Page 7 of Dirty Pool

Wrong.

A very small percentage of people—Gabbie was in that lucky number—could develop type two diabetes because of other health problems, like being insulin resistant. She managed her diabetes with a very strict diet, exercise, and occasionally medications when she needed it.

She’d lost those thirty pounds, but because of the way her disease worked, she was borderline underweight. Something her doctor and father liked to remind her every time she had to step on a feckin’ scale. She’d gone from putting on weight like crazy in a matter of months to struggling to gain any weight for several years.

Yeah, a struggle.

That was the best way to describe this disease.

“Could we not do this today?” she asked, glancing up at her tall father.

Charles stared back at her, unaffected.

She took after a lot of her father’s features—from the red, unruly hair to the freckles that dotted the bridge of her nose and her cheeks … her whole body, really. Even the shape of her green eyes, and the high line of her cheekbones matched her father’s more masculine, stronger features. She was the softer, feminine version.

But her lips?

The small cleft in her chin?

The dimple in her left cheek?

Charles said that was all her mam.

“Today is supposed to be for Ma,” she reminded her da, “not for you to hover and poke at me about what I’m putting in my mouth.”

“But if I don’t do it, who is?”

Gabbie sighed, and crossed her arms over her chest. The people at the table had yet to realize the man throwing this dinner party to celebrate the life of his dead wife had still not joined them to eat. Not that it was stopping them from digging into the food on the platters.

“That’s the point, it’s for me to worry about now.”

“Can’t do that, lass,” Charles said, “that’s not how a father’s mind works.”

She was about to open her mouth and argue further with her father—how was he ever going to learn to trust her if he continued to do this?—when someone at the table saved her from .

“Charles, are you bothering that lass of yours again?” Brennan asked.

One of the men at table grinned at Gabbie. Rather conspiratorially. Like he knew exactly what her father was doing, and he was going to try to save her.

Brennan Brady likely did know, too. Her father’s right-hand man in the Irish mob, Brennan, had been in her life for as long as she could remember. The same way a lot of people at the table were all familiar, comforting faces to her. She hadn’t truly understood that her father was an Irish mob boss until she was thirteen, and couldn’t make friends at her private Catholic high school because the other girls’ parents told them to stay away from her.

Rumors spread.

People whispered and avoided.

High school had been hell in that way.

She learned the truth, though, and that explained a lot about her father and the men that constantly came and went from her life and home growing up. All those late night meetings in her father’s office, and the way everyone in her life hated and distrusted the cops simply because they were cops.

Besides, Gabbie quickly learned that in their life, she didn’t need friends from the outside. She had all the people she needed—friends included—within her own family. They were the only people who truly understood what it was like to be in this family, after all.

What else did she need?

“Aye, lad,” Charles growled, giving his friend a look as he stepped forward to finally take his seat at the table, “you mind your own broad at home, and let me mind mine.”

“Let the girl eat,” Kenneth, her uncle, and another man under her father in the organization said from his seat between his wife and adult children. “She’ll mind her sugars, boyo. You make sure of it.”

“Exactly.” Her father pointed a finger at the two men, giving them a look that told them to shut up. “None of you have to do it—had it been up to you lot, she woulda been shoving all kinds of sugar in her mouth from the time she could chew. Shut the holes in your feckin’ faces, and eat your food before I decide to kick the bunch of you outta my house.”