Page 22 of After Indigo Irish Nights
His heart.
She sat on the uncomfortable wicker settee and tucked her feet under her, unbearably cold and very lonely.
CHAPTERFIVE
His training couldn’t have come at a better time.
Declan dove into it as if he would be fighting Muhammad Ali or Joe Louis back in the day. He had eight weeks to prepare for his first match, according to Cormac.
While his return to boxing had been about reclaiming something he’d loved and earning money for the shop, it was more about avoiding Kathleen now. It was bad enough knowing she was close by—he could almost sense her in the air—but she seemed to be everywhere he was: at Summercrest, at the pub, in town.
Seeing her all the time was breaking him down more than being pummeled by a cadre of large men, all of whom seemed eager to whip him into shape. The giddiness of his trainers swept them all away for the next week as they began their strength and conditioning plan. He rose at five for a few hours of training in the early hours before work and then rushed to the boxing club after he closed the butcher shop at five. He often trained until ten.
They ran miles and full-out sprints, jumped rope, hit the speedball and bag, and sparred with each other amidst workouts dedicated to leg lifts, crunches, pull-ups, push-ups, and multiple rounds of holding plank.
His muscles burned. His body sweated. His heart pounded.
He got used to seeing bruises on his body and ugly scrapes and cracks on his hands and face.
It was miserable. It was elating. It was hell.
On the rare occasions he managed not to think about Kathleen, Sorcha appeared. She’d watch as he beat the bag senseless, arms crossed over her chest, but he didn’t break his rhythm. He ignored her until she went away.
He fell into bed every night, exhausted. He barely spoke to his roommates. He was hardly home.
He ran with Donal, Seamus, his father, and Killian on occasion. Sometimes Fergus and Eoghan walked briskly behind them, and sometimes they tootled behind on ancient blue bicycles Declan was sure had sped through the countryside before Ireland was a republic.
There was an instant male comradery. They had the fever, that was true, but they suffered through the pain with him. The older men complained to high heaven about getting old even as they gritted their teeth and trained like they hadn’t in years. They all gasped for breath after a round with the speedball, and they laughed when someone screamed from a cramp.
Brady didn’t trouble him about Kathleen, thank God, but the villagers shared news about her when they came to the butcher shop. He listened with gritted teeth, determined not to react. She was part of the fabric of the community, and people were bound to talk about her and her work. More troublingly, he realized he was eager for news of her.
That was how he’d learned Kathleen’s equipment had arrived at last, and the Yank was beginning her project. Lisa Ann, who took pottery classes at the arts center, told him the sheer power and noise coming from Kathleen’s shed was like nothing she’d ever heard.
He saw her life through their eyes and was heartsick at not seeing it with his own.
When he was alone, her visage came to mind unbidden, that siren call in her beautiful brown eyes. He looked on it as more training, the kind of exercise that built more of the mental toughness every good fighter possessed.
When she was visiting Ellie at Summercrest one evening, he heard her laughter floating from the parlor. He fashioned his response as he would to another fighter, one of emotional resilience. Her laughter was not going to pull him or sway him to temptation. He gritted his teeth, breathed, and used his training until sanity returned.
She’d laugh if she knew he was using her to hone his concentration and toughness. Actually, she might not, he thought, remembering how sad she’d looked when she’d said she wished they’d met as strangers on vacation.
If only…
They were star-crossed, he came to realize. The idea grew in his mind, and he started to intentionally think of her as he trained. She tested his willpower. She pushed him to the edge. She gave him the courage to keep going when he was exhausted—body, mind, and soul.
Over the next couple of weeks, he worked on coordination, footwork, and agility. Eoghan brought out an old Irish boxing trick of throwing stones for him to catch to improve his hand-eye coordination. When Declan mentioned that most people used tennis balls now, the older man punched him in the shoulder, a pretty good punch for a man of ninety-three, and informed him that no one would fear a man who trained using tennis balls.
Declan caught the stones.
He remembered how to take a punch, and he remembered how to give one. Donal and Seamus could knock him a good one back, while his father’s speed and footwork wore him down, teaching him the age-old lesson that muscle mass doesn’t always win fights.
He went from two miles to four, and it was agreed he would run five days a week, come rain or shine. He went from one hundred sit-ups to five hundred, with one of his older trainers sometimes holding his feet if they were on the red mats at the boxing club.
Everything burned, including that part of him that ached for Kathleen.
He worked through that burn, the fatigue, and the pain from the training. He got so used to wearing gloves again, he was surprised when he saw his bare hands slicing meat at the butcher shop from time to time or washing salt and sweat off his body.
When Eoghan pulled him aside after a brutal bout of punching the bag and told him that a good fighter worked on not only his body and mind, but his heart, he stilled where he stood, dripping sweat. “You have something you want to say?” he rasped.
