“Come now, Rory. You’re a sensible girl. And Tessa has seen to it that you have been most thoroughly warned.”
“As if I would believe anything she had to say without giving you a chance to defend yourself.”
“I can’t. All that she said was basically true.”
Was it? Rory wasn’t so sure. Perhaps it was enough that Zeke believed it to be. No matter how bitterly Tessa accused, no one condemned Zeke any more than he did himself. Rory could read it in his eyes, a sentence of eternal damnation.
“I still don’t want you to go,” she said.
“Forgive me, Aurora Rose, but I fear I am in no mood to take up where we left off when we were interrupted.”
His dry reference to that passionate moment on her sofa caused Rory to blush hotly. “I never expected you to.” She faltered. How could she explain to him what she hardly understood herself? That she just couldn’t let him leave this way, in a far worse case than when she had brought him home.
“It’s a long way across town. You look so tired. I would offer to let you use my Da’s bed, but I already gave it away to Tony’s grandpa. But you could spend the night on my sofa. It’s quite comfortable, and I am sure everything will seem so much better in the morning.”
As his brows arched upward in surprise, she blurted out, “I can’t bear the thought of you going back to that great empty house of yours.”
“It’s not empty. I have twenty-three servants.” Despite the irony of his reply, his lips curved into the semblance of a smile. His eyes softened with something akin to gratitude. Retreating, he dropped his coat back on the chair.
Rory had actually tucked a blanket around him, Zeke thought with some bemusement as he lay flat on his back on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. And she had pressed a kiss to his forehead before turning down the lamps and retreating to her own bedroom at the back of the flat.
Now the parlor was lost in shadow and silence, only the moonlight providing patches of illumination, the only sound an occasional clatter of coach wheels from the street below. The darkness and the quiet oppressed Zeke. He wished he had been more responsive to Rory’s kindness. She probably thought him damned ungrateful, which was far from the case.
No matter how great his misery, he only had to think of her and he found himself able to smile. She was a bit of a hoyden, his Rory, taking crazy risks up in the sky and on the streets of New York. Imagine walking alone through that warehouse district after dark. Still, she had fairly brained that one ruffian who had attacked him.
Yet for all her toughness, she had her more womanly side. He remembered the gentleness of her hands as she had pulled the blanket more snugly about him, softly bidding him good night. He could picture Rory as a mother, raising a rowdy brood of kids.
Oh, she would be quick to deal a smart slap to sticky fingers caught raiding the cookie jar, or to box the ears of squabbling siblings. But he could also imagine her mending scraped knees,brushing back tousled hair, bestowing fiercely tender kisses to soothe away childish woes.
He’d made a mistake when he believed all her nonsense about not being the marrying kind. That’s exactly what she was. She ought to be wed to someone like that Tony. For all the trouble he had caused Zeke, dragging Tessa here tonight, Zeke could tell Tony was a nice boy, an honest one with Rory’s best interests at heart. It was painfully obvious the kid was crazy in love with Rory and half-mad with jealousy.
As for Zeke Morrison, once known as Johnnie Marceone— he was nothing but a selfish bastard. Thinking back to that moment earlier on the sofa with Rory now only filled him with self-loathing. Ever since meeting Rory, he hadn’t given much consideration to anything but his own desires.
Tessa had been right to come here and warn Rory. Exactly as she had said after her own simplistic fashion—he was a bad man.
Zeke tossed restlessly, nearly dislodging the blanket Rory had tucked so carefully about him. He had to bend his knees, the sofa not quite matching him in length, but he had slept in far worse places. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had been ensconced upon the world’s downiest feather bed. No matter how exhausted he was, he knew he would get no sleep tonight.
It had been a shock seeing Tessa again. A year had gone by since he’d seen her last and she still looked ready to spit in his eye. Time had done nothing to dull her tongue. Sharp as ever, she could be more cutting than any blade that had ever nicked him in a street fight.
Maybe that was as it should be. Sadie Marceone had always been too gentle, never rebuking Zeke half enough. Perhaps it was good that she had always had Tessa to do it for her.
All Mama ever wanted was just once to hear you call her ‘mother.’ All your lousy money and you couldn’t even give her that.
Zeke flung one arm across his eyes. He could shut out the patterns of moonlight spilling through the curtains, but he couldn’t shut out those accusing words or the memories they spawned.
He could still see that day so clearly, he might well have been a kid again, all of seven years old. He had been fighting as usual. Some bigger boys had been picking on Buck Tooth Willy again, ever an object of ridicule because of his prominent front teeth.
Zeke had been stupid to challenge the older boys. He was big for his age, but they were so much bigger, members of that dreaded street gang, the Plug Uglies. But something in him had never borne much tolerance for bullies, so he had rushed to Billy’s rescue, fists flying. Billy had escaped, but the two youths had damn near busted Zeke’s head open.
They had left him on his knees in the street, blood spurting from his nose. That’s how Sadie Marceone had found him. That was the first time he ever looked up into her plump, careworn features. Even then the lines had crisscrossed a face forever old, yet her eyes, remarkable blackcurrant eyes, had been forever young.
She had fussed over him, clucking her tongue in that motherly fashion she had, and then scooped him out of the gutter, taking him back to the settlement house where she did volunteer work.
While the other ladies doled out soup to the vagrant poor of the city, Sadie took him back into the kitchens, cleaned up his nose and applied ointment to his cuts.
Looking back on it now, Zeke was surprised that he had let her, half-wild savage that he had been, subsisting mostly off the leavings of garbage cans like some stray dog. Perhaps it had been because Sadie was the first woman he remembered ever being kind to him. Most ladies had eyed him askance, as though they thought he meant to steal their purses, or, worse yet, they hadchased him with the business end of a broom for bringing his dirty person too near their own pampered darlings.
As she tended his hurts, her work-roughened hands had been gentle, her broad smile warmer than the fire blazing in the coal stove.
