Page 97 of Her Irish Savage

I feed him everything I have on Aran Dowd.

41

FIONA

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. My last confession was one week ago."

Oona’s familiar voice chisels into the stone box around my heart. I want to fling open the door on my side of the confessional and drag her out of the wooden booth. I’m dying to throw my arms around her and bury my face in her soft neck and never need to face the world again.

But I paid Father Bertram a small fortune for these few minutes. I can’t afford to waste a single second. “Oona,” I say. “It’s me.”

“Fiona?” Her watery blue eyes are framed by the carved screen between us. “What in the name of the Blessed Virgin?—”

“I needed to see you. I’m going crazy, and there’s no one else who knows me, no one who understands…”

“What’s wrong,coinín beag?”

Little rabbit. For just a moment, I’m sitting on her lap in the nursery on the third floor of thedún. I’m holding Bunbun, myfingers wrapped around his ears as she works a comb through my snarled hair.

Bunbun.

I hear Patrick’s voice, rough with need the first night we fucked in the apartment.That’s your safeword. That’s what you’ll say when you need me to stop.

And then I hear my voice, gasping the word I never thought I’d use, rushing it out, even though I thought he’d ignore me, even though I thought I was lost.

But he listened. He heard. He stopped.

“Fiona, love?” Oona’s voice rises half an octave in concern.

“It’s Patrick,” I say.

“What’s Paddy done now? You tell that boy I won’t make the bannock he likes, if he doesn’t treat you like the queen you are. Send him round. I’ll give him a talking to.”

“He’s gone!” I hiccup when I say it.

“Gone?” Oona asks, like she doesn’t know the word.

“We fought,” I tell her. “Two, no, three weeks ago. I lost my temper and?—”

“What have I told you about minding your tongue?”

I can’t count the number of times Oona has told me I need to calm down, slow down, take the time to let my brain catch up with my mouth. I try to justify myself now, the same as I always have. “But he said things too!”

“I’m certain you remember that two wrongs never made a right.”

“Tellhimthat!”

“I would, if he were the one who sent away Father Bertram and caught me all unawares like this.”

She sounds so prim, my cheeks heat with embarrassment. We don’t have much longer, and I have to make her understand why I’ve cornered her here. “I thought he was different, Oona. I thought he was special.”

But then I remember the look of disgust on her face when I called him Daddy in her kitchen.

Wiping my palms on my thighs, I try again. “He took care of me when he didn’t have to. He helped me when no one else would. He told me when he thought I was full of shit, but he stood by me anyway.”

“Sweet Blessed Mary,” she says, and I see her making the sign of the cross. I think she’s going to lecture me about swearing in church, but instead she says, “You love him!”

“I don’t?—”

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