Ciaran (Bourbon & Blood)

Chapter 3

Three

H ours later, settled in Ciaran’s small house with a John Hughes marathon running on the television, Loralei glared at him from the couch. “I don’t understand why we couldn’t stay at my house! I have a business to run. I still need to go to the shop and try to put everything back together,” she protested.

“And if your customers get shot while they’re trying to buy one of your pretty dresses, you won’t have a business left. As for your house—no security, no protection from the street, too many entrances and exits, and impossible for one man to secure,” he replied, checking the windows and drawing the blinds. There was no point in advertising their presence.

“I don’t think I can do this…I can’t be locked up in here with you for days. Not without killing you or going crazy.”

Ciaran smiled, but not in humor. The truth of the matter was, he felt the same. Loralei had gotten under his skin in a way no woman ever had. She thought he’d walked away because he didn’t care, but it was just the opposite. He’d walked away because he cared too much, because she made him feel things and want things that he wasn’t ready for. “You wouldn’t be the first to try and put an end to me, but if you could manage it in your condition, I’d damn well deserve it.”

She muttered something that sounded like “asshole” and then, with some difficulty, managed to stretch out on the couch. He didn’t offer to help her. She’d made it abundantly clear that she didn’t want him touching her. That hadn’t always been the case. Memories of her overly feminine bedroom, draped in ruffles and lace, of Loralei stretched out on the bed, purring like a cat beneath his questing hands, clamored in his mind. But always, he’d left her alone, sneaking out into the night while she slept.

She’d never stayed overnight at his house simply because he never let anyone do that. The nightmares made him dangerous. Waking up in the darkness with another human being close to him wasn’t a good idea. Having her in his home, guarding her twenty-four seven was a kind of enforced intimacy that could only lead to complications. But maybe it was time to complicate his life a little. Walking away from Loralei hadn’t done a damn thing to erase her from his mind.

“You need to take your pills, or you’ll wake up hurting,” he reminded her gently.

She rolled her eyes. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do!”

“Yes, you fucking do. You’re only being hardheaded about this because I’m the one who said it. Good advice is good advice, Loralei, regardless of where it comes from. I’ll get the pills, and I’ll get you a drink, and you’ll bloody well take them!”

As if she hadn’t protested, he retrieved a Diet Coke from the fridge, knowing it was her beverage of choice, and placed it next to her elbow along with the pill bottle. Churchill, a noble name for an ignoble beast, was snuggled on the back of the couch, panting as if he’d run a marathon. “I’ll make us some dinner,” he said. “Take the damn pill.”

He walked away, headed for the kitchen. Her muttered curse followed him along with the sound of the rattling pill bottle. She might put up a fight for appearance’s sake, but at the end of the day, she was nobody’s fool.

Loralei, in spite of her silver-spoon upbringing, was a practical woman. Of course, the silver spoon had been yanked from her mouth fairly early on in life because her controlling bitch of a mother thought poverty would inspire Loralei to lose weight. He shook his head thinking about it. His own family, at least on his mother’s side, had been fucked up. As for his father’s family, they were an unknown quantity.

It was hard to imagine any family being as massively screwed up as the Crawfords and not have them imploding on daytime television. Matt was difficult to take, and Loralei had her share of issues, but as they’d been birthed and raised by a bloody iceberg, it was a miracle they weren’t both locked up in the nuthouse.

The time he spent in the kitchen helped to calm his temper and give him back a bit of his hard-won control. She was in his head and under his skin. It wouldn’t go well for either of them. But cooking, as always, helped. It reminded him of growing up on the small farm just outside Quin.

His grandmother hadn’t held to the notion that a man shouldn’t cook and clean up after himself. She’d put him to work, and he’d discovered he had an affinity and a knack for cooking. It calmed his mind, soothed his ragged peace, and by the time the meal was done, he felt like he could face her again.

Filling two plates, he carried them into the living room. It was simple fair, roast chicken with potatoes and carrots, tasty without being too heavy for her. Given the amount of pain medication she was on, that was important. As he walked in, Churchill opened one eye, yawned loudly, and then promptly went back to snoring.

“Damned lazy beast,” he muttered.

“An old Irish recipe?”

He laughed. “No. I think this might have been the Barefoot Contessa…or Martha Stewart. I can’t recall for certain.”

She frowned. “I just don’t see you as the type to sit around watching cooking shows all day.”

“I like to cook. My grandmother taught me the basics…but the fancier stuff I picked up while I was recuperating from a bullet. I was at this hospital in Germany, and one of the nurses was a fan of American cooking shows. She brought me what she had on tape while I was stuck there.”

He’d never told her those kinds of things before, he realized. Every word out of his mouth had been guarded, every secret held close and tight. The fear that she’d reject him if she really knew him had created a chasm between them. No, he corrected. He had created a chasm between them. Looking at her, bruised and battered, but alive and once again within reach, he’d tell her anything she wanted to know if it meant he could just keep her.

He’d charmed her, no doubt, Loralei thought grimly. He was good at that. Turn on the charm and leave them wanting more. She stopped herself from saying anything to that effect. There was no way it wouldn’t sound like petty jealousy, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“I didn’t know you’d ever been shot,” she said.

“You’ve seen the scar,” he said, pointing to his side.

Recalling the wicked-looking chunk of missing flesh there, Loralei’s eyes widened in horror. “What did they shoot you with? God above!”

He chuckled. “The scarring isn’t from the bullet, love. It’s from having to cauterize the wound in the field. We were too far away from our exit point, and I was bleeding too badly to go any further. If my buddies hadn’t done that…well, someone else would have had to cook you dinner.”

“Well, I’m glad you made it out,” she replied, taking a bite of the chicken.

Another laugh escaped him. “You sound less than sure, milish .”

“What does that mean? You said it last night.”

He met her gaze steadily, his green eyes so deep and dark she could have drowned in them. After a charged second, she looked away, unable to maintain the contact as he spoke. “It’s Gaelic. It means sweet.”

It hadn’t been so long ago that those kinds of endearments uttered in Gaelic would have set her heart pounding and had visions of white dresses and picket fences dancing in her head. Now, they hurt. They reminded her of dashed hopes and disappointment. “You shouldn’t call me that…or love, or whatever that other word is that you call me. It can’t be that way with us, Ciaran.”

“I don’t mean anything by it, Loralei. It’s just a way of speaking,” he said softly.

He didn’t. He wouldn’t. But everything he said and everything he did had far more significance to her than it ought, and if she was going to get out of her present situation with her sanity intact, it had to stop. She put her plate down and rose. “You never did, and now that I know that, it only makes it worse.”

Leaving him staring after her, Loralei retreated to the bedroom he’d shown her earlier. It was his. She could get the faintest whiff of his cologne when she entered the room. She lay back on the large king-size bed and battled the urge to cry. All her emotions were running hot, just below the surface. The tiniest thing would set her off.

Matt’s words came back to her, about the man who’d attacked her. He was right, she knew that, and taking her chances on her own didn’t appeal. But the idea of having these repeated and charged encounters with Ciaran was more than she could handle. Rolling onto her side, she closed her eyes and tried to gather some control over her emotions. She had to reel it in, or she’d never survive the next few days.

“Please, Matt, figure this out and do it fast,” she whispered.

Ciaran waited for half an hour for her to return, but she hadn’t. Loralei wasn’t a pouter. She didn’t sulk and expect people to pander to her. If she left the room, it wasn’t to make him come after her, but because she was done with looking at him. He put away the leftovers. If he put the lid on the container with a little more force than necessary, so be it. He slammed the refrigerator door so hard that all the contents rattled.

He wasn’t angry so much as frustrated. She had every right to feel that way, to be livid with him. If the situation were different, she would never have spoken to him again and justifiably so. That moment, when he’d fucked it all up, replayed in his mind on a daily basis.

They’d been out at the bar with Kaitlyn and Grant, but the other couple had left early. He’d been in a rare mood, having finally worked up the courage to attempt contact with his long and apparently willingly lost father. To say it hadn’t gone well was an understatement.

While he’d been at the bar, a man had approached Loralei. Embracing, laughing, clearly happy to see one another, when Ciaran had looked at them, he’d seen only one thing—the bastard was money, the same kind of money his father’s family came from, the club that he was being excluded from. As he’d approached, Loralei had smiled at him, and then she’d made the introductions. He couldn’t even recall the bastard’s name except that he’d had about seven of them, and they were followed by the words “the third.”

Ciaran leaned back against the kitchen counter. He’d been an asshole that night, accusing her of slumming it with the farm hand. He’d pushed her away, telling her that none of it had meant anything anyway, and it was time for her to go back with her own kind, that they’d been doing nothing more than killing time with one another anyway. Of course, it hadn’t been that bloodless, nowhere near it.

He’d walked out of her house, slamming the door behind him, and they hadn’t spoken since. Not until last night.

“Fuck me,” he muttered, and strode down the hallway toward the bedroom. He knocked but didn’t wait for an answer. She wouldn’t give him one he liked anyway. Opening the door, he stepped into the room and stopped cold.

It hadn’t occurred to him what it would do to him to see her in his bed. She’d fallen asleep, her dark lashes resting against her cheeks and her chestnut brown hair disheveled. He had no name for whatever it was she was wearing, though she undoubtedly would. The woman loved clothes like he loved air. Whatever it was, he approved wholeheartedly. It draped over every curve, clinging to her lush body in a way that made his mouth go dry and his blood rush.

He stood there for a long moment, just drinking in the sight. A part of him couldn’t stop imagining what it would be like to come in and find her like this every day, to know she was waiting for him at home, in bed, his. He was well and truly sunk, and he knew it.

Her eyes fluttered then drifted open. A soft smile curved her lips as if she’d forgotten for one small moment that he was an utter ass. It didn’t last long. That smile faded and was quickly replaced with a frown and a furrowed brow. “What are you doing in here, Ciaran?”

I’m sorry. I was an ass. I put my foot in my mouth and say the wrong thing whenever I’m near you. I’ve missed you. I think about you every night and every morning and almost every minute in between. A dozen options ran through his mind, but as she sat up in the bed, still gazing expectantly at him, he knew nothing he could say would ever convey all he felt. Action had always been more his style.

Ciaran moved forward and gently cupped her face in his hands. Mindful of the dark bruise on her cheek, he traced it gently with his thumb. Her breath caught, and she stared up at him in confusion, but then he bent toward her, and as he did, her eyes fluttered closed. Ciaran settled his mouth over hers in the gentlest of kisses. It wasn’t about the heat, though it burned inside him like always for her. With his lips playing over hers, molding to her softness, she sighed against him.

Placing one knee on the bed, Ciaran moved closer to her. The pug, who had been snoring loudly, gave a disapproving snort as he rose and toddled to the end of the bed. Neither of them noticed. Holding Loralei to him, he deepened the kiss. She hesitated for just a second then parted her lips for him, welcoming him in. The taste of her was more potent than whiskey. Dark, rich, tempting—he’d never forgotten it, but the memory couldn’t do it justice.

Her hand came up, sliding over his back, pulling him close rather than pushing him away. It was a small victory, but he would take whatever he could get. Seizing the advantage, Ciaran eased her back on the bed. He wanted nothing more than to strip her clothes away and show her in the only way he knew how just how precious she was to him, but it was too much too soon. So, he contented himself with lying there with her, holding her, kissing her. It was so much more than he ever thought to have again.

When he could torment himself with it no more, his body burning for her like a bonfire, he eased back and met her questioning gaze. “I’ve been wanting to do that for two months now,” he admitted gruffly.

“I don’t understand how you can make me senseless with nothing more than a kiss. It isn’t fair,” she murmured.

“No, it isn’t fair. None of this is,” he agreed. “I never meant those things I said to you that night, Loralei, not a bloody one of them. I was jealous and mean with it.”

The hurt and confusion he saw in her eyes cut him to the quick, but it was the mistrust in her voice that shamed him the most.

“We’d argued before,” she reminded him. “You’d been jealous before, but it was different…I could feel you pushing me away. You were so cold, and then when you said I was nothing more than a pastime, well…if you cared for me at all, you had a damned funny way of showing it.”

He rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling, but he didn’t let go of her. He held her close to his side and tried to figure out how to tell her what a small-minded prick he was. “Jealousy and insecurity are two sides of the same coin, love. I looked at that man you were talking to, a man with money and connections and a pedigree that I could never even come close to…and I could see the way he looked at me.” It still stung, the dismissal, the slight disdain as if he hadn’t been worth acknowledging. “Then there was your family. Your brother is right enough, but your mother looked at me like I was something dirty she’d stepped in.”

Loralei gave a snort. “She looks at me that way half the time. I’m not my mother, and as you so eloquently put it in the past, I couldn’t give two shits for her opinion.”

He chuckled in spite of the serious nature of their conversation. Hearing Loralei use his crude idioms amused him. It was half the reason he uttered them in front of her to begin with. “I’m not good enough for you. I never bloody was. It’s one thing for me to know it, for you to know it, and even for your monster of a mother to know it. It was another for that bastard to look at me like I’m a fucking servant who forgot his place.”

She huffed out an exasperated breath. “For the love of God! Jameson Beech is just a boy I went to school with!”

“He’s not a boy, Loralei. He’s a grown man, and he clearly thinks of you as a grown woman!”

“He’s a boy to me,” she replied softly. “Spoiled and used to having his own way, defined by his car and his clothes and by the money his ancestors managed to amass…but he’ll never be half the man you are. Can’t you see that?”

He didn’t look at her, but he did smile. “All I see is that you could do a damn sight better than me or that bastard. You deserve a man who can give you a house and a nice car, who can go to the kinds of parties you do and not stick out like a sore thumb. I’ll never be that kind of man, Loralei. I’ll always be the Irish farm hand.”

“I never wanted you to be anything else,” she said simply.

“I should never have said what I did. It wasn’t true. You’ve always been more to me than that. You have to know that.”

She lay back on the bed, her head on the pillow next to his as they looked up at the ceiling together. “No. I don’t know that. You see all the men with money and fifteen first names as being a better choice than you, and I see every woman who is fifty pounds lighter than me as being better. Neither of us is perfect, Ciaran, but for a minute, I thought maybe we were perfect for each other. What happens the next time I run into a friend from school? Or my mother, God forbid, tries to set me up with someone she deems appropriate?”

The hurt in her voice cut right through him, but he had no chance to reply. He heard the crunch of wheels on gravel a split second before the beam of too-bright headlights spilled through the window.

He didn’t think or question, but grabbed her and rolled her off the bed with him just as a spray of bullets ripped through the windows and the siding, tearing holes in everything and showering them with splinters of wood and glass.

The dog yelped with fright and huddled under the bed, having taken cover at the first sign of trouble. Clearly the wee beast was smarter than he’d given him credit for. The spray of bullets was endless. Everything he owned was being torn to shreds around them.

Loralei screamed, and he shushed her, his mouth close to her ear. “Be quiet, love. I need you under the bed now. Go.”

She did as he asked, scooting under the bed though it undoubtedly caused her pain. The jolt off the bed had done no favors for her either. He could see blood on the carpet where her stitches had torn open. The pug trembled against her side, wide-eyed and terrified.

Cursing the bastards outside and wanting a little blood of his own, Ciaran crawled on his elbows until he could reach the nightstand. Rather than reach up, he opened the bottom drawer and placed his hand under the top drawer, working it until it crashed to the floor. He had two handguns inside it. He gave the smaller of the two to Loralei. “It’s loaded. Can you fire it?”

“My brother is a cop! I’m from Kentucky, for heaven’s sake!”

Her reply prompted a wicked grin. “Right, then. If you see any boots but these,” he said, pointing to his scuffed cowboy boots, “put a bullet in them. Aim for the big toe. You hit it, and those fuckers won’t even be able to see.”

She nodded and flipped the safety off. It was surprisingly sexy to watch her handling a gun. Making a mental note to revisit that later, Ciaran rose into a crouch and began making his way out of the bedroom. He didn’t go to the door but lifted the edge of the rug in the hallway and opened the trap door there. It was an old habit from his army days, but he always liked to have an exit that was unknown.

Lowering himself into the crawl space, he closed the door behind him, the weighted carpet falling into place. Just to the left of the porch, he positioned himself behind a cement column for cover and began firing shots through the lattice work there.

Ciaran took careful aim, each shot measured and considered. His first shot took out a tire, and with his second, he took out a knee. He didn’t know Russian, but he knew curses. The shooter retreated into the lame truck and took off down the drive, sparks flying off the exposed rim. Still, he waited. They could double back, or they could have left someone behind to pick them off unawares.

When the stairs above him didn’t creak, when the house settled into the silence, and more to the point when the night sounds from the surrounding woods resumed, he climbed out from under the porch and made his way back to Loralei.

“It’s me,” he called out. “Don’t shoot me, or if you do, at least leave me with my dignity.”

She peered out from beneath the bed. Her face was white with fear. “How did they find me here, Ciaran?”

It was a damn good question. “We’re having a talk with your brother, and we’ll find out.”

Sergei screamed as the truck dipped onto the shoulder again, and his leg shifted. The kneecap was shattered. He didn’t have to look to know that. “I’ll kill that Irish fuck,” he groaned.

“You haven’t managed to kill a mere woman…one who makes a generous target at that!” Ivanko snarled, struggling to keep the truck on the pavement. They reached the parking lot of an all-night drugstore, and he swerved the truck into a parking space.

“Why the fuck are you stopping?” Sergei shouted. “I need a doctor!”

Ivanko pulled his handgun from his jacket, the silencer on the end leaving no question about his intentions, and pointed it at Sergei. “No, my friend, you don’t.” He squeezed the trigger, the bullet ripping through the other man’s head and burrowing into the seat beneath him. Blood and tissue spattered the windows, but they were tinted so darkly, no one outside would see it, at least not until daylight.

Getting out of the truck, he straightened his clothes and walked away from the vehicle and the corpse of a man he’d known for two decades. He would need to report to Dimitri that they had failed, and he would need to discover why their information had not included the fact that the Irishman was more than just a civilian. Whoever he fucking was, he had skills that only came from years of training.