Page 20 of Shadow Spell

In answer, the dog wagged his whole body, clamped a gnawed blue ball in his mouth, and brought it hopefully to the fence.

“It’ll have to be later for that.”

He stepped into the office, found Kyra, her hair a short wedge of sapphire blue, busy at the keyboard.

“You’re late.”

Though she just hit five foot two, Kyra had a voice like a foghorn.

“Happy I’m the boss then, isn’t it?”

“Fin’s the boss.”

“Happy I had breakfast with him so he knows what’s what.” He knocked his fist lightly on the top of her head as he moved by to a desk covered with forms, clipboards, papers, brochures, a spare glove, a tether, a bowl of tumbled stones, and other debris.

“We’ve had another booking come in already this morning. A double. Father and son—and the boy’s just sixteen. I’ve put you on that, as you do better with the teenagers than Brian or Pauline. They’re for ten this morning. Yanks.”

She paused, sent Connor a disapproving look from her round, wildly freckled face. “Sixteen, and why isn’t he in school, I want to know.”

“You’re such a taskmaster, Kyra. It’s an education, isn’t it, to travel to another country, to learn of hawks?”

“That won’t teach you to add two and two. Sean’s not coming in till noon, if you’re forgetting. He’s taking his wife in for her check with the doctor.”

He looked up at that because he had forgotten. “All’s well there, right, with her and the baby?”

“Well and fine, she just wants him there as they may find if it’s a girl or boy today. That puts Brian on the nine with the lady from Donegal, you at the ten, and Pauline’s at half-ten with a pair of honeymooners from Dublin.”

She clicked and clacked at the keyboard as she laid out the morning’s schedule. Though she tended toward the bossy and brisk, Kyra was a wizard at doing a dozen things at once.

And—the fly in Connor’s ointment—expected everyone else to do the same.

“I’ve set you on at two for another,” she added. “Yanks again, a couple over from Boston. They’ve just come in from a stay at Dromoland in Clare, and they’re having three days at Ashford before moving on. Three weeks holiday for their twenty-fifth anniversary.”

“Ten and two then.”

“They’ve been married long as I’ve been alive. That’s something to think on.”

Listening with half an ear, he sat to poke through the paperwork he couldn’t palm off on her. “Your parents have been married longer yet, considering you’re the youngest.”

“Parents are different,” she said—decisively—though he couldn’t see how.

“Oh, and Brian’s claiming there was an earthquake this morning, near to shook him out of bed.”

Connor glanced up, face calm. “An earthquake, is it?”

She smirked, still clattering on the keyboard with nails painted with pink glitter. “Swears the whole house shook around him.” She rolled her eyes, hit Print, swiveled around for a clipboard. “And he’s decided it’s some conspiracy, as there’s not a word of it on the telly. A few mentions, so he claims, on the Internet. He’s gone from earthquake to nuclear testing by some foreign power in a fingersnap. He’ll be all over you about it, as he’s been me.”

“And your bed didn’t shake?”

She flashed a grin. “Not from an earthquake.”

He laughed, went back to the paperwork. “And how is Liam?”

“Very well indeed. I’m thinking I might marry him.”

“Is that the way of it?”

“It might be, as you have to start on racking up those anniversaries sometime. I’ll let him know when I’ve made up my mind.”

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