Page 362 of Romeo

Neither of us answered.

Braveheart pushed away from the wall. Juju moved farther into the room. Donut abandoned his food, which might have been the clearest indication yet that things had gotten serious, and Worm slowly closed his laptop.

Six Bourbon Kings.

One Angel.

I’d faced worse odds before and come out on fucking top.

Gator’s phone rang, but nobody moved.

The sound cut through the room again, absurdly normal against the violence hanging in the air. Gator kept his eyes on me as he reached into his pocket and pulled it free.

His gaze dropped to the screen, and something changed in the air.

“Romeo,” he said quietly.

Every muscle in my body locked.

Gator answered immediately. “What you need?”

I couldn’t hear a word from the other end, but whatever Romeo said wiped every trace of humor from Gator’s face.

He straightened.

His eyes lifted and locked directly on mine.

For several seconds, I listened to one side of a conversation. My daughter was in trouble. If any of these motherfuckers thought they were leaving me behind now, they were about to remember exactly why they called me the Angel of Death.

Then Gator said, “We’re on our way, cousin.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

Romeo

Fiona was standing at the kitchen counter in one of my T-shirts, barefoot, hair piled on top of her head in a messy knot that looked like it had lost an argument with her fingers. She was slicing fruit with far more concentration than the job required, which gave me plenty of time to sit at the table with my coffee and admire the view without pretending I was doing anything else.

The shirt hit halfway down her thighs.

That was the problem.

Or maybe the blessing.

Depended how charitable a man felt before breakfast.

The last two weeks had done terrible things to my self-control. I had spent more than a year deliberately keeping my hands to myself while Fiona grew up, graduated, figured out what she wanted, and eventually decided she wanted me. Now she was my wife, we were alone in a cabin where nobody could interrupt us, and apparently the woman had taken every ounce of restraint I’d shown her as a personal fucking challenge.

I took another drink of coffee and let my gaze follow the bare line of her legs.

She had surprised me.

More than once.

Not just with what she was willing to try; though, Jesus Christ, I could have spent the rest of the morning thinking about that and never tire of it. What stayed with me was watching her discover how much she could enjoy herself. The way uncertainty disappeared the second pleasure took over. The way she stopped worrying about whether she was doing something right and simply let herself feel.

Watching Fiona come apart beneath my hands had become one of my favorite fucking things in the world.

Maybe the favorite.