The Gallaghers of Ardmore Trilogy

or had he places still to go?
    She let out a huge sigh, not caring that the sound was ripe with self-pity, and carrying her wet sweater, went back into the living room.
    He was pacing, and stopped when she came in. She was dwarfed by his shirt and looked small and miserable and not nearly up to dealing with the emotions swinging around inside him. So he said nothing, not yet, merely took her sweater and carried it into the bath to hang over the shower rod and drip.
    “Sit down, Jude.”
    “You’ve every right to be angry with me, coming in this way, behaving as I did. I don’t know how to begin to—”
    “I wish you’d be quiet for a minute.” He snapped it at her, telling himself when she winced that he wasn’t made of stone. Then he stalked into the kitchen to deal with the tea.
    She’d been married, was all he could think. That was quite a detail she’d neglected to mention.
    He’d thought her to have had little experience with men, and here she’d been married and divorced and was obviously still pining for the bastard.
    Pining for some fancy man in Chicago who wasn’t true enough to keep his vows, and all the while Aidan Gallagher had been pining for her.
    If that wasn’t enough to burn your ass, what was?
    He poured the tea strong and black and added a healthy drop of whiskey to his own.
    She was standing when he came back, the fingers of her hands twisted together. Her damp hair curled madly, and her eyes were drenched. “I’ll go downstairs and apologize to your customers.”
    “For what?”
    “For making a scene.”
    He set the cups down and drew his brows together to study her with as much bafflement as irritation. “What do I care about that? If we don’t have a scene in Gallagher’s once a week we wonder why. Will you sit down, damn it,and stop looking at me as if I was about to take a strap to you?”
    He sat after she did, then picked up his own tea. Jude sipped, burned her tongue, then hastily set her cup down again.
    “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been married?”
    “I didn’t think of it.”
    “Didn’t think of it?” His cup clattered as he snapped it down on the table. “Did it mean so little to you?”
    “It meant a great deal to me,” she returned with a quiet dignity that had him narrowing his eyes. “It meant considerably less to the man I married. I’ve been trying to learn to live with that.”
    When Aidan said nothing, she picked up her tea again to give herself something to do with her hands. “We’d known each other several years. He’s a professor at the university where I taught. On the surface, we had a great deal in common. My parents liked him very much. He asked me to marry him. I said yes.”
    “Were you in love with him?”
    “I thought I was, yes, so that amounts to the same thing.”
    No, Aidan thought, it didn’t amount to the same thing at all. But he let it pass. “And what happened?”
    “We—he, I should say, planned it all out. William likes to plan carefully, considering details and possible pitfalls and their solutions. We bought a house, as it’s more conducive to entertaining and he had ambitions to rise in his department. We had a very small, exclusive, and dignified wedding with all the right people involved. Meaning caterers, florists, photographers, guests.”
    She breathed deep and, since her tongue was already scalded, sipped the tea again. “Seven months later, he came to me and told me he was dissatisfied. That’s the word heused. ‘Jude, I’m dissatisfied with our marriage.’ I think I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’”
    She closed her eyes, let the humiliation settle along with the whiskey in her stomach. “That grates, knowing my first instinct was to apologize. He accepted it graciously, as if he’d been expecting it. No,” she corrected, looking at Aidan again. “ Because he’d been expecting it.”
    It was hurt he felt from her now, quivering waves of it. “That should tell you that you apologize too much.”
    “Maybe. In any case, he explained that as he respected me and wanted to be perfectly honest, he felt he should tell me that he’d fallen in love with someone else.”
    Someone younger, Jude thought now. And prettier, brighter.
    “He didn’t want to involve her in a sordid and adulterous affair, so he requested that I file for divorce immediately. We would sell the house, split everything fifty-fifty. As he was the instigator, he would be willing to give me first choice in any particular