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My jaw tensed though, a welter of…God, I didn’t even know what. Feelings? Sensations? They whirled through me, left me feeling like I’d been thrown in an industrial washing machine and had been put on deep spin mode.
“I’ll go to confession.”
Four words, pathetic really, in the face of what we’d just shared, but they were all I could think to say.
It seemed to be enough.
She sagged into me. “Thank you.”
My lips wanted to twitch into a smile, but I knew this wasn’t funny. She meant it.
And fuck if I didn’t too.
INESSA
The buzzer disturbed us both.Eoghan leaped off the bed, leaving things mostly unspoken between us. I got it. I did. But still, it felt like he and I had never been so close as we were at that moment, and I only hoped we’d reach that point once more.
As I quickly shrugged on some skinny jeans and a thin Ralph Lauren sweater that was a hell of a lot brighter than my current mood—vivid magenta—I wandered out into the hall to see Eoghan, now dressed in jeans and a tee, waiting at the elevator. He was barefoot, and he was pretty much bouncing on his toes.
I stared at them, amused to think he was about to talk business barefoot.
The elevator doors whirled open, revealing Declan, a woman I didn’t know who was glowering at him, and then another woman, more my age, with two bikers in their twenties clustered at her side.
What had I overheard on the phone?
Something about the daughter of the Hell’s Rebels’ Prez bringing security with her?
Yeah, no chance. They were more than security. Every inch of them screamed over-protective, but it had nothing to do with an edict from their boss.
There was love there.
I saw it in a flash.
My gaze connected with the girl’s, and deep in her eyes, there was a misery and a grief so terrifying, it suffocated me for a second.
I felt her pain, felt it so rawly, that I knew, even though she was trying, she thought her man—her other man—was dead.
Unable to stop myself, I cast Eoghan a glance. He was mine, whether he knew it or not, and the prospect of him dying tonight, of this mission going awry, had everything inside me going haywire.
I wanted to cling to him, even as I knew I had to back off. This was business. Feelings couldn’t get involved, but there was no way in hell I could let him leave this apartment without trying to show him something of the chaos inside me.
A chaos the other woman shared.
“Been a long time, Aela,” Eoghan rumbled, his gaze drifting over the oldest woman in the room. Saying that, she was only in her late twenties, early thirties maybe, and she was gorgeous with an abundance of bright blue hair that gleamed in the hall light like it had glitter in it.
The blue matched her eyes, and the bright red paint on her lips was discordant, but it suited her. She had delicate golden studs all the way down her ear and along to her earlobe, and even though I knew she was Irish from her name, there was something faintly exotic about her. The almond eyes that were heavy on liner, then the scrolling tattoos on her wrists that were like living bracelets, Acuig swirling through both tatts… She reminded me of Jasmine fromAladdin. Except with blue hair instead of black.
She shot Eoghan a smile. “Too long, Eoghan. You look well.” She cut me a look too. “Married. Never thought I’d see the day.”
“Da agreed, decided to fix things for me,” he said ruefully, and before I could get annoyed at being talked about like I wasn’t even here, he twisted and held out his hand for me. When his arm slipped over my shoulder, curving me into him, I hesitantly placed my fingers on his belly even as I smiled at Aela.
Eoghan’s small squeeze filled me with a confidence I hadn’t known I’d been lacking, and I greeted her, “It’s a pleasure to meet an old friend of Eoghan’s—”
Declan snorted at that. “They weren’t friends.”
His harsh voice had my brows rising. Declan had always been kind to me, he’d been the one I’d spent the most time with before my wedding. I knew he’d felt sorry for me. Eoghan’s refusal to meet me before the day of the ceremony had hurt at first, then I’d started getting pissed, but Declan had always cheered me up on the occasions where we’d been pushed together.
There’d even been times where I wished he was the one I was going to marry, but this Declan was different fromthatDeclan.
