Passion's Baby

Obtuse as he was, even he caught the edge in her tone. “Exactly what are you expecting, Jane? That I’m going to treat you as if you’re a date? Because if so, you’re in for a disappointment. I happened to catch enough crab for two and since you’re my nearest neighbor, I invited you to share the feast. The fact that you’re reasonably young and not too ugly has no relevance. I’d have done the same if you’d been seventy-nine and toothless.”

“I’m more relieved to hear that than you can possibly begin to guess,” she cooed, the “not too ugly” label stinging worse than anything a wasp could inflict. “Because, loath though I am to damage your massive ego, if a date had been what you had in mind, I’d have been obliged to turn you down. You’re not my kind of man.”

“And what kind of man is that?” he asked offhandedly. “Someone with two good legs who can chase you all over the island, then throw you over his shoulder and carry you off to his lair to have his wicked way with you?”

“No,” she said shortly. “But a working brain is a definite must and yours, I begin to suspect, has yet to be taken out of the box it came in.”

Her observation caught him squarely as he drained his glass, turning the chuckle he couldn’t quite smother into a coughing fit as the wine went down the wrong way. “Okay,” he croaked, when at last he managed to regain his breath, “you win this round. I admit I was ticked off when it seemed you were a no-show and I acted like an idiot. Can we start over, if I promise to polish my skills as a host?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, even though trying to hang on to her annoyance in the face of such a disarming confession was a lost cause, particularly with Bounder fawning shamelessly all over the object of her displeasure. “I can’t say I was flattered by your description of me.”

Steering his chair around the hammock to where Steve’s old kerosene storm lantern sat on a shelf on the wall, Liam put a match to the wick. Just briefly, before he swung around to face her again, the aura of light limned his features in gold and revealed the smile lurking at the corner of his mouth. “You mean the bit about your being not bad-looking?”

“That’s not quite how you worded it, but since we’re aiming for a fresh start, I won’t quibble over semantics.”

“In that case,” he said, heading down the ramp to the grassy area below, “if you wouldn’t mind pouring the wine, I’ll get the fire started, and we can engage in idle gossip and watch the sun go down while we wait for the water to boil.”

Somehow, she doubted Liam McGuire was the kind of man who ever wasted time being idle about anything. He was too full of a restless energy turned inward by the physical restrictions he was forced to endure. Talk about an inquiring mind! He didn’t just look at a person, he looked inside her, his cool gaze probing her most private thoughts.

She’d no sooner joined him at the fire pit than the inquisition began. “Cheers,” he said, raising his glass to hers, and before she had time to acknowledge the toast, let alone take a sip of the wine, went on, “Tell me how your better half wound up in a wheelchair.”

“What?” She stared at him in offended disbelief. Was the man completely insensitive to everyone’s pain but his own?

“Tell me about your husband. I’m curious.”

“Well, that’s certainly stating the obvious! The question is, why do you want to know?”

“Well, we’ve got to talk about something and the last time you were here, you made some remark about understanding my frustration at being in this damned contraption because you’d seen him go through the same thing.” He shrugged, and poked at a chunk of driftwood which had fallen away from the flames. “But if talking about it touches a nerve, we can always debate the vanishing ozone layer or the migration of the otter flea.”

“I didn’t know otters had fleas,” she said stiffly.

Leaning toward her, he planted his elbow on the arm of his chair, rested his chin on his fist, and fixed her in that disturbing gaze of his. “His death’s still too painful to talk about, huh, even after two years?”

“It’ll never be easy. But I’ve come to terms with it.”

“What went wrong? An accident of some sort?”

“No. He had ALS. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, although most people call it—”

“Lou Gehrig’s disease.” He grimaced. “Yeah, I know. It’s one of those things that…well, I don’t have to tell you. You lived it. How long was your husband…?”

“Seven years. We’d been married only eighteen months when he was diagnosed.”

Liam inhaled sharply. “Barely past the honeymoon stage! You can’t have been much more than a kid. And you hung in over the long haul?”

“Well, of course I did!” she said indignantly. “What did you think? That I’d walk out on him because he didn’t remain the perfect, healthy specimen I’d married?”

“A lot of women would have, wedding vows about sticking it out in sickness and in health notwithstanding.”

“If you believe that, then you obviously don’t know much about love.”

“Maybe not, but I know a lot about women.”

Jane stared at him, taken aback by the surge of bitterness which colored his remark, and suddenly as curious about his past as he was about hers. “I don’t suppose you’d care to elaborate on that?”

“Not particularly.” Awkwardly, he bent to wedge another piece of wood under Steve’s old metal crab pot. She could have done it for him in a fraction of the time, but she knew better than to offer.

“It’s going to take a while for this water to come to a boil,” Liam said, “but I’ve got nuts and stuff to snack on while we’re waiting. If you want to make yourself useful, you could get them—they’re in the kitchen—and bring another bottle of wine out of the refrigerator.”

He’d tidied the place up in her honor she noticed when she went inside. The floor had been swept and the counter was empty except for a cardboard box holding cutlery, plates and a roll of paper towels, a loaf of bread, a bag of prepared salad greens, and some packages of nuts and pretzels.

She found the wine and a corkscrew, and emptied the snacks into a wooden salad bowl. When she went back outside, the fire had taken hold and Liam sat with his gaze fixed moodily on the flames licking up the side of the blackened old pot, and Bounder sleeping next to his chair.

Taking a seat at the picnic table, Jane helped herself to a handful of nuts before passing the bowl to Liam. He nodded his thanks and for a while nothing disturbed the silence except the occasional cry of a seagull and the spit and crackle of the driftwood fire. The sky had paled to winter melon green with the sun’s passing and the first faint stars twinkled to the east.

From where she sat, Jane was able to take in the sweep of ocean and distant mountains and, much closer at hand, her host’s unruly mop of dark hair and width of shoulder.

What happened to make you so wary of other people? she longed to ask, and knew a shocking urge to reach out and touch him. There was such a loneliness about his still figure, such a need for gentleness.

Suddenly, as if he knew she was burning up with curiosity, he announced, “You aren’t the only one who’s been married, you know. I tried it once myself.”

He flung the information down like a challenge, as if daring her to take issue with it. “Did you?” she said mildly.

When he didn’t immediately reply, she left it at that and for a while the silence came swarming back, seeming deeper with encroaching night. The flames grew brighter, higher, and a mist of steam rose from the crab pot. Bounder stirred and shifted to a more comfortable position, with his nose nudging the wheelchair’s foot-rest.

“I’m divorced, in case you’re wondering.”

In light of his caustic tone of voice, she’d have had to be mentally defective not to have figured that much out for herself. But it seemed politic not to say so, so she stuck to a sympathetic, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not!” His shoulders jerked in bitter amusement. “I consider myself lucky to be rid of her.”

“Don’t you find that rather sad?”

He tossed her an incredulous glance. “Hell, no! Why should I?”

“Because presumably you were in love with each other once, and when those feelings died, you lost something precious.”

“I lost a money-hungry parasite, sweetheart! Caroline kept a calculator where her heart was supposed to be. Her chief hobby was adding up how much a man was worth, and whether he could afford her or not. Love wasn’t part of the equation.”

“In that case, why did you get married in the first place?”

“I asked myself the same question for years and never did come up with an answer that made any sense. Put it down to a combination of lust, wilful blindness on my part, and great acting on hers. Around the time I found out she wasn’t what she’d first seemed, she decided she didn’t like the demands of my job and found comfort in some other guy’s arms while I was away on a project. Last I heard, she’d dumped him for somebody with a fatter wallet.”

“I can’t imagine any wife behaving like that,” Jane said, wondering if his abrasive front was really nothing more than camouflage to hide a broken heart.

“Oh, trust me, it happens! Just because you spent all your free time polishing your halo, don’t assume every other woman does the same.”

“I resent that,” she said, the surge of compassion he’d awoken in her evaporating just as rapidly as it had arisen. “There was nothing long-suffering about my devotion to Derek. I loved him and he loved me, and we both honored our wedding vows. So don’t you assume just because your marriage fell apart, that mine was held together by baling wire and pity, because it wasn’t! It was strong enough to stand on its own merits, regardless of what life threw at it.”