“I’m sorry. Would you rather I be quiet?”
“No. Ask anything you like. What do you want to know about my mother?”
“From what little you’ve told me about her, I can tell you were close to her. She must have been very special.”
“She was.” His voice held a mixture of pride and wistfulness, making it clear he still missed her very much.
“She was born in Puerto Rico?”
“Yes. She was married in San Juan when she was seventeen. She followed her husband to Savannah, where he went to work on the docks and she found work as a hotel maid. A year later, he was killed in a job accident, leaving her a widow before her nineteenth birthday.”
“And pregnant with you—how terrible for her.”
“No. Her husband wasn’t my father.” There was no emotion in his voice. “My mother fell in love with another man almost ten years later. He was married to someone else. I was conceived from that relationship. Her very Catholic family turned against her because she had a child out of wedlock. She raised me on her own, without any help from anyone.”
“Your father?” she murmured, studying his impassive face.
He shrugged. “I never met him. He had no interest in staying behind to deal with the devastation he had caused in my mother’s life.”
“She must have been a very strong woman.”
“She was. She never accepted any assistance from anyone. She raised me on what she earned as a hotel maid. By the time I was five, she was the head housekeeper. She never made a lot of money, but what she had went to my health care and education. I started working to help her out when I was just a kid, but it was always a struggle to convince her to take money from me.”
“She named you Miguel, but she called you Mac. And she made sure you could speak English.”
“As I said, she wanted me to fit in. She hoped I would become a doctor or a lawyer. But when I chose to enter the police academy, instead—following in the footsteps of a neighbor I admired and who had always taken an interest in mentoring me—she couldn’t have acted more proud of me.”
“You loved her very much, didn’t you?”
“I adored her.”
His simply and sincerely worded reply made her throat tighten. She would like to think that if she ever had a son, he would speak of her with the same respect and devotion with which Mac remembered his mother.
“After my mother died,” he said, looking into the distance over Sharon’s head as if gazing into his past, “I found out that she had put every extra dollar she made into life insurance policies naming me as the beneficiary. Even after I was grown and supporting myself, she felt she needed to provide for me.”
“It sounds as though she adored you in return.”
“She did. I used the insurance money to establish my new business. I think she would have approved.”
“She gave you the ability to pursue a dream, even if it might have been different from her dreams for you. Yes, I’m sure she would have approved.”
“You’d have liked her, I think.”
“I’m sure I would have loved her.” How could she not have loved the woman who had raised this very special man?
Mac gave a little shake of his head, as if shaking off the memories, and moved a hand over her bare body. “Have we talked enough now?”
She reached up to brush back a lock of silky black hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “Do you have something else in mind?”
Lowering his head to her breast, he murmured, “Something’s bound to come up.”
She giggled, and then gasped when his tongue swept over her nipple. “Okay,” she said breathlessly, her fingers tightening in his hair. “That’s enough talk for now.”
He gathered her closer. “Good.”
SHARON WOKE at 2:00 a.m., thirsty and disoriented. After taking a moment to gather her bearings, she turned her head on the pillow to look at Mac. He was soundly asleep, his limbs sprawled, his mouth just slightly parted. Sleep didn’t soften his features much, she mused
. Even now he looked powerful and strong. Still slightly dangerous.