Free Irish Eyes (Stolen Hearts Romance) by Annie Jones

knees and leaned toward her. “Fifty years ago in Ireland, Michael Shaughnessy’s grandfather and my own robbed a private treasure—a chest of antique gold coins, the ill-gotten gain of a very corrupt local official.”
    “Robbed? That gold is stolen?” Julia looked at him, then Fiona, then him again.
    “It was all very Robin Hood-esque, I assure you.” Fiona’s shoulders shimmied as she tipped her head up, her Irish pride, her family pride, ruling the moment. “For a time they thought they might get away with it, but then the truth began to come to light.”
    “My grandfather talked too much, bragged on and on.” Cameron tapped his hiking boot against the table leg. Pride was the last thing he felt telling this tired, familiar tale. How he wished he could keep the old angers from swelling within his chest. “Michael’s grandfather escaped to America only to be deported for the crime soon after. Both of them died in prison.”
    “Well, that explains how the gold got here from Ireland.” Julia tilted her head to one side. “But none of that qualifies as ‘hoopla’ in my book.”
    “Some saw the robbery, not as an act of thievery and avarice, but as a political statement, a means of common man’s justice.” Cameron rubbed one hand along his cheek. “My grandfather became something of a local legend, his woeful story told in pubs and passed from father to son these past fifty years. Michael, my brother, and I grew up in our small town with that as our legacy.”
    Julia narrowed her eyes and nodded as if she could just picture the whole thing. “So, your grandfathers had become folk heroes?”
    Cameron barked out a sharp laugh. “Those men were no heroes.”
    “To your father they were, and to Michael Shaughnessy.” Fiona’s eyes sparked with a challenge for him to deny it, to deny the passions of these men who meant so much to them both. After a moment of holding Cameron’s gaze, she relinquished. Her shoulders sagged . She sighed and shook her head. “But I don’t want them to become heroes to Devin.”
    “Those tales have turned many a young boy’s head,” said Cameron. “My own father, in a misplaced sense of loyalty, kept the secret of the gold’s whereabouts from everyone until he thought it ‘safe’ for the family to cash in on the treasure.”
    “Unfortunately he—and my husband—were killed right here in Cincinnati in a traffic accident last year.” Fiona rubbed one fingertip along the brim of her water glass. “My father-in- law had been the one to work out the paperwork to get us here from Ireland two years ago, but we did not know why until later.”
    “What an amazing story,” Julia whispered softly.
    So softly that, because of the sounds of the retreating lunch crowd around them, Cameron had to focus on her lips to make out what she had said. In doing so, for a moment, he was lost. Retelling the story to Julia had given it new life, or was that more to do with the women herself and what her nearness inspired in him?
    In the back of the pub someone dropped a platter, a round of applause rang out then laughter startled him back to reality.
    “It’s some kind of story, I’ll grant you that. Amazing or not remains to be seen.” He shifted his chair over the hardwood floor and scrubbed his fingers up the back of his hair, his way of reminding himself to stay centered and keep his head in the game. “In going through my father’s things after his funeral, I discovered several clues. But I kept comin’ back to his last words. They were, I knew in my heart, the greatest clue of all.”
    “So you got to see him before he passed?” Julia put her hand on his.
    It was such a simple gesture and yet for Cameron, it brought the moment into sharp focus. It shrank the world down to the two of them. He, the son unburdening the last secret of his father’s deathbed and her, the only woman outside family he would trust with this kind of vulnerability. “Aye, yes. I was in the