Page 19 of Beside Golden Irish Fields
“Your thickheadedness will only encourage me to call in more help, Carrick.” Her white dress billowed even though there was no wind. “Bets smelled my orange scent today after I tapped her shoulder, and I was pleased she put the Yank in the cottage by your sheep. I can visit your mother too. Or your friend Kade. He’d listen to me, I’m sure. Fair warning.”
She disappeared before he could give her a firm talking to. Terrific. This was just like her, trying to fence him in. Well, he was having none of it.
“Your face is thunderous,” Jamie said, pouring them both another drink. “What did she say this time?”
“She’s going to have other people cluck at me. She mentioned Mum, Kade, and Bets. The Lucky Charms getting involved wouldn’t go well for me.” Kade, he could handle.
“Kade will be on your side, but you might as well pack up your belongings and leave town if you plan on crossing them. I’d miss you, brother.”
“And I’d miss you,” Carrick said. “Most days.”
Jamie snorted. They knocked their glasses together and downed the whiskey in one shot.
“You’d best clear the air with Angie fast.”
He poured them another drink and felt the urge to work on the house slipping away. Suddenly he was tired of it all. His pillow called to him. A good night’s rest had always enlivened him. “I’ll find her first thing tomorrow.”
Surely two people agreeing to be friendly and not act on an attraction would stop a ghost and the Lucky Charms in their tracks. Yes, that was the way of it.
When he heard amused laughter coming from the kitchen, he got the shivers himself.
Chapter Six
Angie stared at the golden light seeping into her room when she awoke the next morning. Dawn. Her favorite time to paint. “It’s now or never,” she muttered to herself and rolled out of bed.
She pulled back the cream curtains in her room and sagged in utter bliss as the view rolled over her. A soft white fog covered the verdant pastureland, while billowing clouds danced across an open sky bursting with Persian rose, cerulean blue, and coral pink. The rain had stopped, but everything shone with dew. Sheep were grazing on the chromium green hills, the fog swirling around their feet, making them appear almost like mythical creatures from another place.
“Wow,” she breathed out.
Here be good. Just like the sheep had said yesterday.
Carrick rose in her mind. She tried to banish him, but his thick dark hair seemed to billow in the image as his Payne’s grey eyes locked on her. She tingled all over, dammit.
None of that, Angie.
Yanking open the window, she put her hand out to judge the temperature as much as cool off. Refreshingly glorious, she concluded. Irish weather was notoriously changeable, and Cousin Bets had told them dressing in layers was the key to being prepared for whatever weather one encountered. May had been mostly gray and cold, apparently, which was why the sheep hadn’t been sheared yet. They’d gotten lucky, seeing those words on Carrick’s sheep. She longed to see them again, but they were too far off for the writing to be deciphered from the cottage.
Angie pulled open a drawer in the dresser. She’d filled it with her things yesterday. Bets and Liam had shown them the basics in the small but quaint cottage and left them to settle in. It would have been nice to have more space, but Megan clearly wasn’t ready to be on her own.
Her sister had shut herself in her room upon arrival, and Angie had helped Ollie unpack and made him dinner. They’d had an early evening, although they’d had to wait fifteen minutes for the water to heat up in the bathroom. Their shower had an immersion heater, something all too common in Ireland, Bets had said. Clean and showered finally, she and her nephew had been asleep by seven. Man, she’d slept hard, but she was refreshed.
Two months.
She had two months to get herself in gear and have enough paintings to do a gallery show in early August. She’d pulled a show together in less than a month, so it wasn’t completely out of the question.
Of course, she’d had her voice then. It had been years since she’d produced anything she was proud of.Years.
Her solar plexus tightened, and she couldn’t breathe. Nothing like the twin feelings of terror and pressure to shove her out of her funk.
She was here to turn her life around, and it started now. Good thing she was prepared to reconnect with the Angie she used to be, the one who could paint a gallery-worthy painting in three to seven days and sell it for five thousand dollars.
In high school she’d read inThe Baltimore Sunthat some Orioles baseball players wore the same underwear when they were on a winning streak. She’d created her own painting outfit along those lines in college, and it had rocked her world. So she’d decided to recreate it before leaving for Ireland, something that had required her to buy her first pair of jeans since she’d stopped fitting into her size sixes. But it was time to start letting pieces of frumpy Angie to go, and this was part of it.
Purchasing a pair in a larger size had been tough. She couldn’t dance around the truth anymore. She’d gained a lot of weight since meeting her ex-husband, Randall, and she and her doctor had agreed that she needed to lose some of it because of her elevated blood pressure.
But Angie wanted more than that. She wanted to look in the mirror and like herself again. Feel sexy again.
She hoped washing her new jeans twenty times to make them soft like the ones she used to wear would help remind her of those days as much as the iron-on patches she’d transferred from her old ones. Creative Angie had rocked that single red rose on her right thigh as much as the winding flower tree trailing up her left leg, the theme working with her burgundy jacket from Florence embroidered with yellow flowers on the back, which she could throw over a comfy T-shirt. She didn’t believe in painting in boring things. Her paint splatters added magic to her clothes and very self.
