Mafia Romance

by Aleatha Romig, Skye Warren, Annika Martin, Natasha Knight, Kaye Blue, Michelle St. James, Renee Rose, Parker S. Huntington, Alexis Abbott, Willow Winters

  But she couldn’t make herself say the words, couldn’t do that to him.

  Because however much it hurt him to think she didn’t love him, it would hurt more to know what she’d done, to know that she’d sold their love for half a million dollars.

  “It’s real.” She kissed him. “It’s real.”

  It was all she could give him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Nolan woke suddenly and looked around the room, momentarily disoriented. It was still dark and he started to reach for his phone to check the time when he realized what was missing.

  Bridget.

  She was standing on the other side of the bed, already in her jeans and buttoning her shirt.

  “Bridge.”

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “Don’t.”

  She finished buttoning her shirt and bent to pull on her shoes. He watched as she slipped on her coat and walked around the bed.

  She sat on the edge of the mattress, looked down at him, and reached out to lay her palm against his face. He removed her hand and held it in his like he stood a chance in hell of keeping her there when it was obvious she was already halfway out the door.

  “It was all true,” she said. “It’s real. I’ve always been yours.”

  “Then why…?”

  She drew in a breath and he saw that she was choking back a sob. “I can’t explain it, Nolan. Please… if you’ve ever loved me, don’t ask me to.”

  He sat up and threw his legs over the bed so that he was sitting next to her. “Give me something, Bridge. Something to help me understand.”

  She pulled her hand away. “I’ve given you all I have. I wish there was more. I wish…” She sighed. “I wish so many things.”

  He felt the weight of something invisible and poisonous between them. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this.” He couldn’t keep the anger out of his voice. “What you want me to do with this.”

  “I don’t know either. I’m just trying to figure this out, the same as you.”

  He shook his head. “Not the same as me.”

  He knew what he wanted. He wanted her, not just now but forever.

  “It’s just too much right now,” she said. “Owen and whatever’s going to happen with Seamus… I’m barely keeping my head up. I can’t think about anything else right now.”

  “Then let me help,” he said. “With Owen, at least.”

  He caught the flash of anger in her eyes before she stood. “I knew you’d do this,” she said sadly.

  “I’m trying to help.”

  “I understand that, but this isn’t the kind of help I need from you.”

  “Then what is? Just… fucking tell me what you want.” He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. He was standing next to the bed, naked as the day he was born, shouting at her.

  “I want time. That’s all. Just time to figure it out.”

  “Four years wasn’t enough to know whether you want to be with me?” He hated how bitter he sounded.

  “It’s not about that,” she said. “It’s not about you.”

  “Than what’s it about?” he asked.

  She stepped closer, wrapped her arms around his waist, and looked up at him. “It’s about me and the mess I’ve gotten myself into. I know you want to help, but I have to figure this out on my own. Can you let me do that?”

  He looked down at her. “That’s what you want? What you need?”

  She nodded.

  He exhaled and shook his head. He wanted to sweep her into his bed and keep her there, to hear her say she loved him, to know that she wasn’t going to disappear again.

  But this was love, wasn’t it? Giving someone what they needed even when it broke your heart? Even when it brought you to your knees? Did he love her enough to do that?

  He didn’t even have to think about it.

  “Okay, Bridge.” He bent his head and rested his forehead against hers. “I fucking hate it, but okay. Just don’t forget that I’m here, that I always will be.”

  “I won’t.”

  He nodded and stepped away.

  She started for the door. “See you at the Cat.”

  “Let me drive you to your car,” he said.

  She kept walking. “No thanks. I feel like walking.”

  He listened to her footsteps in the hall, the sound of the front door closing behind her.

  See you at the Cat.

  The words sat like lead in his stomach. She was still in danger, still in Seamus’s path. Nolan had wanted to protect her before, but it was nothing compared to the determination he felt now that he’d held her in his arms again.

  Now that he’d allowed himself to really remember.

  It’s real. I’ve always been yours.

  He thought about Seamus, about the way he’d preyed on Bridget when she’d needed help for Owen, the way he hid his motives behind a genial smile and stacks of cash, the way he let the men talk about Bridget when she wasn’t around, like she was nothing but a piece of meat used to rile up the wolves.

  He let the fury come, let it wash over him until he was vibrating with the power of it.

  One way or another he would remove Seamus. He would find a way to make sure Bridget was safe, that she had everything she needed for Owen and her parents.

  Whether she liked it or not.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Bridget tried to stem the nervousness in her stomach as she parked next to Nolan’s car at Foley’s. It had been nearly a week since their night together and she could still smell him on her skin, still had to catch her breath when the image of his naked body assaulted her memory.

  The one time she’d been to the Cat that week he hadn’t been there. She’d told herself she was glad—that it was less complicated that way—but deep down she knew she was lying to herself.

  She was still hungry for him. Hungry for his hands and mouth on her body, for the protection of his arms and the determination in his eyes that said she would always be okay, as long as she was with him.

  It was a weakness she couldn’t afford. Not now when everything was coming to a head with Seamus, when she could feel the tension rising among the men like a balloon filled to capacity.

  She took a deep breath when she came to the door and stepped into Foley’s. It was nearly ten p.m. the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. The bar was even deader than before, Nolan and Will occupying the same booth at the back of the room.

  “Hey,” she said when she got to the table. She looked Nolan in the eye, wanting him to know she had no regrets, that as shitty as her exit from his apartment had been, she’d meant everything she’d said.

  “Hey.” She saw the night they’d spent together in his face, in the way he couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  “Oh-ho!” Will clapped his hands together. “Mom and Dad are back together again!”

  “Don’t,” Nolan warned.

  “What?”

  “Jesus you’re a dolt. If I was your mom I’d box your ears.” Bridget slid next to Will, if only because she didn’t trust herself to sit next to Nolan. He didn’t seem to mind, his grin suggesting he might be able to read her thoughts.

  “Want something from the bar?” Nolan asked.

  She shook her head. “I have a late night ahead of me.”

  “Work?” he asked.

  “Pies. I promised my mom I’d help.”

  Nolan smiled.

  “I hate to break up this little love fest—I’m not being facetious, I really do—but I think we should fill Bridget in,” Will said.

  She looked from Will to Nolan and back again. “Fill me in on what?”

  “We think we know Seamus’s target.” Will lowered his voice. “The bank target.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “We’re not sure,” Nolan said, “but word is Seamus has had two teams casing Harbor Trust, the one on Broadway.”

  “Broadway…”

  “What about it?” Nolan asked.

  “Seamu
s asked me to pull BPD calls to that location last week.”

  “Can you do that?” Will asked.

  “It’s public record,” Bridget and Nolan said in unison.

  Nolan rubbed the five o’ clock shadow on his chin. “So Seamus wanted to know if the bank has been robbed before?”

  “I wasn’t sure at the time, but it makes sense with what you and Will have been hearing,” she said. “It sounds like he’s casing the place, making note of armored cash pickups and police surveillance.”

  “What did you find?” Nolan asked. “When you pulled the public records from BPD?”

  “Two calls in the last five years—one for an unruly customer and one for a disgruntled employee who wouldn’t leave the building,” she said.

  “So probably not considered a hot target by BPD,” Will said.

  “Probably not,” she said. “Any idea what kind of timeline we’re looking at?”

  “We’re guessing sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas,” Nolan said.

  “Any way to nail that down?” Bridget asked.

  “We’ll see,” Nolan said. “Seamus is playing it close to the vest. The only reason we know is because fucking Casey has been running his mouth ever since Seamus made him sweat after getting picked up at Centerfolds.”

  “He should be careful,” Bridget said. Casey wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, but he was a nice kid.

  “I tried to tell him,” Will said.

  Bridget chewed her lip, turning her attention back to Seamus. “We need to get those names.”

  “I think we’ve got that covered,” Nolan said.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “You going to fill me in?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “The less you know the better,” Nolan said.

  She looked at Will, who shrugged. “Don’t put me in the middle of it.”

  “You don’t get to decide what I know and what I don’t know,” she said to Nolan.

  Nolan set his mouth in a line. “I do when it’s my information.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “You brought me into this. It’s not fair to cherry-pick which parts you let me know about. Besides, not knowing something can be just as dangerous as knowing, especially when it comes to Seamus.”

  It was more likely that she’d inadvertently step on Nolan’s toes with Seamus than that Seamus would make a connection between Bridget and anything Nolan did. They hadn’t so much as looked at each other in Seamus’s presence.

  “She has a point,” Will said.

  Nolan turned his beer glass in his hand, his expression serious. “We’re going to break into Seamus’s house.”

  She shook her head. “That’s a fucking stupid idea.”

  “It’s the opposite of stupid,” Nolan said. “Seamus hands out the money at the Cat on Mondays, and we know the names on the envelopes are written ahead of time.”

  “We don’t know how far ahead of time,” Bridget pointed out.

  “True,” Nolan said, “but none of us have seen him writing on them at the Cat, so it’s safe to assume he does it before he gets there.”

  “Maybe, but he could be doing it somewhere besides his house, like the Playpen,” Bridget said.

  The Cat was Seamus’s primary place of business, but he kept a small office at the Playpen.

  “Anything’s possible,” Will said. “But for someone as paranoid as Seamus, the most likely scenario is that he takes care of the things that could compromise the organization at home.”

  She sat back in the booth, her stomach turning over at the thought of Will and Nolan inside Seamus’s house. “If he catches you there, he’ll kill you both.”

  “He won’t,” Nolan said. “He goes to mass every Sunday night at six. We’ll be in and out before the Sanctus.”

  “I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Do you have a better idea?” Will asked.

  She searched her brain, willing it to come up with an alternative. “I could come with you,” she suggested. “Be a lookout.”

  Nolan’s face hardened. “Absolutely not.”

  She thought about insisting. Nolan wasn’t her boss. He couldn’t tell her what to do.

  But then she thought of Owen, of her parents. She was already putting herself at risk just working with Nolan and Will behind the scenes, and while she would have liked to do more, she was hyperaware of her family’s reliance on her, their reliance on the money she was bringing in for Owen and on the support, however minimal, she offered around the house.

  She sighed. “Will you call me right when you’re done?” she asked. “Let me know everything’s okay?”

  Nolan nodded.

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Try not to worry. Everything will be fine,” Nolan said.

  It wasn’t herself she was worried about. Nolan had protected her to the best of his ability, would continue to protect her. He was the one in danger, he and Will. The possibility of something happening to one of them while she stayed safe was no comfort at all.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Will parked half a mile from Seamus’s house in a Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and they started out on foot. It would have been foolish to leave Nolan’s car, too flashy for the neighborhood and bound to get attention.

  “I can’t believe I’m fecking breaking into Seamus O’Brien’s house while he’s at mass,” Will said. “I’m definitely going to hell now.”

  “Not if you repent.” Nolan’s family was Catholic in name only, thanks to his grandparents who had been good Irish Catholics and his mother who had cast off the mantel of the church’s expectations more or less the day after Nolan’s father’s funeral.

  “I haven’t been to confession in ten years,” Will said.

  “Then this isn’t going to make the difference,” Nolan said, stuffing his gloved hands in his pocket. “You can just add it to the list.”

  Temperatures had taken a dip the day after Thanksgiving, which Nolan had suffered through on Beacon Hill with his mother and Harrison, who after nearly twenty years as Nolan’s stepfather still couldn’t seem to say more than ten words to Nolan over the course of a dinner, even an extended one like Thanksgiving.

  Nolan had eaten as fast as was considered acceptable by his mother, stayed long enough for coffee and pie, and had beaten a quick path to the door, trying to ignore the feeling that the expression on his mother’s face was one of relief.

  He’d left the house thinking about Bridget, ensconced with her parents in the little house in Southie, the smell of home-cooked food drifting through the air, Bridget’s father watching football with Owen after being kicked out of the kitchen by his wife.

  He’d had to check the impulse to show up at the Monaghans’ door, let himself be invited in. It was too soon after his night with Bridget, their relationship too undefined.

  It’s real. I’ve always been yours.

  “So you and Bridge are back together?” Will asked as they turned onto one of the quiet residential streets. It was already dark, the street lamps illuminating the pavement in staggered orbs of light.

  “I wouldn’t go that far.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Will asked.

  “Ask Bridget,” Nolan said.

  “I’m not asking Bridget. I’m asking you.”

  “And I’m telling you I don’t know,” Nolan said.

  “Is this your way of saying it’s complicated?” Will asked.

  Complicated was an understatement. “More or less.”

  “Feck me,” Will said. “You love her, she loves you. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know,” Nolan said. But there was one. He’d felt it between them, not when he’d been inside her, not when he’d owned and occupied her body, let her own and occupy his, but afterwards when she’d said goodbye, her eyes shadowed and sad. “Let’s just focus on the job.”

  “Fine.”

  “Did you bring the picks?” Nolan asked.

  “Of course I b
rought the picks,” Will said. “Think I’m some kind of fecking amateur?”

  “Just making sure. We’ll stay out of the street lights, go around back, and see if there’s an open window. If not, we’ll break in the front door.”

  “Why the front?” Will asked.

  “The side door goes into the kitchen in all these old houses, and that door is next to the driveway. Seamus probably parks there and enters through the side door, which means there will be a light,” Nolan said. “The front door is shaded by the porch. I doubt he’ll have left a light on there when he doesn’t use it.”

  “Sounds like a shot in the dark,” Will said. “How do we know he doesn’t use it?”

  “See for yourself.”

  They’d come to Seamus’s block, his house halfway down the street. The porch was dark, but light seeped down the driveway from the side of the house.

  “Fecking asshole,” Will muttered.

  Nolan laughed and clapped him on the back. “Don’t be bitter.”

  “You cased the place earlier in the week, didn’t you?” Will asked.

  “Let’s just say I did my homework.”

  It was almost like old times, the two of them walking the street, their conversation quiet as the neighborhood went about its business behind closed doors. Except now there was more to lose. More that had already been lost. He envied the young men they’d been, envied their ignorance about what was to come.

  “Let’s cross,” Nolan said when they came to a dark spot between street lamps.

  They crossed the street and continued along the cracked sidewalks toward Seamus’s house.

  “I heard Seamus made Big Billy paint his house after he fecked up a job in Brookline last year,” Will said. “It looks good.”

  The house was tidy, the wood siding freshly painted a crisp white. The porch was clear of furniture, including the folding chairs that decorated so many houses in the neighborhood, prime spots for smoking and people watching. Seamus’s wife, Agnes, had died years before. Nolan guessed Seamus smoked in the house now and had better things to do than people watch.

  “Big Billy should be grateful Seamus made him paint. Could have been worse,” Nolan said as they approached the sidewalk leading to the porch. “Stay out of the light if you can.”