Kieran laughed. “Like the Brady Bunch? Three girls and three boys?”
“Exactly like the Brady Bunch,” she said half-mockingly, “if Mike and Carole were Bible thumping zealots.”
Kieran raised an eyebrow, pulling Faith’s foot into his lap and beginning a slow massage. “Tell me.”
“That’s so not fair,” she moaned. On top of everything else, the man had purely magical hands. “You didn’t strike me as the type to play dirty.”
“I gave you fair warning,” he smirked. “There are definite benefits to knowing every muscle and tendon in the human body.” He did some kind of squeeze/massage thing that she was pretty sure might lead to an orgasm if she’d let it. Her head dropped back against the pillows and her tongue loosened. Clearly there was a link from that spot in the middle of her foot and the part of her brain that controlled her mouth.
“I’m the oldest. Then there’s Mark, Luke, Grace, John, and Hope.”
Kieran’s hands paused for a moment along her arch and looked at her in disbelief. “Gospels and Virtues?”
Faith smiled wryly. He resumed his rhythmic kneading, taking up the other foot.
“Are you close?” She was just about to moan an emphatic “yes” when she realized he wasn’t talking about the effect his foot massage was having on her personal regions.
“No. I haven’t spoken to any of them since before Matt was born.” Even Kieran’s magical touch couldn’t completely erase the sense of disappointment, of failure. “I think about them often, though. Wonder where they are now, what they’re doing. Did they marry? Go to college? Move away? Do I have nieces and nephews I don’t even know about?”
She only allowed herself to think about those kinds of things late at night, when she was alone in her bed and there was no one to see the tears that inevitably fell when she remembered her family, and she never spoke of them out loud. Now here she was, spilling her secrets to Kieran in the light of day.
It was difficult. Moisture began to accumulate in her eyes and that cold, empty feeling started seeping into her chest again. Not wanting him to see her like this, Faith tried to pull her foot away, but Kieran wouldn’t allow it.
“Talk to me, Faith. Why don’t you keep in touch with your family?”
Kieran kept a firm but gentle grip on her ankle, and even had she not been sick, she didn’t have a prayer of getting away from him if he didn’t allow it. And, if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want him to. His hands, his presence, felt good.
Faith took a deep breath and blew it out. She knew it would come to this eventually. He might as well know the truth. Maybe it might even be cathartic. “They disowned me.”
“What?” His hands paused again.
“It’s scripture. ‘If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.’ Matthew 8:18 – one of my father’s personal favorites. I brought sin into the family, so they cut me off.”
The words were laced with a sadness and pain she’d thought she’d come to terms with long ago. But now that she had started, she was determined to get it all out. “I was the minister’s daughter, Kieran, and my dad was a very outspoken pillar of the community. To have his fourteen year old daughter come home pregnant and unwed was like a slap in his face.”
“You are his daughter,” Kieran said.
She took some measure of comfort in Kieran’s simmering outrage. The fact that he couldn’t understand her father’s rationale confirmed what she had already guessed – that Kieran Callaghan was a good man all the way through.
“Was. I don’t exist to them anymore.”
“Because you got pregnant?”
“That’s part of it. To be honest, my father never seemed very happy with me, but that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. He and my mother wanted me to stand up in church every week, to use myself as an example of what happens when you stray from the Word and yield to the temptations of the flesh.”
“That wasn’t the worst part, though,” she added quietly. “They wanted me to give Matt up for adoption so that a ‘good God-fearing couple’ might raise him.”
Kieran released her foot and pulled Faith into his arms. “Ah, Faith. I’m so sorry.”
She knew she should resist him, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Kieran felt so strong and warm and solid. She couldn’t ever remember feeling like this, so ... safe. She knew he was a wonderfully sweet and caring man, and that it meant nothing beyond friendship, but at the moment she didn’t care.