Total pages in book: 107
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 100086 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 500(@200wpm)___ 400(@250wpm)___ 334(@300wpm)
It didn’t matter. He had no intention of letting her walk out of his life and, as a result, there was plenty of time for them to work up to having sex again. For now, he had the dazed look on her face after her second orgasm to keep his demons at bay. He smiled and shut off the water. The things that woman did for him.
He walked back into his bedroom and froze when he realized he wasn’t alone. What the fuck? “You know, Aiden, sitting here silently in my room isn’t sexy. In fact, it’s downright creepy.”
“I need to talk to you. Since you apparently still don’t give a fuck about anyone but yourself, I didn’t dare wake you from your beauty sleep.”
Not this again. Cillian walked into his closet and started pulling on clothes. “Last I checked, I haven’t dropped any balls in the last week, so what crawled up your ass and died?”
“Where were you yesterday?”
Yesterday? He frowned. “I had a date.” After buttoning up his shirt, he moved back into his room to select a tie.
Aiden shook his head. “A date. So you missed out on the announcement that you’re about to become an uncle for a piece of ass.”
He held up his hand and gave his brother his full attention. “Hold on, what? Uncle?”
“Teague and Callie are expecting.” Aiden’s mouth twisted. “She’s due in March.”
The room took a slow turn while he processed that information. “Another generation of O’Malleys is starting.” He wasn’t sure why that was so weird to him, but it was.
“Sheridan-O’Malleys.”
“It might be the fact I was asleep like fifteen minutes ago, but you don’t sound too happy about this.”
Aiden sighed. “It’s a good thing. Or it would be if all signs weren’t pointing to us having an enemy—or multiple enemies—poking around Boston. Callie’s going to be vulnerable, and Teague’s going to be focused on her instead of all the things that could go wrong. It’ll be up to us to pick up the slack.”
“I don’t think Callie’s nearly as vulnerable as people might think.” She’d managed to step up and take over the Sheridan family without more than a few ripples.
Aiden pushed to his feet and started pacing. “You know what I mean. Things aren’t as stable as they should be. We still haven’t heard from Romanov after the Carrigan disaster, and there’s the three percent still missing.”
“I thought you were going to look into that.”
“I did. All the businesses claim that it was an accounting error made in innocence.” Aiden turned on his heel and started another circuit around the room. “They even used the same language.”
“You think they were coached.” It made sense. If someone was crafty enough to slip in and steal from them, they had to be dangerous enough that the businesses affected wouldn’t think to cross them. Considering how they felt about the O’Malleys, that made whoever it was a special kind of scary. Seamus was downright ruthless when it came to getting full and timely payments. It would start with a menacing visit, which was usually enough to bring people back in line—but if it wasn’t, things would escalate quickly. Damage to the property. Damage to the property owner. He hadn’t had to kill anyone since Cillian could remember, but when the O’Malleys first took over the territory, there had been more than a few people who tried to hold out.
If someone was managing to undermine them with that kind of fear present in their people, they were a threat—one that couldn’t be ignored.
Suddenly, he was right on the same page as Aiden.
They needed that information, and they needed it yesterday. “We need that name.”
“You think I don’t know that? I don’t have a lot of options available to me.” Aiden ran his hands through his hair, making it stand on end. “Father wants to make an example of one of them.”
Cillian shuddered. He knew exactly what that entailed. “Isn’t that a little extreme? We’ve worked fucking hard to get these businesses to the point where they’re cooperating with us instead of obeying out of sheer terror.” They weren’t exactly on the same page as the Sheridans, but the O’Malleys were still worlds better than the Hallorans. Or they had been before James took over. He had a softer touch than his father, and from what Cillian could tell, his territory had been benefiting from it.
“That’s the point—they aren’t working with us if they’re slipping money away to someone else.” Aiden stopped short. “He says it’s a good time of year for a fire.”
And suddenly it all made sense. His brother had been stepping up more and more as time went on, taking over the day-to-day operations and phasing their father out. But, as far as Cillian could tell, that had mostly been the legal business. Now it looked like Father was handing over the other side of things.