“He was waiting for her outside of the gym. They argued and I intervened.”
“You intervened?”
“I was there. He’s not going to touch her again anytime soon.”
“You taught him a lesson?”
I shrugged. “I laid him out pretty good.”
Jack sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. “She did suggest that she thought he wouldn’t be coming around again. Mentioned that he hadn’t sent the usual threatening text message this morning.”
“That’s good, right?”
“But how did he get a shot in if you were there?”
Jack’s eyes narrowed as he watched me, a dangerous look that warned me to tread carefully.
“You don’t want her to know that I’m following her for you. I couldn’t just charge in there because it just wouldn’t seem like a guy just trying to help an acquaintance out would do that.”
“You let him hit her?”
“No. But she tried to defend herself and it backfired a little.”
“She did?”
“She got a good punch in before he hit her.”
Jack studied me a long second, then a big smile blossomed across his face. “That right?”
“Yes, sir.”
He laughed. “Good for her.”
“She’s a smart girl, Jack. She’s a quick learner. She’s already picked up quite a bit, hanging out at the gym.”
“You’re teaching her?”
“The best I can.”
“Good. I want her to be able to defend herself. With everything that’s been going on around here, she might need those skills. I don’t want what happened to your father’s daughter to happen to Delaney.”
Brianna, my half-sister—whom I didn’t know existed until nearly a year ago—was kidnapped last year in an attempt by some unknown person to get information that would help bring my father down. Pops, Killian, and Ian managed to rescue her, but the damage was already done. Ever since, this person, whoever he was, had gone after more than a dozen of Jack’s people, killed Stacy’s fiancé, and paid a hitman to take out Killian. And it looked like whoever this person was had a mole inside the organization because the cops were learning things they should never in a million years have been able to put together. Plus, our biggest rival, the Italian mob, was getting information that was allowing them to impinge on some of our territory.
It was a mess.
“I won’t let that happen, Jack.”
Jack leaned forward and touched my knee. “I know, son. That’s why I chose you. I knew you would watch over her without taking advantage of the situation. Killian’s so busy with his new wife, and Ian…that boy…” He smiled. “I never knew it was possible for a boy to be so like his godfather.” The pride in Jack’s expression was almost palatable. “Always a new woman on his arm, the next better looking than the last. It’ll be a special woman who finally ties him down.”
I could only agree. Ian was about my age, one of dozens of foster children my mom brought home in the course of her career as a county social worker. He was adopted by our family when we were both about twelve. His parents were gone, his father killed in a training exercise in the Army and his mother of cancer when he was seven. He bounced around dozens of foster homes before my mom found him, having no other relatives any one could find. Now he managed a bunch of businesses my father bought over the years—a couple of restaurants here in Boston, a casino in Las Vegas, a working ranch in West Texas—but he mostly ran the protection detail my father ran for Jack and his men when he wasn’t entertaining one beautiful woman or another.
“Delaney’s fine,” I said, drawing Jack back to the conversation at hand.
“I know I can trust you, Sean. Just…keep that asshole away from her. And if he touches her again, you come to me. Don’t let me find out some other way.”
“Of course.”
Jack inclined his head, then stood. I stood, too, letting him lead me to the door with a hand on my shoulder.
“She’s a good girl, so much more like her mother than she’ll ever be like me. And I’m grateful for that.”
I glanced at him, a little surprised that he’d admit to being her father so easily after all the cloak and dagger when he first asked me to watch over her. He’d implied she was his lover before…
“This girl is extremely important to me, Sean,” he said. “If anything happens to her…”
“Sean is a good boy,” Pops told Jack. “He’ll take good care of her.”
They both studied me as if I was a book with an intriguing cover.
“No one touches her. You understand that?”
“I do, sir.”
“I’ve chosen you because I know I can trust you and because you were the best boxer in the family, so I know you can teach her a few things. She’s fiercely independent. She needs to learn how to defend herself, you understand.”
“I do.”
“Just remember she’s my girl. I will not be forgiving if anything happens to her.”
“Of course.”
I didn’t know how to answer Jack. So I didn’t.
He patted my shoulder. “Thanks, Sean.”
I walked away feeling as if I’d just been warned, but I just wasn’t sure what the warning was about.
***
The gym was a little busier tonight than it’d been recently. Delaney was already there, working on the heavy bag when I came in. Like the night before, I watched from the doorway for a moment. She had good form. Her arms were up where they should have been, her punches landing accurately. She was clearly learning what I’d been teaching her.
She was wearing those yoga pants again, a white t-shirt hanging low over her ass. This one wasn’t transparent, but there was something about the loose way in which it fit that still made my balls tighten. Or maybe it was just seeing her, just knowing what was under there, the memory of touching her that made my thoughts go places they shouldn’t. I never should have kissed her; I never should have allowed myself to touch or be touched.
Jack would kill me if he knew. And I should respect that; I should respect his wishes.
But how do you ignore this sort of instant attraction?
I dropped my bag on a bench and crossed to where she was working up a fine sweat, her forehead shining in the dim light. She had her blond hair pulled back into a ponytail again. It was pulled tight across her head with the tail itself dancing with every move she made. I slid my hands over her arms, sliding them down to her wrists, not to correct her, but because I couldn’t resist the touch. She stopped moving, tension flashing through her body but then disappearing as she leaned back into me.
We stood that way for a long moment, then she twisted away.
“I’m really not in the mood for this today,” she said softly, cutting through my chest with each syllable.
“Okay.”
“I, um…” Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine. “Would you go to dinner with me? Would you let me buy you dinner?”
My eyebrows rose. “Yeah?”
“I’m hungry. And I feel like I owe you something…”
“You don’t owe me anything.”
“Then maybe I’d just like to get to know you a little.”
I should have liked that idea, but this little thought in the back of my head was like an alarm going off.
You don’t want to know me. I’m not a good man.
But the idea of spending more time with her, just staring at her across a dinner table, was too much to resist.
I inclined my head. “Okay.”
She smiled brightly. “Great. Then…” She hesitated, glancing down at herself. “I guess we should go somewhere casual.”
“There’s a little place down the street I know. I think you’d like it.”
“Yeah?”
I gestured for her to lead the way. She smiled, happy to be leaving with me. Again, that thought flashed through my mind: You don’t want to know me. I’ll just let you down.
&n
bsp; I grabbed my bag, and we walked side by side. There was a heavy silence between us for a block or two, but then we both started to talk at the same time.
“How do you—?”
“I’m sure you—”
She laughed, pausing in her step to look up at me. “Sorry,” she said softly. “I was just wondering how you know this neighborhood so well.”
“My father grew up around here. He used to bring us down here, show us around. Even trained us at the gym.”
“Us?”
“I have a couple of brothers.”
She nodded, beginning to walk again. “I always wanted siblings, but my mom said she’d done it once. She wasn’t interested in doing it again.”
“She got perfection in you.”
She nodded, a wry smile twisting her lips. “That’s what she said, but I think she just didn’t want to go through the whole pregnancy thing again. Too uncomfortable.”
I thought about Stacy, her body swollen with Killian’s child. It looked painful, but she was always smiling, always so excited when the baby moved. She clearly didn’t mind being pregnant.
“Does that frighten you away from the idea of doing it yourself?”
“Everyone comes to experiences differently. I think I might want to try it, figure it out for myself.”
“So you’re open to having children?”
She touched my arm lightly. “First date is a little too soon to be asking questions like that, isn’t it?”
I felt heat flash over my face. I hadn’t meant it that way, but…
She laughed. “Just kidding.”
We ducked into the restaurant a minute later. It was a small English-style pub run by an old friend of my father’s. The place was busy, as it always tended to be, but the owner himself was standing just inside the door, and he came rushing over when he recognized me.
“Sean, me boy!” He patted me on the shoulder as he pulled us inside. “It’s been too long.”
“Hello, Patrick. How have you been?”
“Good, good! And you?”
I shrugged. “As good as ever.”
Patrick beamed, his thoughts clearly spinning when he spotted Delaney. “And who might this be?”
“Delaney Doherty. She’s a friend.”
“Delaney. What a beautiful, Celtic name.”
Delaney blushed as she accepted his enthusiastic kisses near her cheeks.
Patrick turned and yelled to someone, then he came back to me.
“We’ll get you the best table in the place. Have anything you want, it’s on the house.”
“Thank you, Patrick.”
“You’re well known here,” Delaney said, as I took her hand and led her into the loud, boisterous place behind Patrick’s waiter.
“He’s a friend of my father’s.”
“Comes in handy, having friends in high places.”
I smiled, as I led her deep into the dining room, finally finding the table Patrick meant for us. The waiter took drink orders, then disappeared. Delaney’s eyes were bright as she looked around, taking in the dark room with its cheesy décor. The place was filled with anchors and ropes, a nautical theme that seemed especially out of place when you realized there was not a bit of fish on the entire menu.
“The Shepard’s pie is good,” I said.
“What about the corned beef?”
“Excellent.”
We ordered and then sat back to enjoy the bottle of wine the waiter had brought. It was a white this time, a lovely, crisp wine that went down smoothly. I finished a glass as I watched Delaney continue to look around, the amusement on her face like that of a child meeting her hero for the first time. I poured myself a fresh glass and topped off hers, then leaned over the table to catch her attention.
“What do you think?”
She shrugged. “It’s fascinating. I’ve never been to a place like this.”
“Not your usual hangout?”
She laughed. “I grew up poor, so my idea of eating out was McDonald’s. Then I got into business and it became French bistros and hundred dollar tabs.”
“Quite a contrast.”
“I went from poor to not so poor pretty quickly.”
“With Heavenly Match?”
Her eyebrows rose. “How’d you know that?”
“You aren’t exactly unknown in this city, Miss Doherty.”
She inclined her head slightly. There’d been an article about her in a well-known business magazine just a few weeks ago that caught the attention of the local newspaper. It sported a picture of her and a brief history of her business. I read it three times, telling myself that I needed to know her if I was going to protect her. The truth, though, was a little simpler. I liked looking at that picture of her.
“You started the company in college?”
“How cliché is that?” She smiled as she settled back in her chair and lifted her wine glass. “I had a roommate who was having trouble finding a date for the homecoming dance. So I created this algorithm that we could use on the student information database on the administration computers—”
“You hacked the college’s computers?”
“Sure,” she said, a proud smile making it clear that she wasn’t ashamed of her actions. “Everyone does it. In fact, half my programming class had already done it by the time I got around to it.”
“Did it work? Did you get her a date?”
“Yeah. I actually went to their wedding last month.”
“Really?”
“No. She broke up with him a month later. She said he was too perfect.”
I laughed. “But you kept working on it?”
“Yeah. Other girls in the dorms wanted me to do it for them. And then some guy got wind of what I was doing and he offered to invest in the project and…as they say, the rest is history.”
“Must have been exciting for you to suddenly go from college student to CEO.”
“I had to really fight to keep control over it. They wanted to bring in their own people and run it their way because I didn’t have the experience they thought I needed. But I’m a quick learner and I finally bought my investors out and sent them packing.”
“Good for you.”
She looked thoughtful as she lifted her glass to her lips. “It’s mine. I want to make sure it stays the way it is instead of turning into one of these sites where people just use it for hook-ups or whatever. That’s not what this is meant to do. I like the stories we get from people who found the love of their life through our app.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but it was clear that she was passionate about her work. I could almost picture her sitting behind a computer, working her algorithms and making the computer do whatever it was she wanted it to do. I knew enough about computers to check my email and print out legal documents. Everything else I left to Ian. He was the computer expert in our family.
She set her glass down and looked at me. “What about you? I don’t even know what you do for a living.”
“I’m a lawyer.”
Her eyebrows rose. “Really? I would have thought…”
“What? That I was a laborer or something?”
“Maybe.”
I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest, trying to look annoyed. But I was actually amused by her ideas, her thoughts. I liked seeing myself through her eyes.
“Tell me what else you think of me.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know you well enough to have an opinion.”
“Sure you do. Tell me what you think.”
She looked around the room, once again taking in the atmosphere. Then she sipped from her glass once more before focusing on me.
“You grew up in this neighborhood. You boxed and that’s probably how you paid for college. You’re close to your parents, especially your mom. And your brothers. You party hard on Saturday, but you’re always at church on Sunday.”
I smiled, more amused than I thought I would be. She got it all wrong, but I liked the guy sh
e thought I was. He was so much better than the man I really was.
“You have an interesting way of seeing the world.”
“Do I?” She studied my face for a long second. “Did I get any of it right?”
I lifted a shoulder, but I didn’t really shrug. I didn’t answer her at all.
The waiter came with our dinners, setting them before us with a flourish. He brought a fresh bottle of wine, too. Delaney dug into her corned beef, sighing as the flavors burst over her tongue.
“Fabulous.”
“Told you.”
We ate for a few minutes, and then she sat back and studied me over the lip of her wine glass.
“Why don’t you have a girlfriend burning up your phone, wondering where the hell you are?”
“Because I have this habit of screwing things up.”
“How do you do that?”
I pressed my fork to a piece of lamb and watched it shred itself into teeny pieces. I was thinking of Tara, this girl I was with in college. We went to law school together and planned this great life together, how we were going to get our degrees and go into practice together once we served out a little time in the district attorney’s office, or something. But then my mom died, and I fucked up.
“You don’t have to tell me,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “I’m just…I’m overly curious about people. My friends are always telling me that I’m too nosy.”
“No, it’s fine. I just…it’s not something I’m terribly proud of.” I set my fork down and poured us both more wine before downing a good bit of mine. Then I set it down and ran my finger along the top rim of the glass. “I screwed up. I had a sweet girl I dated all through college and into the first year of law school. We were planning a life, but then my mom…”
I swallowed the rest of my wine and poured a little more, taking my time setting the bottle back into the old cooling bucket. Then I focused on her.
“You were right about one thing. I was close to my mom. She was…she was a great person. She was one of those people who always wanted to help everyone, who always wanted to make things better. She was a social worker, and she was always bringing home all these kids. Four of my siblings are actually foster kids whom she brought home and my parents adopted.
“When she got sick—it was pancreatic cancer—we all came rushing home. Killian was just out of graduate school and Ian was at Boston College. Kevin was at Stanford and Kyle was here doing whatever it was Kyle did. We all came home to be with her, but she died less than a week after…”
THE CALLAHANS (A Mafia Romance): The Complete 5 Books Series Page 35