O'Reilly's Bride

“Well, explain this Internet-dating scheme to me then, ’cos I just plain don’t get it.”

“You don’t have to get it. It has nothing to do with you.”

“Doesn’t it?”

She swung round so suddenly he walked straight into her and had to reach out his hands to grasp hold of her upper arms to steady them both.

Maggie felt her skin heat where he was touching, felt the warmth moving up her arm and spreading across her chest. Her heart fluttered and she looked up at him from beneath long lashes. Sean looked down at her with his deep, fathomless dark eyes, the smile still on his lips, and her cheeks flushed a deeper red than before.

Swallowing, she took a shaky breath and asked, “How could it possibly have anything to do with you?”

resides in the border counties between the north and south of Ireland, splitting her not-long-enough days between her horses and her writing. She started writing in primary school and dreamed about writing romances from the moment she first read one in her early teens. She admits that it’s important she’s a little in love with her heroes. That way she can write what her heroine is feeling with more conviction and keep alive the hope that her own Mr. Right might still be out there!

O’Reilly’s Bride

Trish Wylie

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Steve & Esther, who got their family.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

‘WE’RE just going to have to face up to the fact that we have no choice but to sleep together.’

Maggie watched with widening eyes as Sean launched himself into the air and landed on his side on the huge double bed. After a couple of large bounces, caused more by the weight of his large frame than overly generous springing inside the hotel bed, he rolled onto his side and propped an elbow so he could rest his head on his hand.

He patted the mattress with his free hand. ‘Come on over.’

She blinked as he winked at her.

‘You know you want to.’

Hell, yes, she wanted to. As the local-TV news team, they’d just spent the last seventeen hours following the police covering the disappearance of a missing twelve-year-old. Thankfully the search had happily ended in the boy being found, cold and hungry, inside the cellar of a derelict house.

Now Maggie was exhausted, her eyes dry and red with lack of sleep. The very idea of a comfy double bed with soft covers and cushions to put her head on was enough to practically draw a low moan from her lips. But the sight of her cameraman’s long, lean body lying on it was enough to keep her from the delights of sleep.

There was no way she was going to share a bed with him. Uh-uh. Nope. Just not happening. There was only so far friendship between men and women stretched these days. Well, at least once you’d passed the age of about ten. And Sean was a good twenty years past ten. Twenty-three years, five months and four days if her analytical mind remembered the facts correctly.

With a deep sigh and the folding of her arms across her chest she answered his invitation with a calm voice. ‘You can have the sofa. You’re used to roughing it. I’m not.’

He grinned. ‘I’m too big for that wee sofa. And you wouldn’t sleep if you were lying feelin’ all guilty about how cramped up I’d be. I know you.’

Her small burst of laughter came out with what she hoped was a graceful snort. ‘I’d give it a bloody good try.’

‘It’s not my fault there was only this room left.’

‘No, and it’s not my fault that tradition dictates that, as the only man here, you should at least pretend to be gentlemanly.’

‘Don’t get your corset in a twist, Miss Austen. We live in a modern age of equality now.’

‘I am not sleeping in that bed with you.’

‘You’re small enough for the sofa.’

Her green eyes flickered towards the small sofa. It looked plush enough but it was tiny. She guessed the usual occupants of this particular room didn’t have that great a need for sitting. Sean continued grinning and running his hand back and forth along the duvet cover. ‘Seems an awful waste of a honeymoon suite though. Don’t you think?’

She laughed, knew she shouldn’t have when she saw the answering sparkle in his dark eyes, but laughed anyway. ‘A desperate waste altogether.’

‘Then the very least we can do is share the bed. The room demands it.’ His hand stilled and he fixed her gaze with his darkly sparkling eyes. ‘I can manage to control myself if you can.’

Ah, now, but that was just the thing, wasn’t it? The knack for flirting with each other, that they’d both got ever so good at, made this situation all the more difficult.

A few months ago, when Sean had been like a child in a toy store where women were concerned, Maggie would have had no problem sharing a bed with him. Because at the time she’d thought he was a friendly version of lice, relationship-wise.

But since she’d moved into the apartment across the hall from him, spent more ‘quality’ time in his company, got to know him, really know him, they’d become genuine friends. He’d cleaned up his addiction to airheads and the next thing Maggie had known she was batting her eyelashes at him!

So with all the flirting stuff going on and knowing that she genuinely liked him, the last great idea she could have would be sharing a bed with him. In a honeymoon suite, of all places. And in an exhaustive state.

Not a good combination for maintaining that fine line between friendship, and, well, other stuff. And she just couldn’t focus on any ‘other stuff’ when she had other ‘other stuff’ to cope with in her life now. Serious stuff.

‘I know it will be hard for you to resist me.’

Her eyes widened again at the low, sexy tones to his voice. Oh, yeah, him using a bedroom voice would help.

‘How do you get that head through doors?’

‘Well, I’m in here so there must be a way.’

‘Amazing.’ She shook her head and began to peel off her coat. ‘We should do a story on how you manage that.’

His dark eyes watched as the jacket was removed and her shoes were kicked off. She then sat on the edge of the small sofa and unclipped her hair, shaking her head to allow the long auburn curls to frame her face.

Her eyes eventually rose to meet his again. ‘You’re not going to move, are you?’

He shrugged. ‘I might think about it if you continue to undress in front of me. I’d swap a night on the bed for that little show.’

A traitorous giveaway of a beating pulse throbbed in a vein in her neck and Maggie lifted a hand to cover it. She tilted her head a little and rubbed her fingers against the back of her neck to disguise what she was doing.

‘I’d even pay money, to be honest.’

‘Ooh, now, that would put me in a whole different profession, wouldn’t it?’

‘Everyone should have the chance to change careers if they want to.’

Her hand stilled and she glanced at him from beneath long lashes. ‘Like you did.’

He shrugged. ‘I didn’t exactly change.’

‘Giving up making award-winning documentaries on war-torn countries to filming the local news wasn’t much of a change, right enough.’

He grimaced slightly. ‘I guess some people would see it as a downgrade.’

‘Some people would, but do you, now that you’ve been at this a while?’

He studied her for several long moments and then smiled a very small smile. ‘Some might. I don’t. You wouldn’t by any chance be trying to change the subject here, would you, Mary Margaret?’

She smiled at the full use of her given name. To everyone else she was just plain old Maggie. But when Sean used her full name it had started out as a way of teasing her. Here, in the provocative surroundings of a honeymoon suite, it was almost an endearment.

‘You wouldn’t by any chance be trying to avoid having a real conversation by flirting with me, would you, Sean O’Reilly?’

‘I might be tempted to open up if you were over here beside me.’

‘Might you?’

The question remained in her eyes long after her words faded into the air and Sean faltered for a moment, his eyes avoiding hers. He blinked as he studied the duvet cover, his hand automatically smoothing it again as he spoke in a low voice. ‘Maybe if you trusted me not to molest you in the night I might consider answering some of your questions.’

Maggie studied the dark hair on his head as she thought over the offer. So far their friendship had been limited to everyday conversations and simple truths about family and friends. They’d talked movies and books and current affairs on their many car journeys around the country but nothing deeper than that. Already she knew enough about him to have become attached to him, to care. But what she’d learned so far made her want to know even more why he had made so drastic a change to his life. She felt that knowing that would slot the rest of what she knew into place, would give her the complete picture.

It was almost too good an opportunity to miss.

But she also knew that there had been tension in the air between them lately. A very sexual tension. And the only way she knew of to ease that some and veer away from it was to make him smile. Because she couldn’t allow herself to get involved with him on a sexual level, no matter how much her body reacted to the idea. Not while a cloud hung over her.

‘OK. I’ll just have to trust you to be good.’

The required smile was instantaneous as he looked back at her and winked. ‘Honey, I’m way more than good.’

Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘I’ll take your word for that.’

‘You could find out.’

‘No, I couldn’t.’ She stood up and began to walk towards the bathroom, her chin held high. ‘Because nothing is going to happen. I’m going to trust you.’ At the door of the bathroom she looked back over her shoulder and smiled sweetly. ‘And I’m going to ask you personal questions till you’re so tired you’ll snore the rest of the night away.’

Sean watched the door close behind her and continued to smile until her words sank in. It was a big step for him. Huge, in fact. Because he hadn’t talked to anyone about his reasons for coming home. He hadn’t met anyone whom he thought could take listening to it.

Could Mary Margaret Sullivan? Could she listen to all the horrors and understand? He needed to talk about it to someone so that he could start to put it behind him. And he guessed he’d known for a while that she was a candidate for a listening ear. It had just been much easier to hide behind flirting with her.

Spending the night convincing her of how ‘good’ he could be was certainly a more inviting prospect.

But maybe it was time he allowed himself to make a genuine friend, one who really knew him. He may not tell her everything in one go, but hey, it would be a start.

She reappeared from the bathroom ten minutes later. At the sound of the door opening he turned on the bed and his breath caught. It wasn’t going to be easy baring his soul in a gigantic queen-size bed with a woman who looked like that. He could think of much better things to do. Lots of them, in fact.

It wasn’t that she’d dressed to seduce him. Oh, no, nothing that simple from Mary Margaret. In fact, he guessed she probably looked that way every night when she went to bed. All freshly scrubbed face and a simple two-piece pyjama suit in a baby pink. There was nothing vaguely sexual in the way she looked. It was the fact that she looked so sweet and fresh, so untouched by the sordid things of the world.

For the first time in his world-weary life he was immediately and ragingly turned on by pink cotton pyjamas.

‘What?’

He blinked and forced himself to look up into her large green eyes. How in heaven’s name did she manage to look better without make-up? His sisters had always told him that wasn’t humanly possible.

‘What?’

When he didn’t reply, she shook her head. ‘You are a weirdo sometimes, O’Reilly.’

Dark eyes watched as she moved around the end of the huge bed. It was a fairly long walk so he had plenty of time to look. She hesitated when she got to ‘her side’.

One dark eyebrow rose. ‘There’s plenty of room, Mary Margaret.’

Not enough though.

She lifted the cover and got in, keeping as close to the edge as she could without falling out. She tried closing her eyes, inviting sleep to take her.

‘You going to sleep?’

‘Yes.’

‘No bedtime story?’

‘Oh, I’m listening. You can start any time.’

Sean moved over, lying on his side with his head propped on his elbow so he could study her face. He smiled as her mouth pursed into a thin line, then her nose wrinkled and she sighed, ‘What’s wrong?’

‘When we got here I was wiped. Now I can’t sleep.’

He was still smiling when her eyes opened.

She smiled back, then turned to face him across the huge divide. ‘So talk to me.’

‘What do you want to know?’

The thought of actually getting to ask whatever she wanted made her even more awake than she already was from the way he’d looked at her when she came out of the bathroom. His eyes had positively burned her from the huge bed he was occupying. And the sight of his broad naked chest above the covers had woken her up pretty quick.

Trying hard to ignore the sight of that chest within an arm and a half’s reach, she tried to decide what to ask first. ‘How can you be happy doing what you’re doing now?’

‘Maybe it’s the company I keep.’

She blinked at him with large eyes.

He smiled a smaller smile and let his eyes rove up to her hair, the faint smell of her shampoo making it all the way across to him. He liked that smell. Then his eyes met hers again. ‘It’s simpler, less soul-destroying. I guess I just needed this right now.’

Maggie stared deep into his eyes, searching. Searching for evidence that he was being honest when her heart already told her he was.

‘Something to make you smile again, huh?’ Her voice was low, all the more intimate in their present surroundings. ‘You didn’t smile a whole lot when I first met you.’

‘No, I guess I didn’t.’ His voice dropped to a similarly intimate level. ‘Maybe you just brought that out in me.’

She was being sucked in by the moment. Any second she fully expected there to be violins in the background and they would move across the great divide and—

She shook her head.

He laughed. ‘What?’

‘It’s just nice to know that when you looked through that lens the sight you saw was so amusing. I’m flattered.’ She smiled a small smile to let him know she was teasing.

‘You had your moments.’

Her mind turned for a small moment, then she propped her elbow and raised her hand so she could lift her head and rest it there. ‘So is it enough for you?’

‘Looking at you through a lens every day?’ He managed to hold his smile even as he realised it was precisely enough for him. He loved looking at her. Had been doing more and more of it recently, and not just through a lens. Had she noticed that he’d stopped dating recently? Because he was only just discovering why it was he’d stopped.

‘You can quit that, I know what you’re doing.’

‘I thought I was flirting with you.’

‘You are. But you’re only doing it to distract me.’

‘Is it working?’

Yes. ‘No.’

‘Damn.’

She laughed and watched as his eyes sparkled in response. ‘Tell me something else.’

‘You’re the reporter, you ask the questions.’

‘Will you stay?’ Her breath caught when she spoke the question aloud as soon as it entered her head. It was something she really needed to know. ‘Or is this just a break for you?’

Dark lashes brushed against his skin once, twice, as he blinked at her. ‘I’m not going back there, if that’s what you mean.’

‘Never?’

‘Never again.’ He shook his head. ‘I guess you could say I’m burned out when it comes to overseas work. I want to make a life here now. I just needed to come home, that’s all.’

‘Does it help?’

His nod was slow. ‘It does now that I have this new friend.’

The answering smile was warm and sincere. ‘I’m glad.’

Sean watched as she set her head back down on the pillow, her eyes closing again. ‘You want to sleep now?’

‘I think I have to, I’m sorry.’ Her eyes flickered open and she glanced up at him. ‘I’ve still a lot to ask, though.’

‘We have time, Mary Margaret, don’t worry.’ His eyes glowed across at her in the soft light. ‘Sweet dreams.’

CHAPTER TWO

SOMETHING changed.

Sean couldn’t narrow it down to a precise moment in time or some circumstance in particular. But something changed. And the fact that it changed around the time he was finally admitting he had a thing for Maggie didn’t help his inner turmoil any.

She was hiding something from him.

The first thing he’d noticed was how she would turn her eyes away from him. It was one of the things he’d always liked about her. She would look a person straight in the eye when she talked to them, would let them know they had her full attention. And it was a great trait for a reporter. People trusted that she was listening, that what they said mattered to her.

But now she would look down, her lashes hiding the windows to her soul when she spoke to him. And sometimes she even seemed to struggle to look him directly in the lens. Probably because she knew he might see something there.

Then there was the sadness. Not that she didn’t hide that pretty well. Every day she would smile, crack jokes with her workmates, laugh. But as a connouiseur of her laughter he knew that even that was missing something. It took a lot of careful scrutiny for him to spot the sadness, but it was there. In the unguarded moments when she thought no one was looking or for a split-second before she turned her eyes away.

Something had changed.

When she jumped the day that he crept up behind her in the office he smelt a rat. She was quick to flick the screen of her computer off before she fobbed him off with something about his not having yelled ‘boo’ and how she had been writing a personal e-mail. But that was a lie, Sean knew, because she looked away as she said it and she had been jumpy as all hell for the rest of the day.

It took a lot of investigative work for him to get to the bottom of it. But he got there. Eventually.

And when he did he couldn’t have been more knocked sidewards.

With determined steps he walked across the lawn of the big old country manor that had been turned into luxury apartments. Apartments where he and Maggie lived.

It was a gorgeous summer’s day and a great place for a birthday barbeque for one of their neighbours. But Sean wasn’t thinking about the celebrations. Or the food. Or even the beer clutched in his hand.

He was thinking about Maggie. And her latest brainwave.

‘Fancy meeting you here.’

He grinned, immediately recognising her smile for what it was. A front specifically for his benefit.

‘Yeah, fancy that.’ He took a swig of beer and stood by her side, his feet set slightly apart, claiming the piece of ground he was standing on while he looked at the small crowd and glanced occasionally at Maggie from the corner of his eye. ‘Don seems to be having a good time.’ Maggie looked over at their neighbour. ‘Yeah, he does.’ With a safe topic to discuss she immediately slipped into the easy role that until a few months ago had been so natural to her, leaning a little closer to Sean and nudging her shoulder against his upper arm. ‘You see the way he keeps looking at Rachel?’ Sean leaned his head a little closer to hers and dropped his voice conspiratorially. ‘She keeps looking at him too, when she thinks he can’t see her.’ The subject of the octogenarian love affair was one they frequently talked about. Maggie smiled and tilted her head to look up into dark eyes, her voice low. ‘You think they’ll ever get it together? Or is that still too much of a stretch for you into the realms of believing good things can happen?’ Sean’s eyes locked with hers and he stared at her for a long moment. ‘I’m learning to stretch some. So, maybe it might happen yet. They’ve been friends a long time though.’ ‘Yes, they have, but you only have to see the way they are together to know there’s more there.’ He blinked slowly and smiled.

Maggie searched his eyes, looking from one to the other. She tilted her head to the other side and searched again, then an eyebrow quirked and she asked, ‘What?’

The smile remained. ‘What?’

She stared back at him. ‘You have a look.’

‘Do I?’ He continued smiling his usual self-assured smile, his eyes giving nothing away.

It bugged the hell out of Maggie that he had the ability to do that and that he still felt the need to do it around her. He was just so controlled sometimes that she wanted to smack him silly. He held everything inside, guarded from the world so that in the brief instances he did open up it made it all the more of a gift to whoever was allowed in. But he still didn’t completely trust her, did he?

The fact that she’d had to hold back so much from him of late made the realisation almost hurtful. She hated that a relationship that had come to mean so much to her had got to this point.

He searched her eyes in a similar way to how she’d just searched his. ‘What?’

She mimicked his answer. ‘What?’

‘That mind of yours works in mysterious ways.’

‘At least I have a mind.’

‘Meaning I don’t?’

She only had to search for the briefest of seconds to find the spark in his eyes. ‘Not you, but possibly some of those other women you keep company with…’

‘At least they have brains enough to see what an amazingly sexy, damned good-looking, generally all-round great guy I am.’

What would usually have been taken as one of their usual ‘sparring type’ answers was imparted with a somewhat huskier tone of voice than Maggie was used to hearing from him. But as she searched his eyes again he turned his head and looked back over the crowd, raising his bottle to his mouth.

Maggie’s eyes automatically followed the bottle, watched as his mouth fitted around the lip, saw his throat contract as he swallowed. She hated that she noticed but she did.

‘I already know what a great guy you are.’ The words were spoken with sincerity, even though she didn’t have to point out that she hadn’t agreed with the other descriptions of his ‘assets’.

‘Do you, now?’ He studied the last of the liquid in the bottle, swirling it around against tinted glass.

Maggie felt her heart miss a beat at his question. He had an uncertainty in him she’d never seen before. Sean was just always so confident on the outside. Everything he did, the way he held himself, it all spoke of a complete lack of self-consciousness. Until now. What had her sister said to him during the long conversation they’d been having on the far side of the lawn?

‘OK, what’s going on?’

He didn’t look at her. ‘You’re the one who seems to think that any woman interested in me might not have a brain in their head.’