Page 14 of Irish Vice

She’s wary, precisely the way I knew she would be. “Fairfax brought me everything I need.”

“So now you’re scared of me?”

That gets her back up, just as I planned. She pushes her chair away from the table and throws her shoulders back, leading the way upstairs like she’s Washington crossing the Delaware.

Was it only last night that she was attacked at the freeport? That she ended five weeks of exile and agreed to come home? That I tied her to the bed and put her in a blindfold and made her beg for the slap of my riding crop?

Was it only this morning that she found Birte in the dining room?

This day feels like it’s lasted twenty-five years.

I’ve spread her gray nightshirt on the hunter-green duvet. She stiffens when she sees it. “Fairfax must not have realized it was here,” she says, crossing the room and snatching up the soft jersey garment.

Or I ordered him to leave it behind when he collected the rest of her belongings. Faced down his most fierce frown about it, too.

“I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she says, turning toward the door.

“You’re never a bother,piscín.”

She flinches at the pet name.Kitten. Mine to hold. Mine to tame. But I always have to mind her claws.

“Let me go, Braiden.” Her voice trembles.

“I’m not stopping you.”

She can walk past me. Through the doorway. Down the hall. Back to the pool house.

She doesn’t move.

When I close the distance between us, I can smell hershampoo—honey and berries from a bottle Fairfax carried out to the pool house. I see a mark on her throat, a red welt as if she’s pressed the handle of last night’s crop into the soft hollow beneath her ear.

I touch it with my fingertip, and her pulse takes off like a flag fighting a hurricane. I cup her jaw, and she leans into my hand.

“Stay,” I whisper.

She nods, once.

I hate to pull away, hate to lose the heat of her cheek against my palm. But I close the door before she changes her mind. When I shoot the lock, my fingers are strangely clumsy.

There’s one more thing I kept from Fairfax when he packed up all her belongings.

The velvet box is in my top dresser drawer. When I open it for Samantha, I feel like I’m displaying the contents the very first time. The emerald at the heart of her collar catches all the light in the room, gathering it and concentrating it and distilling it into something more.

It’s too much. Too fast.

She crosses her arms, her fingers still knotted in her nightshirt. The gray fabric bunches across her chest like the most fragile shield in the world.

“I can’t,” she says. Then she shakes her head like I’ve challenged her. “I won’t.”

I close the box.

“Itrustedyou,” she says.

“I know.”

“It was all too easy. You said you’d marry me, and I said yes. I thought it was the perfect way to avoid Russo. To be safe.”

“It was. It is.”