Heated Rush - Leslie Kelly [23]
“Come.”
“All right,” she finally murmured, wondering if she’d have time to go out shopping for yet another dress. “Thursday it is.”
Before he could respond, their food began to arrive. Annie deliberately met Sean’s eye as she lifted a quesadilla to her mouth. Licking her lips, she bit into it, and saw his huge grin in response. Now it was official.
But she wasn’t ready to let him completely off the hook yet. “Sean?” she murmured after she’d finished it.
“Yes?”
“You do realize that if this is number one, and Thursday is number two…our third date is going to be back on the farm where we’re surrounded by my entire family?”
The man’s mouth opened and quickly snapped closed. His broad shoulders slumped the tiniest bit as he sat back in the booth, eyeing her across the expanse of the table. He mumbled something under his breath, reached for his beer, then obviously noted the sparkle in her eye. “Brat.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger.”
He didn’t give up. “How late do you have to work Friday?”
Seeing right through him, she replied, “Late. I’ll be at the center, surrounded by lots—and lots—of screaming babies.”
This time there was no mistaking the words that came out of his mouth.
“Bloody hell.”
4
“FATHER SAW YOUR picture on the Chicago paper’s Web site. Do you pay off reporters to splash your face in the society pages, just to infuriate him?”
Sean’s twenty-year-old sister hadn’t even said hello when he’d answered her call Thursday afternoon. She’d simply gone straight to the point, amusement lacing her tone.
“Hello to you, too, Moira.”
“A charity bachelor auction? I thought he was going to choke on his morning biscuits.”
“He’s all right, though?” Sean asked, grudgingly concerned. The old man was a pain in the arse, but he didn’t actually wish him ill. He just wanted him to concede that simply because he had supplied the sperm to impregnate Sean’s mother, and had then paid her off to stay out of Sean’s life, that didn’t mean he owned his son, mind, body and soul.
“He’s fine. Ranting and raving about the house, wondering why you haven’t given up this foolish playboy lifestyle and come home to ‘take your rightful place’ in the family.”
“That’s never going to happen,” Sean said, running a frustrated hand through his hair. He sat on the edge of his bed, a huge, king-size monstrosity only to be found in America. It dominated the bedroom of the elegant hotel suite. “You’d think he’d have figured that out after all this time.”
“Oh, I’m sure he has. He misses you dreadfully. He’s just too proud to say so.”
No doubt about that. Their father was old school, all the way, and refused to admit defeat. Ever.
Sean had always known that, growing up on the family estate in County Wicklow. Traditions ran as deep and thick as the stone walls of the Murphy family home. The air within it smelled of the building’s two-hundred-year history and carried a weight of responsibility that had suffocated Sean from the moment he’d been old enough to understand the words “our family name.”
But it wasn’t until he’d turned twenty-one and learned just how demanding the old man could be that he’d realized he had to get away. Because on that birthday, his father had informed him that he’d arranged Sean’s marriage. Sean’s father and his oldest friend had hatched up a union between their children before said children had even taken their first steps, like some pair of feudal kings out of the Dark Ages.
It still boggled the mind.
“Do you think he’s learned his lesson?” Moira asked, sounding almost tentative. “I mean, I turn twenty-one in the fall. And Maureen’s younger brother James is still single.”
Maureen was Sean’s supposed fiancée who, he heard, had married a few years ago and was living quite happily in Galway.
“James was such a bully when we were kids. Dad wouldn’t…”
“Hell, no, he wouldn’t,” Sean snapped. “He might not be able to admit that he was bullheaded and stubborn