Hot Under His Collar - Andie J. Christopher Page 0,50
shoulder and said, “Just because your errant sister seems to think that she has forever and a day to find a husband doesn’t mean that you can let a perfectly good one slip away.”
Sasha rolled her eyes in her sister’s direction, hoping to give her strength. It seemed to work. “Of course I can. Just because he’s perfectly good doesn’t mean he’s perfectly good for me.”
Wow, wisdom from her basic-as-fuck sister in the crucible of their mother’s twisted sense of traditionalism.
“People get divorced every day.” Sasha was trying to be helpful, but she had to back up when her mother rounded on her.
“Not in this family.”
Madison pushed past her mother into the room. “It’s not really your business, Mom.”
“Of course it’s my business.” The vein in Moira’s forehead was throbbing, and Sasha was afraid that she would have a stroke.
“Can I get you a martini, Mother?” That might calm her down a smidge. Or at least keep her occupied deriding Sasha’s choice of gin.
“That would be the least you can do.”
Sasha busied herself doing that while her mother sat Madison on the couch and harangued her. At this rate, her sister would be back on a plane to New York within the hour. Sasha gave thanks for the fact that she’d fled the family roost after high school, never to return. That move had disappointed her parents, but it had set the tone for the rest of her adult life. They didn’t expect her to bend to their will, and that meant she was off the hook when she wasn’t on the phone with them or at their home. Out of sight, out of mind.
She brought her mother a martini, which she downed in three gulps. “Terrible. You need to get your gin from someplace more upscale than Total Wine.”
Yes, everything was terrible at the moment. Madison gave her a look that could only be interpreted as an SOS in the version of visual Morse code that only sisters knew. “How about we find you something better, then?”
* * *
—
SASHA WAS ALWAYS WALKING into Dooley’s when Patrick was least expecting it. It was as though she knew when his resolve not to think about her was weak. Actually, that was a lie—he’d added lies to his list of sins. His resolve not to think about Sasha was always weak.
Sister Cortona’s words ran through his head and mingled and rioted with thoughts of Sasha and the way she’d looked reading to the preschool kids. He looked at her and saw forever, and it was wrong, wrong, wrong.
She’d left a couple of phone messages with ideas for another event to raise money. He’d saved them and listened to them over and over, lying and telling himself that he needed to hear her voice to properly mull over her ideas.
After his conversation with Bishop Rafferty, he’d been feeling like the whole enterprise was for naught. All the community outreach he’d done over the past few years, trying to get people to give the Catholic Church another chance, was based on the premise that he could do something to make the Church more welcoming. Not that he could change canon law, but that he could make a difference around the edges.
Intellectually, he’d known he was wrong about his individual efforts to make change for a while, but the conversation with Rafferty had really driven it home. And his ambivalent feelings about the Church were now all wrapped up with his growing feelings for Sasha.
He didn’t really doubt his calling anymore. He had the growing suspicion that it was bullshit. His mind was scrambled. And he would probably think more clearly if he didn’t have a cockstand from the gentle timbre of her voice.
The only voice message that he didn’t listen to over and over was the one that referenced that the guy she was dating—he refused to say the man’s name, even in his mind—could help out with a church carnival in a month.
He loved the idea, but the prospect of watching that guy with his hands on a woman that he shouldn’t think of as his, but that he did, was enough to muddle his thoughts even more. He wished that he hadn’t agreed to work with her to save the pre-K program, even though he couldn’t have done it on his own. He’d known it was dangerous to spend too much time around a woman who aroused him that much, but now that he knew her a bit more, he craved her