Three Fates

Mary, so don’t tell me you’re not sentimental.”
    “About people who matter to me, but not about things. I don’t romanticize.” He took her hand, felt her brace. “I looked at you. That’s really all it took.”
    “It’s confusing.” She managed to keep her voice steady, though her heart was humming in her throat. “This maze of circumstances that links our families.”
    “It’s more than that.”
    “I’d like to keep things simple.”
    “Not a chance,” he told her as he drew her to her feet. “Besides, I like complications. Life’s bland without them. You’re a hell of a complication.”
    “Don’t.” She pressed a hand to his chest as he pulled her closer, and felt like an idiot. “I’m not being coy, I’m being careful.”
    “You’re trembling.”
    “Oh, you enjoy that, don’t you? Getting me all stirred up and confused.”
    “Damn right.” He gave her one hard tug. It brought her to her toes, had her sucking in a breath for an oath. Then his mouth was on hers, hard and hot and hungry enough to blur the curse into a small sound of shock.
    He kissed like a man accustomed to taking, with a ruthless skill that had her pulse pumping fast and her belly quivering with need. Though the reaction stupefied her, she felt her own bones go liquid.
    And so did he.
    His hands dived into her hair, used it to draw her head back. “The first time I saw you,” he said. “That’s never happened to me before.”
    “I don’t know you.” But her lips were warm with the taste of his, her body primed for the weight of him. “I don’t sleep with men I don’t know.”
    He lowered his head, skimmed his teeth lightly over her throat. “Is that a firm policy?”
    “It used to be.”
    He nipped his way along her jaw. “We’re going to get to know each other very quickly.”
    “All right. That’s all right. Don’t kiss me again now. It isn’t proper, not with them downstairs this way, Jack. They’re waiting supper for us.”
    “Then we’ll go down.”
     
     
    THEY SETTLED IN the small dining room made charming with china figures and antique glass. The walls were decorated with a collection of old, floral-patterned plates.
    “You have such a lovely home,” Rebecca complimented Mary. “It’s so nice of you to let me come.”
    “It’s a treat for us.” Mary beamed and helpfully cocked her ear in Rebecca’s direction. “Jack never brings his girls to see us.”
    “Doesn’t he?”
    “No, indeed.” She had the soft music of Ireland in her voice. “We only met the one he married twice, and once was at the wedding. We didn’t like her very much, did we, Steven?”
    “Now, Mary.”
    “Well, we didn’t. She had a cold streak, if you ask me, and—”
    “The roast is perfect, Gram.”
    Distracted, Mary sent Jack a twinkling look. “You always favored my pot roast.”
    “I married you for it,” Steven said with a wink. “Like a lot of young men, I did the Grand Tour when I was done with university,” he told Rebecca. “Outside of Dublin, I stayed at a small inn and met my Mary, whose parents ran it. I fell in love with her over pot roast, and ended my tour then and there. It took me two weeks to convince her to marry me and move back to Bath.”
    “You exaggerate. It took you only ten days.”
    “And we’ve been married now sixty-eight years. We lived in America for a time. In New York. My father’s family had fallen on very hard times. They’d never recovered from the crash of ’twenty-nine. One of my daughters married an American and settled there. It’s her daughter who’s Jack’s mother.”
    He reached over to lay his hand over Mary’s. “We’ve had four children, two sons and two daughters. They gave us eleven grandchildren, and they six great-grandchildren and counting. Every one of them owes their life to Felix Greenfield. That one unselfish and courageous act set the rest in motion.”
    “He didn’t intend it. The way it’s been told in my family,” Rebecca explained. “He only wanted to live, to survive. He was panicked when he found the life jacket. He thought only of saving himself, then he saw your mother, and you, trapped in the debris. He said she was so calm, so beautiful in the midst of all the horror. And she held you close to comfort you, and you her, without even crying for all you were just a little thing. And he couldn’t turn away.”
    “I remember his face,” Steven said. “Dark eyes, white skin already smeared with smoke or soot.