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PROLOGUE
Shane
Chief Petty Officer Shane O’Brien rolled his eyes and sighed deeply, falling back hard onto his deep, wide couch. The couch took up most of the space in his small living room, but it was totally worth it. Everything in his modest condo was bought for comfort. He wasn’t home often enough to care about hanging family photos on the wall or putting fresh flowers in a vase on the dining room table. He wanted a bed where he could fall asleep fast, a couch that didn’t break under his big frame when he plopped down to remove his boots, and a coffee pot that made an entire thermos full at a time, not one of those contraptions that specialized in single-cup servings. He was a simple man living alone, and his space reflected that. His deployment schedule was too insane to be fair to a pet, and he had no interest in finding a wife to keep his bed warm. He slept hot as it was.
That very lack of a love life was what his mother was nagging him about. It was all Shane could do to keep from tossing his phone across the room. Instead, his passive-aggressive sigh and an even bigger eye roll followed the end of Margaret O’Brien’s rant.
“I can feel your eyes rolling from here, Shane Michael O’Brien,” Maggie lectured her youngest son.
Caught, he muttered his denial. Nothing could make him feel like an eight-year-old as a sharp rebuke from his Irish mother. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Ma.”
“And I didn’t give birth to six boys. Don’t you lie to me, son.”
“Okay, okay!” He threw up his hands in surrender, even though she couldn’t see them. He turned his earbuds down, knowing she would continue her tirade for a few more minutes, at least before he could get her off the phone.
“No, Ma. I haven’t found a nice Irish girl here to settle down with. Ma, I’m not home very often, you know that. I’m off on missions more often than not. I don’t have time for…” He let her interrupt him with the dozens of reasons she thought he had plenty of time and how he should make time to find love. After all, according to her, his life wouldn’t be complete without a nice wife and a couple of babies to come home to.
Despite what she thought, there simply wasn’t time in his schedule for romance. No matter how many times she called and harped on him to find a wife and give her grandchildren—the same thing she had been nagging all six of her boys about for the past decade—Shane’s answer hadn’t changed. She calledeverySunday, even the Sundays when he was deployed, and instead of talking directly to him, she simply left a nagging voicemail. For every reason he would give her for not finding a wife, she had at least two rebuttals.
Maggie’s biggest solution to the problem was to leave the military altogether and come home to the family business. That was a line he had drawn in the sand years ago. He was not now, nor would he ever be, interested in working with his father and brothers. He loved being a SEAL and couldn’t imagine doing anything else. His career was speeding right along, and marriage would be nothing but a distraction. Romance, dating,or courting, as his old-fashioned grandmother called it, all of it was nothing but a distraction.
And everyone knew a distracted SEAL was a dead SEAL.
If the Navy wanted him to have a wife, he would have been issued one. Or as his fellow SEALs said, “If you ever have the desire to get married, save yourself the hassle and find a woman you hate and buy her a house.”
Shane had thought his oldest brother getting married would give him a bit of a reprieve, that his ma would lay off of him some and be focused on wedding planning instead. If anything, Patrick getting married had the opposite effect. Maggie was more determined than ever to have all of her children married.
Patrick hadn’t precisely chosen his bride well. In fact, he had almost caused a war between the two most powerful organized crime families in America. A war that would have cost multiple lives, millions of dollars, and likely caused decades of violence.
When their father found out he had knocked up Angelique Lombardo, none other than the oldest daughter of the Lombardos—a powerful mafioso family—he had almost come undone. Patrick and Angelique had been seeing each other secretly on and off for years, but with the pregnancy, that cat was out of the bag. Shane had braced himself for the violence sure to come, expecting Angelique’s father to be on a warpath.
Instead, much to his—and the entire West Coast organized crime syndicate—surprise, their fathers had worked things out between them. No one knew what deal had been struck or what magic had been performed to make it happen, but the families were merging through marriage. With the exchanging of vows, two would become one, and the first—not to mention largest and most powerful—Irish-Italian mob family would be created. The merger would likely wipe out any enemy and competitor who had ever stood in their path.
Not that Shane cared.
He could no longer list the enemies his family had, who owed them money, who they were protecting, well, anything to do with the family business. He had been out of the loop for so long, they didn’t bother to pretend to include him in decisions any longer.
Shane was safely settled in the military lifestyle, doing his own thing, living his own life just the way he liked it. The comings and goings of the mafioso weren’t his business. In fact, he made a conscious decision to stay as far away from it as possible. His military career couldn’t be blemished by the crimes of his father or brothers.
As the youngest son, he wasn’t needed to keep the line going. If anything happened to his brother, there were four more in line before he would be called up. His family had a proud history of serving their country, so when Shane had asked permission to follow in his grandfather’s and father’s footsteps, he had received it. He was sure any of his other brothers would have been denied, but as the youngest, he was spared. His father had expected him to do one tour of duty, four years, then come home, but Shane had fallen in love with the lifestyle, and one enlistment had turned into another, then another. Before long, he had made it clear he wasn’t planning to serve less than twenty years.
While his father had released him from his family business expectations, there were other responsibilities he wasn’t as quick to let him out of. He would be expected to head home for the wedding, where he was sure his mother would try to hook him up with half a dozen girls—who he’d let down gently before heading back to California.
Shane had no time for his mother’s matchmaking shenanigans, family drama, or getting wrapped up in any of his older brother’s antics, confident each one was involved in something or other—they always were. He had absolutely zero desire to add complications to his fairly simply, very routine life.He liked the regimen he had worked hard to achieve for himself—the predictable and structured world of the military—not the chaotic hell that organized crime brought.
Once he received the invitation, he would head home to Washington, kiss his new sister-in-law on the cheek, shake hands with his new relatives, then turn around and head right back home where he belonged.
One week, he told himself. He’d go home for one week. That was all. After all, how much drama could one little wedding cause?
Frankie
Franseca Lombardo was bored to tears. She tried desperately to hide how she felt from her features as she downed another long drink of wine. She knew she should sip it like a lady, not gulping it like a parched desert wanderer who had just come across a well, but she was hours past the sipping stage.
There were a million things she would rather do than sit in a high-end dress shop, watching her eldest sister try on wedding gowns. She had tried to beg off. Were all six daughters necessary for a dress fitting when most of them wore the same size? But her mother insisted that they all be present, and what the matriarch of the Lombardo family wanted, she got.
Spinning around in yet another white gown, Angelique squealed in happiness. “I think this is the one!”
“God, I hope so.”
