Between Here and the Horizon (7 page)

Ronan didn’t operate like that, though. He wanted his kids to sit down and reflect on their actions, to process them, and to communicate their feelings as best they could. For Amie, only five, writing down her thoughts was probably still next to impossible, but it was a refreshing ideology, that was for sure.
 

Ronan got to his feet. “I’m glad we got that ironed out. If you don’t have any questions, then I’d say it’s time to meet the little hellions, wouldn’t you?”

CHAPTER SIX

Angels and Demons

Connor and Amie Fletcher were both part angel, part demon. I knew I was going to have fun wrangling them into touch the moment I laid eyes on them. Connor sat across from me in his bedroom, feet hanging off the end of his bed, and he refused to meet my eye. Amie, on the other hand, couldn’t stop staring at me, like I was some sort of ghost.
 

“You don’t look like Mommy,” she said. Turning to her father, she pouted, staring at him accusingly. “Hilary said she looked like Mommy. I heard.”

“No, he said she reminded him of Mommy. That can mean a lot of different things, sweetheart. If someone speaks or acts or talks in a similar way to another person, you can say that they remind you of them. Understand?”

Amie nodded; she looked like she’d just had her heart broken by this news. Two seconds later, she was running around, giggling in a high-pitched voice, playing with a plastic toy Stegosaurus like the disappointment hadn’t even occurred. Connor sat quietly, staring at his sneakers, chewing on his bottom lip.
 

“Connor, please stand up and say hello to Ophelia. She’s going to be taking care of you a lot over the next few months. You’re going to like her, I promise.”
Great
. I really wished he hadn’t said that. If kids wanted to be difficult for the hell of it, they’d go against whatever you told them, regardless of whether it made any sense to them. Connor might have thought I was the coolest teacher cum nanny there ever was once he got to know me, but the moment Ronan told him he was going to like me, to get along with me, he pretty much guaranteed that Connor was going to rail against the very idea of me.
 

“I don’t even get why we had to come here,” he said under his breath. “I hate this house. None of my friends are here.”
 

“It’s okay, bud. School’s going to start soon, and you’ll make plenty of friends.”

“What is she going to be doing with us then?” he asked quietly.
 

“Ophelia’s going to get you up in the morning. She’s going to be make your breakfast and take you to school. And when you get back from school, she’ll take you for a swim downstairs. She’ll play with you. She’ll help you with your schoolwork. That will be okay, right?”

So he really had meant it when he said he didn’t want to be distracted. According to his list of the duties I was expected to carry out, Ronan wasn’t going to have a single interaction with his kids from one day to the next. Didn’t even sound like he planned on sticking his head through the door and kissing them goodnight.
 

The whole thing seemed incredibly strange. Connor slid off the edge of his bed and slumped down onto the floor. He picked up a Lego Star Wars fighter jet and began to dismantle it piece by piece. “It’s too cold here,” he said. “It’s nothing like New York at all.”

Ronan shook his head, bending down in front of his son. Connor didn’t look up, but it was pretty clear he was waiting with baited breath to see what his father would say. “It’s just as cold in New York as it is here,” Ronan informed him. “But no, you’re right. The island’s very different to the city. You’ve got fresh air here. Places to run and play outside. Doesn’t that sound like it would be a fun thing to do? You could even learn how to sail in the summer time. You told me you wanted to do that.”

Connor looked up, over Ronan’s shoulder, straight at me. Only for a second, but the eye contact was long enough to see the fear in his eyes. “I don’t like new people,” he whispered to Ronan.
 

“It’s okay. Ophelia will only feel new for a little while, and then it’ll be normal that she’s here. Okay?”

Connor didn’t look so sure about that. I’d had to win kids over every single time a new school year started, so I wasn’t worried about tackling that challenge. If I could find a level to connect with him on, we’d be fine. At least that was how it was with normal seven-year-olds. This was a unique situation, though. Connor had lost his mom, and that turned everything on its head.
 

Ronan seemed completely in love with his children, and they were equally besotted with him. It was surprising: I’d assumed he’d be awkward and irritable around them considering his desperation to spend the next six months locked away in his study while
I
looked after them, but the opposite was true. He collected Connor up in his arms and sat him in his lap on the floor, chattering and asking him questions about the menagerie of plastic animals he was lining up like they were about to walk two by two into Noah’s Arc. Amie eventually went and sat with them too, using her Stegosaurus to attack Connor’s lions, giraffes and zebras.
 

Cold, cold Ronan laughed and played along. It seemed he had a warm heart after all, even if it was reserved for some people over others. I couldn’t stop myself from softening to him as I leaned against the wall by the door, watching them quietly play. Then again, I didn’t exactly try and stop myself. Ronan, despite our rocky first meeting and his casual way of implying I wanted to sleep my way through the inhabitants of the island, was weirdly growing on me.
 

“You’ll probably want to go and get settled now,” he said, catching me off guard when he looked up at me and spoke. “Your room’s the one at the very end of the hall on the right. I had one of the cleaning girls fetch some shampoo and soaps. A hairdryer. That kind of thing. I figured you wouldn’t have time for grocery shopping for a couple of days. The fridge is fully stocked as well. It’ll probably take you the next week to adjust here. After that, I’m sure you’ll have found your feet.”

“They didn’t need to do that. I brought a bunch of stuff with me from home. And don’t worry about grocery shopping or anything like that. I can manage. I’m very capable.”

Ronan gave me an odd, distracted smile, eyes directed right at my face, though I couldn’t help but feel as though he was staring straight through me. “Oh, I know that, Ophelia. That’s why I hired you.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Note

My room was something out of a hotel brochure, all white linens and soft, luxurious throws. A comfortable reading chair was angled by the window to catch the light, and a small desk against the wall was stacked high with books—
Causeway Island Wildlife
,
A guide to East Coast Islands
,
Patrick Kavanagh and Other Remarkable Irish Poets of the Twentieth Century
. It seemed Ronan wanted me to fall in love with The Causeway, and had provided with me enough reading material to make it happen.
 

I didn’t join the family for dinner. Ronan wanted to spend time alone with the children before I got to work tomorrow, and to be honest I was relieved. I used the expansive kitchen on the first floor to cook up a fresh fillet of salmon, some greens and carrots, and I camped out in my room, watching unfamiliar TV shows on the huge flat screen TV in my bedroom. At around eight thirty I tiptoed downstairs to make sure everything was okay—the huge, echoing house was full of shrieks and screams, loud enough to wake the dead. When I stuck my head through the door to the lounge, what I saw made me laugh.
 

A den, colossal in size, configured out of sofas and bookcases, blue and white and pinstripe bed sheets all pegged together to create one vast canopy that draped down over the lumpy construction. Amie was darting in and out of the many openings in the sheets, screaming at the top of her lungs while Connor chased after her, followed by Ronan, who, surprisingly, was wearing a black patch over his left eye and snarling something in a broad, comedic pirate drawl about tossing them both overboard.
 

Ronan saw me, our eyes making contact, but he didn’t really acknowledge my presence. His focus was on the children. I left them to it and went back to bed, and the shrieks continued on for at least another hour before silence claimed the house.
 

Just after eleven, there was a knock on my bedroom door. I was already in my PJs—just perfect. I needed Ronan to see me in my fluffy white and pink flannel nightwear like I needed a hole in the head. I answered the door, trying to hide as much of myself behind the wood paneling as possible. Thank god I hadn’t washed my face and brushed my teeth yet. A ridiculous thought to have, but still…Ronan seeing me without my makeup on? No thanks.
 

“Hey. Is everything okay?”

 
He hovered in the hallway, looking far more disheveled than he had earlier. The fire that had possessed him when he was with Connor and Amie seemed to have gone out now, replaced by a general weariness that made him look like he was half asleep on his feet. “Hey, no, everything’s fine.” He rubbed a hand against his jaw, then his forehead. “I just wanted to check in and make sure you were still okay for getting the kids up in the morning. They need to be up at seven.”

“Sure, no worries. I got it.”

“Great.” And for the first time ever, Ronan Fletcher offered me a smile. It was enough to make me go weak at the knees. His dimples sunk deep in his cheeks, his full lips parting to flash white, almost perfect teeth at me, and my palms broke out in a sweat. “It means a lot to me that you’re here, Ophelia. I hope you know that. I’m very, very grateful that you agreed to come out to the island. Connor and Amie are going to rely on you a lot over the next six months. I know you’re going to do a great job of taking care of them.”

His sudden, earnest way of speaking to me was baffling, but it was a pleasant change, too. This wasn’t going to be so bad. I could handle anything and everything that was thrown at me if he was this Ronan, instead of grumpy, distant, kind of rude Ronan.
 

He opened his mouth, looked like he was about to say something, but then apparently thought better of it. “Anyway. Thank you again, Ophelia. I’ll let you get some sleep. Good night.” He walked off down the hallway, and I watched him disappear into the darkness, trying not to stare. Mom warned me before I left California that I shouldn’t fall in love with the boss. I didn’t think for a second I was going to, but that smile was something I could get used to. It would be very nice if I got to see it more often.

******

5:45 a.m.

I was awake. It was an hour before my alarm was due to go off, and there was nothing to be done about it. Stupid jet lag. My body clock was all over the place, and I’d been lying in bed for what felt like forever, tossing and turning, wrapping myself up in my sheets, fretting. A good start with the kids was what I needed. I’d barely had a chance to speak to them yesterday, and they hadn’t seemed all that pleased to see me, an interloper, ruining their private time with Ronan.
 

Pancakes. The situation called for pancakes. I could easily make them and keep them warm in the oven until it was time to wake up Connor and Amie. And Ronan…Ronan’s physique wasn’t exactly that of a guy who ate a lot of pancakes in the morning, but the thought of him sitting at the kitchen counter, wavy hair mussed and all over the place, pajama bottoms slung low on his hips, tearing into a breakfast that
I
had made him had me practically tripping over myself to get out of bed.
 

Downstairs: eggs, milk and flour. Butter in the pan. Kettle on the boil.
 

I put out four sets of knives and forks on the table, coasters and placemats, and then I panicked, removing one of the settings.
You’re not part of the family, O. You’re the hired help. Don’t go forgetting that.
Day one and I almost
had
forgotten, though. I was going to have to be really careful to maintain a professional distance from the Fletchers. Every last one of them.
 

Once the food was made and wrapped in tinfoil, stashed in the warmed oven, I decided to go have a quick shower before getting Connor and Amie out of bed. I was on my way back up the stairs when I noticed the white slip of paper taped to the door of Ronan’s study. Was it there before? I couldn’t remember seeing it, but then again I’d been concentrating on finding the kitchen so I could easily have missed it.
 

I wavered. Ronan was so specific about his study that I almost didn’t want to go and see what was taped to the door. It was probably a Post-it or something, reminding him to do something when he got up. I left notes for myself like that all the time. They say curiosity killed the cat, though, and it had already damn well near killed me a couple of times. It had certainly ended my marriage. I’d come home early from school one afternoon with a migraine and heard a strange noise upstairs. I’d gone up to our bedroom and found Will in bed with Melissa, and that had been that. So clichéd. If I hadn’t gone up there to investigate, there was every chance I would have still been married to Will. He was a coward; he probably would have continued screwing my best friend behind my back, but he would never have had the courage to leave.
 

Fuck it. I slipped down the hallway and stopped in front of Ronan’s study. Confusion swamped me when I saw that it wasn’t a Post-it note at all; it was a small, white envelope, and my name was written on it in blocky black biro. Why on earth would Ronan be leaving me notes taped to his study door? Wouldn’t he have slipped it under my bedroom door if he needed to leave me a note? Or on the kitchen counter, where I was more likely to find it? The study was tucked away from the rest of the house. You didn’t need to pass it on your way to any of the other rooms. It was a miracle I’d even seen the note as I started up the stairs.
 

I pulled the envelope from the door and opened it.