The Awakening (The Dragon Heart Legacy #1) - Nora Roberts Page 0,33
Should she walk into the pub or should I see her on the street or in the market I could barely remember my own name much less speak to her.
“And then.” He paused, drank, sighed a long sigh. “In she came one night with her friends—for she was a girl with many friends—to hear Sorcery. I pulled their pints, listened to her lovely, lively laughter, and suffered knowing she was forever out of my reach.”
“It’s hard being shy,” Breen said. “And believing you’re not quite good enough.”
“It is that.” His bright eyes held hers as he nodded. “It was during a break Eian Kelly came up to the bar, and he said to me, ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘tell the girl you like her sweater.’ I make a business of not knowing who he means, but he leans in. ‘She fancies you,’ he tells me. ‘She wonders why she can’t get you to say more than two words to her.’
“And I’m bumbling on how he couldn’t know such a thing, and she doesn’t so much as know my name. He tells me to trust him on this, and I won’t be sorry for it.”
“What color was her sweater?” Marco wondered, and made Tom laugh.
“Blue, all the blues from the palest to the deepest, one bleeding sweet into the next. And up she comes to the bar. I could all but hear Eian’s voice in my head. ‘Don’t be a git,’ his voice said. ‘Talk to the girl.’ So out the words popped, and she smiled at me.
“Oh!” Tom slapped a hand on his chest. “My heart near to burst. She said something, and I answered, but to this day I can’t tell you what the words were with my heart beating so loud in my ears. Later, she stayed for more music when her mates went on. And Eian whispered in my ear to walk her home. I asked her if I could, and so I did. Eight months, two weeks, and four days later, she was my bride. I’ve had twenty-eight years with the love of my life because Eian Kelly told me to talk to the girl.”
“That’s a wonderful story.”
It had tears stinging the back of Breen’s eyes as it made her father real again.
“He had a way, Eian did, not just with music, but people. When he said trust me, as he did to me, you did just that. It wasn’t long after that night, I heard he went back to Galway, and it may be other parts, for it was a year or so before he returned. I wanted to invite him to the wedding, and to book Sorcery into the pub again, but we couldn’t reach him. Then back he came, and we had Sorcery to play. That was the night he met your mother.”
“Here?” Her dreamy, weepy mood snapped into shock. “They met here?”
“Here, on a stormy summer night.”
“Are you going to talk their ears off?” Kate set Marco’s mussels on the table along with a basket of bread.
“Her mother’s daughter she is. I’ll let you eat in peace.”
“No, please.” Breen reached out to lay a hand on Tom’s arm. “I’d really like to hear more, if you have time.”
“I have that and more for Eian Kelly’s daughter. You eat then, and I’ll tell you.”
So he settled back once more with his pint.
“She walked in, your mother, with a group of others. Four, maybe five of them. College girls from the look, on a holiday tour. Well into the evening we were, as I recall, and not a table left to be had. They all crowded up to the bar. Your father was singing . . . ‘Black Velvet Band,’ it was. Yes, I’m sure of it. And the wind blowing, thunder rolling, rain lashing. And I happened to see—I could never tell you why—the minute their eyes met.
“‘No sooner met but they looked.’”
“‘No sooner looked but they loved,’” Breen added.
“Might’ve been written for them. The lightning flash of it. With me and mine, it was a slow yearning, cautious steps. But this, a rocket launched. When he returned in three days’ time to play again, she was with him. And the same two weeks later. I heard they went back to his homeplace to be married, and it was my thought they settled there or went to her home in the States, for I never saw him again.”