Passion's Baby

While it baked, she hauled the big tin bath tub in from the back porch to the middle of the kitchen floor, filled it with water heated in a pail on the stove, and soaked luxuriously. She shampooed the sea salt out of her hair, then rinsed it in cool water from the rain barrel outside. She creamed perfumed lotion all over her sun-dried skin and fished out the meager supply of cosmetics which hadn’t seen the light of day since she’d arrived on the island. She ironed one of the few dresses she’d brought with her, a sleeveless, delphinium blue cotton affair with a full skirt and fitted waist.

After all that, when seven o’clock rolled around, she knew the most frightful attack of nerves, wiped the lipstick off her mouth, threw the dress to the back of the closet, and put on a clean pair of red shorts and a matching top.

“As if it matters what I wear,” she told Bounder. “I could show up stark naked and he probably wouldn’t care, as long as I don’t presume too much on his hospitality.”

He’d acted against his better judgment and was living to regret it. Had regretted it, if truth be known, ever since he’d slunk away from her front step after leaving the note. Cabin fever must have taken hold without his realizing it. Why else would he deliberately sabotage his well-ordered life by inviting her and her demented dog to intrude on it? And why would he waste the better of the afternoon trying to tart the place up to look more than it really was? The picnic table on the grass below the porch had seen better days, and paper towels hardly qualified as fine linen.

He poured himself a glass of wine from the ice chest at his side and wheeled himself over to the railing overlooking the beach. It was almost a quarter after seven and she struck him as the punctual type, so the odds were she’d changed her mind about joining him for dinner, which was fine by him. It wasn’t as if her share of the food would go to waste. The energy it had taken for him to organize the meal had left him ravenous.

Funny thing, though, how a man’s mood could shift. That afternoon, while he’d readied the outdoor fire pit for action, he’d found himself whistling under his breath. He’d believed he was looking forward to the evening, to watching her face break into a smile, to hearing her laughter.

After a while, a guy got sick of the sound of his own voice, and sicker still of the same old thoughts chasing around inside his head. Was he ever going to walk under his own steam again? Was he finished as the expert everyone called on to design a new offshore project?

He needed distraction and under normal circumstances, he’d have found it with other people. With women—though not with a particular woman because that usually led to complications.

No, Jane Ogilvie had done him a favor by canceling out, no doubt about it. Start feeding her, and she’d be moving in before he had time to bolt the door. She had a thoroughly domesticated look about her, and if proof was what he needed to back up the opinion, she’d provided it with all that home baking. So what if she’d never actually produced bran muffins? She managed to make just about everything else, which amounted to the same thing.

He took another swig of the wine and rubbed his newly shaven jaw irritably. Scraping off several days’ growth of beard had left his skin tender as a newborn baby’s backside—and that was all her fault, too. If she hadn’t moved in next door, he’d have remained a contented, unkempt slob of a hermit, instead of jumping through hoops trying to make himself look half decent when the only facilities at his disposal were a cold-water shower and a pint-size mirror hanging over the kitchen sink.

From the corner of his eye, he caught a movement to the left of the porch, a flutter of red and a blur of black, followed shortly thereafter by the thud of paws galloping up the wooden ramp to the porch, and the unmistakable whiff of ripe berries.

To counteract the completely absurd rush of satisfaction threatening to wipe out his ill humor, he shuffled lower in the wheelchair and glowered determinedly at the sun sliding down in the west. Why the devil couldn’t she have stayed at home where she belonged?

CHAPTER THREE

“SORRY we’re late,” she said, balancing the raspberry tart on one hand and trying to control Bounder with the other.

“I didn’t notice you were,” Liam said, apparently too mesmerized by the ribbons of lavender and rose strung across the western horizon to notice the time, let alone her. “Is it seven already?”

“Almost half past, actually. I was afraid you’d have given up on me.”

“The thought never crossed my mind.” Rousing himself to a less supine position, he inspected the contents of his glass and said sullenly, “I was too busy enjoying my solitude.”

So it was to be like that, was it? Pressing her lips together in annoyance, Jane gave silent thanks to whatever minor god had urged her not to overdress for her role in what promised to be nothing short of a dinner farce. “I hope my coming here hasn’t put you out too much.”

“Not a bit. We’ve both got to eat, and it’s not as if we plan to make a habit of joining forces.” He slewed a glance her way and gave an exaggerated start of surprise at the sight of the tart. “Oh, gee, you baked a pie! Why doesn’t that surprise me? Stick it in the cooler over there, why don’t you? And while you’re at it, pour yourself a glass of wine. I’d get up and do the honors myself but—”

“Oh, please! I wouldn’t dream of expecting you to bestir yourself.”

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.”

“And it ended before the strain began to tell.”

“Why, you…you…unfeeling brute!”

“That’s me, all right,” he said, supremely unmoved by her distress. “Stroking fragile egos isn’t one of my talents. I prefer to deal with reality.”

“Oh, who do you think you’re kidding?” she snorted. “You’re so busy trying to ignore the fact that you’re handicapped that you can’t even accept a little help without getting all bent out of shape. You could give lessons on stroking the fragile ego, as long as it’s yours that’s getting stroked!”

He bent to scratch Bounder’s ear and she heard the laughter in his voice when he said, “That’s women for you, Blunder, old pal! Going straight for the jugular. Take my advice and steer clear of the lot of them.”

Bounder reared up, placed a paw on Liam’s lap, and gazed at him adoringly. Talk about male bonding! The whole performance was enough to turn Jane’s stomach. “I’m beginning to wonder why I ever agreed to come here this evening,” she said.

Liam gave another of those annoyingly self-satisfied chortles, as though, having his vented his disillusionment with women in general, he could now afford to take a warped kind of pleasure in her company. “Well, it’s too late to back out now, sweetheart. The water’s boiling and the crabs need to be thrown in the pot.”

“I’d offer to help,” she said sourly, “but I’m afraid I might give in to the urge to shove you in, as well.”

He laughed outright at that, and rolled the wheelchair dangerously close to the fire. “Watch it, Janie! Your halo’s slipping—though I have to admit, I like you better this way. Keep it up and you just might get asked back again. In fact, if things were different, I might have tried to put the moves on you.”

His arrogance, she decided balefully, was exceeded only by her foolishness. She had no business feeling all warm and fuzzy inside at his backhanded compliment, and no business at all wondering what it would take to change his views on love and marriage. He was a confirmed bachelor, and just as well because he’d make a lousy husband. Not that she was interested in finding one. She was perfectly content to be remain single, despite what her friends thought.

Two years is long enough to put the grieving behind you and get on with your life, Jane, they’d scolded kindly, and she’d have agreed with them if it weren’t for the fact that, to them, “getting on” with her life meant finding a new man. They hadn’t understood that she needed time for herself.

“In case you didn’t realize, I just paid you a compliment,” Liam said, flinging the last of the crabs into the pot. “So why the grim expression?”

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