Sean's Reckoning (8 page)

Brave man, Deanna thought. Then again, he was a firefighter. A hot, noisy skirmish probably wouldn’t faze him. After all, he had lots of experience extinguishing out-of-control blazes.

Sean wasn’t prepared for Hank’s haggard look when he finally joined them at the ice-cream parlor that had been chosen for the celebration. He looked every bit as bad as he had a few weeks ago at the gym. He cast a sour look at Sean, barely managed a smile for Deanna, then squeezed into the booth next to Ruby, who never even looked up from her hot-fudge sundae.

Sean might not know what game those two were playing, but one thing was plain—Hank had it bad for the woman beside him. Sean couldn’t think of a single occasion in the past when his pal had been so hung up on a woman. Usually after this length of time, he’d slept with a woman a few times, tired of her and moved on.

Suddenly the answer dawned on him. Hank and Ruby
hadn’t
slept together. That was why they were both so cranky and out of sorts. Sean almost laughed at the irony of it. All this time, he’d been half-envious of Hank’s success, and Ruby had been keeping Hank at arm’s length. She was obviously a whole lot wiser than Sean had given her credit for being. He wondered if Deanna had guessed the truth, but judging from the
puzzled way she was studying the two of them, she hadn’t.

“Hey, Dee, feel like going for a walk?” he turned and asked her.

She regarded him blankly. “Now?”

“Seems like a good time to me,” he said with a pointed glance across the table.

She looked at Ruby and Hank, then nodded with evident reluctance. “I guess so. Come on, Kevin. We’re going for a walk.”

Ruby’s gaze shot up. “You’re leaving?” she asked, a faint hint of panic in her voice.

Deanna regarded her worriedly. “Unless you want us to wait for you?”

Hank seemed to be holding his breath as he awaited Ruby’s reply. She looked at him, waged some sort of internal debate that Sean couldn’t interpret, then finally shook her head.

“Go ahead,” she told them. “Hank hasn’t even ordered yet. I can stay with him.”

“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Deanna persisted, as Sean latched on to her hand and began tugging her from the booth.

“You heard her,” Sean said. “She told us to go on.”

Kevin regarded all of them with impatience. “Are we going or staying?” he grumbled.

“Going,” Sean said firmly.

Deanna looked as if she might balk, but then she shrugged. “We’re going.”

Outside, she scowled up at Sean. “What was that all about? Why were you so anxious to get out of there?”

“Discretion,” he said.

“What?” she demanded. Then understanding obviously dawned. “Oh, of course.”

“You two are acting all weird again,” Kevin declared with disgust.

Sean laughed. “You’ll understand when you’re older.”

“So, where are we going?” he asked. “Is the celebration over?”

“Not yet,” Sean reassured him. “How about my place? Want to head over there for a while?”

Kevin’s expression immediately brightened. “Will Mark and Davey be there?”

“More than likely.”

“All right!” he enthused.

“Deanna, is that okay with you?” Sean asked.

To his surprise, she looked hesitant, but one glance at Kevin’s excited expression had her backing down from whatever objections she had. “Sure.”

As soon as they reached Sean’s apartment, Kevin spotted the older kids and took off without another word. Deanna watched him go with a contradictory mix of dismay and relief on her face. Sean wished he could read her mind.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, concerned that he’d been pushing her too hard and overstepping some unspoken boundary where Kevin was concerned. He thought they’d talked that all out, but maybe she’d had second thoughts.

“Nothing, not really. I’m glad Kevin’s found some friends. They don’t even seem to mind that he’s so much younger. It’s almost as if he has big brothers. He talks about the two of them nonstop.” She grinned at Sean. “Except when he’s talking about you.”

“There’s nothing like having brothers,” Sean said.
“My parents taking off was bad enough, but in some ways losing my brothers was worse. We were best buddies, especially Ryan and me. Mikey was a couple of years younger than me, four years younger than Ryan, but he trailed around after us whenever we’d let him.”

“What about the twins?” Deanna asked. “You never say much about them.”

“It was different with the twins,” Sean recalled. “They were still practically babies when Mom and Dad left—barely two years old. From the time they came home from the hospital, Ryan and I used to take one each and feed them, first their bottles, then that yucky stuff that passes for real food.” He shuddered at the memory. “If I don’t ever again see another jar of mashed peas or carrots, it will be too soon. I’ve never seen a worse mess in my life than those two could make having lunch.”

“You sure that’s not the real reason you don’t want to have kids of your own?” Deanna asked lightly.

“Baby food?”

She laughed. “No. I was thinking of the way babies are when you’re feeding them. You realize just how dependent they are on you. It can be scary.”

Sean thought back to the way he’d felt holding his baby brothers, as if he really were somebody’s hero. If anything, that emotion was the one reason he could see in favor of having kids. It was all the rest—the terrifying fear of letting them down—that kept him single and childless. Instead, he’d settled for being a different kind of hero, one who never had to risk his heart, just his life.

“I suppose,” he said eventually.

She seemed to sense she’d pushed him far enough. “So how’s the search going for Michael?” she asked.

He shrugged, as uncomfortable with this topic as he had been with the one before. Despite how well the reunion with Ryan had gone, he had mixed feelings about the search for Michael. Most of the time he pushed it completely out of his mind. “I have no idea,” he admitted. “I haven’t heard from Ryan lately.”

Deanna regarded him with obvious surprise. “You could always call him or stop by to see him, couldn’t you? Didn’t you say he owns a pub?”

“Yes, but…” He really didn’t have a good explanation for why he’d been avoiding his brother. He was pretty sure it had something to do with the overwhelming feeling of happiness that had swamped him when Ryan had first come back into his life. He didn’t trust that kind of emotion. It never lasted. He supposed a part of him was waiting for his brother to keep reaching out to him. Maybe he needed proof that Ryan was back in his life to stay.

Or maybe it was flat-out jealousy that Ryan had found something with Maggie that Sean wouldn’t allow himself to feel.

“I’d like to go sometime,” Deanna said.

He stared at her. “Go where?”

“To your brother’s pub. I love Irish music. I imagine they have it there.”

“On weekends,” he admitted, still struggling with the fact that she’d actually initiated the idea of getting together with him.

She kept her unflinching gaze leveled on him. “Will you take me sometime?”

“What are you trying to do, Deanna?”

“Ask you on a date,” she said, her expression innocent. “Wasn’t I clear enough?”

He studied her suspiciously. “What if I said I’d take you to some other pub in the city?”

“Then I’d say you’re avoiding your brother,” she responded. “And you certainly wouldn’t want me to get an idea like that, would you?”

He chuckled at the tidy trap she’d sprung. Until he’d met Deanna, he’d had no idea how many traces of cowardice lurked inside him. “No, I suppose not. I imagine you can be a real nag when you set your mind to it.”

“I can,” she agreed proudly. “I learned from Ruby.”

Sean held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “We’ll go the first weekend I’m off,” he said.

To his surprise, instead of feeling trapped, he felt a faint stirring of genuine anticipation. Maybe Ryan didn’t have to be first to reach out. He’d been the one who’d searched for and found Sean, after all. And he had asked Sean to be the best man at his wedding. Maybe it was Sean’s turn to take a risk and keep the lines of communication open.

He met Deanna’s penetrating gaze, saw the warm approval in her eyes and realized that there could be yet another benefit to taking a tiny chink out of the wall around his heart. Eventually there just might be enough room for a woman like Deanna to squeeze through.

J
oey had promised Deanna she could have Friday night off to go to Ryan’s Place with Sean, but on Friday at three o’clock, he called her at the law office and said he needed her to come in after all. Deanna thought of how hard she’d had to work to get Sean to agree to go to his brother’s pub in the first place and felt her heart sink.

“Joey, you can’t do this to me. You promised,” she said.

“I’m desperate,” Joey countered. “Pauline’s sick.”

“What’s wrong with her?” Deanna asked, instantly concerned. Joey’s wife had struggled for years with diabetes. Sometimes when things got especially hectic at the restaurant, she forgot to take her insulin.

“Just a cold, but it’s wiped her out. I don’t want her coming in here, and she shouldn’t be handling orders and sneezing all over the customers, anyway.”

Deanna sighed. She could hardly argue with that. “Okay, I’ll work.”

“I’ll make it up to you, I swear it,” Joey promised. “Next week you can have the whole weekend off. Catch up on your beauty sleep.”

“Next week’s no good,” she said at once, at least not for her plan to get Sean to visit his brother. She knew by now that Sean worked every other weekend. “I want the weekend after next. Guaranteed, okay?”

“Guaranteed. You’ve got it,” Joey said.

“Put that in writing with a penalty clause for cancellation,” she said wryly. At least thanks to working in a law office, she’d picked up a few hints about protecting her rights.

“What?” Joey asked blankly.

Deanna laughed as she imagined trying to enforce such a guarantee, even if she got Joey to sign it. “Never mind. I’ll see you in an hour.” As soon as she’d hung up, she drew in a deep breath, picked the phone back up and called Sean.

“I have to cancel tonight,” she blurted when he picked up. “But I think you should go, anyway.”

“Why do you have to cancel?” he asked, sounding suspicious. “Did you ever intend to go in the first place or was this all some scheme to make sure Ryan and I don’t lose touch?”

“Of course not,” she said indignantly. “I don’t scheme.”

“Okay then, why are you canceling at the last minute?”

Deanna had a feeling he wasn’t going to be much happier about the real reason she was backing out. “I have to work at Joey’s,” she admitted, then added, “His wife’s sick.”

“And there’s no one else he could call?” Sean asked, his skepticism plain. “There’s at least one other waitress there that I know of.”

“Adele never works weekends,” she explained, referring to Joey’s one other nonfamily waitress. “It’s usually Pauline and me. With Pauline sick, Joey’s in a bind.”

“Just this once, don’t you think he could have called Adele first?” Sean asked.

She saw no reason to explain why Adele always had weekends off, that she cared for an ailing husband on the days insurance wouldn’t pay for a nurse. “It’s not a big deal. I don’t mind pitching in.”

“You need time off,” Sean countered. “And we had plans.”

There was an odd note in his voice she couldn’t interpret. “Are you more upset because I have to work or because I have to postpone our visit to the pub?”

“Both,” he insisted. “I told Ryan we were going to be there, and I also know that you’re stretched to the limit. You need a night off.”

“Sean, you can go to the pub without me. You and your brother can spend a little time together. I’ll meet him in a couple of weeks,” she said reasonably.

“And the break you need? When are you going to squeeze that in?”

Deanna lost patience. “When I can,” she said tightly. “Sean, my life is not one of your projects.”

“I don’t have projects,” he said tightly, clearly exasperated. “And I don’t need this.”

“Well, neither do I,” she retorted angrily. “I have enough on my plate without having to defend myself to you.”

She hung up without listening to his response. Judging from the angry tone, it wasn’t the apology he owed her, anyway.

All evening long Deanna kept expecting to look up and see Sean walk through the door. When there was no sign of him, she told herself it was for the best. She’d been running her life reasonably well for a long time now. She didn’t need some man swooping in and forcing changes on her that
he
thought were for her own good.

Despite her rationalization, she was still feeling sick at heart when Joey dropped her off in front of Ruby’s at ten-thirty.

“Thanks again,” he said as she got out of the car. “I’m really sorry about having to call you today and ruin your plans.”

“Stop apologizing. I told you it wasn’t a problem.”

“Then why have you spent the entire evening looking as if you lost your best friend? You and Sean had a fight about this, didn’t you? I know how upset he gets over the long hours you put in.”

Typical of Joey to develop insight and sensitivity when she had something she didn’t want to discuss.

“I’ll talk to him,” Joey offered when Deanna kept silent. “I can explain.”

“No, you’ll stay out of it,” she countered.

“But he’s a good guy. I like him. So does Paulie. She’ll kill me if she thinks I did anything to mess up your relationship with the guy. And since all this happened because she was out sick, she’ll be even more upset.”

“Sean and I don’t have a relationship,” she said, not entirely sure how to describe what they did have. It seemed to be evolving from day to day.

Or at least it had been. She sighed.

Joey frowned. “I really think I’d better talk to him.”

“No, absolutely not. Now stop worrying and go home and check on your wife. Give her my love.”

“I’ll wait till you get inside,” Joey insisted. “Blink the lights like always, so I’ll know you’re safe.”

Deanna leaned down and kissed his cheek. “You are such a worrywort. Good night.”

As soon as she reached Ruby’s apartment, she blinked the lights, then turned and looked directly into Sean’s solemn face. Her heart leaped into her throat. She wasn’t entirely sure whether it was because he’d just scared the daylights out of her or because she was overjoyed to see him. She decided to go with the fear factor.

“What on earth are you doing inside my apartment lurking in the shadows? You scared me half to death,” she said.

“Sorry.”

He didn’t seem very sorry. “How long have you been here?” she asked.

“About an hour.” He’d been sitting on the edge of the sofa, but he stood up now, took a step toward her, then stopped as if he was uncertain what to do next.

“Where’s Ruby?”

“She went out with Hank. Kevin’s asleep in the bedroom.”

Deanna tried to process the fact that Ruby had left her son with Sean without checking with her first. Not that it was a problem, other than the fact that it was one more thing Sean could hold over her head. She recognized the reason for his knee-jerk reaction to
anything he considered neglectful, but it always hurt when the accusation surfaced—spoken or unspoken.

“You’re pretty high-priced for a baby-sitter. What am I paying you?”

He frowned at her attempt at levity. “Don’t even go there.”

Something in his tone warned her he wasn’t in a joking mood. She bit back another jibe and said simply, “I’m amazed Kevin went to bed knowing you’re here.”

He grinned at that. “He was already asleep when I got here.”

“Ah, that explains it.”

He jammed his hands in his pockets in a gesture she’d come to realize meant he was uncomfortable. “So,” he said, not quite meeting her gaze. “You want some coffee? I made a pot. I had a feeling it might be a long night.”

“Oh?”

“I figure we’ve got a few things to hash out.”

She studied him curiously. “Such as?”

“Why you get so uptight just because I’m concerned about you. Why I insist on acting like a horse’s behind when you don’t fall in with my plans.”

Deanna bit back a grin. “You’re right. I’ll take that coffee. If we’ve got all that to discuss, it could be a long night.”

She led the way into the kitchen, took two mugs from the cupboard and poured the coffee. “I brought home a couple of pieces of Joey’s lemon meringue pie,” she said, holding up a takeout box from the restaurant. “You interested?”

His expression brightened. “Sure.”

Deanna set one piece in front of him but put the second piece in the refrigerator.

“You’re not eating any?” he asked.

“Just a bite of yours,” she said, pulling two forks out of the drawer. “I’m not that hungry. Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” he said.

He leaned back and watched while she proceeded to eat most of the slice. A few minutes later Deanna stared at the empty plate with chagrin. “Why on earth didn’t you stop me?”

“There’s something kind of erotic about a woman with a healthy appetite,” he said.

“Even when she’s stealing the food off your plate?”

He leaned forward and wiped a crumb from the corner of her mouth. “Even then,” he said solemnly, his gaze locked with hers. “I’m sorry, Deanna.”

Her head seemed to be spinning. “For?”

“Trying to run your life. I know it’s not my place, but I hate seeing what all this work is doing to you.” He traced a finger under her eyes. “You’re exhausted. The proof’s right here.”

“That’s no way to lift a woman’s spirits,” she pointed out.

“I have to call ’em like I see ’em.”

She sighed. “Sean, I realize you only take on my lifestyle because you care. I suppose I’m just not used to anyone besides Ruby caring whether I’m worn-out or not. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“I can’t promise to stop caring,” he said, regarding her solemnly. “But I’ll try to stop hassling you.”

“That would be nice,” she said. “And I’ll try to
stop overreacting when you lose your head and do it again.”

He gave her a rueful look. “You’re so sure I’ll forget my promise?”

“I’m certain of it,” she said. “But, oddly enough, I think that’s one of the things I like best about you.”

“Care to name any of the others?”

She laughed, suddenly feeling better. “Stop fishing for compliments.”

“You know, Deanna, one of these days we’re going to have to deal with the real issue between us.”

She swallowed hard at the suddenly solemn expression on his face. “What issue is that?” she asked, not entirely sure she wanted to know.

“The fact that I want you,” he said simply.

Desire curled through her like the warmth of a fire on a cold winter night. She refused to let herself look away from the heat in his eyes. “I guess that’s plain enough,” she said, her voice unsteady despite her best efforts to seem blasé.

A smile tugged at his lips. “You’re not going to admit it, are you?”

“Admit what?”

“That you want me, too.”

She drew herself up and inquired in her best imitation of a haughty princess speaking to a peasant, “Whatever gave you that idea?”

To her surprise, Sean laughed.

“Nice try, darlin’, but you’re not going to win any prizes for your acting.”

“I am not acting,” she said irritably.

“One kiss says otherwise.”

“Are you daring me to kiss you, Sean Devaney?”

“Yep.”

“Well, you can just forget it. I don’t have to prove anything to you.”

“Then you don’t mind if I go right on believing what I want to believe?”

She leveled a look straight at him. “Up to you. I can’t control what you think.”

“But you can prove me wrong,” he countered mildly. “Or rather, you can try.”

“That is so…” She couldn’t think of a word to describe just how low she thought he’d sunk, but finally settled on the first one that came to mind. “Juvenile. That’s what it is, juvenile.”

He didn’t seem especially offended by the accusation. In fact, he merely shrugged. “I’ve been called worse.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

She studied him suspiciously. “About?”

“What the hell did your ex-husband put you through to make you so suspicious of all men?”

The question caught Deanna completely by surprise. Sean had never shown any interest in her relationship with Frankie before. And her ex-husband was not a subject she liked discussing.

“Isn’t it enough that he walked out before Kevin was born and left me on my own?”

“That’s pretty rotten,” Sean agreed. “But I have a feeling it was more than that.”

“Such as?”

“Why waste time with me speculating? I’m asking you for an explanation.”

Deanna thought back to her brief marriage. She’d gone into it with stars in her eyes, convinced she was madly in love and that Frankie felt the same way.
Barely eighteen, she had defied her parents, walked away from a promised college education, given up everything and everyone to be with the charming rogue who’d stolen her heart.

But Frankie had been after more than her heart. To Deanna’s everlasting embarrassment, she finally realized he’d been after her trust fund. That money was the only reason he’d been willing to make a commitment to her. After the wedding, when he’d finally understood there was no way either of them were going to get their hands on it, he’d lost interest and moved on to someone a little older, a little richer, someone whose parents hadn’t disowned her.

The humiliation had been almost unbearable. There was no way Deanna could bring herself to crawl back to her parents to ask for help, which, of course, was precisely what Frankie had assumed she’d do. To this day she doubted he knew the dire straits in which he’d left her.

Despite Ruby’s urging her to tell her folks what had happened and that they had a grandson, Deanna had been determined to make it entirely on her own. Though the court had awarded her child support, she’d never expected to see a dime of it, not from a man who’d expected to be supported by her family. So far she’d done a pretty lousy job of triumphing over the past, but at least she hadn’t had to listen to an endless tirade of “I told you so.” One day, when she was really and truly back on her feet, she would contact her parents, but not now.

In the meantime, there were all those scars, the ones that made her question her judgment, the ones that made her distrust all men. Not that anyone could pos
sibly be after her for her money now, she thought, barely stifling a laugh.