Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (24 page)

“Indeed,” Jamie looked pointedly at his watch, “at five am on a Sunday morning?”

“Had to come home sometime,” she said feebly, trying to dart past him.

His arm shot out with one of those catlike movements she’d yet to become accustomed to and halted her. “I think you’ll join your compatriot in the study.”

“I really ought to change first,” she said uncomfortably aware suddenly of whose clothes she wore.

His gaze took all of her in and his eyes elongated slightly, “Where did you get this?” he asked, anger written plainly across his words for all their calmness.

“I- Maggie said that- I... I’m sorry,” she trailed off awkwardly.

“No I imagine it was something she’d left behind, it looks very well on you.” He gave her a strange look, “Colleen would have hated such pretty clothes going to waste. Now if you’d like to follow me inside.”

“I’d rather go up to change first,” she said wincing at the look that flashed out of the green eyes at her, realizing what she would rather or rather not do was of very little bearing at this particular moment.

She followed him through the study doors, studiously avoiding Pat’s eyes until the last moment when she’d no choice but to meet his gaze, as Jamie directed her to sit beside him on the sofa. Pat, far from the exhausted boy he’d seemed when she’d glimpsed him earlier, was glaring daggers at her. She swallowed and attempted a watery smile of conspiratorship on him. It had no effect so she made herself as small as possible in the corner of the couch, upholstery buttons pushing into her back like hard little fists.

“What the hell are ye doin’ here?” Pat hissed as Jamie sat behind his desk again, looking like some x-rated version of the classic Oxford don.

“I might ask you the same,” she retorted primly.

“I believe,” Jamie said eyeing them like they were two recalcitrant children, “that Casey will be the one asking the questions and the two of you will be doing the answering.”

“We were worried,” Pamela protested feebly.

“We were,” Pat agreed for lack of anything more convincing to say.

“It’s not me you need to get your excuses in order for. You,” he looked specifically at Pamela, “ would do to keep as well shot of Casey’s doings as possible. Though I don’t know the gentleman terribly well,” he looked at Pat, green eyes withering in the glare of the early sun, “it seems that your brother is not altogether incapable of looking after himself and that he is also quite used to rough company.”

“Aye, I suppose that’s true,” Pat said miserably, appearing for all the world like a six–year-old who’d had his hands rapped with a ruler.

“And you,” Jamie turned the green gaze on Pamela once again, “have you quite taken leave of your senses running about the city in the middle of the night, a city you’re not as yet over familiar with, looking like an extra in a French wedding farce?”

A small and not very brave clearing of the throat was the best she could summon up in response.

“Now that being said, can I interest the pair of you in joining me for breakfast?”

“No. Yes,” said Pamela and Pat in imperfect unison.

“Right then,” Jamie stood ignoring the vagaries of their various wishes, “come to the kitchen, Pat. I believe Pamela will join us after she changes into something less formal.”

When, ten minutes later, Pamela joined them in the kitchen they were quite comfortably chatting, coffee perking fragrantly in the background. The kitchen shone in the light, its windows facing south and east over the city, that from this distance glowed with an aquatic haze as sun pushed fingers through the morning mist.

Jamie was cracking eggs into a bowl and whipping them with a sure and deft hand. Pat was gainfully employed in chopping tomatoes and mushrooms.

Jamie cocked an eyebrow at her, “Sit, we’ll be done here in a moment.”

True to his word, an omelet with neatly sliced toast and a cup of hot coffee was placed before her in moments. After providing Pat with the same he sat down with an apparently much heartier appetite than either Pat or Pamela could summon up.

“The condemned are condemned whether their stomach is full or empty,” he commented mildly as they pushed food listlessly about their plates. Pat, seeing this for the bit of advice that it was, dug into his food and finished it all off, going to the length of accepting a second helping of toast. Pamela on the other hand found even the soft, buttery eggs would not get past the lump of fear in her throat.

“Ready then?” Jamie asked, having finished off his second cup of coffee and eaten his breakfast with deliberate leisure.

“I’ve a car,” Pat said, patting his pockets for the keys and then patting again with rather more haste.

“Looking for these?” Jamie asked, dangling the desired object in front of their faces.

“When—how?” Pat stuttered, brow furrowing in confusion.

“Sleight of hand, easy as pie,” Jamie said with a smile that bordered on a grin. “Mm, no I think not,” he continued as Pat took a swipe at the keys. “I believe my instructions were to deliver you home personally, as Casey couldn’t get you himself because ‘that little bugger has swanned off with the keys.’ It’s not a direct quote you understand,” Jamie said with mock seriousness, “but it’s as close as I could come without using profanity.”

“I can drive myself,” Pat said stiffly.

“I’m certain you’re quite capable,” Jamie replied equably, “but as I promised your brother that I’d deliver you myself, to prevent any possible escape, I’d just as soon you didn’t belabor the point.

There seemed very little to say to that, the result of which being the two of them finding themselves firmly ensconced in Jamie’s dark green Bentley. In reply to Pamela’s suggestion that she stay behind Jamie had said as though he were talking to someone very dim, “I’m not certain how large of a fool I seem to you, dear girl. but I suggest you don’t try to test the limits of it this morning.”

“My brother, where’d ye find him?” Pat finally found the nerve to ask.

“Called your home number,” Jamie said, overtaking a large delivery van with breathtaking swiftness.

“Oh God,” Pat said, expressing Pamela’s thoughts to the letter. “But I thought—it sounded as if—Oh God,” he finished rather weakly.

“Indeed,” Jamie turned a cheery look on Pamela, “Pat here is under the illusion, flattering as it is,” he paused to concentrate on shooting the beginnings of a stop light, “that I am a man who knows people, who know things.”

Pamela shot a murderous glare over her shoulder at Pat, who was huddled in pure misery in the back seat.

“He’ll kill me,” Pat said after a few more moments of calmly maniacal driving on Jamie’s part. “He’ll be furious that I’ve involved an outsider in his business.”

“I don’t think he has actual murder in mind, though, “ Jamie slowed and stopped for an old man crossing the street at midpoint, “I am of the opinion you may wish yourself dead a few times before he’s done with you.”

“Damn you,” Pamela muttered under her breath, forgetting that Jamie seemed to have the radar acuity of a bat.

“Pardon me?” he inquired politely.

“You heard me,” she said, the stresses of the night breaking into anger, “you’re enjoying this and it’s not a bit funny.”

“I think you will find, Pamela,” he said and there was no humor in his words, only an anger that had hovered, she realized, under the amusement all morning. “That if you are going to act as a child you will be treated accordingly.”

She bit back tears that welled without warning in her eyes, wondering where all the fond teasing he’d bestowed on Pat had gone.

They were there then, crumbling walkway, red door and fading paint stark and unlovely in the morning light.

The car barely had time to halt before Casey, face black as thunder, emerged in the doorway.

Jamie did not so much as open his door but Casey came around to his open window and gruffly said “thank you for looking after him,” before hauling Pat out unceremoniously by the collar and dragging him towards the house. For Pamela there was a hard look and nothing more.

Jamie took her home in a silence so tight and relentless she had to press her lips against her teeth to prevent herself from yelling.

“Come sit down for a minute,” Jamie said after they’d entered the house, which was still and warm with a haze of Sunday morning content. She followed his lead rather miserably to the kitchen, refused the warmed over coffee he offered and placed her hands, folded in front of her, on the table.

“You have bought yourself a summer in Scotland young lady,” Jamie said grimly.

“What?” she asked, wondering if she’d heard him right.

“As it would appear that you’ve neither kith nor kin, someone has to look out for you. I find, rather against my own better judgment that the task has fallen to me. I’ve been extremely poor at it thus far and intend to rectify my ways. I think that two months away from Belfast and those boys is advisable at this point.”

“You can’t make me go,” she said aware that she sounded like a petulant teenager and not caring a wit.

“Oh,” he smiled and raised his eyebrows, “don’t make me prove that I can. You work for me, you have chosen to live this space of your life under my roof, and it’s time one of us took some responsibility for those things. You’ve shown a complete and utter recklessness in regard to your own well-being so I 
will
,” he underscored the word, “be taking responsibility for it.” He sat down facing her and asked with some urgency, “Do you have any idea what you’re getting into here? Do you know who those boys are?”

“Yes,” she said, teeth clenched around her tongue in an effort to not cry.

“Pamela,” his voice was softer, though no less urgent, “do you know what it will mean if you fall in love with him?” He gave her a long, questioning look. “Or is it too late for such a warning?”

She shook her head sadly, knowledge breaking hard on the shores of consciousness, a realization of the untimeliness of life’s messier events dawning. “No—yes—maybe, I don’t know Jamie. A few weeks ago I’d have said no,” she turned her hands palms up in a gesture of complete helplessness, “but now I just don’t know.”

He turned as white as if she’d struck him across the face and pushed back from the table. “I see,” he said as if he didn’t see anything at all. “You will still be coming to Scotland. Two months should give you enough time to make an informed decision.”

“What do you mean?” she asked uneasily but he merely walked past her out of the kitchen.

He returned a moment later, arms loaded with books. “Here,” he said, placing the volumes one by one in front of her, “books on Republicanism, on the Brotherhood, statistics, numbers and specific incidents. Tomes and tomes analyzing, dissecting and studying a perfectly hopeless cause. When you’ve done with that, I’ll take you to meet some real people who’ve lost everything because of some goddamned airy-fairy notion that they could buy freedom with their lives. There are generally speaking two roads that every one of these people end up on, the one to prison or the one to the grave. Your friend understands those choices; he’s already had a fair taste of the one and may be well started on the second. You, however, are coming from a more naïve standpoint and I don’t intend to be responsible for you going down one of those paths without understanding the signs. So like it or not, you will be coming to Scotland.”

She nodded meekly.

It was, even from the perspective of a rose-colored glass wearing, dyed-in-the-wool optimist, an exceedingly miserable day. Jamie didn’t speak to her but closed himself up in his study, emerging in the early afternoon to inform her that she should pack as they would be leaving in the morning.

She accordingly packed and then descended to the main floor to tell him she would be going to see Pat and wasn’t requesting permission but rather telling him.

He gave her the keys to his car and told her she would be home by eleven or face the consequences. Altogether, it was not a pleasant exchange.

Pat’s house was as quiet as Jamie’s, but not quite so fraught with tension.

Pat, cleaning up the remains of his dinner, gave her his day in a nutshell.

It seemed that the day had been one of long quiets and chilling politeness. Casey had invited Pat to explain himself in a deceptively amiable tone. Which Pat had done in a faltering, stumbling and finally lame and insufficient way. At which point Casey pointed out in a rather blistering manner that he ‘didn’t believe his brother was quite that daft though the preceding hours couldn’t prove it.’

Never once, in the long afternoon that followed did he raise his voice, though it seemed to Pat that it went through every possible modulation in the lower range. Pat, for variety, provided the occasional mumble of protest, an apology that may have seemed less than apologetic to its listener and began to feel the faintest flicker of rebellion against these fraternal constrictions. He made the mistake of articulating these finer feelings and watched as his brother smiled, stood and walked calmly into small front room and threw a thirty pound crystal lamp to the floor. Upon venturing into said room he found his brother, still in the fit of blazing calm, sweeping up the remains of the lamp. Pat wisely said no more and retreated to the kitchen where he began to make dinner.

Casey then announced that he would be going to fetch the car and could he trust Pat not to start a revolution in his absence? Whereupon he left the building and Pat breathed his first comfortable breath of the day. Which brought her entirely up to speed Pat said and with yet another mumbled apology, fell asleep, head on the table by his half-eaten dinner.

Pamela, finding the house too still and knowing Casey’s haunts, climbed with the aid of a ladder, a drainpipe and a fence onto the roof. From there she watched the sun, bleary through a hot day’s smog, settle in a coiling, shimmering heap on the horizon. It was thus employed that Casey found her.

“It’s a nice evenin’,” he said quietly, not wanting to disturb the dreamy look on her face, nor the stillness of her body.

“It is,” she agreed.

They sat for some time, the silence companionable, not strained as he had expected. Casey, not a man given easily to fear, had found himself of late, afraid. It was this girl he knew, this girl and what she made him feel, things he had promised himself he would not allow into his life. He had never wanted to cloud the issue of his responsibilities, didn’t feel that a man who took up revolution as his occupation had any right to enmesh a family in those bloody threads. He had taken precautions, never allowed things to grow past the point where he was taking more than comfort in a woman’s body and company. But he could be forgiven, he supposed, for not anticipating this. Who could have predicted that when he came home his brother, his shy, once wordless brother, would know such a girl? This girl, who seemed made of every dream a young man, locked away from the world, could conjure up.