Kathleen O'Brien - A Self-Made Man

“Really what, Lacy?” His eyes met hers.

“It’s just that… This bad-boy-redux act is a bit much, don’t you think?” She tapped his knuckles one at a time. “See? No bruises. No torn, swollen skin. I’d say these hands haven’t broken any noses in a long, long time.”

He grinned. “Or maybe I’m just much better at it these days.”

She shook her head. “In that suit? I doubt it. We’re past that now, Ad—”

He flipped his hand over so fast she didn’t have time to gasp, and he caught her wrist in his palm. She looked shocked, as if she’d been carelessly touching a branch that turned out to be a snake.

“Don’t kid yourself, Lacy,” he said, bending across Prescher Senior’s toy-block kingdom, not caring if he crushed a tower or two. “We’re not past anything. I told you—this is just a uniform. Pockets full or empty, I’m still the same man, and I still don’t care much for snobs. Or hypocrites, no matter how slick and pretty they are.”

She was rallying, but the effort was costing her. He watched the column of her throat adjust as she swallowed her natural reactions of both fear and anger. Her blue eyes lost their strain, rounding instead in an artificially mild enquiry.

“Dear me,” she said softly. “How frighteningly macho…. Should I look into acquiring a helmet and face mask—to protect my own nose?”

He considered for a moment, studying the perfectly shaped nose in question. “No need,” he said finally, letting his words stretch and grow uncomfortably warm and familiar. “If I decide to tackle you, Lacy, I’ll be targeting a spot considerably father south.”

She was going to slap him. He saw the spark flare like silver fire in her eyes, and he caught her free hand just as it began its flinching backswing. He stopped it midair, leeched the willful fury out of it with a slow relentless pressure, and then began to guide it in, toward the soft swell of her breast.

She resisted until the very last moment, and then she finally surrendered, letting him place her hand, palm down, against the blue silk of her blouse.

“There,” he said quietly, letting his hand rest atop hers, letting her deep, irregular breathing rock both palms in unison. “If I wanted you, Lacy, this is where I’d attack. Right here, where your heart used to be.”

AFTER ADAM’S VISIT, Lacy’s workday was shot. She found it difficult to concentrate on even the simplest tasks. She summoned all her tried-and-true tricks for blocking out disturbing thoughts, but nothing worked. Over and over, even in the middle of a business lunch, even while she cuddled the babies in the nursery, even while she reviewed the auction figures with Tilly, her mind kept returning to Adam.

She kept remembering the way his hand had felt against her breast, the hard look in his eyes when he called her a hypocrite. She replayed again and again, like a broken recording, the derision in his voice when he told her she no longer possessed a heart.

Well, maybe he was right. She hoped he was right. Hearts hurt. Hearts broke, and the broken pieces cut you to shreds from the inside.

“Lacy! Come back from whatever planet you’re on and add these figures up for me. You know I don’t do numbers.”

Lacy roused herself guiltily and smiled over at Tilly, who was clearly already bored with the auction accounting. Tilly hated red tape. The government, she always predicted tartly, was going to regulate charity right out of existence.

“Sorry,” Lacy said, taking the computer printout from Tilly’s hand. “I’ll do that.” She didn’t guarantee accurate results—not with Adam’s face popping up where columns of numbers ought to be—but she’d try.

Tilly tapped her fingers on the desk while Lacy entered figures into the calculator. After about a minute, the older woman stood up and started to prowl the room, stopping in front of the mirror to fidget with her towering white wig. She muttered something under her breath, then dropped onto the couch and began flipping through a magazine noisily.

Lacy knew it couldn’t last, but she keyed in numbers doggedly, trying to get as far as she could before Tilly’s patience erupted.

“I’m hungry,” the older woman broke in less than five minutes later, plopping herself onto the chair in front of Lacy’s desk again. “And we’ve got that fund-raiser dinner tonight, so you know we won’t eat until absurdly late.” She pointed to the calculator accusingly. “Can’t we do this nonsense tomorrow? Let’s go to the cafeteria. Kara told me they had a sinfully delicious chocolate pie today.”

Lacy didn’t look up. “You can’t have chocolate pie,” she said firmly. “Blood sugar.” She wasn’t worried—they had been through this a million times. Tilly had no intention of eating the pie. She just wanted to pretend she was going to—a tiny act of pseudodefiance toward the diabetes that she’d lived with—and resented—for the past sixty years. When she’d been diagnosed, Tilly had been twenty-three, a wild young beauty who had just received her pilot’s license, something that had been unheard of for young women in her social set at the time. The diabetes had grounded her for life. Typical, Tilly observed irritably whenever she talked about it. Fate hated to see anyone having too much fun.

“Well, they should make sugar-free chocolate pie,” Tilly said, tapping a pencil indignantly on the edge of Lacy’s desk. “They can’t just act as if only you young people matter. Lots of people can’t eat sugar! Why, do you know what the statistics are on diabetes in this country today?”

“No. And neither do you. You don’t do numbers, remember?” With a tolerant sigh, Lacy flipped the rocker switch at the back of her calculator. Now that the neonatal campaign had heated up, she and Tilly rarely had quiet moments alone together, so she might as well take advantage of this one.

She watched the older woman, trying to gauge her mood. She didn’t want to cause an explosion. Tilly had spent a lifetime cultivating an image as an out-spoken eccentric, and she’d lost the ability to rein in her emotions—if indeed she’d ever possessed it.

“You know, Tilly,” Lacy said carefully, “we’re going to have to talk about the private detective sooner or later.”

Tilly gave her a mulish look—the same look she’d given Lacy every time the subject had been brought up over the past three weeks. “No, we’re not.”

“Yes, we are. He’s been waiting nearly a month to hear from me on how to proceed.”

“Well, let him wait.” Tilly tugged at the hairline of her wig irritably. “He has my retainer. And I haven’t made up my mind yet. I might just want to let the whole thing drop.”

“Tilly.” Lacy leaned forward. “You know that’s not true. A month ago you said finding your daughter was the most important thing in the world to you.”

Tilly harrumphed eloquently and waved her hand in the air. “That’s just because my blood sugar went up so high that day, and I thought I was going to die. I’ve changed my mind about that, too. I don’t believe I will die after all. So there’s no need to rush into airing my dirty laundry in front of any private detective, is there?”

Lacy shut her eyes briefly, praying that her patience would hold out. She hardly knew where to begin refuting an argument as illogical and convoluted as this one.

“First of all, Tilly, you don’t have to be on your deathbed to want to reconnect with your daughter. It’s a perfectly normal urge. I’ve been doing some research, and believe me, the statistics are overwhelming. Almost every woman who has given up a child for adoption someday feels the desire to find that child. And secondly, being single and pregnant may have constituted ‘dirty laundry’ sixty years ago, Tilly, but it doesn’t today.”