Born In Ice Read Online Free Page B

coffee she already had heating. "You take it black?"

    "That's right." He sipped it standing, watching her. "Did you grow up in this house?"

    "I did." She slid fat sausages in a pan.

    "I thought it seemed more of a home than an inn."

    "It's meant to. We had a farm, you see, but sold off most of the land. We kept the house, and the little cottage down the way where my sister and her husband live from time to time."

    "From time to time?"

    "He has a home in Dublin as well. He owns galleries. She's an artist."

    "Oh, what kind?"

    She smiled a little as she went about the cooking. Most people assumed artist meant painter, a fact which irritated Maggie always. "A glass artist. She blows glass." Brianna gestured to the bowl in the center of the kitchen table. It bled with melting pastels, its rim fluid, like rain-washed petals. "That's her work."

    "Impressive." Curious, he moved closer, ran a finger tip around the wavy rim. "Concannon," he murmured, then chuckled to himself. "Damn me, M. M. Concannon, the Irish sensation."

    Brianna's eyes danced with pleasure. "Do they call her that, really? Oh, she'll love it." Pride flashed in. "And you recognized her work."

    "I ought to, I just bought a-I don't know what the hell it is. A sculpture. Worldwide Galleries, London, two weeks ago."

    "Rogan's gallery. Her husband."

    "Handy." He went to the stove to top off his cup himself. The frying sausages smelled almost as good as his hostess. "It's an amazing piece. Icy white glass with this pulse of fire inside. I thought it looked like the Fortress of Solitude." At her blank look, he laughed. "You're not up on your American comic books, I take it. Superman's private sanctum, in the Arctic, I think."

    "She'll like that, she will. Maggie's big on private sanctums." In an unconscious habit she tucked loose hair back into pins. Her nerves were humming a little. She supposed it was due to the way he stared at her, that frank and unapologetic appraisal that was uncomfortably intimate. It was the writer in him, she told herself and dropped potatoes into the spitting grease.

    "They're building a gallery here in Clare," she continued. "It'll be open in the spring. Here's porridge to start you off while the rest is cooking."

    Porridge. It was perfect. A rainy morning in an Irish cottage and porridge in a thick brown bowl. Grinning, he sat down and began to eat.

    "Are you setting a book here, in Ireland?" She glanced over her shoulder. "Is it all right to ask?"

    "Sure. That's the plan. Lonely countryside, rainy fields, towering cliffs." He shrugged. "Tidy little villages. Postcards. But what passions and ambitions lie beneath."

    Now she laughed, turning bacon. "I don't know if you'll find our village passions and ambitions up to your scope, Mr. Thane."

    "Gray."

    "Yes, Gray." She took an egg, broke it one-handed into the sizzling skillet. "Now, mine ran pretty high when one of Murphy's cows broke through the fence and trampled my roses last summer. And as I recall, Tommy Duggin and Joe Ryan had a bloody fistfight outside O'Malley's pub not long back."

    "Over a woman?"

    "No, over a soccer game on the television. But then, they were a wee bit drunk at the time, I'm told, and made it up well enough once their heads stopped ringing."

    "Well, fiction's nothing but a lie anyway."

    "But it's not." Her eyes, softly green and serious, met his as she set a plate in front of him. "It's a different kind of truth. It would be your truth at the time of the writing, wouldn't it?"

    Her perception surprised and almost embarrassed him. "Yes. Yes, it would."

    Satisfied, she turned back to the stove to heap sausage, a rasher of bacon, eggs, potato pancakes onto a platter. "You'll be a sensation in the village. We Irish are wild for writers, you know."

    "I'm no Yeats."

    She smiled, pleased when he transferred healthy portions of food onto his plate. "But you don't want to be, do you?"

    He looked up, crunching into his first slice of bacon. Had she