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Sniffing, Conor folded his arms across his chest. “Don’t know where your phone is.”
My eyes narrowed even further, but before I could snap at him to go and find the fucker, which was loaded down with confidential material that we didn’t need getting into the wrong hands, a wave of fatigue reminded me that my energy wasn’t without limits.
I wasn’t supposed to be awake, was supposed to still be in a drug-induced sleep, but I couldn’t relax. Something was gnawing at me, keeping me from resting fully.
Aela.
Seamus.
I’d heard my brothers talking. Hushed whispers, discussions about their safety. How the fuck was I supposed to sleep with that going down?Famigliacunts trying to get to my boy? With cops in Seamus’s life? Even worse, Feds sniffing around like he was cow shit and Dunbar was one big fucking horsefly?
When I didn’t reply to Conor, just glared at him, Aela whispered, “Since when was Conor so thrifty?”
“Always been thrifty,” I countered gruffly. “Just on his own dime and not everyone else’s. Cheap bastard,” I muttered, before I winced as my body ached with just how fatigued I was. Conor snorted, but didn’t deny the claim, just reverted his attention to the screen he was working on. In this place, that was about as much privacy as I could hope for. “Aela, in the morning, my brothers will be coming up for you. They’ll help bring you to the city.”
“Excuse me?” she replied.
I sniffed. “Excuse you? I don’t. Excuse you, I mean.”
“I have business here,” she retorted, her tone snooty. So fucking snooty that, back in the day, I’d have hauled her over my knee and spanked her for it.
Gritting my teeth, I told her, “Business? More important than our kid’s safety?”
At my words, she immediately gulped.
“I know about him. Brennan told me.”
More silence.
I got it. I couldn’t blame her. If I was her and I had to tell me the truth? I’d shit a brick too.
“I did what I thought was best for him.”
Her words hit me harder than the bullets had. When they’d sliced into me, tearing through flesh and organs with no regard for what they destroyed, that hurt less than her remark.
But it was also pure Aela.
Pure, ‘I won’t cower before you’ Aela.
She’d been softer back when she was younger. More pliable. But stubborn. So fucking stubborn. I swore, she got my cock harder than three lap dances back to back just with her sass.
Pliable just meant she’d bend and wouldn’t break if I put her in a corner, and sometimes, on rare occasions, she’d even come out fighting.
I wondered what a pissed off Aela looked like at thirty-two. I wondered if she looked hotter than she had been back when we were kids.
Closing my eyes at the thought, wanting to savor the memory, I had to admit that I was rocking a boner my heart probably couldn’t withstand right about now. Still, her lack of apology, though it gutted me, made me respect her.
She was standing by her decision. I couldn’t blame her. Not when a handful of hours after she became a part of my world again, there were some fuckers trying to take her and my kid out.
“Best for him now is to know me, right?”
“Before you die?” she countered, her words filled with a fire that was undeniable.
Just shove a ton of kindling in front of her and she’d be razed to the ground in the flames that were born in that spark of anger.
“I ain’t dying.”
“No? Almost did last night. Twice.”
