Page 7 of After Indigo Irish Nights
“The real thing looks as if it were created by angels themselves,” Eoghan said with a sigh. “I can’t wait until I can make a window such as hers.”
“First pottery and now stained glass,” Declan said, shaking his head ruefully. “Eoghan, you’ll have to live another few decades to master it all.”
Eoghan fitted his hand through her arm in the way of an old gentleman. “Who says I won’t, Declan McGrath? I feel younger every day. Now then. Come inside, Kathleen, and have a drink. I’m buying your first round.”
Declan caught her gaze. His shrug seemed to suggest he wouldn’t object.
The butterflies in Kathleen’s tummy fell to the ground in disappointment. Still, she bucked up and said, “You coming, Ace?”
His blue eyes fired with heat, the long scorching kind a guy gave to a girl to make sure she understood him. “I’ll catch up with you. I need to make a call.”
She took Eoghan’s arm more firmly as they walked to the front door of the Brazen Donkey. She was ready to party.
Declan McGrath might have taken a step back, but he wasn’t immune to her.
Not one bit.
CHAPTERTWO
Declan waited until Kathleen and Eoghan were inside before shoving the phone he’d taken out for show back into his pocket. Her effect on him was just as potent as it had been last month, what with her long legs and slender neck and the hot siren-like call in her big brown eyes—a call he seemed incapable of resisting.
Is this what she’d reduced him to? Faking a phone call so he could have a moment to breathe again?
Fuck this. He started for the front door.
“Not so fast.”
Declan jumped at the voice, an incredibly strong one for someone who was dead. “Dammit. Not again.”
“I’d hoped for a more pleasant greeting now that Kathleen O’Connor has returned,” Sorcha Fitzgerald said, appearing in front of him in the same white dress she’d had on the last few times she’d materialized out of thin air and scared the life out of him.
For fuck’s sake, why did his best friend’s dead wife have to pester him? She kept coming to him, insisting Kathleen was his soulmate. It was a load of nonsense, and he wouldn’t have it. “I’m not talking to you, Sorcha.”
The scent of oranges saturated the air around him, so overwhelming that it tickled the back of his throat. He started to cough. How she’d continued to smell like oranges as a spirit, he’d never know, but it had been her signature scent before she’d died in a senseless car accident over three years ago.
The scent didn’t dissipate. No, it only seemed to grow stronger, like a million oranges had exploded around him. “Are you trying to kill me?” he accused between hacking up his lungs.
“That was for ignoring me the last two times I tried to talk to you,” she said, narrowing her green eyes.
“Take a hint,” he shot back. “Go away.”
“That won’t be happening, Declan McGrath, even if you fell to your knees and begged me.” She laughed heartily, her brown hair fluttering as if a gentle wind were ruffling it.
Only there wasn’t any wind to speak of. He wasn’t a man to grow faint—he was a butcher, wasn’t he?—but he leaned against the nearest car in the lot as weakness overtook him. “Leave me alone, Sorcha.”
“I knew this assignment might be one of my toughest, seeing how hardheaded you are, with a heart barred shut like an abandoned cottage. But I intend to help you and your soulmate come together, and I won’t be denied.”
“I don’t want your help,” he ground out. “And stop calling Kathleen O’Connor my soulmate. She’s an incredible woman, I’ll grant you, and I might be interested in her as any warm-blooded man would be, but that’s all.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be afraid to kiss her again.” She let out a royal snort. “Declan McGrath, I’ve known you since you were a boy. Will you deny that the only reason you fear being with Kathleen is that you know she is more than a mere object for slaking your lust?”
He was not going to admit that. Nor was he going to admit how much he’d enjoyed flirting with her before Eoghan interrupted them.
“I don’t like you pushing me toward her. How do you claim to know such things? You’re dead.” He didn’t care what the Irish tales said about ghosts and their uncanny ways. Those stories had never interested him.
“I’m dead, yes, but I know what’s true.” She reached for him, and he flinched as her hand passed through him.
“Jesus, stop that.”
