Read Blood And Water for Free Online

he’d have all the information he needed to see for himself.

Chapter 4
     
     
     
     
     
     
    The phone rang out until his rehearsed voice invited her to leave a message.
    “Hi, Cormac – it’s only me – Enya. Just checking to see where you got to. You left me there to fend for myself,” she quipped, a joke with a serious edge. “You were a bit weird earlier. Give me a shout when you get this. Bye!” She hung up. Throwing the phone on the duvet, she couldn’t ignore the snoring heap that lay sprawled and fully clothed over on the bed.
    Lunch at Seb and Kathryn’s ran on until just after five thirty and it was almost six by the time they’d got back to Ciara’s house. Enya would quite happily have left hours earlier but as her sister’s houseguest she was at her mercy. Only when they turned into the tree-lined driveway did she feel her shoulders relax and the knot in her stomach unravel. Much as she loved her siblings, she’d had about as much of her family as she could take and needed a drink: not a polite glass of wine, but a dirty great big whiskey. Having wisely decided that morning not to introduce Joe into the ‘family’ mix at lunch, she now used him as her excuse to get to the pub.
    “He’s been here alone all afternoon – I think he’d probably like to get out – change of scenery, you know,” she said, knowing it to be far from the truth. Joe was quite happy where he was: in the sitting room, his feet comfortably resting on the coffee table with a beer in hand, watching the footie.
    “You don’t mind if we don’t go with you, do you?” Ciara asked. “It’s just we have to be up early in the morning.”
    “God no,” Enya gushed, feeling only a hint of guilt. “Anyway, I think Joe and I need to talk.”
    She and Joe walked hand in hand the short distance to the local pub, the gesture feeling awkward to her and out of place now she was home.
    “So how’d it go?” he asked, oblivious to her ruminations.
    “Grand. The usual. Nothing changes.”
    She didn’t elaborate and he didn’t look for her to tell him any more. She had shared very little about her family with him and, realising she couldn’t be bothered to tell him about her lunchtime experience, she wondered what on earth she’d been doing bringing him back home with her in the first place.
    She’d picked him up, literally, in a bar in Amsterdam: he’d tripped over her bag and ended up face-down at her feet. She’d helped him up and bought him a drink – it was the least she could do – and had been with him since. That was about six, maybe seven months ago, and in that time she’d never mentioned home. Not until she’d got the email from her solicitor.
    And here they were now. She watched, troubled but focused, while he dribbled in his sleep onto the floral-patterned sheets. She couldn’t bear to get into the bed beside him and instead moved in the darkness to sit at the window. Pulling back the curtains, she sat into the deep sill and drew them back around her, hiding her from sight. The moon was bright against the night sky, an iridescent magical orb shining down on her as she pondered her past and considered her future. Pushing up the sash window she took a cigarette from her pocket and lit it, waving the smoke like a defiant teenager out into the night air. Drawing her legs up to her chin, she wondered if there was any magic in that shining dot overhead. What would she wish for, she asked herself with a sigh and a deep pull on her cigarette. Ciara definitely wouldn’t approve of her smoking at all, never mind in her house, but the whole day had been such a nightmare she deserved it. She shouldn’t have gone to the lunch, she didn’t want to, but Ciara was impossible to say no to and Cormac had promised to protect her from the anticipated intrusive questions that were bound to be fired at her. And they were. But Cormac had deserted her even before they’d finished their pavlova and Ciara, too focused on her