Rough Around the Edges

by Marie Ferrarella

  He was leaving her? And who kept money in a kitchen drawer with the utensils? “Go? Go where?” she asked as she followed him out of the room.

  “Back to work.”

  Hurrying to the front door, he stopped just as he opened it. He realized that it probably seemed as if he was abandoning her, but he had little choice. The call was going to be coming in soon and he had to be there to take it. Doubling back, he squeezed her arm awkwardly.

  “Get some rest,” he instructed gruffly. “And make yourself at home.”

  And then he was gone.

  “Sure,” she said, addressing her words to the closed door. “If home was a pigsty.”

  Turning slowly around to face the turmoil that surrounded her, she sighed deeply. Alice in Disasterland. At least he’d had the presence of mind to bring her car here.

  Still, despite the car and the diapers, she was far from comforted. “Oh, God, Kitt, what have you gone and gotten yourself into?”

  The first thing that occurred to O’Rourke after he’d let himself in late that night was that somehow, his key had fit into the wrong lock.

  He was in the wrong apartment. He had to be.

  What other explanation was there? There was no pile of shirts stacked by the door, waiting for an opportune moment to be carried off to the laundry room at the other end of the complex. No overturned laundry basket he meant to pick up in the corner. The coffee table was out and in plain sight rather than lost beneath an ocean of newspapers and technical journals.

  Like a man in a trance, O’Rourke took a few steps forward, pocketing his key again.

  The sofa was visible as well, without a single textbook sinking into any of its cushions. And as for the carpet, it was completely unmarred by anything except furniture.

  It was as if a tornado had gone through the room and rather than leave debris in its path, had neatly sucked out everything that didn’t ordinarily belong in a living room.

  Had to be the wrong apartment.

  He looked around again. No, this was his apartment all right. He recognized the furniture.

  Awed, O’Rourke made his way into the darkened room slowly, then stopped to slant a glance toward the kitchen. He’d left it looking like a near-survivor in a three-day, all-male chili cook-off competition. Every dish, pot and utensil he owned had been out, either in the sink or on the counter and table, remnants of meals past evident somewhere on their surface.

  They were all gone, every last one of them. Washed, dried and put away from the looks of it when he explored the interior of kitchen cabinets he’d long since left empty. They were full now. Full and organized.

  No pungent order of decaying plant and/or animal life met his nose when he opened the refrigerator. It was also gleaming in its emptiness. If she’d ordered out, there was no telltale evidence of it, no drooping, half-sealed container wilting on one of the shelves the way there had been when he’d left this morning.

  O’Rourke shook his head in complete amazement.

  As he made his way to the bathroom, nothing got in his way on the floor, blocking progress. Whatever he’d left on the floor had been picked up and disposed of in some manner or other. Even the shower looked clean.

  Peeking into the room he had offered her to begin with, O’Rourke saw that it once again looked like a den. Books were back on the shelves, even the ones from the living room. Papers were neatly stacked on the desk and the small daybed against the wall was not only visible, it was accessible.

  He’d forgotten all about that, losing it in the clutter of books, papers and magazines. He had somewhere to sleep now, other than the sofa.

  He felt like a visitor to a foreign land. Because he was bone-tired, he lay down on the daybed, promising himself that he was only going to close his eyes for a minute.

  The crying woke him.

  It crept into his dreams, pushing them apart until they disappeared without a trace. High-pitched crying, the kind that belonged to a newborn just testing its lungs and power.

  “Deirdre?” he murmured. No, Deirdre wasn’t a baby anymore, he thought thickly. Deirdre was eighteen now. “Beth?” he mumbled, sitting up.

  The moment he did, the cobwebs evaporated from his brain and he remembered. His sisters and brothers were a continent and an ocean away. The crying was coming from his bedroom.

  Shawna.

  He was on his feet, stumbling for the doorway before he was completely awake. That he wasn’t stubbing his toes on various objects in his path registered vaguely as he found his way to his bedroom.

  He almost entered before he remembered he wasn’t supposed to. It wasn’t his room now, it belonged to Kitt and they had an agreement.

  Feeling slightly frustrated at being kept out of his own bedroom, O’Rourke leaned against the door so his voice would carry without making it seem as if he was shouting at her.

  “Kitt, it’s O’Rourke. Is everything all right in there?”

  The next thing he knew, the door was opening and he found himself face-to-face with Kitt, her hair mussed and wild about her shoulders, her eyes ever so slightly puffy from lack of sleep. The robe she had on was partially undone at the waist and a light blue nightgown was peeking out, teasing his attention.

  He caught himself thinking he’d never seen anything lovelier in his life before he hastily banished the thought. If he started letting himself go that route, this arrangement between the two of them was never going to work. In return for her help, he’d offered Kitt shelter, not lechery, and he might have his faults, but lying wasn’t one of them. He was an honorable man and he stuck to his word. A bargain was a bargain. Even if it might not be an easy one.

  She’d heard him come in earlier and wondered if he’d knock on her door before going to bed. She never slept well in a new place, and even if she had been so inclined, a certain six-pound, three-ouce princess wasn’t about to let her get more than a few minutes of sleep at a time. It felt as if she’d been up all night and she probably looked it, Kitt thought, though she was sure it didn’t matter to the man standing in the doorway.

  “She’s just wet,” Kitt told him. She turned around and led the way back to the bed, the baby in her arms. “I never realized babies leaked so much.”

  He grinned, dragging one hand through his hair to get it out of his eyes.

  “That they do, love,” he assured her. “You no sooner fill up one end than the other end starts making room for more.”

  Kitt put Shawna down on the bed and began changing her. O’Rourke looked around the room. It was the same in here as it had been throughout the rest of the house. He hardly recognized it. Everything was so neat, it looked as if it was waiting for a photographer to come and immortalize it on film.

  He looked in Kitt’s direction, about to comment on the transformation, but his words dried up in his mouth. She was bending over the baby, completely oblivious to the fact that he had a very clear, very tantalizing view of her breasts. It took him a moment before he finally found his tongue.

  “What did you do to the place?”

  She spared him a glance before putting the finishing touches on Shawna’s tiny diaper. She thought it odd that he was staring at the opposite wall.

  “I made it livable. I had some time on my hands,” she told him, quickly disposing of the soggy diaper by throwing it into a wastebasket he realized had once been in the bathroom.

  O’Rourke cleared his throat, feeling suddenly awkward. “I thought you were supposed to rest while the baby was sleeping.”

  It hadn’t quite worked out that way. Unable to stand the mess, she’d started to pick up just a few things. One thing had led to another until she’d finally cleaned up the entire apartment. Even with all that work behind her, she still hadn’t been able to sleep.

  She shrugged. “I got restless. I’m not much good at sitting around.”

  “Neither am I, but I never felt the urge to clean anything.” Redirecting his attention to the work she’d accomplished rather than to the woman herself, he
found himself relaxing again. “You’re a miracle worker, woman. It didn’t look this good the day I moved in.”

  “I can well believe that.” She looked up to find him staring at her, waiting for an explanation to go along with her comment. “I found things growing in the refrigerator that looked as if it had been brought by the dinosaurs before the Ice Age. Don’t you ever clean out the refrigerator?”

  “I thought you did that when you ate everything that was in it,” he said wryly.

  His voice drifted away as he turned toward the bureau. When he’d left, it was cluttered with clothes and a copy of the program for the hardware he was trying to complete. Those had disappeared, replaced with a collection of small framed photographs positioned equidistant from one another.

  Kitt saw what had taken away his attention and caught her lower lip between her teeth. Had she overstepped her bounds in her zeal to make the place less likely to attract the attention of the health department?

  “I found those under the bed when I was vacuuming. I thought you might like them better if they were on the bureau.”

  He’d wondered where the photographs had gotten to. Picking up the one of his youngest sister, Beth, O’Rourke paused for a second before replacing it and looking back at Kitt.

  “Thanks, I’ve been meaning to do that,” he mumbled. Expressing gratitude always put him on shaky grounds.

  She nodded. “I figured as much. Interesting storage place,” she couldn’t resist adding. “Oh, by the way, if you’re looking for your clothes in the morning, you’ll find them either in the bureau or in the closet. I found your filing system of leaving them all over the apartment too complicated to remember once I washed them.”

  His mouth fell open. That wasn’t in the bargain, either. “You washed them?”

  She nodded, picking up the baby and resting her against her shoulder. “It was either that, or bury them by the roadside.”

  He laughed, shaking his head. “You’ve got a sharp tongue on you, Kitt-with-two-t’s. My mother would have liked you.”

  The words hung in the air long after he had retreated back to the den to claim the last few hours of sleep before he had to go back to the office.

  Kit wasn’t quite sure what to make of them. Or of him.

  Or the very odd feeling that was moving around inside her, trying to find a resting place for itself.

  Chapter Seven

  Kitt pushed the tiny bouquet of baby carnations strapped to Shawna’s wrist back, away from her face. In protest, Shawna squirmed against her chest, mewling a protest.

  Probably because her heart was hammering so loud, it was frightening the baby, Kitt thought. One arm around her daughter, she was holding her own bouquet of carnations with the other. Both had been a gift from O’Rourke. He’d taken care of everything, right down to purchasing the wedding outfit for her and, incredibly enough, a similar one for Shawna. He’d claimed not to know what he was doing, but for a man supposedly without a clue, he was doing brilliantly well.

  Kitt’s heart pounded harder as, listening to the priest, she heard him coming to the home stretch. The all-important words that, business arrangement or not, would bind her to this tall, dark, handsome stranger at her side.

  She hadn’t thought she’d be nervous. After all, this was just supposed to be a business arrangement, nothing more. Something circumstances had forced her into for the sake of her own self-respect.

  Yes, she was an aerospace reliability engineer, and yes, she would be working again and soon, but the fact of it was that she was still a female aerospace reliability engineer and a new mother to boot. Because of government rules and regulations, employers pretended that all things were equal, but in reality, on an unspoken level, they weren’t. People were still people, and in the eyes of those who counted, because of her age, sex and circumstances, she could very well be a liability at the present time. That made getting a job in her field not impossible, but not as easy as falling off a log, either.

  And she needed to fall off that log, quickly, because she only had the money that had been in her purse—Jeffrey hadn’t left her any. Not a single, worn-out thin dime.

  So here she was, standing at the altar of a perfectly lovely church in Bedford, with a cherubic-looking man in clerical robes reading words aloud she had dearly hoped to hear in earnest, rather than because it was all part of a complex charade.

  As they came to the part where they exchanged their vows and their rings, Kitt glanced at the man standing beside her. Despite her butterflies, or maybe because of them, she couldn’t help thinking that O’Rourke cleaned up nicely. He was wearing a black tuxedo and looked, for all the world, just like a beautiful bridegroom.

  Her bridegroom.

  Kitt almost laughed then, just as O’Rourke was saying that he took her for his lawful wedded wife. Too bad this was all make-believe. Too bad the words weren’t real.

  “And do you, Katherine Ann Dawson, take this man…”

  Don’t go there, don’t even think it, she warned herself. She couldn’t think of this as anything but what it was, an unorthodox sort of employment. She was going to have absolutely no feelings for this man, other than for a sense of loyalty. And gratitude, she added, because he had given her a way to save face.

  “…Shawn Michael O’Rourke as your…”

  Not altruistically, she conceded, because she was, after all, helping him, but still the arrangement was mutually beneficial to them both. If he was very easy on the eye, that had absolutely no bearing on the situation whatsoever.

  “…lawfully wedded husband?”

  She realized the priest, as well as everyone else, was waiting for her to give an answer.

  “I do.” The words almost stuck in her throat.

  A wife. Who would have ever thought it? O’Rourke almost shook his head in the wrong place, as the priest continued to say the words that would eventually tie them to each other in the sight of God and the INS.

  A wife, he marveled again. He never thought he’d be at this place in his life at this time. Granted, he’d been in love with Susan and maybe they would have gone to the altar eventually, but he’d never really been a man who was out for a wife and family. He was far too busy for a wife, as Susan had pointed out, and God knew he had already had family enough to spare.

  “Repeat after me,” the priest instructed O’Rourke. “With this ring, I thee wed.”

  He took a deep breath, taking the ring that Simon held out to him. “With this ring…”

  Funny how life pulls strings to make things happen. He raised his eyes from the ring he was slipping onto Kitt’s finger to her face. For a moment, everything seemed to freeze. Were those tears in the woman’s eyes? Women cried at the strangest times. You’d think she was actually getting married.

  “…I thee wed…”

  This wasn’t real, he reminded himself. Legal, but not real. The woman beside him was his business partner, his associate, nothing more. He was going to have to think of her in the same light he thought of Simon.

  Simon would never look this good in the outfit she was wearing. He’d picked it out because it seemed practical. That wasn’t exactly the way he would have described it once he saw it on her. The pearl-white, street-length, two-piece suit adhered nicely to her body, tempting his eye with just a hint of cleavage. She’d woven some of the baby’s breath from her bouquet into her hair. It made her look a little like a wood nymph.

  A wood nymph with a baby in her arms. His little namesake was getting a front-row seat to her mother’s marriage to the man who was going to give her a legal last name. It had already been entered on the birth certificate, after a long debate on Kitt’s part.

  Shawna O’Rourke. It had a nice ring to it, he thought.

  So did Kitt O’Rourke.

  Don’t go there, he warned himself. It was nothing more than a merger for the sheer purpose of keeping him in this country for the next year. One more year would be more than enough time to get Emerald Computers on its feet and tu
rning a healthy profit. After that, all their fortunes would be made, he was certain of it. The concept was too good to fail. And so was he.

  He slanted a glance at Kitt. He hadn’t imagined it. There were still tears in her eyes.

  All their fortunes, he underscored, because he aimed to take care of her, too, for giving him this opportunity. He had always made it a point never to forget a good turn.

  His heart suddenly racing, O’Rourke slid the ring all the way down her finger. It seemed to gleam at him in its new place.

  “Psst, look this way,” Jeremy Lathom hissed at them, waving his hand to get their attention and have them look in his direction.

  Jeremy, his video specialist, was manning a camcorder. For good measure, O’Rourke thought to have the wedding videotaped in case there were any questions later on. He wanted everything on the up-and-up, so that there was no room for future snags or loopholes. He had no intentions of being tripped up. A risk-taker in his early years, he’d learned that “better safe than sorry” had a firm place in his life.

  Folding his hands beatifically before him, the priest looked out at the people sitting in the pews. “If there is any among you who would object to this union between Shawn Michael and Katherine, speak now or forever hold your piece.”

  Kitt slanted a glance to her left, praying Sylvia wouldn’t suddenly be struck with an overwhelming qualm of conscience and feel compelled to raise an objection. The seconds ticked by. Sylvia remained silent. Kitt released the breath she was holding.