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“He’s calling off his dogs?”
“For the moment.”
“You going to crawl back to the Morellis with your tail between your legs?” I asked her, finishing what was left of Poppy’s champagne.
“It’s not that bad,” Eden said, and I laughed. All her power was gone. All her leverage. All she had left was her life and she needed to figure that out quick. She was fucked and she knew it. She swallowed and glanced out the window at the dark night. “Will there be twenty Morellis waiting for me?”
“You’re asking me if I called them?”
“Payback, maybe. For making you do this.”
“I’m not interested in Poppy watching you get gunned down in front of her.”
“Well, if that isn’t a love song, I don’t know what is.”
“No one knows we’re coming in,” I said. “Not Caroline. Not the Morellis. You’ll have time to plot your escape.”
“Or my revenge,” she said, attempting to be coy and cheeky.
“The best thing you can do is get the fuck out of town, Eden, before they even know you’re here.”
She shook her head at me. “You’re so sure all the time, Ronan. One of these days you’re going to be wrong.”
It was, in fact, only a matter of fucking time. I’d spent the last ten years of my life waiting for the bullet in the back of my skull and I’d grown numb to fear or even anticipation. But now…with Poppy, the clock counting down the minutes I had left in my life was loud in my head.
“You’re wrong about Poppy,” she said.
“What the fuck do you know about it?”
“She thinks you’re mad at her and you can punish her with your silences and broody Irish grunts. But I see the truth.” She grinned up at me, baring her teeth in order to score back some of her pride. “You’re terrified of her.”
Frothy Poppy?
With her indignation and brattiness and her heart so big it swallowed me whole?
Yeah. I was fucking terrified.
Terrified that she was telling herself some fairy tale about who I was and what we could be. Terrified that she was pregnant.
I ignored Eden and made a promise to myself. To Poppy. I would get her out of this. Out of this marriage. This fucking city, if that’s what it took. I would get her far, far away from me.
“You want me to take them a message?” Eden said, looking to be useful until the very end in the hopes it would keep her alive.
“Tell them I’ll come to them. They send one guy to my door and this whole thing goes to shit.”
“It doesn’t really work that way with the Morellis,” she said with a wince.
“It does with me. They want the missing Morelli, they get him on my terms.”
I set down my glass and walked over to her, close enough that she leaned back in her seat, and I put my arm on the back of the banquette like I had less than an hour ago when I was fucking Poppy like I might die without her.
“And if any Morelli, including you, comes near Poppy, I’ll kill them.”
* * *
Poppy
“Poppy?” Ronan’s voice pulled me from sleep and my eyes blinked open. A headache pounded and my mouth was dry and sticky.
For a second, one blissful quiet second, I didn’t remember anything. I looked around the dark and quiet cabin and wasn’t sure where I was.
“We’ve landed,” Ronan said. He stood in the doorway, the brightly lit main cabin of the jet behind him. Eden was there in her fur and red lipstick, packing up her purse. And it all came back to me. The Morellis and the Constantines. The strange uncertain future.
My husband.
My porn-worthy wedding night.
A blush incinerated my entire body. Whatever courage desperation and booze had given me, it was long gone. And I felt foolish.
“Are you all right?” he asked with concern that, a few hours ago, I would have begged to have thrown my way. Right now, slightly hungover and scared, I was over it.
“Fine,” I said and stood up. I wore one of his dress shirts with a pair of women’s yoga pants I found in a drawer and refused to think about who they belonged to and how they might have arrived in Ronan’s jet. I shoved my feet into the boots I’d been wearing and pushed my hair, snarled from sleeping on it wet, out of my eyes.
“Let’s do this,” I said. I followed Ronan out into the early dawn of NYC. The city behind us was just waking up, pink-cheeked and fresh. There were two black town cars waiting on the tarmac, back doors open. The air was cool and I shivered in my husband’s dress shirt. He slipped his jacket over my shoulders and I wanted to reject the gesture and the comfort but it was warm and smelled like him. I pulled it over my chest. A cocoon of Ronan.
