Page 84 of Her Irish Savage

There are speeches after the meal. Three different liars get up and say how much they wish they’d met my father, how certain they are that he would have loved tonight’s gala, how wonderful it is that I’m here to show my support.

A band starts to play at the far end of the courtyard, their cover of Donna Summer luring couples onto the dance floor. I tilt my head with an invitation for Patrick, but he says, “Not on your feckin’ life.”

One of the men who got between Uncle Aran and me asks for a dance. Patrick puts his hand on my wrist and says, “Not tonight.” I’m tempted to take the man—Nigel? Edmund? Oliver?—up on his offer, dancing with whoever-he-is just to remind Patrick that he’s not the boss of me. But good-old-whatshisname takes one quick look at my guard-dog’s face and remembers he has to finish an urgent conversation on the far side of the room.

I turn to Patrick, fury knitting my shoulder blades together. “You have no right?—”

“Say your goodbyes. It’s time for us to leave.”

“If you think I paid ten million dollars, just so I can duck out of here halfway through the night?—”

“You have fifteen minutes. And then I carry you out.”

The motherfucker will do it, too. So I make a quick tour ofthe room, interrupting a conversation between the mayor and the police chief, then kissing the cheek of the fire inspector like we’re old friends. I can’t bring myself to lean in toward the tax inspector, but we give each other chilly goodbyes. That leaves Marjorie—one more gush about her gold-and-black gown—before Patrick ghosts up to my side.

I’m too furious to speak as he marches me out to the valet stand. The Land Rover has been kept in the loop of the driveway—one advantage of being the guest of honor. A boy with terrible acne helps me into my seat on the passenger side. When I catch him craning his neck for a glimpse of side-boob, I figure what the hell, and I pretend to have an itch at the back of my head. The kid practically groans as he gapes at the extra flesh my stretch displays. Patrick has to remind him to close my door.

I wait for Patrick to tell me why it was so urgent for us to leave, but he’s busy managing the Land Rover like I’m administering a driver’s license exam. He comes to a complete halt at a four-way stop sign, looking left, then right, then left again. He uses his turn indicators when he changes lanes. He doles out his concentration between the road in front of him, the rear-view mirror, and both side mirrors.

He ignores me when I lean forward to turn on the radio. I think his jaw tightens when I flip away from the cool jazz stylings of some guy who was older than my father. Patrick’s back to the role of Perfect Driving Man by the time I find Metallica. I crank the volume.

When I kick off my shoes and hitch up my skirt so I can rest one heel on the edge of my seat, he does glance over at me. I see his eyes travel from my crotch to my ankle. A muscle twitches by his temple, and he clamps his hands around the steering wheel, his palms perfectly positioned at two and ten.

“You’re supposed to put your hands at nine and three,” I say.

He grunts.

“It’s safer with, you know, modern cars. Ones with airbags.”

The rear-view mirror captures his attention for longer than it should.

I say, “I guess they still taught the old way whenyoulearned to drive.”

“Fasten your seatbelt.”

I ignore him.

“Fasten your goddamn seatbelt,” he says, splitting his attention between the rear-view and the road.

I wish I had some bubble gum. I’d blow a huge bubble and pop it just before it got to my hair.

“Goddammit, Fiona. This isn’t a fucking game. We’re being followed.”

I want to tell him to go to hell. But I fasten my seatbelt before I turn around. There are two lanes of traffic. There must be ten cars behind us. “How can you tell?”

“Hold on,” he says, and he cranks the wheel to the right, hard, without any warning, without slowing down.

I’m thrown against the door as Patrick handles the wheel with the casual grace of a Formula 1 driver. Flooring the accelerator, he weaves between cars, narrowly skating through three yellow lights in a row. Whoever’s behind us ignores the same lights, hurtling through cross-traffic as the June night fills with the sound of screeching tires and honking horns.

“Get down,” Patrick says, reaching over to cup the back of my head with his hand.

“No one’s shooting?—”

“Goddammit!” he bellows, shoving my head between my knees.

I can’t see where he’s going, but I hear the crash. Something splinters in front of us, wood and metal ripping apart. I sit up in time to see we’ve shattered a gate.

“Where—” I start to ask, but Patrick’s too busy steering across a recently painted parking lot.

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