A Woman's Heart. JoAnn Ross

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      Chapter Two

      Forty Shades of Green

      From the air, Ireland was a panorama of field and hedgerow, patchwork valleys set amidst abrupt mountains. Quinn Gallagher thought he’d never seen so many shades of green in his life—sage, olive, beryl, jade, emerald, malachite, moss, sea green, bottle green—the list seemed endless.

      “Christ, it looks just like a postcard,” he murmured as he looked out the window of the Aer Lingus jet.

      “It looks like a gigantic bore,” his seatmate in the first-class cabin countered. “We haven’t even touched down yet and I’m ready to go home.”

      Home. The word had never had any real meaning for Quinn. Home was a place you wanted to go back to, a place where people would take you in. Welcome you. The roach-infested apartments and ramshackle trailers where he’d spent his hardscrabble early years certainly didn’t fit that description.

      Neither did the succession of brutal foster homes until, weary of working on farms from sunup to sundown and being beaten for his efforts, he’d run away at sixteen, lied about his age and joined the navy. And while the navy had, admittedly, represented the most stability he’d experienced in his life, the ships on which he’d sailed around the world certainly hadn’t been home.

      The sun reflecting off the water below was blinding. Quinn shaded his eyes with his hand as he took in the sight of the farmhouses looking like tiny white boats floating on a deep green sea.

      “Boring’s relative. I think it looks like God’s country.” As soon as he heard himself say the words, Quinn wondered where the hell they’d come from. He also immediately regretted having said them.

      Laura Gideon’s trademark sexy laugh revealed she was every bit as surprised by his statement as he was. “Strange words from a card-carrying atheist, darling.”

      Quinn forced a reluctant laugh as something indefinable stirred inside him, something that resisted his writer’s need to analyze and label.

      “Okay, so I overstated. But you have to admit, it does look beautiful.”

      “Of course it does,” the actress agreed. “You said it yourself. The quaint little scene looks like every postcard of Ireland you’ve ever seen. Heaven help us, I have a horrible feeling that the entire country might turn out to be a living cliché.”

      Shuddering dramatically, she linked her fingers with his, a familiarity that came from being a former lover.

      “Perhaps it’s something else.” She turned toward him, her eyes gleaming with the wicked humor Quinn had always enjoyed. “Perhaps it’s your ‘auld sod’ roots calling to you.”

      “I strongly doubt that.” He might be one of the hottest horror writers in the business, but even Quinn couldn’t think up a more terrifying idea.

      “Roots tie you down, Quinn, baby,” he remembered his mother saying. “They wrap around your ankles so bad you can’t never get free.”

      It was the only thing Angie Gallagher had ever told him that Quinn had taken to heart. Twenty-four hours after making that boozy proclamation, Angie was dead. Quinn had gone to her funeral in the company of the Elko County sheriff and his tearfully sympathetic wife, watched the rough-hewn pine coffin being lowered into the unmarked grave and wondered if his rambler of a mother had known she was fated to spend the rest of her life in Jackpot, Nevada, population five-hundred and seventy, not counting the cows.

      The memory, which he usually avoided revisiting, was not a pleasant one. Quinn fell silent as he watched the verdant landscape rush closer. Laura, busy repairing her makeup before facing the press at Shannon Airport, didn’t seem to require further conversation.

      The wheels touched down with a thud. As the jet taxied toward the terminal, Quinn felt his entire body clench—neck, shoulders, chest, legs.

      Enter, stranger, at your own risk, an all-too-familiar voice hissed in some dark lonely corner of his mind. Anxiety coiled through Quinn like a mass of poisonous snakes, twining around phobic pressure points, reminding him of that awful endless summer of his ninth year when he’d slammed the secret doors on his psyche—and his heart—and nailed them shut to keep out the monsters.

      He forced a vague unfocused public smile, heard himself exchanging farewells with the first-class flight crew, even watched himself sign an autograph for the captain’s seventeen-year-old son who was, the silver-haired pilot assured him heartily, his “number-one fan.”

      It would be all right, Quinn told himself firmly. He would be all right.

      But as he walked toward the light at the end of a jetway that had suddenly turned claustrophobic, the raspy little voice belonging to Quinn’s personal bogeyman whispered another warning: Here there be dragons.

      “I still can’t believe that real-estate agent’s screwup,” Laura complained while they waited for their bags in the terminal. “How on earth could she have forgotten to book you a room in town?”

      “She explained that. My name somehow got left off the list of crew members.”

      “You’re not just any crew member. You’re the screenwriter, for Christ’s sake.”

      “With the emphasis on writer. The only reason I agreed to write this screenplay in the first place is because I’m tired of the way Hollywood screws up my books.”

      “If you feel that way, perhaps you ought to stop selling them to Hollywood.”

      “I may be a control freak, sweetheart, but I’m not crazy enough to turn down the big bucks.”

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