Luck of the Irish: Complete Edition (15 page)

He pulled her closer and she leaned her head on his shoulder. She relished the warmth and the feeling of safety that radiated from Declan, enveloping and cocooning her from any danger. She remembered something that had been hovering at the back of her mind since he had appeared in her room the day before. She sat upright to face him. Her eyes sparkled like a pair of sapphires.

“What the hell are you doing in Cork, Declan Slane?”

“
Now
you ask me that?” he laughed.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m grateful you are here, but I never asked you why you came down to Cork. I was just too relieved you did.”

“Well, the answer to ‘why’ I came to Cork is quite a long one. The short version is that I missed you.”

His hands tried to pull her back into his strong arms, but she resisted him.

“Oh, no, mister. You won’t distract me so easily this time. I want to know exactly what happened and we don’t have anywhere else to go today. Spill it!”

As Declan searched for words to best start explaining his reasons to go to Cork, there was a knock on the door.

“Room service,” a voice announced.

“I heard your sigh of relief, young man. You won’t escape this conversation,” Keira pointed an angry finger at him as she stood up and walked to the door.

Declan was right behind her. He got the tray while she signed the order and tipped the man at the door. When he put it down on the table by the bed, she poured the tea. They started eating and she found out she was hungrier than she had expected to be.

“Well, Declan Slane, why did you decide to come down here?”

“I told you my brothers and I had an awful childhood, remember? I said I’d tell you everything about that in person.”

She nodded without taking her eyes off of him. He sighed and hesitated.

“There are so many things about my past I want to tell you, Keira, so much pain. I don’t know where to start.”

“The beginning is usually a nice place to start,” she whispered, then, encouraged him with a smile. “But I understand if these memories are too painful for you, Declan. Just give me a short, less hurtful, version of the facts. ”

“I want you to know exactly what happened, though,” he sighed, putting his cup down on the table.

Keira had also finished her breakfast so they got comfortable sitting on the bed, resting against the pillows. He held her hands and she played with his fingers.

“My father was an alcoholic and a gambler. Luckily for him, his family had enough money to support his vices. When he met my mother, she was this sweet and beautiful young woman. He was attracted to her innocence and grace, probably because they were traits he never found in the people surrounding him. His parents were delighted with the idea of him settling down and starting a family. He started a family right away but never got to the settling down part. Even after my two older brothers and I were born, my father never saw himself as the provider of our family. He relied on his parents’ money for that, while he was too busy pursuing other interests, like women, gambling, and booze.

My mother tried to work but he never allowed her out of the house for more than a couple of hours - time enough to run the household errands and return to the place ‘where she belonged’, as he used to say. Don’t get me wrong, Keira. My mother loved us deeply, but she wasn’t a happy, fulfilled woman.

Father would spend most nights out, in the pubs, drinking his family’s allowance or losing it in the darts and on women. When he got home, hammered and broke, he was all too eager to take his frustrations out on us. My mother was his constant and favorite punching bag. He would beat her up and, if any of my older brothers tried to come between them, he’d beat them up, too.”

“How awful! I’m so sorry, Declan,” Keira couldn’t keep her indignation to herself.

“The worst part was that he used to make my mom think she had done something wrong to deserve that kind of treatment. After a while, my brothers and I would run and hide whenever we saw our father clenching his fists. We would run to our bedroom and I would hide under my bed.”

Keira held his hand between hers, taking it to her lips and kissing it.

“You don’t need to go on, if it’s too much. I get the picture,” she suggested when his face screwed up and he seemed in pain.

“Thanks, honey, I can do this. I have to do this,” he kissed her forehead and laced their fingers together. “One night, when I was six, my brothers were out of the house when the fighting started. I hid in my usual spot under the bed for a while. When I heard crashing sounds and my mom’s screams coming from the living room, I ran there. I froze at the doorway when I saw mom lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He had thrown her against the crystal cabinet smashing it to pieces. The shards of glass had cut her everywhere and she was bleeding. I didn’t know what to do.

Before I could move, my father heard me. He turned to me and I thought he had a fever or something. His face was red and his eyes were burning. He walked towards me while my mother shouted to me to go back to my bedroom. My limbs were heavy as lead, though. I couldn’t move. Suddenly, something snapped in my head. I hurled at my father, kicking and screaming. I was terrified my mom would wind up dead in his hands. I thought I could save her if I hit him hard.”

He stopped and Keira threw her arms around his neck, pulling him into an embrace and holding him tight.

“Declan, please, stop it. I get it,” she whispered as she kissed his damp cheeks.

“No, Keira, you don’t. I didn’t get it, either, at the time,” he gave her the saddest smile she had ever seen. “It took me years to start understanding what happened that night. To be honest, I’m not sure I will ever understand it completely.”

“You were only six. What could you have done?”

“I punched his thigh, which was the highest I could reach. He grabbed me by the neck and squeezed it. I gasped and heard my mom’s weak pleas for him to stop. Then, I passed out. Later, I found out that Jennifer’s parents had heard the commotion. They had come in just in time to take me from my father’s hands. They called the police, but, by the time the ambulance arrived, my mother had bled to death.”

“Did he go to jail for that?”

“The police said there wasn’t enough evidence to rule out accidental death. There were signs of a struggle, but no records of previous complaints. Mom had never pressed charges against him for the many times he had assaulted her. Besides, his family had a lot of money. I don’t know how much effort the police put into finding out if he were a murderer.”

“Oh, my God, Declan,” she squeezed his hands. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Thank you, sweetie,” he cupped her face and kissed her softly. “But it isn’t over.”

“What? How come?”

“Without mother around, he got worse. He drank and gambled more. A little after her passing, he started bringing women to the house, too. They were mostly prostitutes he paid to keep him company. They wore my mom’s clothes and stole her things. It was very painful for me, and my brothers, to see our mother’s memory being defiled like that. Without my mom’s protection, my brothers and I became the ones he’d beat up whenever he felt like doing so. He didn’t even pretend to have a reason anymore.

After a couple of years, my father married a woman he had met during a trip to London. Her name was Sally. She was Irish - from Limerick. My brothers and I thought things would finally improve for us because she was a great lady. I was almost nine when they married, and a little over eleven when she left him. First time he raised a hand at her, she was out the door.”

“Smart woman!”

“That was the thing, Keira, she was. She also tried to teach a lot of things to me and my brothers. We weren’t an easy bunch to deal with, as you can imagine.”

“I can.”

“I was the worst one of all. I didn’t want a new mother. I wanted my own mother back, which was impossible. I blamed Sally for that. She was patient and never gave up on me. Just when I was starting to trust her, open up to her, my father blew it and she dumped him.”

“You must have been devastated.”

“I was sad to see her go, but I was angrier at my father for having scared her off like that. Another effect of Sally’s influence over me was that I admired her. When she left my father, that admiration led me to start questioning my mother’s choices. I couldn’t understand why she had stayed with a man like my father. Not understanding her made me resent her, which made me feel guilty and even angrier.”

“She loved your father. She also loved you and your brothers. She wouldn’t have abandoned you.”

“Yet, I felt as if she had abandoned me. I know it sounds insane, but deep inside me I felt like she had made the worst mistake by sticking with him. I used to think that if she had had the courage to leave my father, she would have offered us a better life away from all that we had to suffer in his hands.”

“You don’t know that. No one does.”

“As a boy, I didn’t know that, Keira. In fact, none of those feelings were clear to me, back then. I sorted them out as I grew older. At that time, I only felt the hatred and the frustration. Most of all, I hated the fact I couldn’t do anything to fix my situation. So, I acted out. I didn’t study. I hung out with the wrong crowd. Jennifer was the only person who saw my act for what it truly was – a cry for help. Luckily, she was also the only person I listened to and she always had a lot to say to me about my attitude. She saved me from myself.”

“I have to remember to thank her for that,” Keira joked to lighten up the situation.

“She’ll love for you to do that. Well, long story short, after Sally left, my father didn’t remarry, but had a series of girlfriends, who got younger as he got older. They only stayed until he started beating them up. My brothers left home as soon as they got their jobs, but stayed in Cork. I wanted to go as far away as I could. Jennifer moved to Dublin to go to college. My life became unbearable without her around to keep me grounded. That’s why I moved to Dublin when I was seventeen.”

“Gosh, Declan, I am so sorry you suffered like that. I wish I could make it all go away,” she whispered as she pulled him for a quick kiss.

She meant to soothe his pain from those memories but she forgot her good intentions as soon as her own body reacted to his proximity. She ran her fingers through his hair. He held her close against his chest, splaying his big hands over the small of her back. Even through the layers of clothing, Keira felt his heart pounding. It was going as fast as hers. He savored her lips without hurry. She melted in his arms, feeling electric shocks traveling through her nerve endings. She kissed him back, hungrily, until they couldn’t breathe. He released her mouth, she gasped. He leaned his forehead against hers and smiled into her eyes.

“Believe me, Keira, there’s nothing I’d like more than to let you make my pain go away, but not today. I’ll gather the last shreds of self-control I still have, I’ll get up from this bed, and take a shower.”

“But you still haven’t told me why you came to Cork.”

He stopped at the bathroom door, turned to her and smiled, “I need to cool off, Keira. When I finish, we’ll go out for a walk, and I’ll tell you the rest of the story in a public place. I don’t trust myself to be locked up in a bedroom with you like this. I’ll end up doing something I shouldn’t do.”

His meaning dawned on her as she heard him turn on the shower. She blushed and giggled as she stood up and opened the closet door to look for some clothes. She smiled at her reflection on the mirror, holding a dress in front of her body. It was perfect.

* * * *

“Thank you for convincing me to get out of that room. It’s such a beautiful day.”

“You’ve been lucky. Sunny days are rare in Ireland,” he looked at her but Keira didn’t notice.

They were lying on the grass at Fitzgerald Park, not too far from the fountain. The air was warm and the breezy carried music and the sounds of children playing nearby. He propped himself up on one elbow, resting his head on one hand and observed her for a while. She didn’t move a muscle. He got a leaf of grass and teased her nose with it. She fanned her hand in front of her face thinking it was an annoying insect. When Declan drew the shape of her lips with the leaf, she opened one eye, frowning at him.

“What?” he hid the leaf of grass but his guilty expression gave him away.

“Are you for real? I was enjoying a bit of sun. Why did you have to do that?”

“I couldn’t resist. You looked yummy,” he leaned and pecked her lips.

Keira sat up straight and moved to cradle Declan’s head on her lap, playing with his hair.

“Are you ever going to finish telling me how you got to my hotel yesterday?”

“I guess I’ll have to or you’ll never let me be,” he sighed, pretending to be upset, and laced his fingers through hers. “After you left Dublin, I was a wreck. I didn’t sleep or eat well. I was absent-minded. I couldn’t put a finger on why I felt like that and told myself I was worried you were driving alone. That was part of the reason. The truth was I missed you, every second of the day. Harry, Màire, and Jennifer pointed that out to me many times. Harry and Màire got really pissed off at me, because I was messing up at work, and they had to do my job as well as theirs. They actually told me to get my act together or else.”