Irish Eyes (Stolen Hearts Romance) (3 page)

He turned his angry eyes to her and kept his arms at his sides.

The police officer stepped up. His huge hand grasped the boy by the jacket collar, throwing the child off balance for a moment.

Suddenly, the boy shot away from the officer, straight into Julia.

The force of the boy’s weight made her stagger backward a few steps, but she quickly regained her footing. The boy moved around so he was standing half behind her, and she automatically straightened up in a defensive posture.

The officer tensed and she wondered if she—or the boy— was in danger.

“Please, lass, please.” The pure pleading nature of the boy’s voice tugged at her heart, and she turned her head to meet his desperate gaze.

“Leave the boy to me, ma’am,” Officer Shaughnessy barked.

“One moment,” she responded, making it clear she wouldn't allow any quibbling. She focused on the child, who was standing so close she could feel his rabbit-paced heartbeat at her side.

Julia placed one hand on the boy’s shoulder. She kept her voice low to preclude Craig and the police officer from hearing. “What is it? Don’t be afraid, you can tell me.”

The green eyes shifted toward the rainbow-covered billboard and a brightness seemed to pass over his features.

“By rights, my pot o’ gold is yours, lass.” The lilting words barely carried to her above the din of traffic and the grumble from the skies above. “I can’t have it fallin’ into another’s hands.”

Officer Shaughnessy tapped the toe of his boot against a stone jutting from the wet grass. “Hurry it up, will ya?”

The boy took a deep gulp. “Please, lass, you’ve got to be the one to claim me treasure. Can I have your promise on that?”

She looked steadily into the boy’s face, her heart as heavy as the laden rain clouds hanging low over the skyline. The child had no home and few possessions, she realized. The last thing he wanted was to lose the belongings he had managed to squirrel away, those things which he counted as precious as gold—his treasures. And he was asking her for help.
“Just tell me where to find it.”

“Now, where are you supposin’ you’d be finding a pot o’ gold, lass?” He wriggled his dark red eyebrows, his glance flicking toward the Lucky Lottery Jackpot Billboard. Their voices blended in a hushed conspiracy. “Under the rainbow.”

“Just find the patch of shamrocks and dig straight down," the boy whispered.

“Dig? I have to dig?”

“Shh!” The boy raised a finger to his lips. “Of course you have to dig for the treasure. Don’t you know anything?”

She smoothed her hand over his thick curls and shifted her weight uneasily. “Actually, I’m beginning to think I don’t know anything at all."

Lightning ripped across the gray clouds, throwing over the boy’s anxious features a mixture of yellow light and shadow.

“If you don’t hurry this along, ma’am, we’re going to be standing in a rain storm.” Officer Shaughnessy shuffled a step closer to them.

“I’ll be coming along with you...sir.” The boy turned and walked away from Julia, his shoulders hunched, his feet kicking at the grass as he went.

As the patrol car drove away, Craig clapped his hands together. “Another good deed done in record time. Now if we could just—”

“Not yet.” Julia moved to the back of her car to unlock the trunk.

“If you’re doing what I think you’re doing,” Craig warned her, “you better realize I’m not going to be a party to it. I have…”

“You have work to do,” she cut him off. Turning to rifle through the piles of blankets and extra clothes, spare batteries, flashlights, and first aid kits she finally found her sorry excuse for a shovel. She thrust the splintered handle into Craig’s hand. “Faith can move mountains, but sometimes it has to do it one shovelful of dirt at a time. And somebody has to hold that shovel.” Julia trudged back up toward the billboard, motioning for her assistant to follow. “That shovel, my friend, is an instrument of faith in human kind in action.”

“Pardon me if I point out it’s also used to dig graves.” Craig hoisted it onto his shoulder and slunk along behind her.

Julia drew in the smell of the impending storm, let it refresh her then let it out in a sigh. “Not today, my friend. Today, we’re digging for treasure.”

CHAPTER TWO

Julia shuddered.

Her hands fisted on the top of her scarred army surplus desk. She stole a sidelong glance at the ominous cadet-blue safe, glinting at her through the half open closet door in her office on the second floor of the shelter.

Last night she and Craig had gone beneath the billboard expecting to unearth a cache of sports cards, a ball cap, perhaps a piece of jewelry, some memento a boy might call treasure. Instead they’d found…
trouble
.

A great big, black pot o’ trouble, to be exact. A leprechaun’s treasure unlike anything she’d been prepared for, honest-to-goodness, heavy, gleaming handfuls of very old gold coins.

She pushed her heavy hair off her shoulders and folded herself into her red cardigan. Her shoulders tightened and anxiety roiled in the pit of her stomach. She could still smell the fresh dirt clinging like chocolate cake crumbs to the cast iron kettle and lid as she unearthed the boy’s secret stash from the damp, dark ground.

Craig had wanted to go with her to take the find to the shelter and call the police to see what to do next but she hadn’t seen the sense of making him miss out on his dinner plans. She’d be find, she’d insisted, with the protectiveness of her staff around her and the gold tucked inside the shelter safe, she would calmly wait for the police to arrive and be done with it.

That’s what she’d intended to do. But this morning she sat in her office haunted by knowledge that she still had a fortune in gold sitting just a few feet away.

“Well? What did the police say? Were the coins reported stolen? Is there a reward?” Craig slipped into her office as silently as his not so sneaky sneakers allowed.

“I don’t know,” she said softly

“You don’t know what?” Craig sat in donated wing-back chair beside her desk, eyes studying her behind his hipster glasses, his elbows and knees poking out at sharp angles from the swayed seat. “About the reward or if the stuff was stolen?”

“I don’t know,” she said with more conviction, almost snapping at her assistant. She looked toward the open office door then cast her gaze around the room, finally coming back to Craig’s expectant expression. She wet her lips. “I don’t know about the police.”

“The—” His brows clashed above his eyes. “Julia, what are you talking about?”

She glanced at the door again and the empty hallway beyond. They were alone. The night staff and evening’s residents had gone already. The shelter stood, wrapped in eerie quiet, locked tight until evening. The lumbering shell of a building never quite felt empty. Always there were shadows and noises and the sense of someone or something in the next doorway, or just over your shoulder. The feeling had stopped needling Julia long ago but today she felt it to the depths of her bone.

She drummed her fingertips against the scratched paint on her metal desktop then finally fixed her gaze on Craig and said,
“I’m talking about Officer Shaughnessy.”

“Officer who?”

“Shaughnessy. The officer who just happened along at the exact time we needed him to spirit away the Irish boy we found.”

“Ah, the leprechaun patrol.” Craig nodded his head and chuckled.

“You wouldn’t be laughing if you knew what I do.” She skimmed her finger over the scribbled notes she’d made the night before. “There is no Officer Michael Shaughnessy that fits the description of our man with the Cincinnati police.”

“Maybe he’s with the—”

She traced her fingertip downward on the paper. “He’s not with the highway patrol, the sheriff’s department, or any of the local campus security forces.” Her wooden chair creaked as she leaned back in resignation. “Craig, he’s not even a mall cop.”

“You’re kidding.”

She shook her head. “I checked everywhere. Michael Shaughnessy is a great big fake.”

Craig pushed against the arms of the chair as if ready to jump up and take action even though he stayed in place. “And we turned that kid over to him?”

“That kid—who told us where to dig up a fortune,” she added.

He hunched his shoulders forward. “What now?”

“I don’t know, but—” She checked out the doorway one more time then inched close to her desk, lowering her upper body and her voice. “I’ve still got the gold.”

“What?” He nearly leaped out of his chair.

“Shh.” She placed her finger to her lips. “Think about it, Craig, a boy who knew the whereabouts of something so valuable, kidnapped by a man sneaky enough to impersonate a police officer? Add that when I told the cops I thought the boy might be in trouble they told me that without a name or photo there wasn’t much they could do to help him. If I had turned that gold over to the police, it might have been like signing that child’s death warrant.”

“And since you didn’t, it might be like signing your own.”

A solid chunk of ice seemed to settle in her throat. She could hardly breathe, let alone swallow. Craig was right, but then, so was she. Her mind raced but no single thought took center stage.

She wanted to go stumbling out to her car and drive away as fast as she could for parts unknown. At the same time, she wanted to stay right there and never leave the relative safety of her familiar surroundings again. For the first time in a long, long time, Julia Reed, mountain mover, had to admit she needed something more than courage, wits and a shovel—she needed to ask for help. But from whom?

“I was going to say top o’ the momin’ to you, but as I get a good long look at this place, I’m more in mind of bottom o’ the barrel.”
Irish
. The accent, though faint, poured like aged whiskey over every syllable from the deep, masculine voice out in the hallway. It sent a tingle through Julia’s body and a shiver down her spine. Then a man stepped into the doorway, smiling. “Looks like I got here just in time.”

“You.” The word whooshed out with the rush of air from her lungs and she didn’t know if help had arrived or she had lost her ever lovin’ mind.

*

Cameron O’Dea made a show of glancing behind himself. His parka rustled, its open zipper cold against his wrist as he flattened his palm to his nubby gray sweater. He cocked his head at the woman with enormous blue eyes who was gaping at him. “Me?”

“You’re... oh, my goodness,” she whispered.

He raised an eyebrow at her unexpected reaction then glanced at the young man glaring at him from a poorly patched wingback chair. “I’ve been known to have this effect on women.” Cameron winked at the woman’s overt scrutiny. “Not to worry, though. It tends to wear off once they become adjusted to my sparkling personality.”

The man harrumphed his opinion of Cameron’s jest.

“Darlin’, you’re ogling me like I was the ghost of Elvis come back to check into this little Heartbreak Hotel of yours. I don’t suppose you’d want to tell me why that is?”

“I—we...” She fanned her flushed cheeks with an open hand.

“Have we met before?”

Her lips fell open as if to answer yes,’ but the long waves of her hair moved gently as she shook her head “no’ instead.

Cameron smiled and leaned against the door frame, stealing a moment to study the woman he had sought out. Julia Reed. He’d had her profile and all pertinent information pulled up last night. Just a matter of a few keystrokes for a veteran agent such as himself and he knew more about her then she probably knew there was out there to know.

She’d chipped a tooth when she was twelve, broken an engagement when she was twenty-one. In college her grades had been average but her commitment to causes made her a stand out. Sometimes she told people that she hadn’t gone to college to get a degree, she’d gone to get an education. She had no credit card debt. No gym membership. No husband, no kids—not even a dog depended on this woman. Yet, Cameron got the feeling anyone could depend on her.

At least he hoped so, because he needed to depend on her—and before it was all said and done, she would need to depend on him, too.

He stroked his chin and narrowed one eye as he took in a quick physical survey of her. The blurred picture from a five- year-old newspaper clipping certainly did not do her justice, he concluded, as a trained professional sizing up a potential suspect. Tall and lean with jet-black hair and a classic facial structure. He raised his knuckle to his lips, trying not to laugh at the stiff description that sounded like it belonged on a police report. Julia Reed would not be so easily summarized.

Yes, she was tall and there seemed not an ounce of fat on her frame, but there was a fragility about her all the same. No husky Amazon here, but a willowy quality, strong yet flexible.
Her long hair tumbled over her stalwart shoulders like waves over a rocky shore. The flickering overhead light shone across the inky blackness of her curls. Such hair, he decided, would go silver with age. Not gray or white, but silver—noble, dignified silver.