With a sigh, she picked Shawna up from the bed. “There, nice and dry. Try staying that way for more than five minutes.” She nuzzled the soft little neck.
Since the baby was wide awake, she decided to take her out into the living room. She could use the company. And the interference. O’Rourke always seemed to be nicer when he was around Shawna.
Strapping Shawna into the infant seat, Kitt walked out of the bedroom and into the living room. A noise from the kitchen caught her attention.
The first thing she noticed was that the table was set. She didn’t remember doing that.
Because she hadn’t, she realized. He had. She looked at O’Rourke with a silent question in her eyes. Why was he doing this?
“You set the table.”
“You were busy.”
The timer had gone off on the stove while she was in the bedroom. It gave him something to do. With two pot holders buffering the pan, he took the roast beef she’d been making out of the oven and placed it on the counter. With less than deft movements, O’Rourke transferred the roast onto a large platter, then brought that to the table.
“And I thought turnaround was fair play.”
He looked out of place doing that, she thought, amusement curving her mouth. “Do men set the table in your part of the world?”
“They do if they’re hungry and everyone else is busy,” he told her gruffly, feeling suddenly like a bull in a china shop. “I’m not completely Neanderthal.”
She set down the infant seat on the floor near the table so that the baby could see them both. “I never said you were.”
Taking two glasses down from the cupboard, he spared her a look. “Not in so many words.”
Kitt took the glasses from him and placed them on the table. “Not in any words.”
Forgetting to use the pot holders, he took out the two baked potatoes she’d put in alongside the pan and instantly regretted it. It took effort to put them down on the counter rather than drop them.
“Here, let me see that,” she ordered. She looked at his hands, then took out a small tube of aloe ointment she’d stored in the drawer. “It’s not bad,” she commented, rubbing in the ointment. “But you could have done a lot of damage to your hands. Pay attention to what you’re doing.”
The slow movement of her fingers along his skin, rubbing in the ointment, dissolved his embarrassment. “Then what is it you do think of me?” he asked, going back to their previous conversation. She looked at him quizzically, and he added, “Just so I know.”
She chose her words deliberately. Carefully. “I think you’re a good man who’s decent and kind and so damn afraid to take a chance on life he’s wrapped himself up completely in his work and he’ll bite the head off anyone who’ll approach him with the truth.” It wasn’t what he’d expected to hear, she thought smugly. “Just so you know,” she finished, paraphrasing him.
He drew his hands away from her, annoyed at his own stupidity. “I’m wrapped up in my work, as you put it, in order to make a go of this company so that there’ll be money to send my brothers and sisters through school and give them the life they deserve.”
She took out a can of soda for herself and a bottle of beer for him. “Maybe they want to make their own lives. Maybe they don’t want things handed to them any more than you do.”
He could argue that no one had handed him anything, that he’d had to work for everything he had, but it didn’t have to be that way for the others.
“I don’t want to see them struggle the way I did,” he insisted, taking the bottle she’d opened from her. “Waiting tables and sweeping out pubs after hours just to have enough for books…”
There was no denying that it had been a hard way to go, Kitt thought, but it had contributed to making him the man he was now. “Didn’t seem to hurt you any. Other than to close you off.”
“It wasn’t the waiting and the sweeping that did that,” he snorted.
She watched as he sliced the roast beef into even servings. The man had an eye and a hand for precision. “Then what did?”
“Watching my father die by inches.” It was painful to talk about, even now, after all these years. “Watching my mother waste away because he was gone. Getting Susan’s Dear John letter.”
She might not have witnessed her parents struggling to put food on the table, but she knew about being hurt by someone she cared about. “Looks like we both have people in our past who liked to leave notes in their wake.”
He’d been so wrapped up in his own world, he hadn’t realized that she had a universe of her own as well. That she’d been hurt in her world. Oh, he knew all right, the way he knew that the sun rose and set and that there were plants that you didn’t touch unless you wanted to spend the next week scratching. But the knowledge hadn’t penetrated where he lived. Deep in the soul of him.
It did now.
O’Rourke studied her face, thinking of the woman who sat opposite him in a completely different light: as a person with feelings, with hopes and dreams of her own. A person who had fought her way to be where she was. A person, like him, who wouldn’t knuckle under.
“Yeah, well, it served to teach us something, didn’t it?” he said. “It served to teach us not to put our faith in something that could blow up in our faces without any warning.”
His voice had gone up and he was scowling so hard, he looked like a thundercloud. “Why are you so angry?” She hadn’t said anything to set him off.
“I’m not angry,” he snapped.
The hell he wasn’t, she thought. “Then why are you shouting?”
“I’m not shouting, I’m just talking.” Realizing that his voice was raised, he lowered it. “Loudly.”
“Oh.” Kitt raised a napkin to her lips, afraid that she was going to laugh at him. There was almost something endearing about the way he was struggling to control his temper—even though she hadn’t a clue as to why it had erupted in the first place.
The scowl on his face deepened. “And you needn’t be trying to hide that smirk.”
Kitt put the napkin back down on the table. “You want me to smirk?”
He felt his temper fraying and he still couldn’t fathom what had set him off like this. All those emotions butting up against one another inside of him were to blame. How the hell did a man cap that off?
O’Rourke drew himself up. He knew one way. “I want you to do whatever you want to do. I think there’s been a great deal of pussyfooting around and maybe we should stop pretending and start being honest with each other.”
Putting down her fork, she stared at him. “Well, now you’ve really lost me—”
“Maybe that’s just the trouble.”
“Come again?”
“That job application,” he said, nodding toward the living room. The form was still on the coffee table where she’d left it earlier, half filled out. “Is that the first step?”
Kitt placed her glass down again. “The first step to what?”
It cost him to be this exposed. It would have cost him more if he wasn’t. “To your leaving.”
Now his anger was starting to make sense to her. It instigated her own. “Is that it? Are you afraid I’ll go and then you’ll be deported? We had an agreement. I don’t renege on agreements,” she said heatedly. “And besides, from the sound of it, you’re well on your way to becoming an enterprising capitalist who—”
This was all new to him, explaining his feelings. He was a lot better at troubleshooting motherboards and confounding processors.
“Damn it, I’m not talking about being deported, or putting up a front for some INS agent who pops up like toast whenever he feels like it. I know you won’t back down on your agreement.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
He threw up his hands. How much plainer could he make it? “Tomorrow.”
She cocked her head, but his meaning remained obscure. “Tomorrow?”
He blew out an annoyed breath. “And the day after that, and th
e day after that.”
She was beginning to lose her own patience. “If you don’t start being any clearer—”
He was navigating through turbulent waters without a compass, but he gave it his best. “You want clear? All right, I’ll be clear. Katherine Dawson, will you marry me?”
“Did you sleep through the first ceremony? I already did.”
He shook his head. She didn’t understand. “I mean really marry me.”
She was trying to follow him, she really was. “That was a fake priest?”
Unable to sit any longer, he got up from the table and crossed to her. “He was a real priest and stop confusing the issue. I mean marry me with your heart—”
She was on her feet instantly, refusing to be intimidated or browbeaten this way. “You leave my heart out of this.”
He’d come too far to back down now. Taking her hands in his, he refused to let her move away.
“I can’t. Any more than I can leave mine out.” He looked into her eyes. “You confuse me and you infuriate me and you make me pine—I figure we’ve got the makings of a fine match right there. Now all I need is for you to say yes.”
“All?”
He heard the dangerous edge in her voice and knew he probably hadn’t said it right. “Maybe I shouldn’t have put it that way.”
“Maybe.” Her eyes narrowed. “If this is about having an itch, I suggest you go somewhere else to scratch it.”
He shook his head, but he still didn’t follow her. “An itch?”
He was playing dumb and she didn’t like it. “Sex, O’Rourke, sex.”
He turned her so that her back was to the baby. “Don’t go using that kind language in front of the little one.”
She’d had enough. Kitt pulled her hands away from his. “I wasn’t the one who brought it up.”
“Yes,” he told her firmly, “you were. Because it’s not about that word, or an itch, or whatever it is you want to call it. I can get someone to satisfy those kind of things any day of the week. It’s the rest of it that I’m talking about.”
“The rest of it,” she repeated, afraid to put her own meaning to his words. Afraid of being wrong again.
“Damn it, woman, I want an independent soul. I want someone I can respect who can respect me and what I need.” He took her hands again, pleading his case with his eyes. “I need a woman I can depend on to be her own person. And if that woman should be packaged up in a body the angels fought over to make their own, with a face that makes a man’s heart skip a beat, well, so much the better.”
She wanted to be perfectly clear on all this. “And this is me you’re talking about,” she said slowly.
He smiled. Maybe there was hope yet. “This is you I’m talking about.”
He left her mystified. “When, exactly, did this awareness suddenly take place?”
That was easy enough to answer. “The first time I looked at you.”
Now she knew he was putting her on. “The first time you looked at me, I looked like a half-drowned, overstuffed sausage about to burst apart.”
He grinned, drawing her into his arms. “Aye, you did at that. But it got better.”
She felt her heart begin to beat hard. “So you’re saying what, that you want to be my husband in every sense of the word?”
“If you’ll let me.” Feeling on slightly safer ground, he opened his heart to her. “I didn’t set out wanting a wife, Kitt-with-two-t’s. I set out wanting an excuse to stay in this country. But I found myself wanting you. All the time. I don’t expect you to love me—”
“Why?” she interrupted.
It took him a second to collect himself. “Because that would be too much to ask—” His business was finally going well, his siblings would be in this country soon. He didn’t expect to be lucky in every aspect of his life.
“Ask,” she told him.
Was she serious? “Do you?”
Kitt batted her lashes at him, feigning innocent ignorance. “Do I what?”
“Do you love me, damn it, woman?”
She almost laughed out loud. “Yes, I love you, damn it, man.”
It was his turn to ask. “Why?”
The grin settled into a smile on her lips. She cupped his cheek with her hand. “Because you need me and I need that. Because you’re there when I need you. And because you won my heart the minute I saw you walking into my hospital room with two bouquets in your hand. I knew then that you had a heart of a poet.”
A poet. Now, there was something no one had accused him of being. “Then you knew more than me.”
“Women generally do know more than a man, Shawn Michael,” she told him, a smile playing on her lips.
“We’ll have that discussion later,” he promised. “Right now, all I want you to know is that I love you, Kitt-with-two-t’s. And I plan on loving you until my dying day.”
“Only that long?” she asked.
His eyes smiled at her. “Something else to discuss. Later.”
Kitt’s smile burned away in the heat of his kiss. It took them a long time to get back to the discussion.
ISBN: 978-1-4268-6859-7
ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES
Copyright © 2001 by Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial office, Silhouette Books, 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
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Rough Around the Edges Page 15