by V. Theia
“Was your husband good to you, Aoife?”
Roving his hand up and down her back he broke their intimate silence.
“Are you sure? You turn into a great growling bear when I try to talk about it.”
Though she posed it with sweetness on her tongue and her fingers tickling his ribs, he heard her hesitancy and he felt ashamed.
Because while he didn’t want to acknowledge she had another life without him coloring her days, he knew she needed to share with him and for Aoife he’d endure anything.
Smiling, he laid his cheek on hers, cradled her jaw as gently as if holding a flower petal.
She sometimes cursed worse than a sailor, but his Aoife was delicate where it counted.
A shock of satisfaction stirred through him when she turned her face and nuzzled into his palm.
“You won’t hear one growl, sweetheart.”
He came back to life with a throat-rasping grunt, as he tried …and failed to rein in a side of himself that she reveled in, but he didn’t feel wholly comfortable unleashing and not on her because that side of him was possessive.
Rough and unhinged to keep her.
No one ever tapped into the bruising power that uplifted his arousal. Only Aoife. It was as if they were both forged from the same intoxicating cloth and it’s only worsened with time.
Their bodies might be sated for the time being, he’d had her more than twice already. Each time more consuming… domineering than the last and his rascal of a ginger girl’s cries of pleasure only fueled his dark fire.
Curled up on his lap, pliant like a boneless fairy, he massaged her inner thighs to help with the ache he put there.
He’d gone at her too hard, too rough, at her insistence, and his brain had shorted out with want battering his lines of defense. Sorry he’d hurt her delicate body, though she screamed her orgasms loud enough. Yet he didn’t deny the selfish pride too.
Making her feel so good became an addiction over the last few hours and she’d contorted her back muscles until he’d thought she’d contracted rigor mortis and then she’d gushed over his belly and chest.
Her orgasms made him feel like a warrior. Those hot little looks she fluttered his way made him feel like her man and it was a title he never wanted to give up again.
Every hot inhale was his own brain telling him to give her more pleasure.
Nothing felt as satisfied as giving that last pump into her close-fitting, eager body and feeling how tighter she’d squeezed him.
It was impossible to assume anything else in life would feel as good.
Facing the jealousy head on he kissed her temple. He needed to know it all.
“It’s okay, sweetheart. I won’t pout or say stupid shit.”
The leap was here as she hesitated, and he knew why. Because he’d already been a colossal dickhead by not giving her what she needed from him.
Lust wrapped around his middle when her fingers found the skin of his stomach underneath his shirt. She was just burrowing in to cuddle, he knew that. Finding her place, but it didn’t stop the banks of fires flushing to life and he had to warn his body to stand down. This was the time for words not action.
He stilled her wriggling for his own sanity with a heavy hand on her hip and willed his erection to ease because if she made a move to free his heavy shaft, he’d be useless to tell her no.
His craving to Aoife was a healthy one if he were comparing it to snorting cocaine six times a day. He could accept any circumstances that brought her back to him, that was his stark revealing truth. He’d take her with a thousand husbands in her past.
Against his chest, her heart was sprinting.
“He was a sixty-five-year-old man, Danny,” What was that about him not saying shit?
His stomach felt like it was being bashed with helium.
He had to listen and not jump in headfirst like a jealous dipshit.
“We didn’t do a thing. I would have cut his wrinkled dick off had he ever tried to put a finger on me.” He grunted using a thumb to massage her hip. “He needed a pretty face, as he told it, to keep his bratty kids in line about their inheritance. I was a pawn for my father and for the sham husband too…I feel sick even saying that word. I should have only ever had one husband. I had to meet him six hours after da offered me up like a set of keys in the middle of the gambling table and I told him right off the bat, I was doing it for my crap father, and it was in name only and I’d slice his balls off in his sleep if he ever tried to touch me.”
Relief kicked a knot of rocks around his belly. Nuzzling his lips to her forehead he shared. “I’ll be fucking you when we’re sixty-five. Any chance I get.” She laughed, running her fingers on his waist.
“Oh, I hope so. I’ll need knee pads.”
He loved her.
He loved her knowing that she’d been married; it didn’t matter once he got used to his jealousy pounding his brain, but hearing the details settled some of that rage in him. Danny rubbed a hand over the back of her neck as she nuzzled his chest with her cheek. He still had a million questions and he filled his deprived lungs to capacity. “You said you were glad he was dead. Does that mean he was cruel to you in other ways?”
“He liked to remind me any chance he got that I was a possession he owned, parading me around his family dinners and golf functions and how he could return me any day he liked to make da pay his debt. I had my own wing of his house, hardly saw him some weeks, but he never let me forget I was a thing he controlled.”
Fuck her father. If the day ever came he saw that man again, Danny couldn’t be held responsible for how many times his fist landed on the other man’s face.
How could he have such a precious daughter and treat her so poorly? He hated that she’d had a bad few years. Hated more that he hadn’t been there to help her.
“So that’s it. An obligated marriage of convenience to pay off a debt that wasn’t even mine. I sound like one of those regency novels your mammy loved to read.” A smile touched his lips at the same time he cuddled her deeper into his chest. “The day he died on the golf course, I was out of there, Danny. I wanted to come to you that very day, but I didn’t have anything. I wanted to be someone before I saw you again.”
“Aoife,” he rasped, feeling the weight of her words. “You are now and always will be everything. Every star in the sky is jealous of how amazing you shine. If someone isn’t capable of recognizing that, then it means there’s more of you for me and you should know by now how possessive I’ve always been about you.”
Eyes so soulful looked up at him. “Can I be yours forever and ever?”
He’d heard that same sentence in her sweet voice at every age of her life and it still held the surprise punch that this phenomenal girl wanted to be his.
Danny Murphy was a former alley rat from Galway.
She deserved princes and someone so much better than he was.
Someone up there had blessed him. There was no other explanation for it.
He replied in the same way they always had.
“Only if I can be yours.”
Aoife Flanagan was a gorgeous woman under any circumstances. Freckles and red hair against creamy skin and limbs so long and lovely but she was completely breath-taking when she started crawling all over him, kissing his cheeks and eyes, giggling and crying in equal measure.
“This means you love me, my Danny-boy.” She declared, soaking him in her tears. He grinned and swiped both thumbs under her eyes and even used the hem of his shirt to clean her sniffling nose, because a man in love didn’t care about a bit of snot.
“Always have. Always will,” he told her, leaning in for a kiss. He needed to find a fresh breath before he asked about Misha’s father and how that relationship went. Being a capable man didn’t mean he was in any way emotionally mature when it came to accepting another man had touched his girl.
Her tongue only just wrapped around his with the promise of more to come when a thump sounded on the door.
Aoife groaned, laying their foreheads together. “Why do we keep getting interrupted?” She groused, clinging to his shirt, offering him her pouty lips right there for the taking.
Danny was of a mind to agree, but he never turned anyone away from his door, no matter how much his cock ached to be doing otherwise. It was often inconvenient for him to live on the grounds of the church, people took it as a personal invite to knock on the door at any time of the day and night for counsel, advice or just a chat.
Danny hadn’t minded until right then.
He did his own groaning, pressing a kiss to her lips, he told her to stay right there. Not because he was ashamed or didn’t want his community to see her.
He did, he wanted to parade Aoife around by the hand and tell everyone he had his heart back. But what with her only being in her little cotton pair of panties, he was possessive after all and also greedy to be the only one who saw her body.
No one ever expects a Renegade Souls member outside their door late at night, because he could reason it would never be good news for the person opening the door.
“Outside,” Lawless jutted his chin and walked a ways down the path. Closing the door behind him, Danny followed with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his pants.
“What’s going on?” Inhaling slowly, Danny could already taste on the colder air that Lawless wasn’t here for a social call. His face unreadable as usual, but there was a hardness to his slashed brows and coarse tone of voice.
“I told you when I let you call in the favor that I needed to know everything.”
“And we told you everything.”
“Wrong. You did. Your girl didn’t.” Confused, Danny waited for him to carry on. “I did a little digging. Something didn’t add up and I don’t like when two plus two comes up as five hundred, you understand? What I like about those Russians, they’re weak, they break like peanut brittle. I’m guessing that’s not something a good pastor like yourself wants to hear, am I right.”
It didn’t feel like a question in the tone he posed it, so Danny shrugged.
He could presume the MC didn’t perform any tasks within the lines of the law and he had gone to them for help so had to accept their means of business too.
“So imagine my surprise when one of the Russian bulls…Grigori Kuznetsov’s bodyguards—or byki, if we want to be technical here—sang like a choking canary and confessed the dead girl was Yelena Orlov, who happened to be the daughter of some big drug kingpin back in the cold country. And then I cross referenced the American birth certificate of the kid. Misha Orlov. Father unknown.”
Breath evaporated from Danny’s chest.
How could this be?
It had to be wrong.
Misha was Aoife’s baby. She’d said so.
Hadn’t she?
He worked back through every conversation in hopes of replaying the words, “Misha is my daughter.” he came up empty.
Either because those words didn’t exist at all, or he was too damn surprised to find them.
“You have to be wrong; can you check again?”
“I’m never wrong. Your girl isn’t the mother and if the underboss emissary is the baby daddy, then he isn’t putting his name to his mistress’ kid.”
Danny cursed and raked a hand around the back of his neck, meeting the sinister blue eyes of the man on his doorstep. “I see you’re catching on, holy man. If she’s not the baby mama, then she’s snatched a Russian mobster’s kid and your trouble just got a whole lot worse. I’d consider both of you getting the hell out of dodge for a while.”
He cursed again.
For days a heaviness sat on Danny’s chest because he had a feeling she wasn’t telling him the whole story, but assumed it was to do with her previous relationship and he’d been in no rush to know those details until five minutes ago.
The years separation meant nothing in comparison to how he knew Aoife deep down. He’d felt it, she’d never concealed anything very well from him before.
The secret lurked this whole time and he hadn’t taken a second to see past his jealousy to discover the truth.
“I need to go inside and talk to Aoife.”
“Sounds like a plan, holy man. But so you know, we can consider favor paid in full. You might just be in luck if the Orlov clan hear about their dutiful daughter’s murder by the pakhan’s second in command. I know how to drop the right words in the right ears, if you get my meaning. It could be the distraction needed to have Grigori forget all about your girl. If not… you know how to pray.”
Danny absorbed all the new information like a sponge and felt the weight of them. Powerless to do anything. He couldn’t take on a world-renowned crime organization, let alone two.
Behind him, the door creaked open and one look at Aoife’s stricken face let him know she’d been listening.
Her eyes pleaded. He felt his heavy heart thud.
Turning back to Lawless, Danny offered his hand and the other man grasped it briefly. “I appreciate everything,” Danny told him.
“If I were you, I’d get my family involved. Talk is those Murphy’s are known for more than just importing illegals. Catch you later, holy man.” Turning on his heel, Danny watched Lawless prowl down the pathway and climb onto his powerful bike. Already his brain was two steps ahead, wondering if it was too late to call his father back home.
“Danny?” Her voice sweet as could be with a slight tremor stroked down his spine as he turned to head back in. “Will you give me the chance to tell you everything?”
Standing in just his shirt, the material skimmed her curves and hung around her thighs, she looked so tiny with her hair poured down over her shoulders and unease in her beautiful eyes.
Airless and with his heart throbbing, he walked inside without taking his starved gaze from her and locked the door behind them.
TWENTY
“Your soulmate will always come to you at the right time.” - Danny
The very last thing she expected Danny to do was lift her into his arms.
In fact, she was braced for him to tell her she had to leave.
When he swept her up, she laced her arms around him and didn’t know what to think as he walked her through his house to the twin sofas.
She loved his living room, but the only comfort she needed was right there in his lap. The moment she heard the biker tell Danny about Yelena and Misha; her heart sank.
“I was going to tell you tonight; I swear I was.”
“I hate that you’ve been in danger for all this time and I couldn’t take you in my arms and tell you it would be okay,” he rasped. His soft lips roamed across her cheek. “I hate knowing how scared you must have been being around those kind of people. But I hate it more how you’ve been alone to take responsibility for your friend’s baby after you watched her lose her young life, and to then to hold onto that secret all this time.”
She felt a sob start in the back of her throat. Stinging relief and endless love.
He wasn’t angry at her for omitting the most crucial part of everything.
She wasn’t Misha’s mum, but she loved her like she was. She’d taken care of the baby since she was three days old and through sleepless nights and walks in the park and bath times, Aoife fell in love with the tiny baby.
“I wished you’d told me, but I understand why you didn’t. I didn’t respond how you needed me to respond, sweetheart. And that is on me, I’m so sorry. I let my jealousy react before I should have spoken. You know I love Misha, right? Even before this, when I thought she was yours.”
“I didn’t know what to do, Danny. I just grabbed her and ran. I watched her mother being viciously killed because Mr. Kuznetsov discovered his mistress had a baby with one of his men. He killed that guy too and took great joy in telling Yelena he’d murdered the boy she loved.”
“Why was she with a man like that if she loved another?”
Aoife looked up and blinked through her tears. “She was trapped. She said he wasn’
t always the way he is now. She fell for the older, sophisticated man who showed her the world and then he changed into something ugly and hurtful. She hadn’t seen him in over a year since he came to the states, but then suddenly sent for her. She was already pregnant by that time. She was a good person, Danny. We were friends almost the instant I started working as Misha’s nanny. She didn’t deserve to lose her life.”
Danny cuddled her in, and she took great comfort in his strong arms, nuzzling the tip of her nose to his stubbled chin. “No, sweetheart, she didn’t. But we still have this giant problem of what we do next.”
We. She loved hearing that.
“I can’t give her back. Not to people like that. I don’t care if I have to run for the rest of my life, she’s an innocent child with no mother because of evil people.”
“We can leave and go back home.”
Surprise blinked through her vision.
“You’d do that?” She gasped. Then added. “You can’t, Danny. Your life is here. Your church people would come after me with torches if I took away their pastor.”
He smiled and kissed her lips. “We can leave, sweetheart. I can be a pastor anywhere, but I only have one of you.”
Oh, her heart pinched, and she started crying again. “I thought I’d die missing you, Danny.”
“Do you feel my hands?” He brushed his mouth against her ear and whispered.
Aoife shuddered against the close assault of his warm breath and his sheer closeness. He’d always affected her that way and she hoped to God he always would.
Leaning into Danny, she hummed and nodded.
The hands in question touched her all over before one rested on her waist, squeezing just enough to let her know he was there. And the other curved around the back of her neck, holding. “These hands will never hurt you, sweetheart. They’re yours when you need comfort, when you crave pleasure. When you need your Irish boy to hold you close and give you every drop of love I have to give you. These hands will always protect my sweet, sometimes sour, ginger rascal girl, because I love you and I’ve always loved you and I’ll die loving only you, Aoife.”