need. Heat swelled from a corner woodstove that crackled with burning splits of live oak. The brush stilled in her hand. She watched the sparks from the fire and realized that for the first time she'd awakened that night, she was actually warm.
At that moment he strode back in the room balancing a tray and set it down on a table. He picked up some ice wrapped in a towel. "Let me see that ankle again."
Reluctantly she stuck her foot out from beneath the flannel shirt. Her ankle was so swollen and purplish gray that it looked like it belonged on a circus elephant.
Conn stood next to the bed looking every inch the giant they called him. But he leaned placed the ice on her foot with such gentleness. He made a point of tucking the ice around her ankle in the exact place it ached. She sat there silent, staring at his wonderful hands.
"That should bring down the swelling," he told her.
"Thank you." She couldn't look him in the eye. She was half afraid he would be able to read her thoughts.
"Here."
She looked up.
He was holding out a blue earthenware mug. "It's soup, not poison." She could hear the smile in his voice.
She took the mug with two hands and looked in it.
"Go on. Taste it."
She slowly raised the mug to her mouth and took a tiny sip. Frowning, she looked down at the mug, then glanced up and took another bigger sip.
He was smiling at her. No cynicism. No double meaning. Just a sincere amused smile.
"It's good."
He crossed his arms and leaned a shoulder against a nearby wall. "My grandmother always gave me a mug of soup in the winter. After I came home from work."
"You worked a job?" The minute she said the words, she wanted them back.
He laughed.
"I didn't mean that the way it sounded. I had assumed boxing was your only profession."
"I didn't start fighting until I was eighteen. Before that I worked in a carriage factory."
She took a drink. It was so warm and wonderful. He was watching her closely, so she asked, "For how long?"
"Eight years."
She choked on the soup. "You worked in a factory when you were just a little boy?"
"I was never a little boy," he said as joke, but there was emotion in his wry humor.
She subtracted the years. "Ten years old is too young to be working."
"We were poor. By then it was just my grandmother and me. If I didn't work, she would have had to. She wouldn’t have had an easy go of it, working in a factory. Me?” He shrugged. “Work kept me out of trouble. She took in laundry, and we got by.”
From the way he spoke she suspected they struggled, and older woman and her young grandson..
“She was all Irish, still had a brogue. By then she was almost seventy years old."
She could hear the tenderness in his voice as he spoke about his grandmother and talked about how she had raised him after his parents died when he was a young boy.
"She wasn't afraid of hard work, and neither was I. She didn't like me working there, not at first. But I had fought so hard to get the job, and I'd already been working there a week before I told her. She gave in, mostly I think because it was honest work. No one took advantage of me. Within a couple of years I was bigger than most of the men, so I never had any trouble."
He straightened. "I guess I'd better let you get some sleep. Tomorrow I'll have some of my friends help me, and we'll see if we can fix the roof."
She searched for the right words, but could only say, "Thank you." She paused, then added, "For everything you did. The cabinet, the soup, the ice, and the bed. The shoulder to cry on. I'm not normally like that. I... well, I haven't been very nice to you. You and I are usually not—"
"I know. You don't have to say it, Nellibelle."
She wanted to tell him how very much she hated that name, but she just couldn't bring herself to destroy this moment.
"When we're around each other, it's like we're in the ring together. You come out punching."
She was quiet for a second, then had to admit, "I do, don't I?"
"Yeah, you do."
"But you don't make it easy on me." She sat up straighter and saw him break into a smile.
"No. I don't."
She laughed then, too. "I think