Page 24 of Dirty Pool

“Well, you can keep us company. Brennan doesn’t mind, do you, mate?”

Brennan passed Gabbie a look, and smiled. “Never.”

She opted to say nothing because at this point, there wasn’t anything worth saying. The car pulled away from the curb, and she settled into the back seat after she buckled up. Her father and his right-hand man conversed back and forth, their conversation switching from their mother tongue to English in a blink.

Gabbie found that most difficult to follow along—she understood Gaelic well enough, but only when someone was speaking slowly. It was harder for her to distinguish the many topics they bounced between when they used both Irish and English to bark at one another, though. Yet another thing that she never understood between her father and his best friend. They yelled at one another more often than they talked.

Then, her father glanced into the mirror again, catching her gaze. “How did last night go, lass?”

“Grand, Da.”

“Oh?”

“Aye.”

She was not about to go into every little detail of her night. She’d managed to pull on a long sleeve sweater that hid the cut on her arm, although she was sure at some point, someone at the club who witnessed the accident would mention it to her father. If he didn’t know about it now, then she wasn’t going to bring it up.

Plus, Michel …

She didn’t think Charles wanted to know that.

“Anything interesting happen?” her father asked.

Gabbie arched a brow. “No.”

“Hmm.”

“Any drinking?”

She sighed. “I’m not even twenty-one, they won’t serve me.”

Lies.

They would and did serve her at some of the mob-owned joints she attended simply because they knew who she was. Plus, she seriously believed they were scared of what might happen if they refused the Irish boss’s daughter something she asked for.

And, if she went to a club that wasn’t mob-owned … well, she had a nice little fake ID provided to her by Aine that worked to get her whatever she wanted. None of those details were important for her father to know, or this discussion.

What were a few white lies?

They wouldn’t really hurt, right?

“No problems at the new place?” Charles asked.

“None that I noticed.”

Except a gorgeous Italian selling drugs in your territory. She kept that thought to herself because she wasn’t sure if her father even knew about Michel being at the club to deal. There was only one major Italian crime family in Detroit—the Vannozzos. They didn’t particularly get along with her father’s organization, but over the years, they’d accepted that they would just keep a healthy distance.

Gabbie wasn’t sure, and she didn’t think she could ask her father without raising his suspicions about why she was asking, but she was sure the Vannozzos were a brand of the Marcellos in New York. She didn’t actively seek out information about the criminal world her father was so involved in, but she wasn’t dumb or deaf, either. She heard when people talked, and she had been around long enough to hear conversations on that topic.

Was that it?

Had Michel came down from New York, and while doing his pre-med, decided to keep himself entertained by messing with the Vannozzos?

“I heard the club was quite full last night,” her father said, dragging her from her thoughts.

Gabbie nodded. “A wee bit. Not too bad, though.”

He didn’t seem very serious about his line of questioning, and if he knew that she was lying, then he didn’t show it. His face remained passive even as he probed her a bit more about her night, and what her plans were for the day after they went to breakfast.