Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) by Cindy Brandner Page B

why not? Because it would be letting down the team, the one comprised of the raging son and the sad, mad dad. As if his father was breathing his breath, standing on his feet, circulating his cursed blood. Well the sad, mad dad had really let the team down this time. At the time of his father’s death, some echo of self-preservation had kept Jamie from the ocean.
    Jamie knew Yevgena had a sharp eye, always had, for the obvious and the not so obvious, he knew why she’d brought this girl, this lick of flame, this heat and need and God-awful fragility and set her down like a sacrifice on his doorstep. He knew and had been utterly suckered by it anyway, just as Yevgena had known he would be. This girl who seemed to have been born yesterday, because he knew that there was no farm in Nova Scotia, no rundown little farmhouse with old, silent parents and a dog with a black patch over one eye. Oh yes, such a place probably existed but not for her. No cold, lonely, misted up northern patch of earth had grown her. It just didn’t happen that way. All that fine, white skin and perfumed hair, all that length of leg and wit of mind hadn’t been fired and brought forth upon a harsh, barren bit of rock. She was lying, but, he’d credit her, she did it like a trooper.
    ‘Tried for years and then when she’s fifty she gets pregnant and there I was, nine months later,’ she’d said, smiling and popping the last bit of a jam sandwich in her mouth. Her appetite was voracious, as if she was afraid she’d never see food again, as if in the very recent past it had been a limited resource and she’d come to know hunger rather too well. Liar, liar, beautiful liar.
    Odd, she was the first woman to stir desire, to make it break like a sickness in his veins and she was the first he had turned down. He’d wanted to make love, with all the elements there, mind, body, soul but drunkenness, for once, had prevailed. He’d slept, there beside her and had been sober when he awoke and had no desire to remedy the fact. It worried him, that.
    Insanity, that was her game he supposed, the sort of insanity that youth insulates itself with, known in less cynical circles as innocence.
    She’d learn, everyone did, he’d been severely infected with innocence himself once. She’d learn that there was an eleventh commandment that negated the previous ten. Hope Is the Only Sin.

    Four weeks after Pamela O’Flaherty had taken shelter under his roof, Jamie, for a variety of reasons, found himself sorely in need of a drink. However, for quite possibly the first time in its history, the House of Kirkpatrick was without refreshment of the alcoholic sort. He searched each floor, including the cellar, where there was nothing more potent than wine to be found and even resorted to crawling on the floor looking under furniture and fixtures. The result of which being himself, standing in the middle of the study floor, cobwebs tangled artistically through the gold of his hair, utter fury flushing his face.
    “What do you mean you got rid of it all?” he said, thinking with lover like longing of the twelve cases of Connemara Mist that only this morning had graced his cellar.
    Pamela, head bent over her recently begun studies, took a moment before looking up. There was, Jamie noticed, very little in the way of repentance in her face.
    “I took the tops off and poured it down the sink, believe me it took up a lot of my day and Maggie is still complaining about the stink of it in her kitchen. “D’you know the Latin word for drunk?” she asked, brow furrowed over her books again.
    “Ebrius ,” he replied automatically, almost missing the insult. “Now look,” he said trying to keep his voice steady, “you’ve no right to go rooting through my things and disposing of my belongings. If you are to go on living here we’ll have to set up some basic rules.”
    She closed her books with deliberate precision and looked him directly in the eye.