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“I guess not,” Tara said slowly. She kept her gaze fixed on Ainslie’s for a second longer, as if looking for reassurance. Whatever she saw there seemed to satisfy her, and she straightened in her seat. “We’re almost there, Aunt Lee. Are you nervous?”
“I’d ten times rather be going into the ring to face Holy-field. Does that answer your question?” Ainslie put her hands gingerly to the headpiece to make sure it was straight, and managed to pull her veil sideways just as St. Margaret’s hove into view.
“Great,” she muttered. “By the time we drop you off at the side entrance I’ll be looking like a—” She blanched. “Oh, my God, it’s worse than I thought it would be. Look at all those people! Don’t they have lives?”
Oblivious to the fact that the limo windows were heavily tinted, Tara regally tilted a palm back and forth until they turned the corner and left the crowd behind. “Wow, this might actually be fun. There’s that cute usher getting off his motorcycle in the parking lot.”
“Don’t even think about it. Motorcycles are dangerous—why do you think I stopped riding them?” Ainslie said distractedly. “Okay, pumpkin, this is where you get out.”
Tires crunching over the gravelled parking lot, the limousine rolled to a stop, and almost instantly the uniformed driver was at their door. As he opened it Tara threw her arms around Ainslie impulsively, hugging her tight.
“I love you, Aunt Lee. If you’re happy, then I’m happy.”
How many times had she held this precious gift of a daughter close? Ainslie wondered, her own eyes tearing as she fiercely hugged Tara back. When her cousin Babs had died of leukemia, leaving the seven-year-old daughter she’d had out of wedlock in Ainslie’s care, she’d already been head over heels in love with the little girl. All the O’Connell clan had adored the child, and even Ainslie’s half brother Terry Sullivan had taken one look at her and handed her his heart. Tara had never wanted for love, and she had given it back in return.
But she hadn’t ever known the permanent presence of a father, and sometimes Ainslie had worried about that. Pearson would fill that void, she thought, giving Tara one last too tight squeeze.
“I’ll see you in there, pumpkin,” she said, clearing her throat and blinking rapidly. “I guess I’d better go run the gauntlet now. If your uncle Sully isn’t waiting for me on that darn red carpet, I’m going to have his hide.”
“He’ll be there.” Tara stepped out of the car, and then popped a thoughtful face back in. “Unless Megan Angelique picked today to be born. Bailey said she’s been feeling like the Goodyear Blimp these last few days.”
With a quick wave she turned and ran to the side entrance of the church, where Ainslie could see a knot of females already waiting for her. The O’Connell women, she thought fondly, catching a glimpse of her aunts Cissie and Jackie before her view was cut off by the driver closing the car door. A moment later the limo pulled sedately out of the parking lot and onto the street.
Ainslie folded her hands in the creamy satin and lace of her lap and chewed nervously at her bottom lip, wishing the day was over.
Immediately she felt a pang of contrition. Pearson had meant well when he’d arranged their wedding. He came from a different strata of society than she did—not to mention a different generation, she admitted honestly to herself—and this was the way things were done in his circle.
So how come when he finally decided to marry he picked a single mom twenty years his junior and an ex-boxer to boot? she wondered as she’d so often done before. But she knew the answer to that—at least, she knew the answer he’d given her.
“Don’t sell yourself short, Ainslie.” He never called her Lee, which was just one more instance, she supposed, of the stuffiness that Tara had referred to. “You’ve got a lot going for you. You’ve built up that derelict gymnasium of your aunt’s into a going concern, you’ve raised Tara as if she were your own child, and you even mended the relationship with your half brother, Terrence, despite the way his father left you and your mother in the lurch when you were a child. I look at you and I see strength. I admire that.”
“As long as it’s out of the boxing ring,” Ainslie hadn’t been able to resist adding, and his handsome features had relaxed into a rare smile.
“You can’t blame a man for not wanting to see the woman he loves take a beating in front of a crowd of lowlifes and riffraff, can you?”
“I prefer to think of them as paying customers, not riffraff,” she’d answered with a touch of tartness. “And I didn’t exactly stand around and take a beating, as you put it. I retired a champ, Pearson. Now I coach future champs. Boxing is an empowering sport for a lot of women.”
And it helped save my sanity two years ago, when I didn’t know if I could go on, she might have said, but didn’t. Pearson didn’t know about that part of her past. There was no reason for him to know. The girl she’d been then was dead, and the man that girl had loved was dead, too.
She hadn’t lied to Tara. The O’Connell females were one-man women. He’d been her first love, her last love, and her only love. She’d been twenty-five years old when she’d seen Malone’s coffin lowered into the cold, black earth, and she’d known that her own life had ended with his.
For a while she’d gone a little crazy, she realized now. Paul Cosgrove had been his partner, and although the government agency they both worked for was so security-conscious that it didn’t even have a name, he’d bent the rules enough to tell her that Malone had been shot in front of his very eyes. Although Paul had gotten him to a hospital, Malone hadn’t survived the head wound he’d sustained—a head wound so horrific that there had been no question of having an open coffin at the funeral.
But even hearing the terrible details of his death from the man who’d witnessed it hadn’t helped her to accept the reality of his passing.
For three whole days after his funeral she’d sat in her darkened apartment all alone, not bothering to change out of the somber black suit she’d been wearing. Only when Paul had actually pounded on her door, demanding to know if she was all right, had she roused herself enough to tell him to go away before returning to her vigil.
Because that had been what it was. For three days and three nights she’d sat, her hands folded quietly on her lap, her eyes open wide in the shadowy gloom, waiting for Seamus Malone to come back to her. Not from the dead. She just hadn’t accepted that he’d been killed. She’d been convinced it had all been some kind of insane trick.
And then on the third day she’d finally fallen into a state of semi-consciousness—not sleep, not true wakefulness, but a limbo halfway between the two. In it she’d relived every moment she’d ever had with him, from the moment they’d first met only a few weeks before, to the last time he’d left her arms. Measured in days, their time together had been cruelly short. But time was an irrelevant yardstick for what they’d had.
In two weeks they’d made a lifetime of memories.
They’d so nearly missed knowing each other at all. On a rare impulse she’d dropped by Sully’s house one night after seeing Tara off with a schoolfriend at Logan Airport. The month-long trip to Arizona had been planned for ages and Ainslie knew that the Cartwells would look after Tara as if she were their own daughter.
That night Sully had casually introduced her to his guest.
She’d stared into a pair of brilliant green eyes, and that had been it. Twenty minutes later, Malone and she had left a bemused Sullivan and had gone out to a Thai restaurant together. Two hours later they’d walked hand in hand along Beacon Street, then ended up back at her apartment and making love. The next morning, just before dawn, Malone had shakily told her he couldn’t imagine life without her.
Love at first sight really happened. They’d had it, and it had lasted, right up until the end.
On their last night together he’d asked her to marry him. She’d thrown her arms around his neck tightly enough to knock him backward onto the sofa. Half laughing, half tearfully, she’d told him yes, and in the middle of their kiss his pager had gone off. Forever after, Ainslie had wondered how things would have turned out if he’d ignored it, but wondering was futile.
He’d answered the page. He’d left her apartment a few minutes later, after one last, hard kiss and a quick grin, telling her he wouldn’t be gone long. Sometime in the hour that followed, he’d been killed.
It had been her love for Tara that had finally forced her to pick up the pieces of her shattered life and rebuild some kind of existence after Malone’s death. On the fourth day after his funeral, she’d stripped off the clothes she’d been wearing and stood under the shower until the hot water ran out. Then she’d pulled on a sweater and a pair of jeans, balled the black suit into a paper bag and thrown it down the garbage chute at the end of the hall. She’d returned to her apartment, taken a deep, shuddering breath and firmly closed a door in her mind.
But she still dreamed about him every night—saw those brilliant green eyes, that midnight-black hair, his slow smile. She hadn’t let those dreams stop her from agreeing to marry Pearson, however. Tara needed a father. Pearson wanted a wife. And what she’d told Tara a few minutes ago had been true—he was a good man, and she cared for him. He knew she wasn’t madly in love with him, but that wasn’t what he was looking for, he’d told her quietly. Mutual affection, the shared goal of creating a family of their own one day—if she could give him that, he would make sure that Tara never wanted for anything.
It was something a little more than a business agreement, something much less than a love match. And she was going through with it.
The limousine whispered to a stop in front of the red carpet. Before the driver could get out, Sully, impossibly handsome in a dove-gray morning suit with tails, was opening her door for her. He looked harassed. Behind him one of Boston’s finest was trying to keep onlookers away from the waist-high velvet ropes that created a barrier between the crowd and the carpet.
“What the hell was McNeil thinking?” he growled as he took her hand and helped her from the back seat.
“It’s like a damn circus,” she agreed, slanting her eyes sideways at the throng of bystanders just as a camera flash went off. “Let’s get into the church and get this over with.”
“My sister the romantic,” Sullivan murmured, stepping up his pace. “You should at least give them a smile, Lee. When Pearson and the rest of the McNeil clan arrived, they were glad-handing all over the place.”
“Goody for the McNeil clan,” Ainslie said tightly, almost tripping on a ruffle as she mounted the last step. Nonetheless she paused just before the open oak doors, pasting a stiff smile on her face and looking out over the milling crowd.
Sully was right—the least she could do was to be gracious. After all, these onlookers were ordinary people like herself. Most of the upturned faces were smiling at her.
But not all of them.
About to turn away to step into the church, Ainslie’s attention was caught by the incongruity of a figure at the edge of the crowd. Heavily bundled in an old army greatcoat, the derelict’s inappropriate clothing alone pegged him as odd. The knitted watch cap pulled low on his forehead only partially concealed the unkempt hair that straggled to his shoulders. His heavy beard was dark and ungroomed. He was wearing fingerless gloves, as if it was deepest winter instead of a mild autumn day. His ramshackle shopping cart was piled high with what appeared to be odds and ends of broken appliances. Riding on the top of the pile was what looked like a pair of used boots.
Although the shopping cart provided a physical barrier between him and those nearby, it was obviously unnecessary. Like so many street derelicts, there seemed to be an invisible demarcation line around him, as if drawing the attention of someone so obviously unbalanced would be dangerous.
Except there was no fear of that. His attention was fixed solely on her, Ainslie saw with a prickle of unease.
“Come on, champ,” Sully said wryly. “This is just the pre-bout warmup. The main event’s inside.”
He started to move forward, but Ainslie remained rooted to the stone steps, her grip on his arm tightening.
She could smell roses—smell them so strongly that it seemed as if she were enveloped in a perfumed fog. She knew her bouquet was inside the church; even if it hadn’t been, it was of white lilac and lilies. Yet she could smell roses—red roses—and for a moment she could almost swear she could feel cold velvet petals brush against her lips.
It wasn’t unease that was making her heart beat so madly, Ainslie thought, holding on to Sully for support. It was fear. She was going crazy, and she knew it.
The derelict’s hair was a matted tangle obscuring his eyes, but even as she watched he wiped at it with a gloved hand. Across the crowd, his gaze met hers, and she felt the blood drain from her face.
His eyes were a clear, brilliant green. She’d only seen eyes like that on one man, and that man was dead.
Abruptly the derelict turned away, wrenching his shopping cart around on two wheels so quickly that a man in a business suit had to scramble to get out of his path. Hunched over the handles, he started pushing it down the street toward a nearby alleyway.
He was trying to disguise his height, Ainslie thought faintly. He was trying to cover his features with that appalling beard, trying to become just another invisible cast-off from society with his strange assortment of clothing.
Either that, or he was exactly what he appeared to be—a lost soul, a denizen of the streets, a man who had slipped through the cracks and who had stayed there.
But she had to know.
“What the hell’s going on, sis?” Speaking out of the corner of his mouth, Sully tugged at her elbow, a faint frown creasing his brow as she turned to him. “Are you getting cold feet, or what?”
“Did you see him?” She forced the urgent question out from between lips that felt coldly numb. “Did you see him, Sully? Was it him?”
“See who?” Frowning in earnest, Sullivan looked over his shoulder from where a knot of ushers and bridesmaids waited just inside the oak doors. “What are you talking about, Lee?”
“I’m sure it’s him. See—there, with the shopping cart!” It felt like a gigantic weight was pressing down on her chest, making it hard for her to breathe. Ainslie heard the high quaver in her own voice, and turned to her half brother. “Don’t you see him, Sully?”
There was more than concern on his features now, there was alarm, and beyond him Ainslie caught Tara’s dubious look. The good-looking teenager she was standing with broke off whatever he’d been saying to her.
She was causing a scene. She was causing a scene at her own wedding, and she didn’t care, Ainslie thought desperately. It couldn’t be him—but she had to know for sure. She wrenched her arm from Sully’s grip and ran to the edge of the top step, leaning out over the black iron railing that framed it.
“Malone!”
Her hoarse cry was more of a scream, and with part of her mind she realized that the crowd had fallen silent and was staring up at her with avid curiosity. But she wasn’t concentrating on anything or anyone but the shuffling figure in the greatcoat, now almost at the entrance to the alleyway.
“Malone!” Her voice cracked on his name, and she felt Sullivan’s strong hand wrap around the lace on her upper arm. “Dammit, Malone—look at me! It’s you, isn’t it?”
“For God’s sake, Lee!” Sullivan’s voice was almost as shaky as hers. He thrust his mouth close to her ear. “Malone’s dead, sweetheart. You know that. Let’s get you inside—”
She shut out Sully’s words. The veil blew across her face and she impatiently pushed it aside, feeling the headpiece finally let go. It fell from her hair and tumbled down the top two steps. It didn’t matter, she thought as she watched the man in the greatcoat turn back to look at her from the entrance to the alleyway. Even at this distance she could see the pain etching his features.
There was no way he could be Malone, Ainslie thought faintly, her knuckles white against the iron railing as his eyes met and held hers for a heartbeat. No way at all. As Sully had said, Malone was dead.
It was him.
“Malone,” she whispered incredulously, her hand going to her mouth. She felt the hot rush of tears behind her eyes and blinked. Joy, so sweet and sharp it felt like pain, lanced through her. Unheeded, warm tears slipped down her face.
Through her blurred vision, she caught his one last, agonized glance before he turned and pushed his cart swiftly down the alleyway, his head bowed. He disappeared around a corner and was gone.
“No,” Ainslie breathed disbelievingly. “No—I won’t lose you again. I can’t have lost you!”
Breaking free of Sullivan’s grasp, she whirled desperately away from him and ran down the steps into the crowd.
Chapter Two
“For the love of Mike, Ainslie—what were you thinking of, flying down the church steps like that?”
The little change room at the back of the church was packed with O’Connell females. Jackie O’Connell Byrne, once a flawless beauty and still sexy at fifty, raised an incredulous eyebrow at her niece.
“We’ve got a packed church, an organist who’s started the wedding march twice, and one extremely patient groom out there. What we don’t have is a bride walking down the aisle.”
“Would you like me to get Father Flynn in to talk to you, dear?” Her face flooding with color, Cissie glanced meaningfully at the yards of white ruffles and lace of her niece’s wedding dress. “Is there…is there something you’d like to confess before you go through with the ceremony, Ainslie?”
“For crying out loud, of course there’s nothing she needs to confess,” Jackie snapped. “Just because you’re still hanging on to your virginity for dear life at forty-nine doesn’t mean—”
“Shut up, the both of you!”
The gravelly roar that cut through the small room came from a wiry figure clad, like Jackie, in a silk suit. But instead of a skirt, the jacket was paired with trousers in the same sea-foam green that Tara, sitting wide-eyed a few feet away, had so vocally groused about earlier. Peeking out raffishly from under the cuffed silk pants was a pair of lime high-top sneakers.
A flicker of amusement briefly overlaid the chaos of Ainslie’s thoughts as she took in the pugnacious jut of her Aunt Kate’s jaw. Even as she stood there facing down her younger sisters, she seemed to bounce a little on the balls of her feet, as if she were getting ready to take on an opponent in the ring. Her boxing days long behind her, Ainslie mused, the woman once known as Kiss of Death Katie would never be anyone’s idea of a sweet little old lady.
The rest of the O’Connell women had fallen silent. Raking an impatient hand through her cropped steel-gray hair, Kate’s gimlet gaze fell on one of Ainslie’s cousins.
“Bridie, go out and tell Father Flynn that Ainslie’s just feeling a little faint from all the excitement. Say she needs a few minutes to compose herself before the ceremony.”
“Lie to a priest, Aunt Kate?” Bridie sounded shocked.
Her aunt’s jaw jutted out even farther. “It’s not a lie. Look at the poor girl, for God’s sake. Her face is like cheese.”
“Thanks, Aunt Kate,” Ainslie murmured dryly, then wished she’d kept quiet. As Bridie reluctantly left the room, the high-tops swivelled her way.
“Lying to Father Flynn’s going to buy us ten minutes, no more, so let’s hear it, Lee. Are we scrubbing this event or what? And what was that performance in front of the church all about?”
Performance was the right word, Ainslie thought, feeling the color rise in her cheeks under the scrutiny of her three aunts and Tara’s alert glance from the corner of the room.
She’d made a complete fool of herself. She’d heard cameras clicking like crazy all around her, had seen Susan Frank, News Five’s roving reporter, elbow her way toward her like a stevedore in high heels, and had felt one of her own satin shoes catch in a billowing ruffle.
She hadn’t fallen for the same reason that she hadn’t been able to go any farther. The crowd had just been too thick. As Susan Frank, microphone thrust out in front of her, reached her, sanity had suddenly washed over Ainslie in a cold wave.
Of course it wasn’t Malone, she’d thought stupidly. How crazy can you get, O’Connell? Malone’s dead. You’re running after a ghost.
“And here we were hoping to surprise you, sis.” Sullivan had given a rueful chuckle and tightened his grip on her arm. “We told Lee her favorite great-uncle, Paddy Malone, wasn’t up to making the trip over from the old country, Miss Frank. His heart’s not as strong as it used to be, so we didn’t want to disappoint her if he couldn’t make it at the last minute, but it looks like she spotted him. Come on, Lee, Paddy’s already slipped in the side entrance.”
If anyone could whip a choice morsel away from a shark, her half brother could, Ainslie thought now. Susan Frank had looked immediately bored, Sully had hustled her into the church and Aunt Kate had taken over from there.
But even the combined forces of the O’Connell women and Terry Sullivan couldn’t hold off the delayed wedding for much longer, Ainslie told herself. Not for the first time since she’d accepted Pearson’s proposal, she felt a pang of longing for her mother—a longing that had never really faded over the ten years since Mary O’Connell’s untimely passing.
When Thomas Sullivan, Sully’s feckless and charming father, had walked out on his second wife and his young daughter, taking his son by a previous marriage with him, at five years old she’d felt as if her world had been torn apart, Ainslie remembered. Reverting to her maiden name, Mary O’Connell had moved in with her sister Jackie’s family and the O’Connell clan had practically smothered Ainslie with love. But the lack of a father had always hurt. Even when her beloved half brother Sully had come back into her life years later, his reappearance hadn’t been able to completely make up for Thomas’s absence.
Her aunts and Sully would always be there for her, Ainslie thought, meeting Kate’s inquiring gaze. But her mother would have known without asking that she still intended to go through with this wedding. She wanted Tara to have the one thing she’d missed out on—the presence of a stable father figure in her life.
“We’re not scrubbing this event, Aunt Kate.” She forced a smile and smoothed down a ruffle. “You were the one who taught me to leave the butterflies outside when I stepped into the ring. I—I guess I just forgot that for a minute.”
“Is that all it was, butterflies?” Her aunt looked unconvinced, and Ainslie nodded decisively.
“Plain old-fashioned bridal nerves,” she said firmly, and saw the doubt in her aunt’s eyes disappear. “Ladies, start your engines—or at least get your butts out of here so the bride and her chief bridesmaid can make an entrance in a minute or so.”
