CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ronan
I could count on my hands the number of times I’d slept a full night’s sleep and almost all of them were before St. Brigid’s. There were a few times, alone on the jet, traveling from Ireland to New York, I was exhausted enough to trust I was safe. I fell asleep so deep the attendants had to wake me when we landed.
But no, most of those blissful nights of sleep happened when I was a kid. Before I realized Da was leaving the house after he kicked me up to bed.
But after all that with Poppy, after letting down every guard I had left against her, I slept like a babe.
It was disorienting, waking up without fear or panic. I reached for her, expecting to find her soft and warm, her hair a tangle over her face, her body a breath away from ready for me.
But instead I hit cold air and a piece of paper. I was well used to dread and it filled me as I blinked my eyes open and turned the paper over so I could read it.
Trust me. I love you.
I crumpled it up in my fist and hurled myself from the bed. She was gone, the daft girl. The stupid lass. The apartment was empty. The jewels tossed over the couch like they meant nothing. The bankers box spilled onto the floor where I’d shoved it.
She’d been looking through the box again. And she must have found something, otherwise why would she leave?
Trust me. I love you.
Or she’d gone to strike some new deal with either Bryant or Caroline. I held myself still against the hurricane-force fear. I clenched my fists and I tried. I did. I tried to find whatever part of myself hadn’t been scoured by my life. I wanted Poppy to be right. For there to be, inside of me, what she saw.
A garden fallow and waiting but still a garden.
I could trust her.
And I could trust she loved me, and this raging, burning desire and fear I felt for her—I could trust that, too. And I could stand there and put down all my weapons. I could believe in her. In her good strength and her sound mind.
She would not hurt me. Or betray me.
But what if she’s pregnant?
Walking around with my child in her belly and it wasn’t her I didn’t trust. It was the world. The world that would hurt her if I wasn’t standing between it and her. My whole life, I realized, from one breath to the next, the only life I wanted, the only one with meaning was to be standing between her and what would hurt her.
“Poppy!” I roared. I roared it again, throwing open the door to my apartment only to find Raj.
“The fuck, Ronan?” he said. “Get some fucking pants on you.”
“Have you seen Poppy? She’s—”
“Upstairs. She’s had a meeting—” I pushed past Raj and ran up the stairs, hitting the door onto the rooftop patio.
“Ronan?” Poppy said, smiling at me over her teacup, even though she was confused. Smiling at me because she was just so happy to see me.
Me.
And at the sight of her I was…I was complete. I’d never thought to call this feeling love. Because love, from what I’d seen, was ever-changing and mercurial. It was a thin motive and after-the-fact excuses. This feeling in my body for her, this reckoning in my soul—it was so much bigger. It was fundamental. I fell to my knees in front of her, thinking of that wedding ceremony, those ancient words I’d spoken from the whole of my chest.
“Ronan?” She looked at me, worried. “Are you all right? Did something happen?”
“You,” I said. I was distantly aware that Niamh was there too, not approving of any of this, I imagined. But this girl with the eyes and the smile. This girl was all that mattered.
“You happened, Poppy.”
She stroked my lips, and in her eyes I could see that she understood the power of what was happening in my chest. This silent-communication thing we had between us was working. But she deserved to hear the words. And I needed to say them.
“I’m yours, Poppy,” I said to her face. All that I am. Every part of me. My violence and my bloodstained hands. Like I was a knight and she was a queen, I would defend her to my death. “I love you and I’m yours.”
She set down the teacup and touched my bare shoulders, my face. She pressed her hand over my heart and I put mine over hers. “You are mine,” I said to her. “You were mine the minute I saw you.”
I wasn’t born with poetry, or if I had, it was quickly beaten out of me, but I was fucking Irish. And in my Irish soul I knew she’d been mine forever. This life and the next until the world ended.