Page 1 of Quinn, By Design

CHAPTER ONE

Avisitor was rareenough to summon Niall Quinn to his front porch. “Don’t worry about the squeak,” he called to the huddled figure inspecting the hinge on his lop-sided gate. He was close enough to recognise his landlady’s elegant calves and ankles. “It lets me know I’ve got a visitor.” Noticing she had shapely legs might be excused as artistic interest, but it was a distraction he wasn’t ready for.

She spun toward his voice, her coat floating on the breeze, before settling around her too-thin figure. Niall stepped out of the shadows.

“I’m Lucy McTavish.” She crossed the yard and stretched out her hand.

“I know.” Instead of the formal handshake she offered, Niall gripped her hand to draw her up the two wide wooden steps to his porch. Without makeup, Lucy’s pallor was hauntingly evident and matched the sadness in her almond-shaped hazel eyes. She smelled of roses, with a hint of vanilla, transporting him back to carefree afternoons in his mother’s cottage garden at lilac time.

“How do you know?” She withdrew her hand, pointedly reclaiming her own space.

“I saw you at your granda’s funeral.”

Niall had stood at the back of the church. Not a close friend, his time with Cam had been too short to claim that honour, but he’d miss the old man’s advice and encouragement. Mutual respect and a passion for fine craftsmanship had forged a special bond.

Lucy’s courage at the funeral had earned his respect, while her vulnerability roused protective instincts he’d tucked away for the sake of his sanity after his bust-up with his ex-fiancée, Sinead.

“I’m glad you’ve dropped by.” Niall gentled her as he would a lost child. “Please. Come in.” He gestured for her to precede him through the front door.

He’d been considering how to introduce himself since the funeral. Texting was out because he didn’t have her number. Using social media seemed wrong for the words he had to say. Her arrival on a Sunday, in unrelieved black, less than ten days after the funeral, gave the encounter an ominous urgency.

“I didn’t see you.”

“You were too caught in your grief to see me.”

She’d been too caught in her grief to see anyone. Her eyes had shimmered with tears, her fragility brittle enough to shatter with a blow. She’d held herself ramrod straight. Her self-discipline awed him, and her anguish had compounded his own, re-opening the hole left by his da’s death.

Already partway down the hall, she pivoted, met his gaze, then focused on a spot over his shoulder. “I’m sorry for my rudeness.”

“Whisht, lassie. There’s no need for an apology. I lost my da a few years ago, didn’t care who saw me cry like a baby.”

The colour drained from her cheeks, leaving them chalk-white, and drawing Niall’s attention to her dark auburn hair. The tight bundle at her nape punished, rather than tamed her thick tresses.

“I learned ‘whisht’ from Grandpa.” She sounded bereft, and he’d been raised to tend any animal in pain.

“I picked it up working in Ireland. Cam used it when he was about to impart some piece of wisdom to my eejit self.” Niall smiled encouragement and waved toward the doorway at the end of the short hall. “I was in the kitchen.

“The loss is a constant, learning to live with it is the challenge,” he murmured before cursing his cack-handedness.

For feck’s sake. Cam had said he was Lucy’s only immediate family. She probably knew more about loss than Niall hoped he ever would. He couldn’t recall who’d used the expression, but the words fitted her—“She knew her way around in the dark.” Grief could be endlessly dark.

Neat, black, serviceable pumps continued up the narrow hall and into his neat, serviceable kitchen, theirrat-tat-tatshutting a door on his words of condolence. She pressed a—praise the saints—dark-charcoal bag to her side. The woman should wear green, any shade, not this unrelenting black that made her look forbidding, when in truth she was stripped naked by mourning.

“You call him Cam.” She stood stiffly beside the three-by-two-metre, bark-to-bark Huon pine table he’d finished in the early hours this morning, then muscled into the kitchen so he could live with it a few days.

“He asked me to. Said Cameron McTavish made him feel ancient.” Niall stepped around her, his arm brushing against hers in the space made smaller by his table. She shivered. Not fear. Maybe cold? Grief could also make you cold from the inside out.

“I have some questions for you, Mr. Quinn.” She straightened her shoulders, tilting her chin to signal her return to business.

“Please sit down, Ms. McTavish,” he replied with equal formality. Then, without waiting to see what she did, he continued to the kitchen bench. “I was making tea. Share a cup?” He spoke over his shoulder. Tea was his mother’s cure for every ill.

“I won’t be here long.” Politeness jostled with annoyance in her answer.

“Tea doesn’t take long.” Niall kept his back turned.

“Thank you,” she said. He heard a chair being placed on the floor and learned Lucy McTavish didn’t pull chairs across stone tiles. Instead, she lifted them before setting them in the correct position.

After filling the kettle, Niall opened the fridge and eyed ingredients before making his choice. A seeded sourdough loaf, a mature cheddar, tomatoes and lettuce. He added pickles. “Milk?”

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