“You’d think you could poke your fingers straight into the heart of it,” Murphy commented from the doorway.

Shannon nodded, tracing the coils again before she turned. “She’s brilliant. Though I’d prefer you not tell her I said so.” Her brow lifted when she studied him. He didn’t look so very different from the man who walked his fields or played his music in pubs. He was without his cap, and his hair was thick, curled, and a bit damp from his washing. His sweater was a soft gray, his slacks shades darker.

She found it odd that she could picture him as easily on the cover of GQ as on Agricultural Monthly.

“You wash up well.”

He grinned self-consciously. “You look at things, people, more as an artist does once you’re used to them. I didn’t mean to keep you.”

“It’s no problem. I like seeing where you live.” Her gaze glanced off him and focused on a wall of books. “That’s quite a library.”

“Oh, that’s just some of them.”

He stayed where he was when she crossed over. Joyce, Yeats, Shaw. Those were to be expected. O’Neill, Swift, and Grayson Thane, of course. But there was a treasure trove of others. Poe, Steinbeck, Dickens, Byron. The poetry of Keats and Dickinson and Browning. Battered volumes of Shakespeare and equally well-thumbed tales by King and MacAffrey and McMurtrey.

“An eclectic collection,” she mused. “And there’s more?”

“I keep them here and there around the house, so if you’re in the mood, you don’t have to go far. A book’s a pleasant thing to have nearby.”

“My father wasn’t much on reading, unless it had to do with business. But my mother and I love—loved to. In the end, she was so ill, I read to her.”

“You were a comfort to her. And a joy.”

“I don’t know.” She shook herself and tried a bright smile. “So, am I getting a tour?”

“A child knows when she’s loved,” Murphy said quietly, then took her hand. “And yes, you’ll have a tour. We’ll go outside first, before it rains.”

But she made him stop a half a dozen times before they’d traveled from the front of the house to the back. He explained the raftered ceiling, and the little room off the right where his mother still liked to sew when she came to visit.

The kitchen was as big as a barn, and as scrupulously clean as any she’d ever seen. Still, it surprised her to see colored jars of herbs and spices ranged on the counter, and the gleam of copper-bottomed pots hanging over it.

“Whatever you’ve got in the oven smells wonderful.”

“ ’Tis chicken, and needs some time yet. Here, try these.”

He brought a pair of Wellingtons out of an adjoining room and had Shannon frowning. “We’re not going to go tromping around in . . .”

“More than likely.” He crouched down to slip the first boot over her shoe. “When you’ve got animals, you’ve got dung. You’ll be happier in these.”