An Outrageous Proposal by Maureen Child Read Free Book Online Page A

beside his mother’s bed in a torture chair designed to
make visiting an ordeal, Sean braced his elbows on his knees and cupped his face
in his palms. It had been only his mother and he for so long, he couldn’t
remember his life any other way. His father had died when Sean was just a boy,
and Ailish had done the heroic task of two parents.
    Then when Ronan’s parents had died in that accident, Ailish had
stepped in for him, as well. She was strong, remarkably self-possessed and until
today, Sean would have thought, invulnerable. He lifted his gaze to the small
woman with short, dark red hair. There was gray mixed with the red, he noticed
for the first time. Not a lot, but enough to shake him.
    When had his mother gotten old? Why was she here? She’d been to
lunch with her friends and had felt a pain that had worried her enough she had
come to the hospital to have it checked. And once the bloody doctors got their
hands on you, you were good and fixed, Sean thought grimly, firing a glare at
the closed door and the busy corridor beyond.
    They’d slapped Ailish in to be examined and now, several hours
later, he was still waiting to hear what the dozens of tests they’d done would
tell them. The waiting, as he had told Georgia not so very long ago, was the
hardest.
    Georgia.
    He wished he had brought her with him. She was a calm, cool
head, and at the moment he needed that. Because what he was tempted to do was
have his mother transferred to a bigger hospital in Dublin. To fly in
specialists. “To buy the damned hospital so someone would come in and talk to me.”
    “Sean,” his mother whispered, opening her eyes and turning her
face toward him, “don’t swear.”
    “Mother.” He stood up, curled one hand around the bar of her
bed and reached down with the other to take hers in his. “How are you?”
    “I’m fine,” she insisted. “Or I was, having a lovely nap until
my son’s cursing woke me.”
    “Sorry.” She still had the ability to make him feel like a
guilty boy. He supposed all mothers had that power, though at the moment, only his mother concerned him. “But no one will talk
to me. No one will tell me a bloody—” He cut himself off. “I can’t get answers
from anyone in this place.”
    “Perhaps they don’t have any to give yet,” she pointed out.
    That didn’t ease his mind any.
    Her face was pale, her sharp green eyes were a little watery,
and the pale wash of freckles on her cheeks stood out like gold paint flicked
atop a saucer of milk.
    His heart actually ached to see her here. Like this. Fear
wasn’t something he normally even considered, but the thought of his mother
perhaps being at death’s bleeding door with not a doctor in sight cut him right
down to the bone.
    “Do you know what I was thinking,” she said softly, giving her
son’s hand a gentle squeeze, “when they were sticking their wires and such to
me?”
    He could imagine. She must have been terrified. “No,” he said.
“Tell me.”
    “All I could think was, I was going to die and leave you
alone,” she murmured, and a single tear fell from the corner of her eye to roll
down her temple and into her hair.
    “There’ll be no talk of dying,” he told her, instinctively
fighting against the fear that crouched inside him. “And I’m not alone. I’ve
friends, and Ronan and Laura, and now the baby…”
    “And no family of your own,” she pointed out.
    “And what’re you then?” Sean teased.
    She shook her head and fixed her gaze with his. “You should
have a wife. A family, Sean. A man shouldn’t live his life alone.”
    It was an old argument. Ailish was forever trying to marry off
her only child. But now, for the first time, Sean felt guilty. She should have
been concerned for herself; instead she was worried for him. Worried about him. He hated that she was lying there so still
and pale, and that there was nothing he could do for her. Bloody hell, he
couldn’t even get the damn doctor to step into the