Something is humming in my ears. I’m half-awake, that strange place between two worlds where I can either drift gently back into whatever comforting dream I was having, or snatch hold of my thoughts and allow them to drag me back to reality. My eyelids are heavy, so heavy, but I’ve already gone too far.
Goddammit!
I roll over, keep my eyes firmly closed, try to concentrate on the colors dancing around behind my eyelids. Relax. Let my thoughts slip away…
Do these relaxation techniques actually work on anyone?
The humming is back. I slide my hand out from under the comforter and reach for my phone on the nightstand, but it isn’t there. I can’t hear my alarm. Is it even a workday?
Voices.
My eyes fly open, and I try to sit up, but the world slips away from me, and I bury my head in the pillow, waiting for the room to settle.
“I’ll leave you to it.” I don’t recognize the man’s voice. Has someone broken into my apartment?
Deep breath. Try to still my frantic heart. But everything feels off-kilter; this doesn’t even smell like my pillow. Then an image pops into my head: a man being thrown off the roof.
Panic builds up inside me like a tidal wave, and I force myself into a sitting position, wincing as my head spins. Jesus, how much did I drink last night? I never drink at office parties. Did someone try to get me drunk… Did someone spike my drink?
Emmett fucking O’Hara!
“Here, drink this, it’ll make you feel better.”
My fingers are pried open, and a glass is placed into my hand. I open my eyes to find Emmett fucking O’Hara looking at me with concern in those clear blue eyes. I take a sip, track the ice-cold water through my body, and then guzzle the rest of it, shuddering as it goes down.
“Did you spike my drink?” My words are slurred like I’m a raging alcoholic with a permanent hangover.
“I wouldn’t say spiked exactly.” There’s a faint hint of amusement in his tone.
“What would you say then?” The water is threatening to come back out, and I can’t be sick in Emmett O’Hara’s house, not if I want a job to come back to in the New Year. He’s sitting too close to me, and I can’t think clearly. “Did we…?”
He shakes his head, the kind of smile on his face that would launch a thousand ships, or something like that. “No, we didn’t have sex if that’s what you’re asking.”
Thank the fucking lordy lord.
I can go back to work and not worry about him picturing me naked.
Something happens then, and my stomach lurches like I’m on an airplane. And all at once, I take in my surroundings: Emmett is seated on a couch that isn’t a couch because it’s attached to my bed, which isn’t a bed because there are other seats just like it. And there are round windows, and I can see the sky outside, and the humming isn’t coming from a refrigerator or a heating system.
It’s coming from the engines of a fucking aircraft!
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and try to stand as the aircraft dips to one side, throwing me into the arms of Emmett O’Hara. The man who proposed to me with someone else’s diamond ring, drugged me, and then kidnapped me on his private bloody jet.
“Get off me.” I bat his hands away and leap back onto my feet.
“You fell on me.” His voice is so calm it winds me up to cranky time.
I look around the plane for something to stab him with. All I can find is a bottle of water, so I pick that up and start hitting him with it, taking some small pleasure from the way he crosses his arms in front of his face like he’s trying to fend off a vampire.
“Stop. This. Plane. Right. Fucking. Now,” I grind out between slaps that are nowhere near as hard or as painful as I’d like them to be.
“We’re already in descent preparing to land.” Emmett snatches the bottle from me mid-swipe and hides it under his seat. “You need to sit down and fasten your seatbelt.”
But I’m way past doing what this man tells me. Right now, he has shrugged off the role of boss and stepped straight into the mantle of crazy-abductor-with-a-private-jet-in-which-to-hide-his-victims. I spot his briefcase and pick it up, swinging it directly towards his smug good-looking face.
“No, Mary. Not the briefcase!” He jumps up and wrestles it away from me, and I can’t believe how weak I am after whatever it was that he drugged me with. “Sit. Fucking. Down.”
“Help!” I yell, my eyes darting around the cabin trying to find a way out. “Help me! I’m being kidnapped!”
He takes a deep breath, stows the briefcase in a cabinet above his head and faces me with his arms crossed over his chest.
“You’re not being kidnapped, Mary. We’re engaged to be married, remember? Do you think anyone is going to believe that the Managing Director of O’Hara Developers kidnapped his own fiancée?”
The Managing Director of O’Hara Developers.
Even the way he says it makes my blood boil. But it slowly dawns on me that I played right into his hands when I impressed everyone at the office party with his marriage proposal. He’s right. No one is going to believe that Emmett O’Hara, player extraordinaire, would need to kidnap the woman from IT. If he wants a woman, all he has to do is snap his fingers and there’ll be a whole bunch of beautiful women waiting in line to be chosen.
“Where are you taking me?”
I sound exactly how I feel. Defeated. How does anyone stand a chance against someone who can buy his way out of any situation?
“Home.”
“Home?” My head is clearing way too slowly. It’s like trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded.
“Sit down, Mary. Please?” He gestures to the seat where I’ve been sleeping for God knows how long.
I do as I’m told. Even I can tell that the plane is making its descent, and there’s no point trying to get away from him while we’re in the air. My only hope is to make him believe that I’m going along with his plan—whatever it is—and then try to get away from him in the airport.
“Thank you.” He sits in the seat next to me.
He’s wearing a sky-blue sweater that clings to his chest and makes his eyes appear even brighter, and it would be so much easier to hate him if he wasn’t so goddamned hot.
“Where’s home?” I don’t dare peer out the window because if I don’t look, I can pretend to myself for a little longer that we’re still on the same continent.
“Ireland. County Wicklow to be precise.”
Tears well in my eyes as I try to work out how much it’s going to cost me to get back to the States from Ireland without a private jet at my disposal.
“Look, I’m sorry I drugged you, okay? But, well, you weren’t exactly keeping quiet, and these things have a habit of going viral online, and I didn’t want my family to find out about it before I had a chance to tell them.”
“Don’t they have cellphones in Ireland?” I sniff loudly, blinking back tears.
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“Of course it wasn’t,” I mutter under my breath.
It never is. I mean, you only have to watch a Hallmark Christmas movie to recognize that the path of boy meets girl and lives happily ever after never runs smoothly. But if he thinks I’m accepting that as a valid reason for abducting me, he really doesn’t know me at all.
“The guy on the roof,” he continues, “he knows my family.”
Oh, well that’s just what I wanted to hear. If he doesn’t kill me for witnessing him at his psychotic best, the O’Hara family will.
“Haven’t you guys heard of Christmas spirit? You know, the season of goodwill and all that? I promise, all you need to do is sit me in front of the TV with Macauley Culkin and a twinkling tree, and I won’t breathe a word to anyone.”
A smile tugs his mouth up at the corners, and my stupid, cheesy-movie-fueled heart does the stupid fluttery thing that is the staple of every rom com ever made in the history of time.
“No one is going to hurt you, Mary. You have my word on that.”
“Well, forgive me if your word doesn’t exactly inspire me with confidence, Mr. O’Hara. Who drugged me and flew me halfway around the world without my consent?” I press a finger to my lips and pretend to ponder the question.
“Look, I’ve already apologized for this.”
The plane lists to one side again, and he watches me closely with something that might’ve passed for concern in his eyes if I didn’t know that he was a coldhearted self-absorbed kidnapper.
“We just need to get through Christmas. Then, when everything has settled down, we can go back to our own lives.”
Can he even hear himself?
“So, let me get this straight because, you know, you changed the rules while I was in a drug-induced coma.”
“You were not in a coma, Mary.” Is that amusement in his voice?
“You want me to pretend, in front of your family, that we’re in love and engaged to be married, and then, when the Christmas tree comes down, we walk away like nothing ever happened?”
“Aye, correct.”
“Well, that’s easy for you to say. They’re your family. They know you. God knows how many other women you’ve brought home to meet them.”
“None, Mary.” He shakes his head. “You’re the first.”
I don’t believe him.
“But what about me? I’m going to be permanently scarred. I’ll probably need therapy for PTSD.” Tears sting my eyes. “My first proposal was supposed to be special, and you’ve taken that away from me.”
His eyes flicker as if he’s waiting for the punchline, and then he furrows his brow when he realizes that I’m being serious. “You’re being melodramatic now. It wasn’t a real proposal. It doesn’t even count.”
Ugh! The man is despicable.
I press my face against the cool glass of the window and plot my escape. Once I’m free, I’ll start plotting my revenge. People like Emmett O’Hara think that they can get away with murder—literally—and it’s about time someone taught him a lesson.
When we step off the private jet, my stomach sinks through the floor. Where’s the airport? Where’s the security, the airline staff, the other travelers? There’s nothing here but a huge shed-type building, and a 4×4 with the engine running.
“Wh-where are we?”
“Welcome to Ireland.” Emmett, wearing a beige cashmere overcoat, takes my hand and leads me down the steps and towards the waiting car. His driver has already gone ahead and is waiting to open the car door for us. “Smile.”
I do. Although inside, I’m screaming, “Let me out of here!”
The driver refuses to make eye contact. Of course, he does—he was probably in on the whole abduction thing. The thought of him carrying me, unconscious, onto the private jet makes me cringe, but I refuse to let them see it. I am going to get away from Emmett O’Hara and his murderous family if it’s the last thing I do.
Inside the 4×4, I lean against the window and watch the world go by. The countryside is green. Not the kind of green you see in Central Park, but vibrant green, a green that’s alive and thriving and fertile. There are rolling hills—who’d have thought that hills could actually roll—and craggy mountains, and blue sky that bleeds into the horizon. There are streams and sheep and endless forests, and not another person in sight.
Sitting back, I realize how much I’ve missed all this color. I like living in New York with its relentless noise, its varied cultures, and its busyness, but I realize with a jolt that even when I’m in my apartment with the door locked and the blinds pulled and a book on my lap, I never truly experience the kind of peace I feel right now.
I lose track of time with the gentle rumble of wheels on tarmac and the heat inside the vehicle. I empty my mind of all the bad things I want to do to Emmett O’Hara when Christmas is over, and instead, concentrate on the moving vista. Like a child on a family day out, I still want to yell, “Sheep!” whenever I spot some, but I don’t.
Emmett has made it quite clear that we are only keeping up the pretense in front of his family. We are not in a relationship. We don’t even have to like each other because, come January, I’ll never have to see him again.
But inside, I feel as if I can never go back to being the Mary Chrysler I was before yesterday. This might be a game to Emmett O’Hara, but he might just have changed my life with his actions, even though I haven’t yet figured out how.
We turn off the road and drive through a set of wide, open gates. I sit closer to the window, my breath creating a ghostly white patch on the glass, expecting to see Emmett’s family home. But all I can see are more fields, hills, and woods in every direction.
Emmett’s arm snakes around me and he points to a spot beyond the trees. “This is our land. Through there is a salmon stream, and this way—” he gestures to the view from his side of the car “—you’ll see the house once we’re clear of the woods.”
Woods? A salmon stream? Is he fucking kidding me right now?
A scoff escapes my lips before I can stop it.
“What?” His eyebrows are so low his eyes look kind of stormy, and I instinctively back away from him. “It’s just home to me.”
How could this ever be just home to anyone?
When the house finally comes into view, I sit back and gape at it, and I don’t even care. It’s so vast, it’s like ten houses have grown together over the years to create this building of many parts. I mean, it’s not a stately home or a castle, but rather a house made of gray stone that couldn’t make up its mind what shape it wanted to be, and all at once, I’m eager to get inside and explore.
Emmett is smiling when we pull up outside the door that’s decorated with the kind of giant wreath I’ve only ever seen in the movies. His face looks younger, like a boy who can’t wait to come home and tell his parents that he scored his first goal in a soccer match, and I remind myself that it’s Christmas. Even Emmett O’Hara won’t be an asshole during the holidays.
Then he looks at me, and the smile fades. “I know it isn’t going to be easy, but I’d appreciate it if you keep this between us.”
