The Irishman's Christmas Gamble
Page 8

“You’ll do,” he said, sweeping them into the elevator and through the club to the limousine waiting outside the front door.
“A limo to go sledding? That seems wrong.”
“It gets crowded at Suicide Hill so we don’t want to worry about parking.”
She slid into the car to discover a long Flexible Flyer sled resting upside down across the leather seat behind the driver. The incongruity of it made her laugh.
“You’re enjoying yourself already.” Liam sounded pleased.
“There’s only one sled. Are we taking turns?”
He scooted close to her on the seat. “We’re in this together. We’ll go faster that way.”
 

The limo driver found a spot by a fire hydrant so they could unload the sled. Liam carried it across the sidewalk to the top of the hill, where a bundled-up crowd of mostly teenagers stood waiting for an opening to head down the slope. As she and Liam joined them, Frankie looked downward to discover a steep incline dotted with trees and speeding sliders whose shrieks and laughter rang through the ice-clear air. At the bottom a line of hay bales cushioned the metal fence that guarded them from a plunge into the frigid gray waters of the Hudson River. While she watched, a sled slammed into a bare tree, spilling its rider off into the snow and dumping the snow from the tree’s branches on top of him. “This looks dangerous,” she said, releasing her breath only when the rider stood up and brushed at the splotches of white on his clothes.
“It looks like a helluva good run.” His face was lit with excitement and he rubbed his gloved hands together in anticipation. “I think it’s best if I lie down on my stomach and you lie on top of me. That will keep our center of gravity lower, so the steering is better.”
“I’d say that you’ll give me a soft cushion to land on, but there’s not much soft about your body.” And she’d be lying full-length against it. Luckily, there would be many layers of fabric between them.
His eyes blazed, but he turned back to the slope. “Ah, I think we have an opening.” He positioned the sled on the flat space at the top of the park. “I’ll get on the sled. You give us a push and then jump on top of me.”
With that he dropped to his knees and stretched out on his belly on the Flexible Flyer, his shoulders jutting out over the sides and his legs extending far beyond its end. She almost sent him down without her, but the truth was that she wanted to feel the long, solid length of him against her. “Ready?” she asked, stooping to set her hands on his waist.
“Do it!”
She dug her toes into the snow, giving Liam a sharp shove forward. Then she hurled herself on top of his back as the sled tilted its nose downward and began to move.
The runners hissed over the well-packed snow and the wind drew tears from the corners of her eyes as the sled picked up speed. But her awareness was focused on the way his hair tickled her cheeks as it blew back, the way his shoulders bunched under her hands when he yanked the sled’s steering bar right to avoid a fallen sledder, and how delicious it was to have her breasts crushed against the warm, solid wall of his back.
And then he was rolling, taking her off the sled with him just before it slammed into the protective hay bales. Now he was on top of her, braced on his forearms and laughing, while their legs tangled in the churned up snow. “A good first run, but we can do better,” he said, leaping up and hauling her to her feet before they got taken out by less controlled sliders.
He grabbed the sled’s rope and then her hand, pulling both of them over to the side for the trudge back up the slope. By the time they reached the top, she was gasping for breath.
“I see I’m going to have to get you to the gym more often,” Liam said, as she bent over, her hands on her knees.
“It’s just that you have longer legs than I do.”
When she straightened, there was no laughter on his face. “Frankie, you have to take care of yourself.”
“Do you call this mad hurtle down a slope filled with crazed teenagers taking care of yourself?”
He looked at the people launching themselves down the hill with wild enthusiasm. “Yeah, I do. Because this is the kind of pure fun I couldn’t allow myself when I was on a team. I couldn’t ice skate or ski or play basketball or rugby, for fear of getting injured. Golf was about as rough-and-tumble as it got, and even then I took care with my back. I missed playing something, anything, just for the pleasure of it.” His gaze returned to her. “What kind of fun did you get up to when you were building your empire?”
Frankie snorted. “My idea of a good time was dreaming up new kinds of chocolate bars, experimenting with flavors, fighting my way into new markets. Watching my bank account go up and up and up until I knew I would never have to return to Finglas.”
“But you did return to Finglas. You built that cooking school that’s free to kids like us.”
“I never set foot in it. I sent people I trusted to make it happen. When I got on the plane to Philadelphia, I made myself a promise that I would leave that life behind me. Even for a good cause, I wasn’t going back again.”
He dropped the sled’s rope and cupped her shoulders in his big hands. “I know it was hard for you. Your da was a right bastard, and your ma had all those kids to take care of. But we had some good times there in Finglas, you and I.”
“Once you got the scholarship for the training academy, you were gone, and I hoped to God you wouldn’t be coming back.” She hadn’t realized how hard it would be without Liam there. Not only because he always had her back, but because he had never once laughed at her dreams. “I missed the hell out of you.”
He pulled her into his arms, cradling her head against his chest. “Ah, God, I would lie on my hard cot in the academy digs at night, aching to see you, to hear your voice. It was like my heart had been ripped out and left behind.”
She did it again. Allowed herself to lean into his strength before she lifted her head out of his supporting hand and looked him in the eye with a wry smile. “A pathetic pair we were, then.”
Instead of laughing, his mouth went thin with anger. “Don’t dismiss what we felt for each other. It was a powerful thing for the good, not a weakness in us.”
“It hurt so badly that I wasn’t sure I would live through it.” She’d never told another soul how close she’d been to giving up in the months after Liam had gone off to seek his bright future. She’d walked the dirty, cracked sidewalks beside the walls covered in obscene graffiti and wondered if she would ever claw her way out.