by Katee Robert
He started to reach for her but ended up fisting the comforter of the bed and letting her work. This is what he’d wanted when he booked the hotel room instead of driving back to the O’Malley house. Charlie. Him. They had nowhere to be for the next few hours, and they wouldn’t be interrupted. There was no rush.
For her part, she seemed content to take her time—and drive him out of his goddamn mind in the process. As Aiden watched her suck him off, her bright red lips wrapped around his cock were almost enough to make him come from the sight alone. “Bright eyes, I need you.”
“You have me.” She rose and grabbed one of the condoms from where he’d tossed them on the bed. “Tonight. Right now. You have me. We got out, Aiden. We’re okay.” She rolled the condom onto him and then braced her hands on his shoulders. “How do you need me?”
The offer was just proof that she saw him better than most people. She recognized that he needed to reassert the control Alethea had threatened. Aiden pulled her down onto his lap and kissed her. He’d intended it to be a silent thank-you, but the notion didn’t last past their first contact. Charlie opened for him immediately, her tongue seeking his.
He lost himself in the feel and taste of her. Each second that passed settled the rattled feeling in his chest, until his frustration and fear over how shit had gone so south melted away.
And then there was only Charlie.
He drew back enough to say, “I should be asking how you need me.”
“Are you?”
He grinned. “No. I want you on your hands and knees on the bed.”
She climbed off him to obey. He stood, and his mouth went dry at the sight she offered. With her knees parted and the arch in her spine, he could actually see how wet she was. “You liked sucking my cock.” He shifted onto the bed, easing up behind her.
“So much so that I’m going to do it again at the earliest available opportunity.”
He chuckled. “I can’t argue with that.”
“Really? Because I thought I was going to have to follow through on my threat to tie you down to just get you to let me do it.” She hissed out a breath as he palmed her pussy. “You’re very cagey.”
“Are you into bondage, bright eyes?” He slipped one finger into her and, satisfied that she was more than ready, he brought his cock to her entrance. Aiden gripped her hips and worked into her with short, controlled thrusts, until he was sheathed to the hilt.
Charlie moaned. “I’m a control freak.”
“I noticed.” He’d also noticed that she enjoyed their games as much as he did. He pressed his hand against the small of her back and slid it up her spine, guiding her down until the top half of her body was flush against the bed. The position left her ass in the air and allowed him deeper yet.
Satisfied she would stay there, he pulled almost all the way out and then thrust deep. Charlie cried out. “Harder, Aiden!”
This time, he obeyed. Aiden followed her muffled commands, fucking her just the way she needed. She thrust back to meet every stroke. He wanted to maintain this feeling of perfection all night long, but Charlie felt too good. “Touch yourself,” he demanded.
She snaked one hand beneath herself, and her pussy clamped tight around him in response. He kept up the angle that had her writhing on the bed, holding tight onto his control and keeping his own orgasm at bay. She didn’t make him wait long. Charlie cried out his name over and over again, her shrieks barely muffled by the comforter.
It was too much. Aiden couldn’t hold out any longer. He tightened his grip on her hips and drove into her, chasing the pleasure her body offered him. He came with a curse, and it was like every muscle in his body dissipated.
He collapsed half on top of her. “Fuck, Charlie.”
“You just did.”
Aiden laughed hoarsely and gave her ass a light smack. “Mouthy.”
“Every damn day.” She rolled to face him and tucked in against his chest. When apparently that wasn’t close enough, she draped one long leg over his hip and hugged him. “I needed that.”
“Me too.” He held her close. The soft cadence of her breathing washed over him, erasing the last of his lingering unease. Tonight had been a closer call than he wanted to admit, which was bad enough.
Putting Charlie in that position despite her questioning the wisdom of it was inexcusable. “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you.”
“You had it under control.”
Not nearly as under control as he would have liked. He kissed the top of her head. “Next time your gut says it’s a bad situation, we’re out. No questions asked.”
She tensed. “That’s stupid.”
What the hell? He couldn’t see her face to gauge where her head was at, but her response didn’t make a damn bit of sense. “There’s nothing stupid about it. You knew it was a bad call. I didn’t listen to you, and we almost got into a conflict we might not have walked out of.”
“That was just common sense. You can’t trust my gut. I can’t trust my gut.”
Ah. Aiden forced his body to relax and waited for the tension to bleed out of his tone. “You couldn’t have known the other cops would turn on you.”
She jerked back from him. “I do not want to talk about it.”
“Charlie.” He let her go, because the alternative was to wrestle her to a standstill, but it made his chest ache to watch the distance between them open up. “You have to face it at some point. You couldn’t have known.”
“One, I don’t need the therapy session. Two, stop trying to distract yourself from your mistake by focusing on me. Three, fuck off.” She scrubbed a hand over her face. “Shit. Fuck. Goddamn it. Now I’m sorry. That was out of line. But the point stands—my past is off-limits. Respect it or this ends now.”
Her obvious pain made him want to press her, but there was shit he didn’t want ripped open. And she was right—he’d latched on to her past to avoid thinking too hard about his present.
Aiden held out a hand. “Come back to me.”
“Not until you agree.”
He sighed. “I won’t talk about it tonight.”
“That’s a shitty-ass promise.” But she still crawled back into his arms. He barely had time to relax when she spoke again. “Keira is going to start taking Krav Maga lessons.”
“I’ll arrange to have an instructor brought to the house.” His little sister knew how to shoot—he and Teague had made sure all their sisters did, even if Carrigan and Keira took to it better than Sloan. They had men whose whole job was to keep them safe, but it was always possible that the time would come when they’d have to defend themselves.
He’d never considered some kind of martial arts. Aiden knew how to fight, but there was nothing formal about it. He was a goddamn brawler.
“Wrong. You’ll arrange to have Mark—or whoever—escort her to her classes several times a week.”
As much as he didn’t like the idea of his sister traipsing out into Boston with any regularity, Charlie’s tone said that she’d go to the mat for this. He wanted to know why. “You took her there today.”
“Yes, I did.” She hesitated, and he found himself holding his breath to see what she’d say next. She rewarded his patience by shifting away enough to meet his gaze. Her expression was as frank as he’d ever seen, stripped of the artifice she’d been wearing like a second skin since agreeing to pose as his fiancée. “I’m prefacing this by saying that it’s not an invitation to delve into my past—it’s just to give you some context. Understand?”
“Yes.” He agreed too readily, but Aiden was hungry for more of her. He knew what he’d read, but reports failed to do Charlie justice. He wanted to know every part of her mind the same way he was beginning to know her body.
She gave him a suspicious look but finally said, “I had plenty of training—as you can imagine—but after my attack … I’d never felt so helpless as I did in those first few months while I was recovering. I was helpless and terrified that someone would decide to finish the job, and I
spent too much time hiding away.”
The actions sounded familiar, even if the cause wasn’t the same. She could have been describing Keira. “I’m with you so far.” He deliberately didn’t think about what he’d like to do to the men who’d hurt Charlie badly enough to instill that fear in the first place.
“Eventually, I started training again out of spite. I hated that I’d been weak, and wanted to do anything to combat the chance of that happening again. It was about control, which I’m sure you can appreciate.” She traced the vein that ran along his forearm. “Keira feels helpless and scared, even if she would rather cut you than admit it. The partying is just an escape, but she’s always going to wake up and find herself sober and have to start the whole process over again. Krav Maga isn’t going to magically fix everything that is wrong in her life, but it will give her an outlet that she desperately needs.”
She snuggled into him again. “You should have seen her going after that punching bag. She needs this. I know it’s dangerous to have a schedule that requires her to leave the house, but that’s what your security people are for. They can figure it out. Dmitri Romanov”—she choked a little on his name—“doesn’t seem to want to hurt her at this point, so the danger is as low as it’s ever likely to be.”
Aiden fought down his knee-jerk reaction to reject the idea out of hand. The truth was that Keira needed help, and though he’d never have imagined that she’d find a champion in Charlie, their relationship was developing into something resembling friendship. He stroked his hand over Charlie’s hair. “You feel strongly about this.”
“You have no idea how crazy it drives me to see you and your siblings acting like idiots around each other. I get it—you’re big bad mafia people who have a boatload of issues—but you’re letting your relationships with them be poisoned for no goddamn reason. It’s a fucking tragedy.”
He tried to see it from her point of view. Charlie had no siblings. Her mother was gone. Her father had essentially disowned her, though they remained in regular contact, so Finch had to love her—as much as the man was capable of loving anyone. But that didn’t mean he was a good father to her. By all accounts, he was just as shitty a dad as he was a person in general.
It made sense that Charlie had come in, taken one look at Aiden and his siblings, and wanted to fix things. “Some things can’t be fixed.”
“And some things aren’t as broken as you might think. How can you tell the difference?”
She had him there. Aiden rolled her onto her back and propped himself up on his forearms. “Would it make you happy if I tried to mend things?”
“My happiness is irrelevant. I’m temporary.” She rolled her eyes. “But yes, it would make me happy if you’d at least try. You can send me thank-you flowers when you realize I was right all along.”
Fuck, he liked this woman. Somehow she’d managed to survive all the terrible shit life had thrown her way. Aiden kissed her, slow and searching. When he finally lifted his head, they were both breathing hard. “I’ll talk to Liam about setting up a detail for Keira so she can start training.”
Charlie’s blue eyes danced. “And?”
He nipped her bottom lip. “And I’ll call Carrigan and see about setting a meeting up. Happy?”
“It’s a start.”
Carrigan was the easier of the two fences to mend. Which was saying something, because she still hadn’t forgiven him for siding with their father when she chose James Halloran. Aiden had tried to force her hand, which had created a fracture between them that he didn’t know how to broach.
Truth be told, he hadn’t even tried.
He slid off Charlie and stood. “Get dressed. I don’t know about you, but I want to catch a couple hours of sleep in my own bed tonight.” Her laughter chased him into the bathroom, where he disposed of the condom.
Who would have thought that when he sought out Charlie Finch, she’d end up being the kind of woman he’d never realized he might actually need?
Theirs wasn’t a love story for the ages. Their differences ran soul-deep despite the fact that they were melding together just fine for the moment. But she’d never stop being a cop.
And Aiden had no choice but to stay on his path.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Aiden waited until Charlie’s breathing evened to climb out of his bed. He pulled on a pair of pants and stopped at the door. He was tempted to look back and see her there tangled among his sheets, her face relaxed in the way that only sleep seemed to be able to manage. He didn’t. What he had to do to put the next stage of this shit show into motion required him to harden his heart against hurting her, despite what they’d shared in that hotel room mere hours ago.
There was no choice.
He just hadn’t expected the guilt to be quite so strong.
At this hour, the house was quiet and felt empty. Maybe it was his conversation with Charlie, but it struck him that most of his siblings were gone, moved out and on, and that if he didn’t succeed, Keira would follow the same path and it would only be him and Cillian left of the O’Malley clan. At least Cillian and Olivia were bound to fill the halls with children, though he didn’t think she’d be on board for seven kids, the way his mother had been.
And what about him?
Getting married was in the future—he couldn’t avoid it indefinitely—and after everything that their family had gone through, he’d have to make a politically advantageous marriage to solidify their power base. Alliances could make or break them, and it was his turn to take a hit for the greater good.
His mind turned to Charlie, despite his best intentions. He was enjoying the hell out of their time together, and she’d more than proven she could play the game along with the best of them. She’d correctly read the situation with Mae—better than he had—and adjusted accordingly. She’d offered him comfort and surrender. She cared about his siblings, and his relationship with them.
But he wasn’t keeping her. He couldn’t.
Aiden padded into his office and shut and locked the door behind him. It already bore marks of his father being back—papers that had been neatly organized, now scattered across the glossy desk, the bottle of expensive liquor now severely depleted, the very air more stagnant and cloying. The latter was his imagination, but he caught a whiff of the cologne Seamus favored and gritted his teeth.
The man might as well have pissed on the carpet to mark his territory.
At least the burner phones were exactly where he’d left them—in the bottom drawer. He pulled one out at random and considered it. If they successfully removed Alethea and Mae from the New York equation, the new influx of territory would keep Romanov busy for years. He’d have to work his way through the Eldridge operations and ensure that only those loyal to him remained, a time-consuming task. Romanov might very well leave the O’Malleys alone for good and focus on issues closer to home.
But he couldn’t guarantee it.
The Russian was a slippery bastard. He could do the logical thing and worry about New York, but he was just as likely to assume that Aiden had lowered his guard, and then attack the O’Malleys instead. They were only temporary allies, and with Romanov’s eye on Keira, that alliance wouldn’t last past Alethea’s fall.
Aiden refused to allow that to happen—which meant it was time to bring in the next wave of his plan—whether it would hurt Charlie or not.
He dialed the number he’d memorized as soon as Liam had tracked down the information. Despite it being well after two in the morning, the line rang only a handful of times before a gruff voice answered. “John Finch.”
“Hello, Agent Finch.”
Silence for a beat, and then two. “Who is this?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know. You’ve got my brother dancing to any tune you set, so I would assume that you’d have the rest of us down by now.” Aiden fought to keep his tone cool and disinterested, fought his anger at this man for fucking with his family, and his anger at his brother Teague for getting caught
up in such a desperate situation.
“Aiden O’Malley. Do I want to know how you got this number?”
It struck him that Finch might think Charlie had handed it over. The guilt circling Aiden’s throat like a vise tightened. His control wavered. “I have my ways.”
“I’m sure you do.” There was rustling on the other end as Finch settled in. “What is it I can do for you?”
He didn’t miss the fact that the man hadn’t addressed his comment about Teague. He didn’t expect Finch to. It was one thing for Aiden to suspect it—it was entirely another for him to know for sure. He could have told the fed that it was a lost cause. He had more than enough information to incriminate his brother. That wasn’t why he was calling.
At least, it wasn’t the sole reason he was calling.
“It’s more about what I can do for you.” He didn’t wait for Finch to comment. It didn’t really matter what the agent thought of this. The only thing that mattered was him acting how Aiden needed him to. “There’s going to be a showdown of sorts between the Eldridges and the Romanovs on October twelfth.” He rattled off the specific location. “It might look like a deal gone wrong, but I think you’ll find it’s much more intriguing. I suspect you’ll want to be there.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t sound the least bit impressed. “And what do you expect in return for this tidbit of information?”
“I expect you to back the fuck away from my brother.” It came out harsher than he meant it to.
Finch sighed. “Look, kid, even if your brother was an informant, that deal would be between him and the fed who works with him. You making a deal has nothing to do with that.”
That was about what he’d anticipated, but frustration still reigned supreme. Aiden drummed his fingers on the desk, staring at the closed door. Part of him had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. He’d known better. “Your daughter is very beautiful.”
“Leave her alone.” All tiredness was gone from the man’s voice. “She’s been through enough, and whatever problem you think we have is between us.”