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A nightmare last night?
His being forgetful when my man’s memory was razor sharp?
Something was going on, and I wanted to know. How could I help fix things if I was kept in the dark?
He was silent for so long that I didn’t think he’d speak, then he broke my heart by admitting, “You know my stepfather abused me?”
My heart stuttered, rage and compassion warring inside me as I retorted, “I’d poison his bread if I could.”
I knew something was wrong, but I hadn’t thought it was to do with his stepfather.
Finn blinked at that, but he smiled. “Only you could make me smile at a moment like this.”
“You know if you crush up apple seeds, you can make cyanide?” I mean, you needed a hell of a lot of apple seeds, but that was how they’d done it in the old days. “I go through thousands of apples in the bakery. I know where to get a source of untraceable cyanide.”
“Let me guess, Jen told you that one,” he drawled with a chuckle. “She’s more into the vengeance shit than you.”
“I watch documentaries too,” I said in a scurry. “Plus, I learned all kinds of crap at culinary school.”
“‘How To Poison People 101?’ Isn’t the objective not to poison people when you're learning to be a chef?”
I shoved his shoulder slightly. “Don’t be dense.”
“I’m pretty sure this life is poisonous in and of itself. A few years ago, you wouldn’t have told someone you’d lace their Danish with cyanide.”
Tipping my head to the side, I murmured, “That’s where you’re wrong. I wasn’t an angel, Finn.”
“No?” He smiled. “Actually, you’re right. Not past tense. Present. Youaremy angel.”
“Even angels can have dirty faces when they shove it in a bowl of cookie dough.”
That had him snorting out a laugh. “Like Jake did last week?”
I nodded. “You’re surrounded by angels with dirty faces.”
I didn’t tell him that I thought he belonged in the same category.
Maybe ‘the life’hadchanged me. Maybe I was more risk cautious, danger aware, than before, and maybe I knew there were some things that had to be done to keep the world spinning—
I sighed.
He wasn’t wrong.
Men had died on the O’Donnelly compound over the holidays.
My husband had returned to me from only God knew where the night before Christmas Eve, stinking of smoke, and wouldn’t you know it? There’d been a terror attack against the cathedral in New York…
It wasn’t hard to put two and two together.
Wasn’t hard to think that maybe he’d been a part of that whole thing that had New York on a red alert the likes of which we hadn’t seen since that horrendous September back in '01.
I reached over and cupped his chin. “Do you judge me for letting my morals slip?”
“Are you kidding me? I thank Christ every fucking day for that. There'd be no you and me if you couldn't deal with...” His words waned, but I heard them anyway.
If you couldn't deal with the things I have to do to put bread on the table.
“Then what’s the problem?”
