Page 18 of Hot Irish Halloween

“You come from a family of criminals?” Now that was interesting.

“Do you find that exciting, good girl?” Jack drawled with glittering eyes.

Damn, that was fuckinghot. She was grateful they were there, in the middle of a restaurant, where she couldn’t go over and slide right onto his lap.

The server returned again and broke the mood. Although Penny couldn’t wait for Jack to tell her his story, she was grateful to finally eat something more substantial than grapes and crackers. While she cut and ate her steak, cooked to perfection with a tenderness that literally melted in her mouth, he continued.

“My mam’s a Rourke. They’re small-time hoods here in Dublin. She decided to leave for England when she was young to ‘escape the life.’ Ended up in Manchester working in a bar whereshe met my father. Another gangster, him and his brothers,” Jack said, pausing for a bite of potato. “That’s good, innit?”

Penny tried her potato and agreed wholeheartedly. And now she understood why Jack looked different than the other men around here. Clearly the Anglo-Saxon had overpowered the Celt in his genetics.

“Anyway, four years and one baby into the marriage, Mam had enough of the Carr’s shite and decided to come back home. She found out my father had been taking me with him on his errands.”

“Damn, that’s scary. How old were you?”

“Two. Can you imagine? A gun in one hand and a toddler on your arm looking to collect? I think she loved him, but that was it for Dierdre. She packed us up and came back here to my grandparents. They helped, but they worked, too. She pretty much raised me on her own until I was about thirteen.”

“It must have been hard for her,” Penny murmured with sympathy.

“It was. And I didn’t help by being a wild little bastard. When I was twelve, I started working for her brother Redmond. He’d lived in America for a while but had to self-deport or go to jail. He chose deportation.” She laughed. “He brought me into the fight circuit to toughen me up. And then one day, Dierdre met Bran Valentine. Straight-laced, fancy education, worked in a bank that he wasn’t stealing from. You’d look at the man and think he’s soft. Wrong. It was Bran who saw where I was headed. He snatched me up by the collar and said, ‘Now, young man…’”

Crinkles appeared at the corners of Jack’s eyes at the memory. How was it possible for that to make him look even more attractive?

“He said, ‘Young man, if you don’t figure your life out, I’m gonna do it for you.’ And he took me to Charlie’s gym. They beatthe hell out of me and put the discipline in. The rest, like they say, is history.”

“Well, alright, Bran Valentine!” Penny cheered with a laugh. “What about your biological father? Are you in contact with him?”

“Oh, sure,” Jack said, wiping his mouth with his napkin. “He did come to Dublin to be with us, but he ran into trouble with the Rourkes and had to go home. I speak to him from time to time. He’s still in that life. He is who he is. He can’t change. I lived in London for a while when I was training for my first title fight, and I’d go up and see him, spend time with him, his brothers, and me aunt. Got pretty close with my cousin James. He’s in London.”

“What does James do for a living?”

Jack grinned. “He’s a criminal. And I’ve got Rourke cousins in New York. Guess what they are?”

“Criminals,” they said in unison.

“Wow,” Penny drawled, shaking her head. “Remind me to keep my hands on my purse at your family reunion.”

Jack leaned forward on the table, holding her gaze captive with his own. “That means you’ll be coming to meet me family?”

“Well, I… it was a joke,” she murmured.

“No, you should meet them. Redmond’s still around. I see his daughter Meghan a lot. She lives not too far from where we are with her twins. And you should come by when Bran’s playing the fiddle at the pub. Maybe you could even sit in and play your banjo. He’d love that.”

A rush of pleasure and anxiety flooded her at the suggestion. This was casual, right? Meeting his family would be casual. Jamming at aseisiúnwas something people did here for fun, that’s all.

But Jack’s eyes touching hers didn’t seem very casual. Penny scrambled to get the subject off her hanging out with his family and back onto him.

“Of all the things you could have done for a living, though…why fighting? Was it, like, a way of channeling aggression?” she guessed.

“Like an anger management thing?” Jack asked with a squint. He rubbed his jaw slowly. “It started off that way, yeah, sure. I was always fighting when I was a kid. Somebody said somethin’ I didn’t like —pow. They looked at me funny —pow. I settled it, no hesitation. But when I started training with Charlie, and my other teachers for Muay Thai and jiu-jitsu, I learned how to control that. Even studied Tai chi for the mindfulness.”

“Wow, so you can fuck people up fast or slow,” Penny said with raised eyebrows.

He grinned. “I can. But martial arts isn’t just about how to fuck someone up, although it helps. It’s teaching you to recognize your own worst impulses and how to defeat them. Self-control, self-respect. Optimizing your body, feeding it good food, giving it rest. It’s your entire life.”

“A spiritual thing?”

“That can be part of it too, yeah. It’s whatever you need to get out of it. When I was in that cage, it wasn’t just about what I could do to the other fella. It was how I could rise beyond my limitations. How I could be the best version of meself.”

---