The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [60]
Wrapping her shawl closer, she pushed her way through the crowd to the bar. “O’Hara,” she whispered, catching his eye, “I must talk to you.”
He nodded and after calling to the girl to take over behind the bar, he signaled Missie to go into the back room.
She paced the Turkey carpet in the narrow little parlor nervously. It was the first time she had been in his private rooms, and this was the world of a man she barely knew. The furniture was heavy and dark and had obviously been brought over from the old country. There were a few faded sepia photographs framed in gilt on the walls and two massive chairs, stuffed iron-hard with horsehair and decorated with lacy antimacassars on either side of the cast-iron firegate. The mantelpiece was covered in red velvet trimmed with a bobble fringe and a galvanized tin bucket of coal sat on the hearth, alongside a tall vase containing the wooden spills with which O’Hara lighted his cigars. Missie guessed that everything must look just the way it had in his dead mother’s house in Ireland.
O’Hara thrust aside the heavy red velvet curtain dividing the parlor from the bar. After covering the tiny room in two huge strides, he took her hands in his massive paws. “Missie, I’m real sorry. What can I say to comfort you, me girl? Only that she was an old lady and she must have had a grand life. ’Tis you I’ll be worrying about now, left all alone with the little girl.” He hesitated, then coming to a decision, he took a deep breath and said, “I’ve been thinking, Missie. Why don’t you let me look after you and Azaylee? Sure and I’ve got enough to keep you in comfort and give you a decent home. And besides, what with Prohibition threatening, I’ve already got a few other irons in the fire. There’ll be a fortune to be made, Missie, and I intend some of it to be mine. What d’you say to that?”
He grinned at her as if his idea was the simplest thing in all the world, and she stared back at him, stunned.
“But I can’t,” she exclaimed, horrified, “I can’t just live here with you. What would people think?”
“Think?” he repeated, puzzled. “Why, they’d think nothing except that you’re me wife. I’m asking you to marry me, Missie.”
“Marry?” she repeated disbelievingly.
O’Hara shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, then he suddenly folded his giant’s body and went down on one knee. His broad handsome face blushing as red as his hair, he said, “Missie, I swear I’ve niver told this to another woman except me mother, but I’m telling you I loves you. You’re the loveliest girl I’ve ever seen and you’ve got the kind of spirit that I like. I’m asking you properly to be me wife.”
Missie’s head swam. It was all wrong, a nightmare: She barely knew O’Hara and he certainly didn’t know her, he didn’t know the educated English girl who was Professor Marcus Aurelius Byron’s daughter; he didn’t know the same girl who loved Misha Ivanoff so passionately she could never forget him. O’Hara didn’t know Verity Byron! All he knew was the poor skivvy washing glasses behind his bar and eating his charity food, the “widowed” mother of a four-year-old girl, though she doubted he even believed she really was a widow. And all she knew was the charming, brawny Irishman who ran his alehouse with an iron hand. Still, Shamus O’Hara was a decent man and he had asked her honorably to marry him. Of course if she did, then her money problems would be solved: Azaylee would have a home and a father and she would have a man to look after her, someone to lean on. The idea was suddenly tempting. She closed her eyes and Misha’s face came to mind, proud and strong, his intelligent gray eyes looking directly into hers, and she knew it was all wrong. Azaylee could never have another “father” and she would never love another man.
O’Hara rose from his knees. “I can see by your face I’ve troubled you,” he said. “And at a time like this as well. I’ll be leaving you to think it over, Missie. Maybe afterward, you’ll feel more