Читать книгу The Whisper - Carla Neggers - Страница 10

Beara Peninsula, Southwest Ireland

N ights on the Beara Peninsula were quiet but also incredibly dark, and Josie Goodwin found herself restless, frustrated and decidedly annoyed with her lot. As much as she liked Keira and Lizzie and enjoyed their company, she hated being left behind, stuck in a cottage in the Irish hills while Will, Simon and Myles were off doing…well, whatever they were doing.

She had few details. She’d learned early that morning that Myles was en route to Ireland and had alerted Will, who in turn had alerted Simon. In the month since Myles had again disappeared after helping to free Abigail Browning, he had continued to avoid communications with anyone in London. For the past two years, he’d sacrificed much to establish his cover as a rogue SAS officer and penetrate a deadly association between drug traffickers and a terrorist cell.

His cover was so deep, so impenetrable, that no one—not even Will Davenport—had known what Myles was up to. Josie and Will had believed Myles had been dragged off in a firefight in Afghanistan and killed—and not heroically at that. Killed by his terrorist friends after he had betrayed his colleagues to them.

But he hadn’t been killed, and he hadn’t betrayed anyone.

Now it was time he had help.

Josie resisted the temptation to pace. What she wanted to do was to return to London. But what could she do there?

Nothing more, she thought bitterly, than she could do right here.

With a heavy sigh, she surveyed the tidy room. Keira had lit a wood fire. Lizzie was washing up in the kitchen. Scoop Wisdom had left little evidence that he’d been here at all, never mind for two weeks. Josie walked over to the front window and looked out at the stars and half moon. She wondered if Myles would have let Norman Estabrook and his thugs kill Abigail before he risked compromising his own mission. He would never have considered such a dire option. He tackled problems head-on and went after the outcome he wanted—in that case, Abigail Browning free and safe, Norman Estabrook and his thugs dead or captured and he, a British agent, with the key information he needed to carry on his mission.

Josie could see Myles giving her one of his crooked, cocky grins. “No worries, love,” he’d say.

She’d never met a man so certain he could achieve whatever he was after.

She raked a hand through her hair. How could she blame Myles for the risks he’d taken—for his courage, his sacrifices?

Because she bloody well could, she thought, forcing herself to smile at her two housemates—Lizzie in the kitchen, Keira heading for the bedroom. “You’d never know Scoop had ever been here, would you?”

“That’s typical Scoop,” Keira said. “You should see his apartment. He had to get rid of everything after the fire, but he likes living a stripped-down life. He doesn’t need much more than a good colander for his garden harvest.”

“I like how you say ‘fire,’” Lizzie interjected. “It was a bomb.”

Despite her blunt comment, Lizzie was an optimist by both nature and conviction and every bit Will Davenport’s match. Josie had begun to doubt if he’d ever find the woman who was. Lizzie Rush not only knew her way around five-star hotels—she had taken on a billionaire and his professional thugs, and she’d held her own with Myles, Will, the FBI and the Boston police.

Lizzie was joining Keira and her young cousins and their detective father for tea on Christmas Eve at the Rush hotel in Dublin. They’d invited Josie. She just might chuck London for a few days and go at that.

Assuming she wasn’t in prison for killing Myles Fletcher in his sleep.

Of course, that would require he avoid getting himself killed on his own first. Will and Simon had gone after him in part because they were convinced—as Josie was—that Myles was on the verge of getting himself killed. It had been a long, difficult, treacherous two years. He had done his share. Would he ever be able to return to a normal life? Would he even want to?

Josie refused to go down that particular road. For a time, she’d thought Myles was, finally, a man who understood her, and she’d thought she understood him—including the challenges of being involved with him.

Of loving him.

She smirked to herself. That had been madness, hadn’t it? Fortunately, she had her son, Adrian. She’d gone outside before dark and called him. He’d had schoolwork to do. He was with his father, an accountant who hadn’t been pleased at all when he’d seen through Josie’s charade of a life. He hadn’t wanted a wife who was an intelligence officer in any capacity, even if it was largely behind a desk. He wanted a normal life. Who could blame him?

Adrian adored Myles and had asked about him frequently in the initial months after his presumed death and betrayal. Josie had been prohibited from saying anything—that Myles was alive, dead, missing. And what had she known? Nothing, as it turned out. Just as well she’d stayed mum. Adrian had finally stopped asking, but only after telling Josie that he knew Myles would be back.

Keira carried an armload of blankets and sheets from the bedroom. “It’ll be like a sleepover. Girls’ night. We can have a pillow fight.”

Lizzie paused at the sink, and she and Josie both gaped at Keira as if she’d lost her mind. Girls’ night? A sleepover? A pillow fight?

“Don’t look so shocked,” Keira said with a laugh, dumping the linens in a heap on the sofa, her pale hair hanging in her face. “I’ve never been one for troops of girlfriends, I admit, but I do like having you both here. Two of us can share the bed and one can sleep on the sofa, or one in the bed, one on the sofa and one on a mat on the floor. It’ll work.”

“Of course it will,” Lizzie said, smiling.

Josie angled Lizzie a sharp look. “If you polish that kettle for one more second, you’ll rub a hole in it. What is it, Lizzie? What’s on your mind?”

Lizzie dropped her cloth and abandoned the kettle. She stared out the dark window above the sink. “I was just thinking about Sophie Malone.” She sighed and faced Josie again. “I’m forgetting something. I know I am, but I can’t think what it is.”

“Something important?” Josie asked.

“I hope not.”

Keira sank onto the sofa next to her heap of linens. “Sophie’s a Celtic archaeologist originally from Boston, and she’s participating in the folklore conference. I can understand that she’d want to see the ruin. She just happened to pick a morning Scoop was there.”

“Yes,” Lizzie said, “but that doesn’t mean that’s all there is to it.”

Josie stood by the fire, welcomed its warmth on her back. “These days, nothing is ever quite as it seems, is it?”

Keira fingered the hem of an inexpensive sheet. “Sophie got to Scoop, don’t you think?”

“Is our Dr. Malone attractive?” Josie asked.

Keira blushed. “It’s not that.”

“Nonsense. It’s always ‘that.’”

Obviously preoccupied, Lizzie walked over to the pine table. “I didn’t know Sophie that well when she worked at our hotel in Boston.” She picked up a charcoal pencil from Keira’s array of art supplies, then immediately set it down again. “I know I’m missing something. I’ll remember, though.”

Of that, Josie had no doubt. Both Lizzie and Keira had faced considerable danger and violence since June and had come out on the other side in good shape.

Josie hadn’t faced anything more dangerous or violent than her email in-box.

“Are you going back to London tomorrow?” Keira asked her.

“I’ve no idea what I’m doing tomorrow,” Josie said, keeping any trace of bitterness out of her tone. “Today didn’t go as I expected. Why should tomorrow?”

Lizzie, obviously as restless as Josie was, pushed aside Myles’s pathetic Irish wolfhound drawing. “We can all drive to Dublin in the morning and have tea and scones at my family’s hotel there,” she said.

“You mean you want to talk to your cousin the doorman,” Keira said. “See if he can help you remember whatever it is about Sophie Malone you think is escaping you.”

Lizzie stood up straight. “We need to know exactly what her interest in your stone angel is.”

“It’s not my stone angel,” Keira said quietly. “It belongs to Irish legend now.”

Josie had noticed Keira struggle with her emotions since Simon’s departure. The upheavals of the past three months had to be finally catching up with her. She’d encountered a brutal killer, fallen in love with an FBI agent and learned of family secrets—the mysterious circumstances of her own conception here on the Beara Peninsula, a terrible murder thirty years ago that had haunted her mother and uncle. Before she’d had a chance to absorb all that, her life was again disrupted when Norman Estabrook decided to exact revenge. He’d trusted Simon, never once thinking he was an undercover FBI agent. As payback for what Estabrook regarded as Simon’s betrayal, he’d sent a killer after Keira. She and Lizzie had stopped him in the ancient stone circle just down the lane.

And now here we are again, Josie thought. Lizzie, hotelier and daughter of a spy. Keira, artist and folklorist. The two women were in love with dangerous men, and not a little dangerous themselves.

And me?

She was the enigmatic British spy, she thought with amusement and just a touch of bitterness. After Myles, she’d given up hope of having a normal relationship with a man.

Any relationship at the rate she’d been going for the past two years.

Now what? Myles was alive and he wasn’t a traitor, but nothing would ever be the same between them. There was no going back to their lives prior to his supposed death and treachery. He’d made his choices.

Lizzie sighed, shaking her head. “Stop kidding yourself, Josie.”

“What?”

“You’re as in love with Myles Fletcher as ever.”

“As ever? I’ve never been in love with him—”

Lizzie and even Keira burst into laughter. Josie suppressed a flicker of impatience. What did these two women know about her life? But she knew her mood had nothing to do with them and everything to do with those few minutes with Myles that afternoon. Being near him again after two years hadn’t been what she’d expected. She could almost feel his mouth on hers, his hands on her—the path to ruin, that sort of thinking.

“All right, then,” she said briskly. “It’s late and I’m hungry. What shall we fix for supper?”

Lizzie raised her eyebrows. “You’re blushing. A stiff-upper-lip MI6 agent—”

“I keep Will Davenport’s calendar,” she said with a mock sniff, “nothing more.”

“Myles will come back to you,” Keira said softly.

Josie snorted. First the bloody bastard had to live through the week. But she smiled and reached for her coat. “Shall we just head to the pub before Eddie O’Shea closes up for the night?”

Keira slipped on a long, thick sweater. “You’re not going to tell us where Myles, Simon and Will have gone, are you, Josie?”

“You’re assuming I know.”

“They’re not fishing in Scotland, that’s for sure,” Lizzie muttered.

She led the way out into the night. She looked as if she could have slept on bare rock in a gale and awakened fresh and ready to go. Josie found herself wanting to tell her new friends more about herself, but she knew she wouldn’t. Let them wonder about the true nature of her work without any confirmation or elaboration from her. That she wanted to chat with them just proved how comfortable she was with these two women.

Quite scary, actually.

Discovering Myles wasn’t dead or a traitor had thrown her off completely. She’d become so accustomed to shutting off any thought of him—any feeling. She couldn’t bear thinking about him. Then all of a sudden…there he was, mixed up with a dangerous American billionaire and chasing terrorists.

He’d never expected to survive this mission. She’d seen that in his gray eyes just a few hours ago.

Couldn’t she have found an easier man to love?

It was almost ten o’clock when they arrived at the pub. Eddie O’Shea was closing up, but he let them in and served them fish soup and warm brown bread that he said his no-account brother Patrick had made. Josie sat with Keira and Lizzie at a table by the peat fire, Eddie’s springer spaniel sleeping soundly on the hearth.

“You look worried,” Lizzie said.

Josie nibbled on one last bite of bread, liberally spread with Irish butter. “I have this terrible sense of foreboding.” She realized what a ridiculous and unhelpful thing that was to say and attempted a smile to cover for herself. “Perhaps it’s just due to an impending bad night on the sofa.”

“Don’t worry about Keira and me, all right? Do what you have to do.” Lizzie leaned back, as at ease in the simple Irish pub as she was in one of her family’s hotels—or Will Davenport’s mansion in the Scottish Highlands. “Keira and I can check with Colm Dermott in Cork on our way to Dublin and ask him about Sophie. We’ll be fine.”

Josie had no doubt about their abilities, but they would also follow a lead if one came to them. They were curious about Scoop Wisdom’s archaeologist. Just because he was a police officer who’d just recovered from serious injuries sustained in a bomb blast and just because Myles had been at Keira’s cottage didn’t mean there was any danger in asking questions about Sophie Malone.

Didn’t mean there wasn’t, either, Josie thought, tempted to order Irish whiskey to go with her soup and bread.

Keira twisted her hands together, as if they’d gone too long already without holding brushes and pencils. “It’s not as if I don’t have time to kill,” she said wistfully. “I haven’t a single image in my head to draw or paint.”

Josie recognized her new friend’s malaise for what it was—painter’s block. Perhaps a trip to Cork and Dublin would be a good distraction. It certainly wasn’t on the face of it unsafe, but as they headed out onto the dark, quiet lane, Josie couldn’t suppress what she could only describe as a chill up her spine.

She blamed Myles Fletcher and wished she’d ordered that whiskey after all.