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But there is no angle here. No secret card up my sleeve I’m waiting to play.
I want to marry her and I will fucking do it.
I’ve already come to possess everything else in her life.
Might as well add her vow to the list.
My fiancée – because that’s already how I’m starting to think of her, and Cristo Santo, it kind of makes my dick hard – shakes her head again and then walks over to the tub. She turns off the water then carefully gets in. I watch her closely, primed to grab her if I need to because I’m worried those trauma-weakened legs are going to give out like a baby deer’s. But my Songbird’s made of strong stuff and she gets in just fine on her own.
She refuses to look at me, instead staring mulishly at the foamy bubbles that currently conceal her from her elegant collarbones down. She lifts her wet, soapy arms, tugging at the loose hairstyle on the top of her head until it all comes tumbling down in a wave of liquid fire that makes my heart feel like it’s beating both too fast and in the wrong place – in my cock instead of in my chest.
“Alright. I’m in the bath,” she tells me. “I’m not going to pass out or hold my breath or anything. You can go now.”
I do, but just for a couple of seconds. I leave the bathroom only for as long as it takes to grab the chair from Deirdre’s room. Then I carry it into the bathroom and set it down beside the bathtub.
Deirdre had been leaning back against the tub eyes closed, but they pop open at the sound of the chair being set down and my body dropping into it.
“What are you doing? I said you could go!” she snaps.
“See, the thing is, I actually can’t,” I say. The chair is facing away from the tub. I’m sitting in it backwards, straddling the seat. I rest my forearms along the chair’s back and make myself comfortable.
Deirdre gives a bitter laugh.
“You’re Elio Titone. Pretty sure you could do anything you set your mind to.”
“Almost anything,” I correct her. “Leaving you alone tonight isn’t on that list. I am physically fucking incapable of that right now.”
She rolls her eyes at me, but I’m not exaggerating. I feel like if I walk back out that door, if I put any meaningful distance between us after everything that’s happened tonight, then some vitally important blood vessel inside my head is gonna pop for good this time.
I could have lost her tonight.
It’s something I’ve been pushing down, down, down since we got home. A reality I’ve been stuffing behind softer things like tea and baths because stopping to confront the fact that she could have gotten killed tonight, could have died right in fucking front of me, literally makes me think my goddamn heart might give out.
I’m thirty-four years old. I’m way too young to have a heart attack or an aneurysm or whatever the fuck it is I feel like I’m on the verge of when I imagine losing Deirdre.
Darragh doesn’t know how lucky he is that his men have garbage fucking aim.
If that bullet had so much as nicked her freckled skin…
Rage, and something else, something that feels far too close to panic, make an ugly mess of my guts. My hands prickle and burn. I grip my elbows, forearms still resting along the back of the chair, and I fucking fuse my gaze to Deirdre, as if the intensity of my eyes alone can create a protective layer around her.
She looks like she’s decided to pretend that I’m not here. She doesn’t glance at me and she doesn’t speak, and that’s just fine by me, because I have shit to sort out in my head.
I have to decide what I’m going to do about Darragh. My instincts tell me to gut him like a fish, fill his belly with bricks, and dump him into a frozen fucking lake.
But I also have to be smart about this. Darragh isn’t a lowly soldier or some sniveling ex-boyfriend of Deirdre’s. He’s the head of the Irish mob, protected at all times. Killing him would be astronomically difficult, and even if it were achievable, there’s a very good chance I’d take a bullet to the brain in the process.
And then what? Curse steps up to avenge me, Darragh’s men step up to avenge him, Toronto’s streets run red with blood. And in the Shakespearian-level chaos of the fallout, who the hell is gonna be left to take care of my Songbird?
Fucking nobody, that’s who.
Mad Darragh might be a nutcase, but he’s not an idiot. Right now, he believes he’s taking back something that belongs to him, just like his soldiers said. But I don’t think that he would be dumb enough to try to abduct or kill a Titone. His men might not have even realized it was me with her tonight, now that I think about it, because I highly doubt they would have let loose a single shot if they’d been close enough to see who I was. Darragh Gowan chews on grudges like a starving dog with a bone, but I also know that he wants to stay in business and make a shitload of money. Not embroil his entire operation in a feud with the highest levels of La Cosa Nostra over a sweet but ultimately worthless little nobody like Deirdre.
Because really, that’s what she is to them. Her father was bottom rung mafia. Deirdre is even further removed. She doesn’t have money or status or friends.
But she’s got me now.
Yeah. I definitely need to think this through. Don’t rush.
