Okay, they’d made it this far. Ordering herself to settle down, she scooped a hand through her choppy cap of brown hair.
“Look there. The sun’s breaking through.”
She studied the miserly opening in the gray, and the watery beam that struggled through. “Wow, the light. It’s blinding.”
He laughed, reached out to smooth a hand over the hair she’d just ruffled. “We’re out of our element, Lieutenant. Maybe it’s good for us to be out of the norm now and again.”
She knew her norm. Death, investigation, the insanity of a city that ran instead of walked, the smells of a cop shop, the rush and the burden of command.
Some of that had become Roarke’s norm in the last couple years, she mused. He juggled that with his own world, which was buying, selling, owning, creating pretty much every freaking thing in the known universe.
His beginnings had been as dark and ugly as hers. Dublin street rat, she thought, thief, conniver, survivor of a brutal, murderous father. The mother he’d never known hadn’t been so lucky.
From that, he’d built an empire—not always on the sunny side of the law.
And she, cop to the bone, had fallen for him despite the shadows— or maybe because of them. But there was more to him than either of them had known, and the more lived on a farm outside of the little village of Tulla in County Clare.
“We could’ve taken a copter from the hotel,” she said to him.
“I like the drive.”
“I know you mean that, so it makes me wonder about you, pal.”
“We’ll take a shuttle when we leave for Florence.”
“No argument.”
“And we’ll have a candlelight dinner in our suite.” He glanced toward her with that relaxed, happy smile. “The best pizza in the city.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“It means a lot to them that we’d come like this—together—for a couple of days.”
“I like them,” she said of his mother’s family. “Sinead, the rest. Vacations are good. I just have to work myself into the mode and stop thinking about what’s going on back at Central. What do people do here, anyway?”
“They work, farm, run shops, tend homes and families, go to the pub for a pint and community. Simple doesn’t mean unfulfilled.”
She let out a little snort. “You’d go crazy here.”
“Oh, within a week. We’re urban creatures, you and I, but I can appreciate those who make this way their own, who value and support community. Comhar,” he added, “that’s the Irish word for it. It’s particular to the west counties.”
There were woods now, sort of looming back from the road, and pretty—if you went for that kind of thing—stretches of fields divided by low walls of rock she imagined had been mined from the pretty fields.
She recognized the house when Roarke turned. It managed to be sprawling and tidy at the same time, fronted with flowers in what Roarke had told her they called a dooryard. If buildings sent off an aura, she supposed this one would be content.
Roarke’s mother had grown up here before she’d run off to the bright lights of Dublin. There, young, naive, trusting, she’d fallen in love with Patrick Roarke, had borne his child. And had died trying to save that child.
Now her twin sister ran the house, helped run the farm with the man she’d married, with their children and siblings, parents—the whole brood seemed to root here, in the green.
Sinead stepped out of the house, telling Eve she’d been watching for them. Her gilded red hair framed her pretty face where green eyes warmed in welcome.
It wasn’t the connection of blood kin that put that affection on her face, or in the arms she stretched out. It was family. Blood, Eve knew, didn’t always mean warmth and welcome.
Sinead caught Roarke in a solid, swaying hug, and as her murmured greeting was in Irish, Eve couldn’t understand the words. But the emotion translated.
This was love, open and accepting.
When she turned, Eve found herself caught in the same full-on embrace. It widened her eyes, shifted her balance.
“Fáilte abhaile. Welcome home.”
“Thanks. Ah . . .”
“Come in, come in. We’re all in the kitchen or out the back. We’ve enough food to feed the army we are, and thought we’d have a picnic, as you’ve brought such nice weather.”
Eve cast a glance up at the sky, and supposed there were degrees of nice weather, depending where you stood on the planet.
“I’ll have one of the boys fetch your bags and take them up to your room. Oh, it’s good to see your