side of my face and disappear into the whorl of my ear. I had never cried much in my life before Eoin died. Now I cried constantly.
“My car is filled with parcels. I’ll bring them in when I am finished here. Beatrice has reassured me that you now have everything you need.”
“Thomas . . .”
“Anne,” he responded in the same tone, raising his blue eyes to mine briefly before he continued his careful snipping. I could feel his soft breath on my skin, and I closed my eyes against the flutter in my belly and the curling of my bare toes. I liked his touch. I liked his head bowed over my body. I liked him.
Thomas Smith was the kind of man who could quietly slip into and out of a room without drawing much attention. He was handsome if one stopped to contemplate each feature—deep-set blue eyes, more glum than glittering. Long grooves in his cheeks when he flashed a brief smile. Straight white teeth behind well-formed lips that perched above a dimpled chin at the apex of a clean-cut jaw. Yet he had a slight stoop to his shoulders and an air of melancholia that had folks respecting his space and his solitude, even as they sought him out. His hair was dark, more black than brown, though the glint of stubble he removed from his cheeks each morning was decidedly ruddy. He was lean, his ropey muscles giving his spare frame girth. He wasn’t tall. He wasn’t short. He wasn’t a big man. He wasn’t a small man. He wasn’t loud or obtrusive even as he moved and acted with an innate confidence. He was simply Thomas Smith, as ordinary as his name, and yet . . . not ordinary at all.
I could have written stories about him.
He would be the character that grew on the reader, making them love him simply because he was good. Decent. Dependable. Maybe I would write stories about him. Maybe I would . . . someday.
I liked him. And it would be easy to love him.
The knowledge was sudden, a fleeting thought that settled on me with butterfly wings. I had never met someone like Thomas. I’d never once been intrigued by a man, even the men I’d temporarily let into my life. I’d never felt that pull, that pressure, that desire to discover and be discovered in return. Not until now, not until Thomas. Now, I felt all those things.
“Tell me the story,” Thomas murmured.
“Hmm?”
“The story you are planning for Eoin’s book. I’d like to hear it.”
“Oh.” I thought for a moment, putting the threads of my ideas into sentences. “Well . . . it is about a boy who travels through time. He has a little boat—a little red boat—and he takes it out on the water . . . on Lough Gill. The boat is just a child’s toy, but when he sets it in the water, it becomes big enough for him to climb inside. He rows across the lake, but when he reaches the other side, he is always somewhere else. America during the revolution, France with Napoleon, China when the Great Wall was being built. When he wants to go home, he simply finds the nearest lake or stream, sets his little boat in the water, and climbs inside.”
“And he finds himself back on the lough,” Thomas finished, a smile in his voice.
“Yes. Home again,” I said.
“Eoin will love that.”
“I thought I would write the first story, the first adventure, and then we can continue to add more, depending on what he is most interested in.”
“What if you give him the book you’ve already made, the one with empty pages, for that purpose, and I help you construct another?” Thomas straightened, drawing my sweater down over my stomach and tucking his tools away, the operation completed. “I’m a decent artist. I can certainly draw a picture of a wee boy in a red boat.”
“I’ll write the words, and you’ll draw the pictures?” I asked, pleased.
“Yes. It will be easier to do that on loose pages. When we’re done, we’ll organize the words and pictures so they correspond. Stitching and gluing will be last.”
“We don’t have much time.”
“Then we should get started, Countess.”
Thomas and I worked deep into the early morning hours on Friday and Saturday—how he managed to work all day and make a child’s book most of the night was beyond me. He created a system so that the pictures and text would align