The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

own eyes slitted. “Is what that does to you, what you know it does to me, enough for you?”
    “Have I said differently?”
    “No.” But even as he struggled with his straining temper, he cupped her chin. “Would you?”
    However set off he was, she was sure his study of her was cool, calculated, and thorough. A man with that measure of control was an irritant, she thought. And a challenge. “You can be sure you’ll be the first to know if I’m dissatisfied.”
    “Good.”
    “And as a woman of my word, I’m telling you now I don’t appreciate you bursting into my home uninvited and manhandling me because some bug’s crawled up your arse.”
    With a half laugh, he shook his head, stepped back. “Point taken. I’m sorry.” He bent down, picked up the bag she’d dropped, and handed it to her. “I was just up on Tower Hill, at my uncle’s grave.”
    She angled her head. “Are you grieving, Trevor, for someone who died long before you were born?”
    He opened his mouth to deny it, but the truth simply slid out. “Yes.”
    Everything about her softened. She reached out to touch his arm. “Come sit down now, and I’ll make you some tea.”
    “No, thanks.” He took her hand, lifted it to his lips in an absent gesture that made something inside her stretch and yearn. Then he turned away and paced restlessly to the window to look out at the work in progress.
    Was he the invader here, he wondered, staking his claim? Or a son returning to dig in roots? “My grandfather wouldn’t speak of this place, and being a slavishly dutiful wife, my grandmother wouldn’t either. As a result—”
    “Your curiosity was whetted.”
    “Yes. Exactly. I thought about coming here for a long time. On and off, even made half-baked plans a couple of times. But I never seriously committed to it. Then the idea for the theater jumped into my head, full blown, as if I’d been building it there, stage by stage, for years.”
    “Isn’t that the way it is sometimes with ideas?” She crossed to him, looked out with him. “They simmer around without you really being aware of it, until they’re cooked proper.”
    “I suppose.” Hardly aware of it, he took her hand. Just held it. “Since the deal’s done, there’s no harm in telling you I’d have paid more for the lease, given you a higher percentage. I had to have it.”
    “Well, then, there’s no harm in telling you we’d have taken less all around. But we very much enjoyed the horse trading and winding up your man Finkle.”
    This time he did laugh, and most of the tension drained. “My great-uncle would have come here, and my grandfather. To Gallagher’s.”
    “Oh, to be sure. Is it what they’d think of what you’re doing here that’s worrying you?”
    “I don’t worry what my grandfather would have thought. Not anymore.”
    There, she thought, that sore spot again. This time she probed, but gently. “Was he so hard a man?”
    He hesitated, but it seemed he was in the mood to speak of it. “What did you think of the house in London?”
    Puzzled, she shook her head. “It was very elegant.”
    “Fucking museum.”
    She blinked at that, there was such undiluted anger in his voice. “Well, I’ll say the museum part of that statement occurred to me, but it was lovely.”
    “After he died, my parents gave me clearance to change a few things in it. Things that hadn’t been changed in thirty years. Opened it up a bit, softened some edges, but it’s still his place underneath. Rigid and formal, as he was. That’s how my father was raised. Rigidly, and without affection.”
    “I’m sorry.” She stroked a hand in circles over his back. “It has to be sad, hard and sad, to have a father who doesn’t show he loves you.”
    “I never had that problem. Somehow, through some miracle, my father was—is—caring, open and full of humor. Though his father wasn’t. He still doesn’t speak of it much, the way he was raised, except to my mother.”
    “And she to you,” Darcy murmured, “because she knows you’d need to understand it.”
    “He wanted to make a family, a life, that was the opposite of the way he’d been raised. That’s what he did. They kept us in line, my sister and me, but we always knew they loved us.”
    “I think it shows the beauty of the gift they gave you that you don’t take it for granted.”
    “No, I don’t.” He turned back to her. Odd, he hadn’t really expected her to understand, nor had he expected to feel such