The Good Daughter by Jane Porter Page B

fine, but if she didn’t, Kit wasn’t about to poke or probe what might still be a tender wound. “I think it was just sex,” she said casually, taking a sip of her margarita.
    Polly’s eyebrow arched. “As if sex is nothing.”
    “Sometimes it is nothing.”
    “And sometimes it’s everything.”
    “I disagree.”
    “Kit, you can’t have a great relationship without good sex.”
    Kit suddenly thought of her years with Richard. Richard had never been particularly sensual, but he got the job done. He was an engineer, for Pete’s sake. He was excellent with the mechanics, knew how to make her orgasm. He’d also reminded her of that more than once when she expressed dissatisfaction with their relationship.
At least you have nothing to complain about in the bedroom,
he’d say, smirking and puffing out his chest.
    Kit didn’t argue the point with him. What could she say? That she’d rather he marry her than make her come? That an orgasm didn’t necessarily make one feel loved? That frequent sex didn’t answer her need to have a family…to be a mom?
    “Maybe,” Kit said, taking another quick sip of her cocktail. “But sex is strange. I think it’s weird.”
    “Weird?”
    “Don’t you think so? I do. And maybe it’s just me, but when it’s right, it’s so right, and yet when it’s wrong…” Her voice drifted off. She wrinkled her nose. “It’s just yuck. Horrid.”
    “I agree with you. Bad sex…ugh. There’s nothing worse.” Polly fell silent, mulling the thought over. “So, Meg and Jack are good now? They’ve worked everything out?”
    “I think so,” Kit answered, knowing only that the two of them put on a united front for the family. Kit wasn’t sure what was really happening at home but hoped her sister and brother-in-law were doing well. She liked Jack. He was an architect and historian and, best of all, a book person like her. “I hope so. They seem okay now.”
    “I guess they’d have to do the unified front for the kids.”
    Kit was protective of all her sisters, but of Meg in particular.Meg had a lot of responsibility growing up, probably too much, while Kit acknowledged now that she herself had probably had too little. “That’s a good thing, though, because they’re awesome kids, and they love their parents. They want them together.
    “Do you still see the kids a lot?”
    “Not as much as I did over the summer, but I try to get up to Santa Rosa at least once a month. They’re only an hour or so north of me, so it’s not a long drive, the problem is finding the time. It’s harder now that I’m spending every other weekend with Mom, but I expect when baseball starts up again, I’ll drive up more often. I love going to JJ’s games. He’s good. He reminds me a lot of my brother, Tommy, at that age.”
    “Tommy played baseball, too?”
    “All the way through college. Got drafted by the Brewers but after a couple seasons in minor-league ball, gave it up, got a ‘real job.’”
    “As a firefighter,” Polly said knowingly.
    “The family business,” Kit agreed, knowing that her father could trace his genealogy straight back to County Clare, when his great-great-great-grandfather Seamus Brennan headed to America to find his fortune in the gold and silver rushes of California and Nevada. Seamus panned for gold and worked the mines for six dirty, dusty, backbreaking years before accepting that he wasn’t going to strike it rich, and ended up in the beautiful new city of San Francisco, where he worked in a hotel and part-time as a volunteer fireman. Within five years the volunteer job turned into a permanent job and every generation of Brennans since had at least one son follow in Seamus’s footsteps. “Six generations of San Francisco firefighters, and before that, God knows what they were doing in Ireland.”
    “Starving?”
    “Hopefully not. Although I don’t really know a lot about the Brennans in Ireland. We knew my great-great-great-great-grandfatheremigrated