Keep Me (Beggar's Choice #3)

by Lily Morton

  We’ve been staying here for the last three days making a real week of it drinking and eating, and up until last night I’d slept with Bram, but last night his mum had turfed him out saying that it was bad luck and he’d truculently conceded and gone to stay in Sid’s suite. I know that it’s custom but the bed had been cold and empty without him next to me. I even missed his fidgeting.

  I sigh and tighten the tie on my dressing gown which is a chocolate brown and cream kimono that Bram had brought back from Japan for me last week, and then I wander over to the table where the remains of our breakfast are spread. Looking up I still at the sight of my dress hanging from its wooden hanger from the wardrobe door.

  It’s stunningly beautiful and as soon as I’d stepped into it I’d known it was the one, almost the way I’d felt when I met Bram for the first time. It’s an Oscar de la Renta design which I’d gone for out of sentimentality and because it’s utterly beautiful. It’s white and strapless, floor length, and the skirt is white with a see through overskirt that has flowers and leaves embroidered all over it. I’m wearing it with a pair of the most girly, sparkly, white Christian Louboutin platform shoes, but I’m keeping my hair simple – no veil and just my hair pulled back in a loose, low bun with a flower tucked into it. I know Bram will love it but potentially he’ll love what’s underneath it more.

  Thinking of him I pick up a bit of almond croissant and pop it into my mouth. I needed this peace but what I need more than anything really is him. I know it’s bad luck but I really want to see him now before all of the chaos starts so that we can be together like the quiet before the storm.

  Living with him has been a revelation to me. Looking at him in the past from the outside you would have thought that when he settled down he would have been an independent lover who valued time away from his partner, and someone that treated everything lightly. However, that couldn’t be further from the truth because he’s fiercely committed to us and making sure that our relationship works. We’re a real team and just as I love and take care of him, he’s my staunchest supporter and biggest cheerleader.

  He’d announced that we’d be based in London for the next few years because he wanted me to enjoy my new job as a staff nurse at Great Ormond Street without disruptions. He’d also asked that we never be apart for more than a couple of weeks at the most, and when he is away I don’t worry because I know that I’m always in his thoughts because he lets me know that. He’s my best friend and I’m his.

  I hear a sudden scrape on the balcony outside my room and whirl around raising a hand to my mouth, and then I gasp out a laugh as the person that I want to see most is in the middle of climbing over from his balcony next door.

  “What are you doing Romeo?” I hiss, rushing over to grab his arm and haul him away from impending death on the cobbles below. He shoots me that familiar lopsided grin that makes his eyes warm all the way through.

  “I had to see you,” he hisses.

  “Does Maud know?”

  At the mention of his mum he whirls around. “Fuck no, is she in here?”

  “No.” I smile, drawing him into the room and then going thankfully into the arms that he holds open to me. I sigh thankfully as his heat and strength surround me. He always feels like home to me. I feel his smile against my hair and then he grunts happily under his breath as he bands me tightly to him.

  “Fucking missed this,” he finally says, raising his head and smiling down at me.

  I don’t think that I’ll ever truly get used to how beautiful he is but at the risk of keeping his head a normal size I do try to conceal it, but not today. Today, I have stars in my eyes and he knows it judging by his smirk.

  “I’m marrying you today,” he says happily, examining my face and pushing his hand through my loose hair watching it trail down my back.

  “I know. I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Why? Were you thinking of ditching me at the altar?” he murmurs tongue in cheek.

  I laugh. “Maybe. You’ll just have to wait and see.” However, at the mention of the wedding I jerk and push him behind one of the floor length velvet curtains.

  “What the fuck?” comes his muffled voice.

  “Stay there,” I hiss urgently.

  “Why, is it my mother?”

  “No, my dress is out and you can’t see it.”

  “Alys,” he sighs. “I’m seeing you. What does it matter if I see the dress?”

  “It matters,” I call, grabbing my beautiful gown and hanging it up in the bathroom and then shutting the door thankfully. “I just want you to be amazed and dumbstruck when you see me coming down the aisle.”

  He pokes his ruffled head around the curtain, his expression soft with love as it often is. “Alys love I always feel like that when I see you, didn’t you know?” I shake my head and he grabs me hauling me back to him. However, his hands catch on my hips and a look of stunned gratification crosses his face.

  “Oh no,” I protest, trying to pull away but he hauls me back a smirk crossing his face.

  “That feels firm and stiff like lace,” he murmurs, his busy hands working at the tie on my robe. I try to bat them away but to no avail as the robe parts open and he hisses in a breath. “Fuck,” he groans. “How am I supposed to get through the ceremony knowing that this is under your dress? Do you want me to pop a stiffy at the altar?”

  “Bram, you’re not supposed to see this.”

  “Not see it,” he huffs indignantly. “It’s burnt on my motherfucking retinas.”

  He pulls the robe from my shoulders leaving me clad in just a white corset, transparent white skimpy panties, sheer white hold ups and a sapphire blue garter. “Fuck it’s like the Victoria’s Secret catalogue, only better.”

  “Why better? What is better than that?”

  “You,” he says simply. “You know that I don’t see anyone else.”

  That’s true and something that I never thought I’d see, but he honestly never looks at other women. The former man whore is still warm, engaging and flirty but there’s absolutely no heat in it until he looks at me. Viv once laughed about it after watching him completely ignore an extremely beautiful model’s overtures. As she put it Bram has sampled every female delicacy on the planet, sometimes more than once, but once he’d met me he’d realised the difference between sex and love. Anything else to him is like muesli - boring and unnecessary.

  I’m brought back to the present when he pulls his t-shirt over his head and gets naked in seconds by dropping his jeans.

  “Oh my God,” I snort. “If speedy stripping was an Olympic event you’d be going for gold I swear.”

  He sneers. “Babe I’m a rock star, it’s practically a CV requirement. Now fucking get here. I need to fuck you in that get up rather more than I want to breathe.”

  “Bram it’s bad luck.” This is a token protest and his smirk tells me that he knows just how token it is.

  “Seeing you is bad luck. Fucking you is not mentioned in any old wives tale.”

  “That’s a technicality.” My protest is dimmed by the moan that I give out when he draws me against him and I feel his warm skin against mine.

  “You were saying,” he groans, dipping his head and licking across the top of the lace on my breasts while both hands grab my cheeks through the sheer panties and pull me against his hard cock. I try to say something smart but he moans and takes my mouth licking into me with a satisfied murmur, and I lose my head, winding my hands around his neck and letting him take me down to the bed.

  An hour later I raise my head from under the sheets and take a look at the clock and let out a shriek. “Fuck!”

  “What?” he grumbles, burrowing back under the covers and against me like a sexy, ruffled mole.

  “I’ve got to shower again, do my hair and get my make up on. We get married in an hour.”

  “Calm down. You’re getting married to the man who is currently in your bed and who is now also late. There can’t be a wedding if neither the bride nor the g
room is there to get married. That would make the guests just early and rude.”

  “That makes no sense at all.”

  “It does to me, and as I’m the one getting married and therefore the reason for this whole shindig, everyone ought to accommodate me in doing what I want, and that’s what I just did. I did you which was what I wanted.”

  I laugh looking down into his sleepy face and rumpled hair and adoring him. “God, I love you so much,” I say quietly.

  He smiles up at me, that true, sunshine smile that I only ever see when he looks at me, and then signs that he loves me too. “So much,” he adds clearly. “And Alys,” he grabs my hand and pulls me back on top of him. “This,” he gestures between us. “This could never in a million years ever be considered bad luck. Now I’m getting up. You’re going to get ready, and then you’re going to skedaddle that gorgeous arse down to the chapel and make me the happiest man on earth.”

  I smile with tears in my eyes and watch him scoop up his clothes before I shriek and run to the balcony in time to see him, completely starkers, hopping over the balcony and into the next room to a giant chorus of manly roaring and a very feminine shriek.

  “Fucking hell Ma, what are you doing in here?” I hear him shout and then I collapse in giggles.

  Bram

  I look in the tarnished old mirror of the church waiting room checking my appearance, and then sigh as my mother pushes me back and then goes to town on the tie that I’ve just fucking knotted perfectly. I sigh. “Ma please, it looks fine.”

  She looks up at me and I idly wonder when it happened that I got so tall or she got so small. All my life I’ve stood in awe of her. I admire her fierceness, her love and her drive to overcome being a widow with a small son at such a young age. It was her sheer certainty that her son wasn’t going to end up being a wastrel or a criminal or both that impacted my life so much. I may have lived away from her for a long time, but there wasn’t a day went by without her ringing me or writing long letters, and I’d always felt her fierce uncompromising love for me. It had taken me years to acknowledge that I’d felt abandoned, but I’d never doubted her love for me and I still don’t.

  Her voice brings me out of my thoughts. “Bram child please watch your language. We’re in church.”

  “A chapel,” I correct automatically. “And Ma with the amount of money that I paid for Father Reilly to officiate at this chapel I actually think that I might now own the building.” I pause. “Actually I think I might own the Catholic Church.”

  She huffs and smacks me as I start laughing at the thought of being Father Reilly’s boss. Then her face softens as I straighten. She runs her hand over my shirt and straightens the lapels of my dark grey, three piece suit. “Such a handsome boy,” she says softly. “You look more like your dad than ever as you grow up.”

  “Do I?”

  “Yes you’ve seen the photos.” I have but I don’t equate those faded photos of them in 70’s clothes as being like me. I don’t think any child really does. She carries on, “He’d be so proud of you. I know that I am.”

  “You are?” I can hear the faint need in my voice, that ever present need to make her proud in order to mend her opinion of me that I’d broken in my teens.

  She looks surprised. “I tell you often enough don’t I?”

  I shrug. She does but I usually take it with a pinch of salt as something all mothers have to say from time to time.

  She stares at me intently and then gives me that lopsided grin that I see in the mirror every day. “Oh Bram I’m so proud of you. Not just the career and the big houses and the money. They’re good for you but what I’m proud of is in here.” She taps my chest. “I’m proud of you for the man that you’ve become. This strong, kind, loyal man whose friends love him like family. This funny, warm man who people want to be with because they come away feeling like they mean something. That’s the man I wanted you to become when I held you in my arms for the first time.” She pauses and something settles inside me for the first time since I set foot on British soil all those years ago, a scared, belligerent thirteen year old. She smiles sadly and runs her hand through my hair and taps my cheek gently the way that she did when I was a child and she was trying to get me to keep still and ready for school. “I wish that I’d seen all of it,” she murmurs. “I missed so much trying to do the right thing.”

  “You did the right thing,” I soothe even though a tiny part of me knows that I will never do that to my children. I will never say that to her though because I love her, and because I will never be a scared widowed woman with an unruly son who was paying too much attention to any gangs in the area as a way of seeking male approval. Ireland was a different place then and boys like me ran in danger of disappearing and dying violently.

  Then as now she surprises me though by scoffing. “I’m not sure of that but I did the best thing, even though I thought I’d get you back in a few months with your tail between your legs, humbled and happy to be home.”

  “What?”

  She looks startled. “You knew that. I told you. I said that I’d ring you in a few weeks and see how you felt then.”

  I groan. “I thought you meant that you hoped I’d fall into line and do as I was told.”

  “No, I meant that I’d come and get you, but Bram I couldn’t say it when you left because you’d have taken no notice of the lesson that I was trying to teach you.” She hesitates. “Would you have come home?” she asks in a small voice.

  I grab her into a close hug smelling the scent of L’Air du Temps by Nina Ricci which she’s worn since my dad bought her the first bottle. “Ma, I’d have come home like a fucking shot if I’d have known that.”

  She huffs out a sob and doesn’t even bother to correct my language. “I wish that I’d known. I’d have been on the first boat over. I thought you liked it and that having a man around the house was giving you what you needed.”

  I forbear from pointing out that would only be the case if what I needed were slaps and punches and constant lectures over what makes a man. I won’t say it because she doesn’t need to hear it, and I don’t need to say it. It’s done and dusted and maybe I did learn something, even though it was principally the opposite of everything that my uncle wanted to teach me.

  As if sensing my thoughts she tilts her head back. “Maybe it was for the best though love because if you hadn’t been there you’d never have met the boys. You wouldn’t have all of this. You wouldn’t have Alys.”

  I smile at that. I can’t help but smile when I hear her name. It warms and strengthens me like a shot of whisky on a cold day.

  She pats my face. “Ah, that’s the face I want to see on my boy’s face on his wedding day when I’m talking about his beloved. I’m glad I arranged all that.”

  I nod for a second and then I do a double take. “What? What did you just say?”

  There’s a tap on the door and Matt sticks his head round. He’s dressed in a suit similar to mine and his hands are full of flowers. He looks confused for a second. “What did I say?” he asks as my mum hugs him energetically. She loves Matt, sometimes more than me I think, and he always stays at her house if he’s over here on business.

  “Not you,” I say impatiently. “Her. She just said something very interesting.”

  My mother smiles impishly. “I said that I was glad that I arranged him and Alys.”

  I splutter as Matt laughs. “You did not arrange anything,” I say indignantly.

  She scoffs. “Bram love sometimes I think that you’re a little beer drip short of a barrel.” Matt chokes out a large guffaw. “Of course I arranged it. I sent her to you didn’t I?”

  “Tell me more,” I say silkily, folding my arms over my chest and settling my ass on the edge of a table.

  She smiles. “Such a lovely girl. I knew as soon as I met her that she was the one for you. The ladies of the church agreed with me too.”

  I straighten. “You didn’t throw it open to public vote did you because that’s wh
at this sounds like?” Matt’s face is now a deep maroon colour as he tries not to laugh.

  “Not public vote,” she replies cautiously. “Just the church ladies, and they’ve all known you since you were in nappies.” I groan and she hastens on. “Really Bram this happens all the time in small communities - matchmaking and setting up unions. Really I should be on television like that Millionaire Matchmaker but a poor Irish version.”

  “You’re not poor,” I mutter distractedly. “But how could you know that I’d fall for her?”

  She straightens my sleeves and taking the boutonniere from Matt she fastens it in my lapel, stepping back for a better look before nodding with satisfaction. “Well really dear all I had to do was get you to swear not to touch her. If your pecker wasn’t calling the shots I knew that your heart would fall, and look at you now.” Matt laughs loudly as she gestures triumphantly around the small waiting room of the ancient old chapel that has stood in the grounds of this place for hundreds of years.

  When we’d talked about wedding venues we’d both known that we wanted to do it in Ireland and this place had instantly caught our attention. Alys loved it for the atmosphere, while I liked it mainly because it was big enough that if I bought all the hotel rooms out for a week we could shut the gates of the long drive and close the fucking paps out for the entire time.

  I stare at her for long enough to make her start to squirm, and then I reach forward and draw her into a tight hug. “Love you Ma,” I whisper.

  “Love you back a hundred times more,” she whispers back, and then as if synchronised we both reach out an arm and draw Matt into the hug with us. We stay that way for a few minutes and then Matt stirs.

  “Much as this is lovely,” he says. “I actually came in to tell you that the bride will be here in five minutes so you might want to get ready.” My mum is instantly in motion whirling out of the room and leaving me to Matt. I stare after her feeling a bit like a tiny cracked piece of me has repaired itself, and then I look up to see Matt looking at me.

  “Ready?” he asks softly.