Because of her pretty face and naive questions, she’d suckered more than one big-talking rich boy into coughing up a healthy chunk of his allowance from home. She’d socked away several thousand dollars before word had gotten around that playing cards with Alice Newberry was as risky as investing in junk bonds. Even then there had been takers, men with big egos who’d wanted to prove that they had the card sense all the other guys had lacked. Those weekly poker games had nicely supplemented the money she earned in tips at a local bar near Boston College.
She grinned at the memory. Patrick had no idea what he was in for.
When he finally got back to the boat, he was carrying two huge sacks. He set one on the galley counter, then upended the other one in her lap. Chocolate bars spilled all over, dozens of them.
Eyes wide, she gathered up as many of them as she could reach. “Oh, my, you didn’t steal all of Molly’s, did you?”
He seemed to sense her ambivalence about that. “You going to give them back if I did?” he taunted.
Just the faint scent of chocolate wafting through the wrappers tempted her. “Probably not,” she confessed with total honesty. When it came to chocolate, she had few scruples.
“Then it’s a good thing that I drove out to the fast-mart on the highway and bought out their stock. I’d hate to bring Molly’s wrath down on our heads.”
“You do know I can’t possibly eat all this, don’t you? Or are you hoping I’ll take a stab at it and wind up in some sort of diabetic coma?”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“So you can beat me at cards.”
“I don’t need you unconscious to win,” Patrick chided. “Those candy bars are just a token of my affection. Say thank you.”
She met his gaze, saw the teasing glint in his eyes and was captivated all over again. “Thank you,” she said softly.
“Anytime.”
The air in the tiny galley sizzled. At least it did right up until the second she caught on that charming her was his real means of attacking her concentration. If she was feeling all mushy and tender toward him, she might be distracted from playing cutthroat poker.
“It’s not going to work, you know,” she told him mildly, as she deliberately turned her back and ladled their soup into bowls.
“What’s not going to work?”
“I’m not going to become so overwhelmed by my hormones that I can’t concentrate on the cards,” she said, setting the soup down in front of him.
His lips twitched slightly. “You think not?”
“I know not,” she said emphatically.
“You’re turning it into a challenge,” he warned. “Men love challenges.”
Uh-oh, she thought, recognizing the truth in that statement. Men were disgustingly predictable when it came to challenges, especially challenges uttered by a woman. She tried to regroup. “It wasn’t a challenge, just a warning.”
“Nice try, but I know a challenge when I hear one.” He grinned as he cupped the back of her neck and held her mere inches away from his face. “And when I decide to take you up on it, you won’t even see it coming.”
Her stomach flipped over, even after he’d released her. She glanced a little frantically at her watch. “It’s getting late.”
“Oh, no, you don’t, Miss Newberry.” He moved aside their untouched bowls of soup and slapped a deck of cards on the table. His gaze caught hers and held. “Ready?”
A part of Alice that had been too long dormant snapped to life. “Ready,” she said, instantly revived, despite the lack of nourishment.
She leaned across the table and looked directly into his eyes. “Do your best, Devaney,” she said defiantly. “It won’t be good enough.”
Instead of reaching for the cards, he skimmed his knuckles gently along her jaw. A half smile lifted the corners of his mouth. “We’ll see.”
Alice shuddered and fought the desire to lean into his touch. For the first time since she was ten years old and held her first poker hand, she had the distinct feeling that she was in way over her head in a card game.
She instinctively reached for her soup, ate several nourishing spoonfuls, then faced him with renewed determination as she looked over the cards she’d been dealt. It was the most pitiful assortment of five cards she’d ever seen, but she was used to overcoming the odds. She looked Patrick squarely in the eyes, chose two cards, when she should have dumped four, and laid them on the table.
“Two,” she told him, her tone deliberately gloating.
His gaze narrowed. “Two, huh?” He dealt those and took three for himself.
Alice saw the faint twitch of his lips and knew that he’d gotten something, while her own hand was no better than it had been at the outset. Not even a pair, much less a high card to back it up. Still she tossed a few chips on the table to force Patrick to win the hand honestly.
He matched her bet. “Call.”
Alice spread her woeful cards on the table, expecting to get a hearty laugh for her attempt at a bluff. As it turned out, Patrick had even less, a nine high card to her ten. She grinned and raked in the chips, noting that he didn’t seem to be the least bit concerned.
“Nice bluff,” he complimented her.
“You, too. You had me worried for about half a heartbeat.”
She reached for the cards and shuffled. “Now I know what to look for.”
“Oh?”
She grinned at him without explaining and dealt the cards. “Okay, Devaney. Time to get serious.”
His gaze held hers. “Darlin’, I’ve been serious since the minute we met.”
Alice fumbled the cards and sent them flying. It was Patrick’s turn to grin.
“Sorry,” he apologized without a trace of sincerity in his voice. “Didn’t mean to rattle you.”
“You didn’t,” she assured him. How could he when she knew perfectly well that Patrick was never serious, not when it came to a woman? This time, though, she kept her eyes squarely on the cards.
A fat lot of good her total concentration did her, Alice thought when she’d lost three hands straight. Patrick was better than she’d expected. She was glad they were playing just for fun. Not that that had kept her competitive streak from kicking in. She still wanted to whip his butt.
“Don’t get too confident, Devaney.”
“I know,” he said soberly. “It’s just the luck of the draw.”
Alice studied him. He’d sounded a little too uncharacteristically modest. “What are you up to?”
He gave her an innocent look. “Me? Nothing at all.”
“You’d better not be.”
“Or?” he said, barely containing a grin.
“Or you’ll regret it,” she said, and triumphantly spread her king-high straight on the table.
Patrick winced and folded his hand.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” she gloated.
There was a devilish twinkle in his eyes when he met her gaze. “Oh, I imagine there’s a great deal you could teach me, Miss Newberry.”
There was no mistaking the fact that he was talking about a whole lot more than poker.
The evening was proving to be a lot livelier than Patrick had anticipated. Intrigued by Alice’s competitive streak, he dealt, but when Alice would have picked up her cards, he placed his hand over hers. She gave him a startled look.
“Okay, enough fooling around,” he declared.
“Fooling around?” she repeated, sounding breathless.
“Yeah, fooling around. It’s time to get serious. What are we playing for?” he asked. “What do these chips represent? Pennies? Matchsticks?” His expression turned hopeful. “Clothes?”
Her look shot down that idea.
“Okay, you name it,” he said.
“Points,” she said. “Winner take all.”
“And the prize?”
“When I win—”
“If,” he corrected.
She frowned. “Okay, if I win, you have to contact your family.”<
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Patrick froze. Not that he expected to lose, but there was no way in hell he’d agree to those terms. “Forget it.”
“You said I got to choose. Are you backing down already? You’re not scared I’ll beat you, are you?”
She’d caught him there. He wasn’t about to let her have the upper hand, not even for a second. “Okay, then, what if I win?”
“I suppose it’s only fair that you choose that,” she said.
“You go to Boston with me for my brother’s wedding,” he said impulsively.
He knew as soon as he saw her eyes light up that he’d made a huge miscalculation. Obviously, she now saw the bet as a win-win situation for her goal of reuniting him with his family. And of course if he showed up in Boston with Alice on his arm, his brothers were going to be wearing the same gloating expression she currently had on her face.
“Done,” she said at once, before he could amend the bet.
“You’re sneaky,” he accused her.
“No, you just subconsciously want what I want,” she told him.
Patrick frowned at the suggestion that he was in any way anxious to make peace with his folks or strengthen the bond between himself and his newly found brothers.
“I made my choice six years ago. I don’t regret it,” he told her flatly.
“Of course you do. Whatever happened shouldn’t negate all the good years you had with your family.”
“Those years were a lie, and I don’t regret turning my back on my parents or even on Daniel, for that matter. Maybe you had regrets about leaving home, but I don’t. Don’t go projecting your past on me, Alice. Maybe your reasons for leaving home were less valid than mine.”
Alice folded the hand of cards she held, set them facedown on the table and looked him in the eye. “I’ll tell you my story if you’ll tell me yours.”
He saw the trap, but he was too curious to deny himself the chance to learn more about her. “Okay. You first. Why did you take off the minute you got out of high school?”
“Because I was determined not to be trapped here the way all of the women in my family had been for generations. They grew up, finished high school, got married to a local fisherman and stayed home with the kids. Many of them lost their husbands to the sea. It was a hard life, even for those who didn’t lose their husbands, and I wanted more than that. I wanted my own identity, my own career to fall back on.”
Patrick didn’t see why that should have caused such a rift that she’d never seen her folks again. “What am I missing? That doesn’t sound so awful.”
She sighed heavily. “It shouldn’t have been, not in this day and age, but my parents were very traditional. They saw my decision as a reflection on their choices. They said if what they’d given me wasn’t good enough, then I should just get out and see how hard it was to make it on my own. So that’s what I did. I left. I had just enough money to get to Boston and spend a few nights in a boarding house near Boston College. I had no money for classes and very little for food. I was lucky, though. I got a job after a few days, and it paid the bills with a little extra. Playing poker added to my savings, but even so it took me a year to save enough to start taking classes. I was twenty-two when I graduated and I’ve been teaching now for four years, three in Boston, one here.”
“Good for you! You should be proud of yourself.”
“I was. I am,” she said with a touch of defiance.
He studied her intently, trying to figure out why she sounded as if she still felt she had something to prove. “In all that time your parents never contacted you?”
She shook her head, her expression unbearably sad. “Not once. I invited them to my graduation, but they didn’t even reply. I heard after they died that my mother wanted to come, but my father refused and she wouldn’t go against his wishes even then.”
“I’m sorry.”
There were unshed tears in her eyes when she looked at him. “It was all so silly. I was too stubborn and they had too much pride. If only any one of us had reached out, maybe we could have worked things out.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I did reach out. I sent that invitation. I thought it was a gesture, but I don’t know, maybe they saw it as a slap in the face, as me trying to show them how I’d done what I set out to do to spite them. And after that, I suppose their refusal to come to my graduation was one more blow. I felt as if I’d been rejected again. I’d been thinking about them a lot in the months before they died. I almost came home several times. I thought maybe if I just showed up it would be easier.” She met his gaze. “Then it was too late. I’ll blame myself forever for waiting too long.”
“You couldn’t have known that there wouldn’t be years and years to mend fences.”
“No, but it proved that things shouldn’t be allowed to fester. We never know how long we have. The bitterness between us will be on my conscience forever.”
Patrick looked away, thinking about the bitterness and anger and blame between him and his parents. As far as he could see, there was still no comparison between what they had done and what Alice’s parents had done. The Newberrys had never abandoned three little boys. The Devaneys had, and they’d done it without once looking back. In his eyes that was unforgivable.
“You promised to tell me about your split with your family,” Alice reminded him.
He had and he regretted it, but he wasn’t going to renege on his promise. “It’s an ugly story,” he warned her.
“I still want to hear it.”
He nodded. “Then I need a drink. You want anything?”
She shook her head as he poured a shot of Irish whiskey into a glass and drank it down. It burned his throat and made his eyes water, but a moment later he could feel the warmth stealing through him. It was a comforting sensation, which was one reason he rarely touched the stuff. It would be too easy to get lost in it.
“Okay,” he began. “Here’s the short version. Unbeknownst to me or Daniel, my parents had three sons before they had us. You met them the other night—Ryan, Sean and Michael. I guess on some level we knew about them, because we were two when things fell apart. We had to have been aware that we had big brothers, but kids forget. They’re adaptable at that age. At any rate, our folks just picked up stakes and moved to Maine with Daniel and me.” He looked directly into her eyes, then added so there could be no mistake about what he was saying, “They left their other sons behind.”
Alice stared at him, evidently not comprehending…or not wanting to. “What do you mean they left them? With friends? Another family?”
He shook his head. “They left them for Social Services to deal with. Ryan and Sean came home from school, and the rest of us were gone. Michael was with a baby-sitter.”
“My God!” she whispered.
“It gets worse,” Patrick told her, needing her to understand the full extent of his parents’ treachery. “They never once checked on them. Ryan, Sean and Michael were separated. They were placed in foster care. Michael says his family was terrific and Sean’s was okay, but Ryan was understandably angry and hard to deal with. He bounced from home to home. Because of the way my parents left, there was no way any of them could be put up for adoption, not with the laws on the books then. Instead, they led makeshift lives with makeshift families.”
“How awful for them,” Alice said, obviously shaken. “And you had no idea?”
“Not until I was eighteen. Daniel found some old photos hidden in the attic. We asked our folks about them. They admitted that they’d left their oldest three sons behind in Boston when they moved here, that they had no idea how they were. Maybe if they’d at least given permission for them to be adopted, I could forgive them, but to leave them in limbo like that…how could they?”
He met her gaze. “They refused to explain what they’d done. In fact, they acted as if we didn’t even have the right to ask. Daniel stuck around. He’s still hoping for an explanation, I guess. As for me, I will never forgive what they’ve done. There
isn’t an explanation they can give that would make what they did okay. I keep trying to put myself in my brothers’ shoes on that day, coming back to an empty apartment, finding out that they’d been left behind. They must have been terrified. It makes me sick to my stomach just thinking about it.”
“Your parents must have been desperate to do such a thing,” Alice said, trying to explain away the inexplicable.
“Don’t defend them to me!” Patrick said. “Put yourself in my brothers’ shoes. Ryan was barely nine, the others even younger, and they were abandoned by their family, while Daniel and I were chosen to go with our parents. My God, what kind of selfish, cruel person does that to three little boys?”
“Only someone who’s desperate,” Alice insisted again. “Someone who can’t see any other way out.”
“They were adults. They had a responsibility to their children to find another way out,” he said, his tone harsh. He sighed heavily. “For the longest time after Daniel and I found out, I dreamed about them. I kept seeing their faces, imagining them crying. I wanted to look for them, but I was scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“That they’d hate me, or at the very least, resent me for being chosen to go with our parents.” He regarded her with a sense of wonder. “The amazing thing is that they don’t. They came here wanting answers, not revenge.”
“Doesn’t that tell you something?” Alice asked.
“That they’re incredible men to have survived what our folks did to them,” he said at once. “But I still don’t feel right being around them. I feel as if I was given something they should have had, something they were entitled to—a secure home, parental love.”
“It didn’t seem to me as if they begrudge you that,” Alice said.
“They don’t,” he admitted. “Like I said, they’re better men than I am.”
“No, they’re not,” she said fiercely.
Patrick grinned at her. “You don’t know me well enough to be so quick to jump to my defense.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “Have you even been listening to yourself? You’re not just upset with your parents because they lied to you and Daniel, you’re filled with compassion and righteous indignation on behalf of brothers you didn’t even remember. You’re as connected to them as if you’d spent a lifetime together.”
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