enjoy. Taking it easy. Seeing a bit of the world.”
Orla stepped up when Niamh died. She took over the running of the house, brought up my boys, Ruairi and Eoghan as if they were her own sons. It’s about time she started putting herself first.
“Why would I want to see the world when everything I want is right here?” She pushes past me, grumbling, on her way to the kitchen, and I let her go, smiling.
By the time Amelia comes down, her hair stringy-wet from the shower, looking fresh in faded jeans and a floral shirt fastened into a knot above her waist, the kitchen is filled with the aroma of coffee, and Orla has spread a selection of home-baked cookies, shortbread, and flapjacks in a basket on the table.
“Coffee!” Amelia exclaims. “Was it that obvious that I didn’t get enough caffeine on the flight?”
This is my first glimpse of the bubbly personality mentioned in her file, and I find myself beaming at her from across the table. “I always come back dehydrated. Doesn’t matter how much water you drink on a flight.”
“Even on a private jet, huh?” Her eyebrows slide into the curls framing her face, and her cheeks turn pink. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that how it sounded.”
I laugh. How could anyone take offense at anything Amelia says?
“Even on a private jet. It might be comfortable, but the distance is still the same.” I reach for Orla’s hand across the table. “This is Orla, my mother-in-law. She’ll try to interfere, but you need to be firm and remind her that you’re the housekeeper now.”
“Oh, gosh.” Amelia seems to flinch. “I’m not replacing you, am I?”
“Heavens, I certainly hope not.” Orla chuckles.
“You’ll soon get used to her sense of humor too.” I sit back in my seat and watch Amelia sit across the table from us as if this is her first interview.
She quickly rises again like she got an electric shock. “I’m so sorry. You’re waiting for me to pour the coffee. It’s the jet lag, I swear. I’m not normally this slow.”
“Sit, child.” Orla stands slowly, gripping the edge of the table as she stretches her spine. “I can still make a decent cup of coffee, although it’s probably nothing like the coffee you get in America.”
Amelia sits and helps herself to a shortbread. She doesn’t meet my eyes when she says, “You have a beautiful home,” so it’s unclear which one of us she is talking to.
Orla comes back to the table with three mugs of steaming black coffee. The cream and sugar have already been set out in the middle of the table with the assortment of biscuits. “Our home is your home,” she says. “Isn’t that right, Declan?”
One thing I’ve learned about Orla over the years is that she chooses her words carefully. If she didn’t like Amelia, I would soon know about it.
“Aye, that’s right.”
When she finally looks at me, her expression is unreadable. Is she already having second thoughts? Or is she simply fatigued from the flight?
While I’m still puzzling over the look in her eyes, Orla jumps in with the question I’ve been asking myself since I offered her the job: “What brought you to Ireland?”
Amelia adds too much cream, and three spoons of sugar to her coffee, and stirs slowly, methodically. Then, “My dad is Irish. I never knew him,” she quickly adds. “He… doesn’t know about me. I’m not here because I want him in my life, I just want to find out a little more about my heritage.”
She sips her coffee, adds more cream, then takes a flapjack from the basket. Amelia York has a sweet tooth.
“I’m starving.” She catches crumbs in her palm. “Sorry, I won’t eat more than I earn, I promise.”
I smile. I want to tell her that she is a breath of fresh air. I’ve never met anyone like her before. She says what she thinks, eats when she’s hungry, smiles when she’s happy. And gets these tiny frown lines between her eyes when she’s worried.
I want to smooth those lines out with my thumb.
I want to show her everything and see my home and this beautiful island through her eyes.
But she’ll be on the first flight back to New York to escape the clutches of the lunatic Irishman if I say this out loud.
And besides, Orla is listening and watching, and she doesn’t miss a goddamned thing.
“Child,” Orla says, “you’ll find no judgement in this house. We don’t want you wasting away because you’re too scared to help yourself to food.”
Amelia smiles. Finally, she relaxes back in her seat, and her face seems to glow even more brightly.
“Your father…” Orla diverts back to the conversation. “Perhaps Declan can help you find what you’re looking for. Will save you a whole lot of time and effort.”
“You want to know his name?” The frown lines are back. When Orla nods, she blurts it out as though it has been trapped inside her for too long. “Michael Morran.”
I wish Orla hadn’t asked. I want to turn the clocks back to the moment when Amelia entered the kitchen, steer the conversation in a whole different direction, a million miles away from the name that is still hanging in the air awaiting a response.
I know Michael Morran. He’s the kind of man who would cut out his own grandmother’s heart and sell it to the highest bidder if it would buy him a little more power.
I refuse to believe that Amelia is related to him.
And I pray to God in heaven that she doesn’t track him down because guys like Michael ‘Monster’ Morran don’t take kindly to surprises, especially the life-changing kind.
“Declan?” Orla is watching me closely.
“No, I don’t know him, sorry.”
“Is this your wife?” Amelia is studying a picture of me and Niamh in a simple silver frame on the mantelpiece in the living room. “She’s beautiful.”
“Yes.” My voice is clogged with emotion.
Twenty-three years, and it still hits me like a sledgehammer in the gut whenever I think about never seeing her again.
“I’m sorry.”
Amelia doesn’t look at me with pity in her eyes the way other people did after Niamh died. I don’t know what it is that I can see, but it isn’t pity.
“You have nothing to be sorry for.” I smile.
I’ve been giving her a guided tour of the house, and the questions have been relentless, like a child who just learned to read soaking up every book they can find.
“How often do the floors get polished?”
“Is the hot water system on a timer?”
“Am I allowed in the study?”
“Where do I run errands?”
She tucks an apology onto the end of every question because she thinks she’s driving me crazy. When, in fact, the opposite is true. My sons would tell her that I’m not a patient man, but I could answer Amelia’s questions all day long, and still not be bored in her company.
“Come.” I guide her back to the conservatory and out through the sliding doors that open onto the back garden.
“Holy crap!” She stands on the decking and blinks at the land surrounding the property. “Sorr—” she stops herself from apologizing. Again. “Please tell me that you have a gardener.”
“I have a gardener, Amelia.”
“Thank God for that.” She scrunches up her nose by way of yet another apology, and my pulse speeds up. Just a little. Enough for me to notice, anyway. “I can’t tell a daisy from a dandelion. I couldn’t even keep a succulent alive in my dorm room at college.”
I laugh. I can’t remember the last time I laughed out loud, and this thought is as frightening as knowing that a stranger, a young woman from New York City, can have this effect on me within hours of making her acquaintance.
“I’ll take you to meet the horses.”
Amelia follows me across the decking, checking out the terracotta urns overflowing with flowers, and the walled garden to our left.
She’s so distracted that she stumbles over the edge of the decking, and I catch her before she hits the ground on her knees.
“It’s okay, I’ve got you.” I hold onto her arms, dragging out the moment, too distracted by the gold and black flecks in her brown eyes to let her go.
She peers straight back at me, lips parted, a light flush on her cheeks which could be embarrassment at tripping in front of her new boss. “Thank you. I’m not normally this clumsy.”
“It’s been a long day.” I step back, my arms reluctant to lose contact. “We can go to the stables another time.”
She nods. “It might be safer.”
I leave Amelia in the kitchen with Orla who is preparing the evening meal.
In my study, I sit at my desk and pour a large slug of brandy into a crystal tumbler. The first shot doesn’t even touch the sides.
My brain is churning around Amelia’s presence in my house. The timing. Eoghan, my youngest son, has just met a young woman from New York. Emily. The housekeeper’s role opening up is purely coincidental, of course.
And then there’s Amelia’s announcement that her father is Michael Morran.
This worries me perhaps a whole lot more than it should.
If she finds him… If she discovers her lineage and then decides to approach him…
She has no fucking idea what she’ll be getting involved in.
No one fucks around with Monster Morran, and I can’t sit back and watch it happen.
But it’s the rabbit hole that my thoughts are spiraling into that bothers me the most.
Amelia is young enough to be my daughter.
I down my brandy and refill the glass.
Nope. My brain is still picking up where it left off like an itch demanding to be scratched.
Amelia is younger than my youngest son. I can’t believe that I’m even considering this, but I know how I felt when I caught her in my arms on the decking.
I thought we could co-exist in the same house, boss and housekeeper, and never get close to one another, and yet, within hours of her arrival, I’ve already held her in my arms.
I already know how it feels to want to protect her. To need to protect her. To keep her safe, watch her smile, make her happy.
And for Amelia’s sake, I know what I must do.
I’m going to contact the recruitment agency and retract the offer of employment. I’ll transfer twelve months’ salary—enough to cover the initial contract terms—into Amelia’s account. I’ll send her back to the States in our private jet.
I can’t let her get close to her father.
I can’t let her get close to me because I’m frightened of what will happen if I let her stay.