Ryan's Place - By Sherryl Woods Page 0,7

cost her money. Some had gotten her mixed up in projects that were a waste of her time. Only one had been related to a scoundrel who’d stolen her heart.

Still, she couldn’t seem to keep her eyes off him. He was, after all, every girl’s fantasy of a Black Irish hunk. She noted again that his coal-black hair, worn just a bit too long, gave him a rakish, bad-boy appearance. His deep blue eyes danced with merriment, at least when he wasn’t scowling over having been outmaneuvered by Father Francis, a wily old man if ever she’d met one. There was a tiny scar at the corner of his mouth, barely visible unless one looked closely, which, of course, she had. After all, the man had a mouth that any sane woman would instantly imagine locked against her own.

Yes, indeed, Ryan Devaney was the embodiment of every woman’s fantasy, all right. A very dangerous fantasy. It would be all too easy to fall in with Father Francis’s scheming.

Ryan Devaney was also a man of contradictions. For one thing, he might have his hard edges and unyielding black moods, but she herself had seen evidence of his tender heart in the way he’d bustled the protesting priest out of the bar and into his car for a ride the few blocks to the rectory. Maggie was a sucker for a man with that particular mysterious combination.

For another thing, Ryan was a successful businessman with the soul of a poet. The rhythm of his words, when he’d lapsed for a moment into an Irish brogue to tease a customer, had been like music to Maggie’s ears. She sighed just remembering the lilting sound of his voice. She could still recall sitting on her grandfather O’Brien’s knee years ago, enthralled by his tales of the old country, told with just such a musical lilt. Listening to Ryan Devaney, even knowing that the accent was feigned, had taken her back to those happy occasions.

She’d known the man less than two hours, and she was already intrigued in a way that had her heart thumping and her thoughts whirling. She blamed at least some of her reaction on her innate curiosity. Her father was a journalist, always poking his nose into things that he considered the public’s business, long before the public even knew they cared. Her mother was a scientist and professor at MIT, a profession that managed to combine her curiosity about how the universe worked and her nurturing skills.

Inevitably, living with two people like that, Maggie had grown up with an insatiable desire to understand what made people tick. She had a trace of her father’s cynicism, a healthy dose of her mother’s reason and an intuitive ability to see beneath the surface.

Among her friends she was the one they turned to when they were trying to make sense of relationships, when a boss was giving them trouble, when a parent was making impossible demands. Maggie always had a helpful insight, if not a solution, to offer.

The only life she couldn’t seem to make sense of was her own. She was still struggling to carve out a niche for herself. She had a degree in business and in accounting, but in one of those contradictions that she seemed to like in others, she kept searching for a creative outlet that would feed her soul as well as her bank account.

Her last job certainly hadn’t offered that. She’d loved the small coastal town in Maine, which was why she’d persuaded herself that she could be happy doing bookkeeping for a small corporation. In the end, though, the early-morning strolls on the beach, the quaint shops and the friendly neighbors hadn’t compensated for the daily tedium in her job. She’d given her notice two weeks ago, on the same day she’d broken off a relationship that had been going nowhere.

Now she was the one in need of direction, but she’d given herself until after the start of the new year to figure things out. With savings in the bank, she didn’t have to rush right into another job. She was going to stay with her parents, brothers and sisters for the next few weeks, then decide if she wanted to return to Maine, where she’d been making her home for the past four years, and look for more satisfying work and a relationship that had more excitement and more promise of a future.

With all that heavy thinking awaiting her, Ryan Devaney and his contradictions