Briarwood Cottage by Joann Ross Page B

she tacked on as she went back to tuning the fiddle.
    Just as Patrick Brennan had promised, the snug door had a reserved sign on it. It wasn’t large—just a booth and a pair of wooden benches that looked as if they might have been reclaimed from one of the many stone churches Cassandra had passed on her drive to Castlelough—but set in the back of the pub as it was, it offered privacy while allowing them to see the wooden dance floor where the musicians were setting up.
    “I’m sorry about that,” he said as they sat across from each other.
    Cassandra shrugged. “She had no way of knowing. She was being kind.”
    “But it still hurts.”
    “Yes,” she said softly. “It does.”
    “And I suspect it always will,” Duncan said. In the beginning, he’d told himself that he’d suffered in silence in order to not make Cass’s pain even worse. Then, as the days went on, he’d used the excuse of her having retreated even deeper into that remote, icy shell. How could they have a conversation, he’d reasoned, if she refused to say a damn word?
    But he’d belatedly accepted that the reason he’d remained silent was that it hurt too much. And even if she had been willing to talk about the miscarriage, he’d have had not a clue what to say. Especially since the one thing his numbnuts brain had come up, the promise of another child, had only made things even worse.
    He’d told himself when he heard she was coming that he was going to take things slow. Not force her into a discussion that she wasn’t ready for. But he could see for himself that Sedona Sullivan had been right about her having gotten stronger.
    Having vowed, during the long, sleepless night waiting for her arrival, that he was going to be totally honest this time and not hold anything back, he decided the time had come to share something personal that he’d never told anyone.
    “My mother had a miscarriage.”
    She’d obviously been stumbling into telling Cass herself, that night she’d called while sounding as if were making her way through a bottle of Bombay Sapphire. He’d known that her call had been well intended, but her timing and delivery had sucked. Which was why he’d abruptly cut her off before she’d gotten to the crying jag. Which Cassandra so hadn’t needed.
    She turned toward him, her surprise obvious.
    “She did? When?”
    “The summer I turned thirteen.” And all these years later, talking about those days still tangled his gut into knots.
    His mother had called her pregnancy a surprise miracle, seemingly excited at the prospect of dirty diapers, a crying infant, and no sleep. Of course, the McCaraghs could easily afford to hire a nanny to take over the unpleasant parts of parenting. But one night, Duncan had been awakened by a loud argument about his mother’s desire to tend to her child herself. It had been the first time he’d ever heard his coolly remote father raise his voice.
    The following morning at breakfast, his mother’s eyes had been red-rimmed, but she’d kept the appointment with the first of the selection of nanny prospects the gold-star employment agency had lined up.
    “That’s quite a gap between children,” Cass said.
    “It was. And being a teenager, not to mention an only child, I’ll admit that I wasn’t looking forward to the changes an infant would bring to our lives.”
    “Your life,” she guessed.
    “Bulls-eye. You never knew my mother before.”
    “I don’t know her now,” Cass pointed out.
    “Touché.” It was something he was going to have to figure out. Later. “She was a warm, outgoing woman who filled our home with sunshine.”
    “Really.”
    It was not a question, but he heard the skepticism in her tone. “Really. It was only after I’d grown up that I realized how much of an effort she’d made to try to compensate for my father’s coldness.
    “Anyway, I’ll admit to being mad as hell. But there must have been a lot of chapters on sibling rivalry in all those baby