by Sophia Gray
If I thought the storm was going to get any better after my little stop to pick up my passenger, I was sorely disappointed. If anything, it seemed as though it had gotten worse. Grumbling about it, I turned on the radio and checked that the heat was on full blast. It was.
The radio was static filled at best, but every so often it would clear up just long enough to catch a snippet of the announcer.
“…biggest storm in...years…stay off the…unprecedented number of accidents after…”
I caught a few more sound bites about the storm moving steadily northwest—the exact direction I was heading. Meaning I was likely to be lost in this weather so long as I continued to drive in it. It reaffirmed my earlier thoughts that I was going to have to find a place to pull off and hole up for the night.
Except it was close to midnight and there wasn’t a damn place in sight.
I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to find shelter anywhere, and what was worse was my impromptu passenger didn’t seem to be faring very well. The few times I reached over for him, risking taking off a glove to put bare skin against his face, he felt feverish and sweaty.
Just great, I thought miserably, putting my glove back on. I saved him from the cold so he can die in my car from a fever!
My poor car was crawling across the white covered roads uneasily, the tires sliding on patches of slick road that was icing over. It just wasn’t made for this kind of weather—it was barely made for driving as it was, and I lived in the city.
I tried my cell again, but it beeped at me and told me that not only was I getting no signal, but it was also down to only five percent battery remaining. If I didn’t get it plugged in soon, I wasn’t even going to have a cell phone with no damn signal, for all the good that did me anyway. My car had a cigarette lighter, so one might think I could charge my phone. And I even had a charger cord that would work with the cigarette lighter.
Except the lighter didn’t work.
Under normal circumstances, that really didn’t bother me. The only people who really needed my cell to be on were my family. And the unemployment office. I spent more time jumping from job to job than I ever would have imagined, doing the worst things I could come up with just to pay rent. Well, maybe not the worst things. I hadn’t gotten into prostitution yet, thank you very much, but I admitted to myself that there had been a couple of times where I thought it might come to that.
Mom and Dad never would have let that happen, I thought, remembering my parents bright and smiling faces. They were the homegrown type who belonged on a farm somewhere, even though my father sold insurance and my mother was a part-time school teacher. My brother wouldn’t let it happen either, if he had any way to stop it.
My brother was probably what one would call the black sheep of the family. He liked to move around a lot, never seemed to hold down a job for more than a few months—not that I was doing better—and had had about a half a dozen different girlfriends in as many months. Our mother always liked to lecture him about how he needed to start being serious. How was he ever going to survive old age if he was alone and flitting about from one job to the next?
Of course, Sean never seemed much worried about it and I figured he had a few years still to get his act together. Sure, he was almost thirty now, but I was, too, and I didn’t count that as too late to get settled.
I glanced over at the unconscious and feverish man beside me. His breathing had become heavy and there were beads of sweat rolling down his forehead. I frowned. The heater was running full blast, the window was down in the back, and I was still freezing. But if he were sweating, would it be better to turn it off? Was it a better idea to try to cool him off or keep him warm?
I decided warm, remembering it was usually important to let a fever run its course—assuming you couldn’t get any medicine for it. If it got really bad, I could dump him back in the snow to cool him off again, but that seemed like a terrible idea. He’d felt halfway to frozen when I found him, and besides, if he got out of this car, I wasn’t sure I could get him back into it.
The drive was taking forever thanks to my significantly slowed speed. The snow was making it so I wasn’t willing to risk going any faster, but I knew my time was running short. Or at least, that of my mystery man, Mr. Tall, Dark, and Gorgeous over there.
I glanced at him and frowned. Did he look better? Worse? Were his eyelids flickering? If they were, was that a good sign? He moaned now and then or shifted ever so slightly, but I couldn’t tell if that was due to the car’s bumpy ride or if he was half awake in there. When I looked back to the road, dipping and swerving with what I hoped was the road, I finally saw it. A sign. A turn off. I’d nearly driven right past the thing. It was a miracle I hadn’t, in all honesty. It was a difficult thing to see, my headlights were foggy, and the sign was crooked and half lying in the snow. But just barely I was able to make it out. Lodging, One Mile.
Relief blooming in my breast, I took the turn and hoped something was open.
Chapter 2
Ciaran
I felt like hell. Worse than that, I felt like hell reheated, then frozen again, then tossed to the dogs to gnaw on. My head was pounding like a son of a bitch and I felt the uncomfortable, painful pinpricks of a body warming up after a long, cold night in the snow.
Which was exactly where I’d been.
My brain was a little foggy about some of the details, but I knew I’d been slumped over in the snow, freezing and half dead when I saw her. Beautiful. Perfect. And very clearly a figment of my imagination. She brushed the snow from me like a soft fleece blanket. Her hands were like petals, but petals on fire. They were so soft, but they burned everywhere they touched. She looked down at me with the biggest blue eyes I’d ever seen, like two shining orbs, beacons of light in an otherwise dark tunnel, and I thought she couldn’t be real. Something like that just didn’t belong in the real world.
But reality snapped back pretty quickly. The cold numbness in my fingers and my limbs ached like nobody’s business, and when she finally got me to roll just a bit, I felt like I might just break in half. But I pushed through as she coaxed me to my feet. I didn’t even know how I managed it. I felt too fragile to move, something I was most definitely not used to or fond of, yet somehow she got me to my feet. Slumping heavily against her, her body warm and pliant, sweetly curved beneath a half dozen layers of clothing, and her soft brown hair tickled against my skin like silk. It made me groan a little at that touch of heaven.
It was pretty obvious I was delirious with all this imagining of ethereal angels and heaven and such bullshit. Not exactly my normal MO. In fact, I had a tendency to view women in two respects: little sister or a quick, hard fuck. My lifestyle didn’t really lend itself to a lot of in between in that respect.
The first responded to a deep-seated need to protect. That usually was reserved for my boys, my family, but I always had a soft spot of little girls in need. I would never let one go hungry, but as soon as they were fed, I’d find a spot for them and send them on their way. I had a soft spot for them, but not a home. They had no place in my kind of dangerous life.
The second view solved my natural, biological needs. The physical ones. I enjoyed sex as much as the next guy and I took it where and when I wanted it. There hadn’t been any shortage in that supply, but I’d never met one I wanted more than once.
But as this beautiful woman helped me struggle through the knee-deep snow in the middle of what sure as hell looked like a damn blizzard, I found myself trying to categorize her.
Those big blue eyes screamed at me sweetness, innocence. My inner need to protect tried desperately to rear its fierce head, to pump me up enough that I could cover her with my body and shield her from the danger that lurked right around every corner. But as I leaned against her much smaller frame, my back bent over because she was so much shorter than me, I couldn’t help but notice other things.
The curve of her waist, small and fragile beneath her coats. The length of her denim cl
ad legs, shaped just right to wind around my hips. Her firm, perky rear with that perfect mixture of fit and supple.
And her breasts. I couldn’t see them beneath her sweater and her coat, but as I slumped against her I felt the full curve of one against my ribs, soft and pliant. I was delirious enough to imagine the shape of it beneath all of her layers, that sweeping softness, that firmness, that silky smoothness I already felt like roughing up with the stubble growing along my jaw.
My physical urges towards her were instant and undeniable. She was a gorgeous woman and my mind could imagine doing all sorts of things to her as she writhed beneath me—and looked up at me with those impossible, huge blue eyes.
I never mixed the two categories of women. If you were a little sister, that was it. I treated you like a child in need of protection and I didn’t want a child in my bed. And if you were a wanton woman in need of a good fucking, well, then you were in my bed and then you were out of my house. Period.
But this woman…
She didn’t seem to fit, though I admitted I was hazy and more than a little out of it. I probably thought clearer when I’d had half a dozen shots of whiskey. At least then I’d be warm, I thought, the idea running through my addled brain helplessly.
My eyes were mostly closed—they felt frozen shut, though they weren’t actually—but as we moved up the ditch bank, I realized where we were going. Parked haphazardly along the side of the road and still running was the worst piece of shit car I’d seen in a long time. It looked like it was saved, just barely, from the scrap yard after the claw had sunk into it and carried it halfway to the crusher. And yet it still hiccupped and ran, puffing out steam from its tailpipe and grinding a little from beneath the bent hood.
It looked just shy of ready to blow up. I wasn’t thrilled by the thought of it, but when she slid me into the seat all of my concerns about it melted away. Heat. Blessed fucking heat. It poured from the vents and even though it was being sucked away out the broken back window and God knew where else, I still felt better. Warmth of any kind felt better.
She closed the door on me and I was unconscious before she even got into the driver’s seat.
I was meeting with Shane McCarthy and he was late. And not just a little late. Half a fucking hour late and it was pissing me off. This had been half his idea, half mine. We were rivals, it was true, but that didn’t mean we didn’t have history. And it didn’t mean that once upon a time we hadn’t been closer than any two brothers could be. We weren’t blood, but we didn’t have to be. We grew up on the same streets and were taken in by the same old couple.
But that didn’t mean we were the same.
Things had changed since our childhood and not for the better. The Lucky Skulls were counting on me and thus far I hadn’t let them down, but when McCarthy started up the rival gang, the Irish Hounds, it wasn’t any wonder things went downhill, and fast. Suddenly the territory that had been plenty for the Lucky Skulls was being wrenched away from us forcibly—by people who had once been like brothers.
War broke out. There had already been casualties. I lost Tim, James, and Dorian. McCarthy had lost just as many.
I couldn’t have guessed that the old man dying would have torn us apart like this, but it had. Marie begged it to end, but how could it when neither of us seemed willing to let the past be the past? We couldn’t even be in the same room with one another without pulling a knife or a gun.
Marie told me the honest truth in the way that only a seventy-six-year-old woman can: “You’ve gotta be the bigger man, Ciaran m’boy. Make the first move or no one’s going to.”
It was a truth I took to heart, and when I threw the suggestion for a meeting to the wind, McCarthy got it loud and clear. I heard back from him in a short week’s time and the meeting was set up for tonight.
I hadn’t expected the snowstorm that was rolling in like a bad omen, despite the rings around the full moon and the weather report that was suggesting it could hit at any time. I’d thrown on jeans and a t-shirt, and of course wore my thick leather jacket, but as I stood there shivering in the snow, I thought it definitely wasn’t enough.
And what kind of idiot wears steel toed boots in the snow? I thought as I stood there blowing warm air across my knuckles in a vain attempt to warm them back up. They were already starting to go numb, and if this turned into a fight, I didn’t want to have numb, cold, sore split knuckles. That was just a bit much. Though at least my cold hands kept my attention away from my cold toes. I hated cold feet.
But it looked like in the end all of it was a moot point. No one was here and we were coming up fast on an hour. If I waited much longer, I’d just make myself angrier than I already was—and I’d probably make myself look weak to anyone who found out about it. My men or the Irish Hounds.
“Fuck, McCarthy,” I cursed into the frigid air. “You’re a real piece of shit.”
I finally decided I wasn’t going to wait anymore. I just turned to get back on my bike and get the hell out of here before the roads got too icy and the air too cold to make for any sort of a comfortable ride when I heard a voice ringing back to my ears.
“Is that any way to start off peace talks?”
I turned around again to see McCarthy was waltzing up towards me, a half smile plastered on his face as usual, his red hair brighter for all the falling snow. He looked a little crazy, like some demon walking through the soon-to-be white out.
I frowned. “About as good as to start it off by making the other party wait almost an hour.”
He shrugged his large shoulders, unconcerned. “Didn’t mean to worry your pretty little head over it, did I?”
It took everything I had to force calm into my system. I was pissy with him already and it didn’t help that he made me wait and was now teasing me for it. But I reminded myself that we were here to talk about making things right between us, ending this stupid feud before we lost anyone else.
“Dunno. You were never the brains,” I muttered, unable to help myself.
I saw his smile flicker, the only reaction he had to my goad. He continued as though he hadn’t heard it at all, which was how I know my words had really pissed him off. “But I’m here now, so let’s talk peace.”
Forcing a steadying breath into my lungs, I closed my eyes for half a second before opening them again and getting myself ready for a long, grueling night and a conversation I really didn’t want to have. I knew I was going to have to make compromises. I knew I wasn’t going to like any of them. But I also knew I didn’t have a lot of options. Either we fought it out until there was only one man standing or we figured out how to make things work between us.
“Alright. Any chance you’ll just move on and find greener pastures?” I started, mostly kidding, because there was no use in hoping. I knew he and the Irish Hounds were here to stay.
He actually laughed. “Oh, you’ve got quite the sense of humor, Ciaran, my brother. But alas, no, I’ll be staying for the long haul.”
Something in me tensed at the brother comment. I never forgot where we came from or how we were connected, but it was an old wound that had been torn open again not so very long ago. I hadn’t yet come to terms with all of it and I had the sense that he probably knew it. “Fine. I expected as much. So I guess we need to start talking compromises.”
He shrugged nonchalantly, then crossed his thick arms over his broad chest. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he was solid as a brick. I wasn’t sure he was stronger than me, but I also didn’t want to test it one way or the other if I could avoid the fight. “Compromises? Well, that’s simple. I want Merrill. All of it. No exceptions.”
I stiffened.
Merrill was an old industrial city that was half as prosperous as it had been when it started. Work started drying up as the money flowed elsewhere, but it was home. It was where I’d scrounged and hustled to stay alive on the streets, and it was where I’d met Ma and Pa, Marie and Donnie Sullivan, who’d been better to me than anyone else in this life. And he wan
ted me to give all of that up? There wasn’t a chance.
Don’t forget, it’s his home, too, an unwelcome voice whispered in my head. I pushed it aside and focused on the conversation at hand. “Not much of a compromise,” I commented. “How about we talk about boundary lines instead?”
He laughed again. “You honestly think I’m willing to cut up what is rightfully mine? You really are crazy, Ciaran.”
I licked my lips. This was sounding less and less like a peace talk and more and more like the kind of meeting you have when you want to lay down the law—or intimidate the hell out of someone. Which I expected was the real reason for our little get together. It made me angry and cautious both. If he were here to make me afraid—which, good luck with that—then he likely had something up his sleeve should I not cooperate.
Which there was no doubt in my mind that I wasn’t going to.
“Rightfully yours?” I questioned.
His eyes narrowed, but his smile never left. I knew this was bad. “That’s right. The old man would have wanted it this way—”