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SAOIRSE
This isn’t me.
I don’t recognize the girl in the hotel room mirror, despite her having my features, dark strawberry hair, my green eyes, and my figure. In these new clothes, purchased just for tonight, I feel like an unfamiliar person in a foreign place. My heart skips a beat in my chest as I run my fingers anxiously through my bone-straight hair, all the usual waves ironed out of it.
On the foot of the bed next to me, there’s a file, open with documents and photos spilling out of it, like I’m some kind of agent or one of Viktor Andreyev’s new assassins-in-training on a mission instead of the daughter of an Irish King, the closest thing to royalty there could be on American soil. I glance at it, feeling my heart speed up a little as I catch sight of the pictures again—pictures of a man I also hardly recognize.
When I knew him, he was polished, smooth, and elegant, always with a clean-shaven face and his dark reddish-brown hair carefully styled back, always in a suit or a button-up and slacks. If those arms were ever visible, they were smooth and bare, without a speck of visible ink in sight.
This man in the photos is someone else. More muscular than before, stubble where his cheeks used to be smooth, a scar running down one side of his face from the corner of his eye to below his chin—something that might make another man look less handsome, but only serves to make him look even more attractive and more dangerous, a roguish sort of sex appeal.
I push the pictures around the duvet, glancing at each of them as I try to steady my heartbeat, but seeing his face in every one doesn’t help matters at all. In some, he’s wearing a t-shirt and jeans, tattoos covering every inch of his exposed arms and crawling up his throat. In others, he’s wearing a well-worn leather jacket, sometimes a beanie in the colder weather, other times with that thick auburn hair that I remember so well loose and messy around his face.
Connor McGregor.
The man I was once supposed to marry—and that tonight, I’m supposed to pretend to seduce. A concept that is completely unfamiliar to me. I’ve spent my whole life protecting my virginity, a thing that was drilled into me from a young age and contained the majority of my value to my family. I’m not expected to give it up tonight—but I’m supposed to seduce this man into thinking he’s coming to my hotel room to fuck me.
It’s not as if I’ve never thought about sleeping with Connor McGregor before. Once upon a time, it was understood that he’d be my husband. But I’d always pictured it as a cold, transactional kind of thing. A clinical coupling to join our families and produce an heir. I hadn’t thought much about pleasure or passion back then.
But this man—even in still images, he oozes sex appeal. This man doesn’t look like the kind to spend fifteen minutes thrusting into a woman in the missionary position and then rolling over to sleep. This man looks like he’d throw a woman up against a wall. Toss her over his shoulder and carry her into the bedroom, whether she wanted him to or not.Demandthings from her, filthy things, things that I’m not even sure I have the capacity to describe, with my narrow concept of sex and complete inexperience.
Connor never really excited me, not the way Liam had. But looking down at the photos, I feel a throb between my legs, an unfulfilled ache as my mouth goes dry and my pulse speeds up. I can feel my arousal between my thighs, dampening the lacy panties that I’m wearing underneath the abnormally tight jeans.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Saoirse. If you’re not careful, he’ll be the one seducingyou.
I grab the photos, shuffling them into a pile and turning them over quickly. The only way this is going to work is if I maintain control of the situation. I can’t do that if I’m salivating over a man I haven’t seen in years, who doesn’t even know I’m coming.
The documents in the file, all procured by men my father has sent out looking for information on Connor these past months, tell me a few very important pieces of information. First, Connor is running his own gang out of London now—a mid-level operation dealing in things like party drugs, a bit of money laundering, and weapons between them and Ireland. He hasn’t cut off all Irish ties, that much is clear, but he’s going by an English name, a fake identity.
William Davies.
There’s a knock at the door. “Come in,” I call out, my heart pounding a steady rhythm in my chest as I close the file, turning towards the door as it opens. It’s my father, as I knew it would be—Graham O’Sullivan, right hand to the Irish King, as the O’Sullivans have been for generations. Tall, bearded, handsome, the one that I take after more than my mother, a commanding presence who instilled in me a strength that’s served me well all these years, even if it causes us to butt heads at times. Though I’ve always known it was my place to serve the family through marriage to the right man, my father taught me that didn’t mean I had to be weak or subservient.
An Irish rose is no wilting flower.
“You look perfect.” My father looks me up and down from head to toe. “He won’t be able to resist you.”
“I don’t feel like myself.” I glance in the mirror again. It’s not as if I’ve spent my entire life in evening gowns and jewels—I went to college, after all. I wear normal clothes. But this—the black jeans are skin-tight, outlining every curve I have, made with some sorcery that makes my Pilates-firm ass look bigger than it actually is. The top I’m wearing is dark green, sleeveless, and with a draped wrap neckline low enough that I can’t wear a bra. It shows off the swell of my full breasts, and god help me if I move too quickly to one side or the other—someone might catch an eyeful of an entire breast, nipple and all.
Which, I suppose, is the point.
The rest of it feels just as out of place. Huge silver hoop earrings, biker-style Doc Martens with the jeans tucked in, and a buttery-soft black leather jacket to cover up against the chilly London rain, which seems to persist here even in summer. The jacket I actually like—I might keep it. But the rest, including the dark eye makeup and false lashes, feels so antithetical to my usual style that it’s like wearing a different skin.
The last time I wore green to meet a man I was supposed to marry, I was in silk and diamonds, swathed in candlelight, dressed like royalty to have my betrothal to the Irish King blessed by the priest.
Tonight, I’m dressed to seduce.
“Good,” my father says. “We don’twantyou to look like you, Saoirse. The less likely he is to recognize you until you get him up here to the room, the better. He knew you for a long time before, after all, and while you’ve certainly changed in the years since he left, he might remember you. The less you look like that girl he was supposed to marry, for now, the better.”
“He probably doesn’t remember me.” I press my lips together, frowning with remembered annoyance. For all that I was always meant to marry a McGregor son, neither of them ever noticed me much. Connor was too busy learning his place as the McGregor heir, and Liam—well, Liam was too busy being himself, the reckless, playful, funny younger brother. The latter had no responsibilities and no one watching him.
Except for me.
“He’d be a fool not to,” my father says gruffly. “But for our sake and the sake of the plan, let’s hope you’re right. Now come on, lass, let’s get you downstairs.” He looks at me, his gaze hardening. “This is an important night, Saoirse, for all of us. Everything depends on you getting Connor back here, to this room, for him and I to talk.”
He reaches for my left hand, thumb rubbing over the space where a ring used to be. “Liam left you in disgrace,” he reminds me—as if I needed reminding—“with a broken engagement. This is your last chance to do what you were born for, lass. If you don’t succeed, who knows what man will take you. If Liam keeps his seat, it’s likely that I won’t keep mine. The O’Sullivan family will fall, and I’ll be forced to marry you off to whoever can offer us some alliance and cushion that blow.”
I meet his gaze unwaveringly. “Don’t worry,” I tell him calmly—more calmly than I feel inside. “I know what this means for us. I’ll do my duty.”
