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“Ronan,” I sighed. “Even you need a break.”
“Do I though?” He grinned at me. “If it’s you crying uncle, lass…”
“I am a little sore,” I admitted.
The laughter fell from his face. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”
“Quiet,” I said. “I liked all of it.”
“So I guess we play cards?”
“I’ll warn you, my Go Fish game is legendary.”
“Yeah, you’re a real card shark. Tom taught me how to play gin rummy. At the church.”
“They let you have cards?”
“I figure they thought it was hard to murder someone with paper cuts.” He smiled at me, easy and loose in the memory and I hadn’t seen him easy and loose in a memory for a long time. “Anyway, gin rummy, that’s my game.”
“You’ll have to teach me,” I said. “I don’t know it.”
A puzzled look crossed his face and he straightened, looking around. “I don’t think I have cards here.”
That didn’t surprise me. I never saw him watch television. Or pick up a book.
“What do you do for fun?” I asked him.
“Fucking you is fun.”
I laughed, the fizzy water I was drinking almost coming out my nose.
“What did you do before I came along.” I realized the trap I’d walked into and held up my hand. “I don’t mean other women. I don’t mean to pry.”
“There were no other women, lass. No one who mattered. And no one for a long time.”
“So?” I asked, unwilling to let this go. “What did you do for fun?”
“You won’t laugh?”
“Oh my god, is it…were you like a mime or something? A clown? Please, please tell me you were a clown.”
“Fuck off, Poppy. I’m being serious.”
I turned my face to stone. “I won’t laugh.”
“I used to draw.”
Like his mother.
I took tiny sips of air so I wouldn’t cry.
“It all stopped at St. Brigid’s, but when I was wee, I loved art. I had a teacher who entered a picture I’d drawn in some city contest and it got a red ribbon. I remember even my da was proud of me. Took me to the pub and showed me off.”
He twirled his pasta and took a bite. We ate from the pan, sitting at the table. Each of us in our underwear. It was a scene in a rom-com movie and I was giddy with love. It felt like a dream. A bubble I would do anything to keep from popping.
“Your mother would be proud of that,” I whispered.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. But I saw the wheels turning in his head, the way he might be seeing himself in a different way.
* * *
Poppy
There was a pounding on the door that snapped me awake and I registered the warmth of Ronan’s body leaving the bed. The hallway light flickered on and Ronan’s low voice rumbled. Raj answered. All before I managed to get myself out of the blankets.
Ronan came back into the bedroom, naked and carrying a gun.
“That shouldn’t be as hot as it is,” I said, watching him put his gun in the bedside table. “Who was at the door?”
He held a creamy envelope out to me, the kind sealed with real wax. Extremely fancy. Old school.
“What does it say?” I asked, staring at the envelope like it was a snake about to bite.
“I didn’t read it.”
I took the thick paper and slipped out a note written in a heavy script.
“It’s an invitation,” I said. “To have drinks with Leo Morelli.”
“Me?”
“Both of us.”
I wore a red dress with only one shoulder strap. It was tight and sexy and it showed off the scar on my arm in a way that I thought said “I’ve seen some shit so don’t fuck with me.”
Ronan was mad at me, but he could not keep his hand off my shoulder, his thumb stroked over the healing edges of the scar sending shivers across my neck.
“You like my dress,” I said, curled up against him in the back of the car. Raj was driving. The invitation told us not to come armed and to only come with a driver.
Both of those rules did not make Ronan happy.
“I’d like it better at home.”
“You look nice,” I said, running my hand down the crisp white of his shirt. He wore a dark suit that made him look lean and deadly. Sexy. We looked sexy together. A sexy dangerous couple having a drink with another sexy dangerous couple.
No big deal. Nothing to see here, folks.
My heart was going like mad, though.
“I don’t like this, Poppy.”
“You’ve said that a million times. But marriage made us safe, remember?”
“Morelli’s aren’t known to kill other Morelli’s, but anything could happen.”
“Why would he want to hurt me?”
“Because I shot him not too long ago. The war between him and Caroline.”
I turned on him, mouth agape. “You’re just telling me this now?”
He shrugged, silent. The arm behind my head an iron bar of tension.
