The Irishman's Christmas Gamble
Page 5

“Bollocks. You always had your sights on world domination.”
“All I wanted was so much money that I would never, ever have to think about it again.”
“So you don’t think about your money?”
“You know the answer to that. Money brings its own burdens.” Even though she’d given half her fortune away by putting it into a charitable foundation, it still required substantial attention. “But you have an extra layer of pressure. You have to win.”
“Always.” His tone held undercurrents that seemed to extend the meaning beyond soccer. But his next words were light. “Neither one of us likes to lose. It’s worse than dying because you have to live with it.”
She laughed at the sports cliché and then sobered. “Has it gotten any easier, Liam?”
“On the soccer pitch, no.” He frowned into his champagne. “But there are certain situations that require patience and tolerance, so I’m learning to be less…intense.”
“What situations would those be?”
He nodded toward her plate. “Eat your caviar.”
If it were twenty-three years ago, he would have blurted out his secret to her. Liam had always been open with her, even while she had hidden the darker parts of her life from him. So it was strange to have him withhold anything, but he was a grown man now, in more ways than just the physical.
She picked up the tiny mother-of-pearl spoon and scooped up the black beads from their glass dish, dropping them onto the perfectly round, bite-size blini. Popping the blini between her lips, she let the aroma fill her mouth and then pressed her tongue upward to pop the firm eggs against her palate. They released their rich, buttery flavor of salt. Definitely Ossetra, one of the best.
“You still eat the same way,” Liam said. “With your eyes closed to concentrate on the taste.”
“Only when the food is worth the effort.” After the deprivations of her childhood, she’d had to train herself not to gulp down food. So now she chewed slowly and with attention.
He looked pleased. “I told the chef to make sure the flavors were unique and interesting. He seemed confident about everything except the dessert. I insisted on chocolate.”
“You told him who I am.”
“It will inspire him to up his game.” He took a bite of caviar, chewed, and swallowed. “Tell me about the Bellwether Club.”
She started to give him her well-rehearsed tale about the fancy clubs rejecting her because she was a woman, Irish, and new money. How she’d resolved to found her own ultra-exclusive place and make it the clubbiest damned club in New York City, open only to those who had made their ten-figure fortunes entirely from scratch. But Liam wouldn’t let her laugh about it. He drew out the pain of those rejections, took only honesty from her. And she felt lighter once she’d made the confession to him.
“What about you?” she asked, as they ate a salad of papaya, beans, and crushed peanuts with a tangy coriander dressing. “What did you thumb your nose at?”
He shook his head, making a curve of thick auburn hair fall onto his forehead. She wanted to brush it back, as she had in the old days, when she allowed herself only small touches so she wouldn’t be tempted to more. “It wasn’t sports that hurt me. For all that I hate to lose, I know that someone has to in every game.” He trapped her in the blaze of his deep blue eyes. “I kept hoping I’d hear from you. But you never answered my calls or my emails.”
“I had an international business to run in the U.S. You had an elite sports career in Europe.” It took all her willpower to keep her voice firm, just as it had taken all her willpower not to answer his calls. But she’d been afraid to talk with him, fearful that her self-discipline would collapse under the weight of her feelings for him. “What would have been the point?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Friendship?” His tone was pure sarcasm.
“You wanted more, and I didn’t have it to give.”
He leaned forward. “I’d have settled for a word every now and then. Just to know you remembered your oldest mate.”
“I have a box in my safe of every news story ever written about you, every photo ever taken, every magazine cover you were on. I know all the teams you played for, the championships you won…or lost, the contracts you signed.” The wags he’d dated, but she wouldn’t admit that to him.
Surprise and gratification danced across his face.
“I kept watching for an engagement announcement, too. You’re wealthy, famous, and good-looking. I was sure you’d be married by now.”
He seemed to flinch before he forced a smile that was meant to be wicked. “I’m glad you noticed the good-looking part.”
“I’m not dead, just disciplined.”
“Why the discipline? Don’t throw the age difference at me again. We’re both old enough so it doesn’t matter.”
“It matters because you can and should have children. You always wanted them.”
He turned to stare at the windows that reflected the flickering candle flames. “And you didn’t because you felt that all those babies destroyed your ma and took away any hope she had of a better life.”
He didn’t know how much deeper it went. She’d never told him about how she lay awake listening to her little sisters and brothers crying with hunger at night. She’d taken to giving them as much of her own food as she could without starving herself. Even being careful, she’d blacked out from hunger a few times in school. The nurse had been kind enough to blame it on low blood sugar, giving Frankie a few graham crackers to wolf down.
She’d dropped out of school to work at Balfour Chocolatiers because she couldn’t bear to see the children’s huge hungry eyes staring at her, pleading, as she ladled out the tiny portions of the dinner she’d scraped together. She didn’t tell her da about the job so she could keep the money to buy food for all of them. And every now and then she got to bring home rejected chocolates, a treat that made her siblings look upon her as nothing short of an angel.
But she still heard their thin, desperate voices, crying, in her nightmares, and it brought back the old, throat-clutching feeling that her siblings were starving, and she couldn’t save them.
She was grateful when Liam’s voice broke into those memories. “But you made more than enough money to hire all the help you needed,” he said.