by V. Theia
In the sexiest move of all time, he pinned Aoife with his slim hips and whipped the T-shirt over his head in one of the hottest moves she’d ever seen, discarded it without care, baring his rough-hewn body. God, it was so hot, heat went straight to her poor neglected clit, informing the flesh that her love was so near, making her whimper without shame as she reached for him.
She needed to touch Danny, to make sure this wasn’t one of her most lucid dreams that plagued her constantly, offering her snippets of what she’d tossed away.
He wrenched away leaving her bereft and empty. Fists to the wall, his ragged breath in her face. The moment was broken and she had the urge to cry.
His eyes burned through her clothes until she felt the whisper touch of his fingers he would draw over her stomach once their lovemaking was finished a long time ago.
“I only ever wanted you, Danny,” she whispered.
“I can still taste when you lie, Aoife. There’s nothing about you I don’t know … except that’s not right now is it? Seven years of things I don’t know.”
“You can push me away all you want. I’m not letting go. Not this time. I intend to fight for you”
He blinked the lust from his eyes. “I’m not pushing.”
“Then why does it feel like you are?”
She watched the flex of his jaw. Feeling the radiating anger pulsing between them as a living thing in the room.
He left her standing in the middle of his kitchen with her heart pouring out trauma, and her body alive again.
She might have lost this round, but there was still a whole war to win with Danny Murphy.
Being loved and accepted was once her everyday life. It was woven into the fabric of what made Aoife Maureen Flanagan and that kiss only proved they still had the capacity to go back and reboot from where they left off.
Surely.
Grown up and ready for that life together.
Hopefully.
He could be angry. And he would be when he knew it all.
But where Aoife was once backed into a corner without a way out. She was free now to love and adore who she wanted to.
Only… there was just a small matter of the mafia looking for her … most probably.
And a very angry Irish man who still hated her decisions.
Aoife unglued her feet, rounded her shoulders and grabbed a cookie, shoving half of it into her mouth.
Even chewing on oatmeal coconut, she still tasted Danny on her tongue.
The war, she decided, was hers for the taking.
He better be ready.
Because she wasn’t going anywhere this time.
Not unless Grigori caught up with her first.
EIGHT
“Like a moth to a flame, I was drawn back to her fire.” – Danny
“What do you want to eat?”
Filling the doorway, with both of his hands caught on the top of the jamb, he watched her blowing raspberries on the baby’s belly and his own tightened.
He’d given her seven hours alone until he couldn’t help himself by going to find her.
Scowling over his own weakness dogging his every step, as he’d set down his work on the table and tracked the short distance through his house from the back room in the church, where he’d been trying in vain to come up with a subject for this week’s sermon.
The pull towards her was too great and he’d needed to see her.
“Nothing,” she replied, not looking towards him.
She went on dressing the baby who pumped her little legs and made those noises young bairns made.
He still couldn’t grasp she was a mother.
It pained him in a place he’d locked up forever ago. A selfish pain because why shouldn’t she be a mother?
She deserved a slice of happiness more than most.
Her childhood hadn’t been the best.
Most often, Aoife had been in the adult role taking care of her deadbeat parents.
Taking herself to school, making her own dinner.
Was she happy before all this mess? He’d wondered more times in the last day than he could count. And the warring parts of him couldn’t take any of her happiness not being with him.
“You have to eat.”
“I’m on a hunger strike.”
He snorted a laugh at her mouthy, snapped reply. She curled a leg underneath her and looked over finally. Her eyes so stormy and readable with her emotions on the surface, made him take a gulp of air and ignore every roaring instinct to lift her up and place her on his lap.
That wasn’t him anymore. It couldn’t be him.
The old Danny would have soothed her bad mood with his mouth latched onto the side of her neck.
“Why did you yank your shirt off, Danny? Earlier in the kitchen.” She clarified as if he’d needed the reminded he’d crawled into her mouth and nearly dragged her to the floor.
His stomach muscles tightened. A twisting, thrashing inferno was burning his chest until even after five swallows he could barely breathe without feeling like he was on fire and it only worsened when he looked at her.
This was not good.
In fact it was downright problematic.
“I don’t know,” he answered truthfully, holding her gaze. “It felt like the thing to do.”
“Exactly.” She said quietly, pointing an accusing finger at him. “It was natural to you because we always needed to be as close together as possible. Do you remember?”
He’d forgotten nothing. That was his problem.
“You’re angry at me, so you are. But that means you care, Danny. And I want you to give me the chance to exonerate myself from all these years of anger. You have to give me that chance.”
There was a time that this spunky, ginger haired girl with her sharp tongue and strong personality made the whole world disappear for him.
Now she was giving him fucking heartburn.
Danny looked anywhere but at Aoife. Over her shoulder, her eyebrow, the bridge of her nose but never directly in the eye, because there was a possibility he would forget who he was now and become who he was then.
I’m starving for her.
“I care about everyone, Aoife. It’s in the job description.”
That wasn’t entirely true, but it was the only answer he could give without further putting himself in the line of fire for just what he was willing to do for her.
Rather than being put off by his pithy retort, she laughed and stepped down from the high raised bed, she handed the baby to him before he had a word in the matter.
Not that he would have refused. The little one was cute, and she looked up at him curiously as if weighing up his worth for her ma.
“That’s a good one. I think I can eat now.”
Danny grinned and moved out of the doorway. “That hunger strike lasted about the same time as the one when you were ten years old.”
“I got what I wanted didn’t I?” She boasted. And the brat knew she had. She’d waged a war on eleven-year-old Danny that day, declaring if he didn’t take her with him when he went to the Tribesmen football match, she wouldn’t eat again in her whole life.
Threats meant so much more to a kid and he’d threatened to wallop her arse if she dared to skip dinner.
She ate that night and went to the game holding his hand.
Little brat, then and now.
“We need to discuss how we get you both out of the country. I take it you don’t have your passport?”
“I don’t even have my own underwear. I left everything back at the house. Besides,” she trailed after him as he made the way down the stairs to the kitchen. The scene of their earlier crime. “I don’t want to leave the country. How can I make things right with you if I’m far away?”
The earth stalled beneath Danny’s feet and he turned to look at her. A muscle went nuts in his jaw. “I don’t think that needs to be a priority. Do you have anyone you trust that you can lie low with?”
“Yes, you.”
S
he took the baby from him and sat at the table. “If you don’t want me here just say so, Daniel Murphy. God forbid I wear out my welcome.”
It was his turn to pin her with a look. One that said not to push him. “I’m trying to help you, you crazy woman. You tell me you’re on the run from a Russian member of the mafia. I’ve seen every episode of the Sopranos, that’s my whole involvement with this kind of shit, Aoife. Forgive me if I’m trying to do what I know to keep you both safe without involving the authorities, which I still think we need to do.”
“I’m safe here with you. No one knows about our connection. Being in a church is the last place those guys would look for me.”
She had a point, but it didn’t give him ease.
He went about fixing sandwiches until he’d placed a heaping pile in front of her, which she dug into instantly.
“These are good,” she mumbled with her mouth full.
“Cora usually cooks actual meals. I’m not very good with a stove.”
“I can cook. Remember that venison stew ma would make sometimes?” She smiled around a pouched cheek of food and all Danny could think about was tasting her food.
Tasting her food so fucking long and hard.
He swerved his mind because he needed to not think of the ways Aoife used to feed him on a regular basis. It had been a long time since he ate, and he was feeling more on edge than he usually would.
Nothing about this situation and having Aoife back in his vicinity put him at ease.
“I’ve been in touch with the local MC. Motorcycle club,” he clarified when her brows pinched in the middle. “They’re going to make sure the house is watched at all times and they’ll allow you to stay there if need be. Trust me, they’re men we want on our side.”
Our side. So easily he aligned himself with her.
Later he’d think more about that but for now he sat opposite Aoife and grabbed a doorstop thick ham sandwich.
“I’ve known of them for a while because more than once I overheard Grigori bitching about them.” The mood in the air shifted suddenly and her expression was not hard to read. She was hurt that he’d tried to get rid of her, as she would think.
“What if I don’t want to go to the bikers?”
“We don’t have choices here, Aoife. You asked for my help. This is me doing the only thing I know how. Without your passport we’re down to very few options. Maybe we can get your things back somehow. Was your apartment guarded?”
“No, I could come and go as I pleased. I’m not bothered about my clothes, but I would like my ID and wallet back, plus a few personal effects.”
Without thought, he slipped his phone from his back pocket and put a call through. “It’s Danny Murphy. Is there a way one of your boys could retrieve some items from a place over on …” He supplied the address Aoife whispered to him. The call was kept brief. Lawless told Danny he’d get back to him.
“Are you friends with these men?”
“Not really.”
“Then why would they help?”
“Because I asked.”
She seemed to accept his answer and went on eating with the baby sleeping soundly on her lap. His eyes roamed over the rosy cheeks and he wondered how the birth was. Had she been alone, did she have someone to hold her hand?
His chest tightened into a balled knot.
“I don’t want you to hand me over to someone I don’t know, Danny. I might as well have taken the chance on my own.”
He sighed and rubbed his face.
He could no more hand her over to someone else than he could summon the devil.
He figured the latter would be easier.
But having her around him, smelling her unique Aoife scent and catching her watching him was playing holy hell on his heart.
“I’m not going to, not how you make it seem. But we need help, you need help and these men know how to contain the Russians.”
“I think he’ll kill me,” she said rocking the baby gently. “And then he’ll hand this little one over to a nanny and not care a dot about her again. She’s a thing, not a child to him. I never once saw him hug her or hold her with affection.”
Violence was so long ago in his past it almost seemed like vivid daydreams, sometimes hard to recall just how he would spend his days using his fists. But the surge of violence rushing through his arms to bunch his hands was very much real.
So much so he nearly called on the big guy to give him strength.
“No one is taking your baby from you, Aoife.”
She looked up and the expression in her eyes jolted a thrill through his torso.
“Look, I should tell—”
The shrill of his phone interrupted and a few minutes later he told her. “They’re going to see about getting your things. At least this way it would appear you’ve left the country and you can just lie low here until we can get you on a plane.”
“I don’t have a passport for Misha. They’re not letting me leave the country with her, Danny.”
Jesus Christ almighty.
It was going to be one roadblock after another, and he knew he couldn’t take too much more exposure to Aoife.
On one hand, he fucking loved it.
Having her sassy, tempting green eyes on him again like he was the only living, breathing man on earth for her. And on the other hand, it killed him having her eyes on him, to know what was lost—thrown away.
But he didn’t know if God was putting this second chance in his path again or testing out his faith.
His body felt alien crossing the floor.
Like his bones didn’t belong to him and the closer he got, the greater his skin buzzed with reawakened sensations they’d made between them.
She was right in what she said.
The second they’d kissed; he’d been right back in that moment of needing … craving to be close as possible to her; skin to skin. It was the only way he could calm down back in the day, after one of his fights, Danny would be so fueled on adrenaline, almost as if he could take on the world. Aoife would tell him to take off his clothes.
Not always for sex.
Mostly for sex.
But then she would do the same and just hold him and the warmth of her skin and the feel of her beating heart would return him back to normal.
Slack lips and his jaw unlocked he went down on his haunches in front of her. Both girls looked at him. One more curious than the other and he jiggled the bare little foot but addressed Aoife. “No one is killing you or taking this one from you. But you need to cooperate, okay? This isn’t like before, Aoife, where you’d bargain with me. This shit is serious.”
“Are pastors allowed to say shit?”
He arched an eyebrow and the flame-haired temptress grinned at him. Before he could stop himself he moved a long strand of her hair. His fingers grazed her cheek and they both sucked in a breath.
“I say a lot of things I shouldn’t. Cooperate, okay?”
She nodded. “I will. I don’t know how this will get fixed, but I’ll do everything you say, Danny.”
He heard her say those exact words but in her much younger voice and it boiled his skin. He had to stop thinking of things that had no business being thought about.
The universe must hold a grudge against him, he assumed. Because that delicate, complicated, barely-there pressure of her fingers when she reached out and touched his fingers still on top of her daughter’s foot, felt like a fist slammed between the rungs of his ribs.
In that sincere moment of connectedness, something silently passed between them.
A soulful acknowledgment?
A peek at feelings that should have died out?
A what-if…?
Whatever it was, it shook something loose inside Danny and for the craziest minute he wanted to do more than kiss her.
The baby letting go of a yowl saved him from anything reckless.
“I should see if she needs changing. Can we talk tonight when she’s sleeping?”
He found himself agreeing even as a lump of emotion caught the air in his throat.
He didn’t know whether he wanted to hear what Aoife had to say.
What could she say other than dredge up a past neither of them needed to rake over again?
Her touch was airy at first. Walking over the fine hairs on his wrist before she traced his veins on the back of his hand.
What was he doing, allowing her to touch him like that?
He wouldn’t let anyone else.
Aoife had her own rules.
“I hope one day you’ll know how sorry I am that I was the one who broke us, Danny.” His eyes grew heavy-lidded, dropping to half-mast and an involuntarily clench in his mid-section made him reach down and grab her fingers before they explored his skin any further and sent him fucking insane.
He worked for God, but he was still a man with a healthy appetite for things that weren’t good for him.
“If I forgive you, will you drop it?” He rasped.
If he leaned forward he would be touching her lips.
“You’d only be forgiving me, so I’ll shut up. That’s not how it works, Danny.” She chastised with a sad look in her eyes.
She had so much to deal with, he didn’t know why this non-consequential part of their lives even mattered now.
They were a lifetime ago, when they were two different people.
But his begging heart disagreed.
They were yesterday.
They were today.
They were this very minute.
Nothing about him and Aoife was the past and he’d only just realized it never would be. No matter where their lives had taken them and would continue to take them.
The paths they walked were parallel and destined to always fork in the road eventually.
“We’ll talk tonight, and you can say what you need to, okay? Then it’s set aside.”
Her initial smile at his compliance dropped and her fingers stalled on his arm. He left it there, well aware she was touching him and how good it felt. Not only to be touched in a non-platonic way, but by Aoife.
He should be punched for the things rattling around inside his brain.
She’d come to him for help not to be mauled against walls and have dirty thoughts thought about her.