AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Since my baby brother got fucking married! That’s when.”
I shrugged. “Not by my choice.”
“Doesn’t matter. She’s yours now. Da said that would change things, and he was right.”
“What else has the old bastard been saying?”
Aidan laughed at my growl, but his lips stopped twitching when he said, “Da implied that you needed to settle down.”
“You don’t say,” I groused, and I waggled my hand at him. I didn’t particularly like the sight of the titanium wedding ring on my finger, but I wore it because all married men in the family did.
The whole Catholic thing was a fucking joke sometimes.
It didn’t stop men with said rings from boning anything in a skirt that wasn’t their wife…
Hypocrisy. That was why I hated the church. Our lives were one big round of it, and it stank like shit, and I was way too clean to appreciate that.
“He said the only thing that has kept him on the straight and narrow is Ma—”
Before he could carry on, I hooted out a laugh. “You mean to tell me he thinks the life he’s led is straight and narrow?”
Aidan’s grin was sheepish. “Apparently. Can you imagine what he would have been like without Ma?”
“Fuck knows.”
“Well, he seems to think you’re on that path. So, by that logic, when you’re sixty-six, you’ll be even worse than Da.”
“If any of us live that long.”
“Don’t be maudlin.”
I shrugged. “Not being maudlin. None of us lead good lives, do we? It’s not like we’re spared violence on the regular.”
“We’re New Yorkers. There’s violence everywhere,” was his retort, which made no sense to me, because he was the one with the worst injury in the family.
Hell, Aoife was on daily doses of antibiotics thanks to that drive-by shooting that had almost claimed Aidan’s leg, so with both of them as living proof that violence was part of our world? Yeah, I thought I had the right to be maudlin, especially when agony lined his face every fucking day.
We weren’t just close because we shared blood, but because we’d made the choice to be… I sometimes wondered if he remembered that when he lost the fight with another pill.
Clearing my throat at the thought, I grumbled, “Did you call just so I could cheer you up?”
His grin reappeared. “Yeah. If that was right, then it didn’t work.”
I snorted. “I live to entertain.”
“Well, right now, your idea of entertaining isn’t working either. What the hell have you been doing with her? Conor says you haven’t left the apartment once all week.”
I rolled my eyes. “That fucker is a pervert.”
“No, he’s been trying to find a trace of the hackers who bypassed his firewall.” Then he smirked. “But he’s a pervert too.”
“We’ve been acclimating to one another,” was all I could think to say in answer to his earlier question.
I’d had no real desire to go out, to leave the apartment, not when…
Fuck.
I hooked the towel around my neck, strode over to grab the remote, and turned it down so she wouldn’t be able to hear our conversation.
