by Avery Flynn
“Lies,” Lucy hollered, the wine obviously kicking in. “We love you—just the way you are.”
“Thank you, Mr. Darcy,” Gina said.
“You’re quite welcome,” she said in the world’s worst British accent, which got the three of them giggling again.
And as inappropriate as it may have been, they continued to giggle and cheer all the way through Kill Bill—because some days, watching a kickass female with a sword and a bad attitude was what a woman needed to get through a heartbreak.
…
Ford stared at the beer mug sitting on the bar. He’d been sitting on the same barstool at Marino’s for two hours in the middle of the afternoon and in that time, he’d watched the foamy head on his beer disappear but hadn’t taken a single drink. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to drink. He wanted to have all the drinks. But he lived too far away from Marino’s to walk, and in his present dark mood he wasn’t sure he could stop at one or two or twenty-five, and he wasn’t getting behind the wheel after that.
So instead of drinking the beer, he stared at it until the lack of condensation dripping down the outside of the mug proved the amber liquid inside was now room temperature. That had gotten more than a few comments from his brothers and sisters in blue who were playing darts in the back and checking each other out in the front. He’d ignored them. He didn’t care what they thought or didn’t think. None of it mattered.
After four days of being shut down every time he tried to reach out to Gina to explain, he wasn’t sure if anything mattered any more.
Of course, he’d known that was a possibility when he’d accepted the assignment from Rodriguez to check out the box Gina’s brothers had left. But knowing something could happen and having it actually happen were two very different things. One result made him drink a few beers. The other made him want to drink a few kegs.
The barstool next to him scraped against the floor as someone scooted it back and sat down. The flash of red hair in his periphery told him who it was before Frankie even opened his mouth.
“When Shannon called and said you’d been sitting here staring at your beer for the past two hours, I thought she was just trying to get in my pants again.” He winked at the woman behind the bar, who just rolled her eyes. “But here you are, like a man about to snap and, oh, I don’t know, join the police department or something.”
Ford cut a dirty look at his older brother. “I am a cop.”
“I know you are, moron. That’s what makes it funny. I give you shit for being a cop. You tell me to go eat smoke. We flip each other off and all is right with the world.” Frankie picked up Ford’s beer and took a long drink, then grimaced and set it back down on the bar. “You are fucking up the flow of things almost as much as this shitty, warm beer.”
He flipped off his brother. The idiot just laughed and clapped him on the back. Then, he threw some bills on the bar and stood up. “Come on, you’re coming with me.”
“Why?” Ford asked as he eyeballed his brother, not trusting where the impulsive giant was going with this.
“Because sitting in a cop bar talking about your feelings,” Frankie said, making the last word sound like an infectious disease, “is not something I want to do.”
That made two of them. “We aren’t talking about my feelings.”
Not now. Not here. Not anywhere. He was going to sit here and stare at his beer and not think about Gina Luca and how he’d fucked up the best thing to have ever happened to him. He put his elbows on the bar and laid his arms on either side of the beer mug and gave it his full attention.
Frankie snorted, obviously unimpressed. “But we will be talking about your feelings, because your head is wedged so far up your ass right now that you are insufferable even for you.”
“Insufferable.” Ford picked up his beer and took a swig of the lager that was so flat and warm that he immediately regretted it. “That’s a big word for a firefighter.”
“There you are.” Frankie grinned down at him. “I knew you were lurking in there somewhere. Now get your scrawny ass up before I pick you up and embarrass you in front of your little buddies in blue.”
Scrawny? What the fuck? “I’m six two.”
“Exactly. Scrawny. Now get a move on, baby brother. Finian is on shift tonight, and Fallon and the rest of our lovely sisters still aren’t talking to you, so that means knocking some sense into your thick skull is up to me.”
Ford didn’t want to go. He wanted to sit here at Marino’s and glare at his shitty room-temperature beer and snarl at anyone who had the balls to try to talk to him. But he knew Frankie. He’d known him his whole life. And never in all those years had the eldest Hartigan sibling ever backed down from a single solitary thing.
His brother had two speeds: full throttle ahead and dead asleep, which meant that if his brother was all in for making Ford come with him then he really was all in. At six feet six inches tall, Frankie was big enough to throw Ford over his shoulder and haul him out of Marino’s. Ford couldn’t let that happen. He might be a complete idiot, but he still had his pride.
“Fine,” he said, adding enough distaste to the word to make sure his brother knew his exact thoughts on the matter, and then stood up and walked out of Marino’s.
If he’d thought Frankie would be any more chill when they were both sitting out on his deck looking at the grass that Finian had painstakingly planted and watered for months, then he was wrong. Frankie was even more of a pain in the ass in his own environment, where he’d pulled out every detail of the Gina fiasco with the subtlety and gentleness of a Mack truck skidding across an ice sheet and smacking into a snowman.
“So, let me get this straight,” Frankie said while staring at Ford like he’d never seen a dumber human being in his life, which, since he worked with firefighters, was really saying something. “First, there was the thing at the hotel, which you fucked up.”
“I didn’t know Gallo and Ruggiero had set her up, and when I mentioned I hadn’t been expecting her, she ran.”
“Yeah, because—newsflash—chicks have egos, too.” Frankie took a drink of his beer. “And then when, by the grace of some benevolent force in the universe, you get the opportunity to hang out with her again, you fuck that shit up by not being honest.”
“I didn’t lie, regulations kept me from being able to tell her the complete truth.”
“You went to the same Catholic school that I did. Do you really think Sister Mary Helen would say that a lie of omission didn’t count if it was work-related?”
“Fuck you,” he grumbled and flipped his brother off.
“That’s what I thought.” Frankie returned Ford’s middle-finger salute with one of his own. “And then, because you’re not a big enough asshole already, you don’t do whatever the fuck it takes to make Gina understand that you’ve seen the error of your ways after the disaster of epic proportions at Mom’s house, and instead slink away back to your cop shop until you go over to her house under false pretenses again and snoop around for evidence of her brothers committing a crime.”
“It was for her own good. If someone else had gone in there and found something, they wouldn’t have been able to protect her against the fallout like I would.”
“So, you’re the hero in all of this, is that what you’re saying, baby bro?” When Ford didn’t answer, Frankie went on. “Because you sure as shit look like the heel to me.”
“Thank you, Professor Hartigan. I wasn’t aware of how badly I’d screwed everything up.”
“Well, it’s a good thing she was just a piece of temporary ass and not someone who actually mattered.”
The world turned red. Ford shot up and bum-rushed his brother, wrapping his arms around his waist and taking him down in a picture-perfect tackle. After that it was total chaos, complete with jabs, elbows to the ribs, and a flipped deck chair. They wrestled for control, delivering as many punches as possible before they were both laying side by side on the deck, surrounded by chairs that had been knocked over—or in one case
, broken in half—and breathing so hard he would have thought they’d just tangled with a pack of elephants. Well, judging by the feel of his jaw, he might have.
“You are such a dumb fucker,” Frankie said, his words sounding funny because of the right hook Ford had delivered to his big brother’s mouth.
Ford was too tired and achy to sit up and smack Frankie around for the comment. “How’s that?”
Frankie snorted, then let out a pained groan. “Because instead of being here trying to kick my ass—which you’ll never be able to do, by the way—for insulting your girl in order to get a rise out of you so that the dim bulb above your head would go off, you should be out there begging and groveling and doing whatever it takes to get the woman you love to give your scrawny ass another chance.”
Because there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about what Frankie got right in that little speech, Ford focused on what his brother got wrong. Just because he didn’t shop in the giganto section didn’t make him a pipsqueak. He was six foot two, for the love of Mike. “I’m not scrawny.”
“But you are wrong.”
Ford opened his mouth to argue—a move that made his sore jaw ache—but he had nothing to say to that, because his oversized doofus of a brother was right. “I know.” Damn it. He hated it when that happened.
“So go get your girl, Ford.”
“What if she won’t listen?” His voice cracked on the last word, as though his fears had been ripped from his throat. He’d be lucky if she didn’t swing that sledgehammer at him, let alone actually hear him admit what a dumbass he’d been.
Still laying down beside him, Frankie swung his arm in a wide arc, and his massive paw of a hand landed with a hard thunk on Ford’s chest. Both men let out an oof of pain before Frankie said, “You mean the guy who bucked three generations of tradition by bypassing the fire department for the police department is scared of doing something hard? Don’t fool yourself, little bro. You’ve got what it takes to make this happen. If anyone can beat the odds, it’s you.”
Ford lay there, his breaths still coming out as big puffs of air, trying to figure out what to say, because that was probably about as close to an “I love you man” and “you aren’t a total dipshit for becoming a detective” as he’d ever heard from his oldest brother.
“If you ever tell anyone I just said that,” Frankie said, “I’ll deny it.”
“All the way to the grave,” Ford said with a laugh, even though it made his ribs hurt like hell, but not nearly as much as the idea of spending the rest of his life without Gina.
So, he ignored how much his entire body ached and got up, so he could go get his girl.
Chapter Twenty
Ford walked into the hotel on Bleaker Street out of breath and a little out of his mind. Okay, a lot out of his mind. He’d tried Gina’s house, but she wasn’t there. He’d tried Vacilli’s Bakery. No dice. He’d braved Lucy’s house and had to remind her that maiming was a serious offense as she put a mean-looking claw hammer down on her kitchen counter when he asked her if she knew where Gina was. Finally, Fallon had taken pity on him—thanks to intel from Tess—that Gina was working a wedding at the very hotel where they’d first met.
And that’s how he’d ended up here with no fucking clue what to do next.
He didn’t have to be a detective to find her once he got to the lobby. He just followed the sound of the Cha-Cha Slide to the right ballroom.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked an old lady in head-to-toe black standing next to the door like a gargoyle.
“I need to talk to the wedding planner.” And he didn’t have time to play good cop and chat with this old biddy.
He started to walk through, and the old woman whacked him right in the shin with her cane. Pain ricocheted up his leg, and he stopped dead in his tracks before she took a whack at his head with that thing.
“My fool of a great grandson is in there celebrating a marriage that’s not going to last past thirty days, and I know you weren’t invited, so go find another party to crash.”
Since hip checking an old lady wasn’t on his to-do list, Ford turned and reached down deep for the Hartigan charm that had thus far eluded him his entire life. “You look like a woman who knows what she’s talking about, so I’m sorry in advance for your great grandson’s doomed wedding. But I only need to talk to Gina. I promise I’m not crashing.”
“Don’t try to soften me up, buster.” The cane came down on his toe this time. “I’m beyond flattery.”
His toe throbbing, Ford took her at her word and took a step back and tried another tack—honesty. “Look, lady, I messed up with the woman I love, and she’s inside, and if I don’t talk to her and set everything straight, then everything is going to go right to hell.”
The gray-haired bouncer kept her cane on the ground and glared up at him. “Don’t use that kind of language around me. I’m a lady.”
“One with a cane she’s not afraid to use,” he muttered.
“Damn skippy,” she said, using it to tap his toes with enough force to remind him of the damage she could do with that thing. “Now, I don’t want to know what you did, because it’s plain as day that it was total foolishness.” She put the plastic stopper of her cane down on the ground, missing the inside of his foot by two inches, and leaned on the handle to bring herself to her full height of probably five foot nothing. “So what are you going to do about it?”
“Tell her I love her.” That was all he had so far when it came to having a working plan.
The old lady gave him a look that screamed try again. “Pretty words are cheap.”
If he clamped his jaw closed any harder, he was going to lose his back molars. Taking a deep breath—or at least as much of one as he could through his nostrils—he looked over the old lady’s head to the ballroom beyond. The lights were dimmed, but he could see people dancing, a wedding party up at the front, and a DJ in front of a huge movie screen. That was it. Everything had started with that Kiss Cam. Maybe that would fix everything, too.
“Ma’am,” he said, his voice louder than he meant for it to be, but volume control had gone out the window the second time she’d gotten him with her cane. “I’m gonna do whatever it takes to get her back.”
The old woman gave him an assessing look, then snapped, “So what are you doing standing out here?”
What the hell? After all that, she was just going to act like he was the one delaying everything? It had to be the wedding. People lost their minds at weddings. Not willing to waste another second on trying to unravel that mystery, he rushed inside the ballroom.
Gina wasn’t near the DJ booth. She wasn’t near the catering stations. She wasn’t by the bridal party dais. He was getting ready to breach the dance floor, when light spilled out from the swinging door leading to the staff area. There was no mistaking that brown, wavy hair with its tendency to frizz. He’d found her.
He rushed over to that side of the ballroom and through the staff doors into a makeshift kitchen in full go mode. There were waiters and guys in tall chef hats and dishwashers carrying heavy tubs filled with cutlery and mini plates rushing around the room. And there, in the back by a woman in one of the hotel’s signature black blazers, stood Gina. She was wearing that green dress again from the first night they’d met. It had made him stop and take notice. Now that he knew the woman in the dress, he appreciated how beautiful she looked in it even more.
His mouth was open to call out to her before he knew it, but he clamped his jaw shut. He’d spent the past week giving her words. That wasn’t going to be enough. He needed to show her this time, and for the first time since she’d walked out of his parents’ house, he knew exactly what to do.
And sadly, it wasn’t going to be as easy as just getting her on a Kiss Cam again.
…
The wedding had gone off without a hitch and the reception finished early, and Gina was so glad that at least one thing in her world was turning out the way she’d hoped. She walk
ed into her house and swept up the mail scattered on the floor under the postal slot in her front door.
The daily paper was on the top, with a huge front-page spread about how the Waterbury Police Department had stopped a shipment of heroin and arrested ten people associated with the Esposito crime family. After that it was bills, junk mail, and one blue envelope with a foreign stamp. She was about to dump it all on the foyer table when the return address on one envelope caught her attention.
George Ainsley
510 Luca Street
Nassau, Bahamas
Her fingers shook as she ripped open the envelope. After they’d taken a cruise a few years ago and had discovered Luca Street, her brothers had told way too many lame jokes about how awesome it would be to live on a street with their name. It had to be from them.
Ms. Luca,
Thank you for your interest in renting the home on Luca Street. Unfortunately, it has been occupied by new buyers. They were alerted to the real estate investment opportunity by a mutual friend you share who gave them an early heads-up about how their former circumstances were not tenable. The current owners have no plans at the moment to sell the property but should the situation in your location change, they will reconsider.
Sincerely,
George Ainsley, Esq.
Gina didn’t know whether to cry or laugh. She’d recognize Paul’s ridiculous sense of humor anywhere. He probably thought using the name of their old next-door neighbor and writing in code to let her know they were okay was hilarious. Chuckling despite her frustration that her brothers had gone all cloak-and-dagger on her, she relaxed for the first time in days. And once that weight was off her shoulders, something else landed in its place as she looked down at the newspaper laying on the table.
Ford hadn’t just tried to help. He actually had. He’d gotten her brothers to leave before an Esposito-related drug bust went down. He’d tried to tell her, and she wouldn’t listen. She wouldn’t give him a chance. Even after he’d broken one of his precious rules for her by giving a heads-up to her brothers. Her lungs tightened, and she crumpled the letter in her hand. After years of not trusting people and building her walls, she hadn’t given Ford the chance that he’d given her. Instead, she’d spent their time together just waiting for him to show his real self. What she hadn’t realized was that he had been doing exactly that the entire time. And her? She’d been too scared to let herself believe what had been there in front of her all along.