Running Back (New York Leopards 2)

Not Ivernis, here. Just Kilkarten.

I closed my eyes and breathed in the salt and earth.

Maybe I loved Kilkarten more than I loved Ivernis.

Maybe it wouldn’t hurt, coming back here.

If I’d been asked four months ago for my reaction to not finding Ivernis, I wouldn’t even have been able to consider the possibility. If forced under pain of death to give that option thought, I would’ve guessed I’d be utterly devastated.

Thirty-one teams didn’t win the Super Bowl every year. And the next season, they all went out and tried again.

My heart would ache if I never found Ivernis. But even if I never found it, even if my heart hurt, I would still come back here if it meant I was with Mike.

Because that was really all there was to it. I loved Mike. I couldn’t promise that I would love him in two years, or seven, or twenty. But right now, I loved him more than my lost city.

And I knew that by the time it ended, we might be so entwined that I wouldn’t be able to separate from him completely, and I would just have to cut off a whole part of myself, and that I would bleed when that happened. But right now I just didn’t care. Because I agreed with the poets, that it was better to have loved...

I kept shoveling. The sun moved; the mist came and went. We ate and laughed and napped. Pete told me about the calf born that morning. MacCarthy admitted he was considering moving to Dublin. Three-thirty came and went, and people started to get antsy. I considered calling the day early. Mike was only here two more days. Might as well spend every last second I could with him.

Or maybe I’d go home with him.

“Natalie!”

Across the field, Simon Daly waved frantically, jumping up and down and shouting my name. “Come look!”

I dropped my shovel and started to run.

His unit was a massive ten by five, and they’d shoveled about two feet down. Most of the workers stood along of the edges of the unit, but I jumped right in with Simon. Mike and Jeremy weren’t far behind me. “What’d you find?”

Simon moved aside and gestured. “Practically broke my shovel. It’s rock. Big, solid rock, but I don’t think its bedrock yet, because look here, I hit the edge and it curves real nice.”

I looked at the other corners of the unit, which didn’t show a hint of stone. “I don’t think it’s bedrock, either. But the survey didn’t pick up anything here—oh, of course.” We were in the north-west quadrant of the site, where the soil make-up had been moist enough that the radar had only penetrated a few centimeters. “It wouldn’t have. All right. It might just be a boulder. Still—Colin, get a whiteboard and write down the time and date and longitude and latitude and add an arrow north. Anna, get the camera.” I arranged the whiteboard with trembling fingers and then stepped back and took several snapshots.

I took one of white-faced Jeremy for good measure.

And then I jumped into the unit and started digging, and so did Jeremy, and then came Grace and Duncan. And slowly, slowly, the dirt vanished and a capstone appeared, and then, layer by layer, more stones, backstones, purposefully placed to hold the first, a subsurface burial tomb.

I met Mike’s eyes.

And then I sat down and started to laugh and cry.

* * *

That night the rain hammered down like the seventh Chapter of Genesis. But our floral room was cozy. The lamps cast warm pools of light and the room smelled like Earl Grey and bergamot.

Mike and I stayed warm and cozy under the blankets. I leaned against him and let out a content sigh. “I’m so happy. We’ll have funding, we’ll have things to excavate...” It shocked me, how much the weight disappeared. Now we didn’t even need the reporter’s article—we’d saved ourselves. “And thank God, because everyone kept talking to me about all their plans—about catering business, and Eileen about expanding the inn, and O’Malley wants to get a set dinner done, and Tim’s brother, the carpenter, wants to build protective structures.” I laughed. “I’d tried to resign myself to finding nothing—I’d pretty much done it—but now I feel like the whole world has realigned and everything is right again.”

“And you know what the best part is?” Mike murmured.

“That we found Ivernis?”

He pulled me closer. “That if you’re not out searching for other sites that might be Ivernis, you’ll be able to come back to New York in the off-season.”

My chest fluttered. He wanted me with him. I wanted to be with him. “Hey.” I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at Mike. “Something I want to tell you.”

He traced my brows, my cheeks, my lips, his forefinger brushing lightly over sensitive skin. I caught my breath and he smiled. “What?”

I pressed a kiss to his finger, then to the skin behind his ear. With my hand resting on his chest, I could feel the shudder that ran through him, and I smiled and drew back.