Plotting the Fake Relationship
Chapter seven
áINE
My heart is beating a mile a minute as Kieran opens the passenger door on his SUV for me.
That was…I don't know what that was. I've never reacted to another man like that! I was about to climb Kieran like a tree when Sadie's yell got through to my passion fogged brain.
My body is still buzzing with need.
Not just desire.
Need.
I ache between my legs, sensitive flesh that hasn't been touched by another person in six years pulses with a craving to be filled. By this near stranger.
My nipples are so engorged with blood, they ache and it's all I can do not to rub and soothe them.
Kieran reaches across me to clip my seatbelt in place, his scent too familiar after a single afternoon and evening spent together. He doesn't wear cologne, or aftershave. This is pure, basic man and my ovaries scream for it like teenage girls at a Tyla concert.
Overwhelmed with his size and blatant masculinity, for a moment, all I can see, smell, or feel is him.
My fingers cramp with how hard I have to curl them into my palms so I don't reach out to slide my hand inside his leather coat and caress the hard muscles I felt pressed against my body during that kiss.
I'm still trying to breathe past my body's staggering reaction to him when Kieran slides behind the steering wheel and starts the SUV.
His big hands flex on the steering wheel as he turns onto the drive and my brain throws up the fantasy of those same hands cupping my breasts, strong fingertips plucking at my aching nipples.
Pleasure pulses in my core and a full body shudder goes through me at the image.
Kieran curses. "I should have turned on the car ahead of time."
When there's not even frost on the ground in the morning, much less right now? This man has a serious case of over-protectiveness.
"That's a full sentence," I force myself to tease, not even a little willing to tell him the shudder was not from cold.
How could it be? Despite that sudden shower today, we've been having record breaking temps during the day this Spring and it's still seventy degrees outside.
You need to get a handle on your hormones, girl!
Kieran's jaw clenches. "I don't like to talk."
"Why?"
He doesn't answer.
"Isn't that something I should know if we are supposed to be in a relationship?" I press, hoping that talking will curb the unexpected desire raging through me.
He doesn't answer immediately and I get the impression he's considering my question. Then, he says, "No."
Surprise. Not surprise.
"It's going to be hard enough faking a relationship for my mom and girls," I warn him. "But not knowing anything about you is going to make it impossible."
Even if by some miracle we convince my mom we've been secretly dating, there's no way she's going to believe I waited to introduce Kieran to her and the girls only a couple of days before we're supposed to get married.
My worries achieve what my self-admonishment didn't and the desire banks inside me. It doesn't disappear. No, that would be too easy, but stress supersedes it.
Should I tell my mom the truth? I've kept the truth about Troy from her, but that's more about not sharing what I know, not actively lying to her. I'm not a naturally dishonest person and this is my mom.
"Maybe I should tell mom what's going on." Being able to talk to her about it would be such a relief.
"No."
"Darn it, Kieran! Stop with the unilateral, single word answers or I swear I'm going to dose your breakfast with Ipecac syrup," I threaten.
A curious stillness comes over him. "You're going to make me breakfast?"
"After we're married. It's what a wife does." Among other things I'm absolutely not going to think about right now. Then an even more disturbing thought comes to me. "We are going to live together, right?"
No way will my girls believe the marriage is real if we don't. And if they don't, neither will Kenneth Shaughnessy or anyone else and poof there goes our protection.
"I don't expect you to cook for me," he says, answering my question in an oblique way.
"I make breakfast for mom, me and the girls, why wouldn't I include you? Though if you leave the house at some ungodly hour before dawn, consider the offer rescinded."
"Breakfast or the Ipecac syrup?" he asks, deadpan.
My laugh pops the bubble of tension pressing in on me. "Are you teasing me Kieran Lleshi?"
The right side of his mouth quirks a little. But true to form, he doesn't give a verbal answer.
I consider which unanswered question I want to address first, I go with the most immediately pressing. "Why can't I tell my mom what's going on?"
"It's not safe."
Wow. Three whole words. "For who?"
"Any of us."
Us. That word hits hard and I don't even know why. "But why though?"
His fingers flex on the steering wheel, but that's the only indication my questions are bothering him.
Too bad. If we're getting married, I'm not living like a mushroom like I did with Troy.
The manure that got dumped on me because I'd been living in the dark isn't something I ever want stinking up my life again.
So, I wait Kieran out.
After two solid minutes of silence, he says, "Every person who knows the truth increases the chance of it coming out."
"Thank you."
"For?"
"Making the effort to explain and not expecting me to read the shorthand of your monosyllabic replies."
He nods. "I'll try."
"By try, do you mean talking in full sentences."
He inclines his head.
"Okay. I'll try too."
He flicks me a glance before his attention goes back to the road. "Try…" He pauses and when I don't answer, he adds, "To what?"
"To understand what you mean when you only give me a few words and I need paragraphs."
"My stepfather backhanded my mom when I talked too much."
Oh, my gosh. A vise of painful compassion squeezes my heart. "Your mom, not you?"
He shakes his head.
"Did he hit you?"
Kieran nods. "But it didn't make me obey."
"I'm sorry." Picturing him as a little boy living at the mercy of such a monster puts another Kieran sized hook in my heart.
"I won't do that," Kieran promises.
If I thought he would, I wouldn't have agreed to this marriage no matter what the mob threatened me with, but I appreciate him saying it.
"You're a protector, not an abuser," I say.
"I will always protect you and our girls."
Okay, we need to address that. "They're my daughters. Just because I'm marrying you doesn't make them yours."
"It does."
"No. I…you can't want to become an instant father." Can he?
"I promised," he says.
"To protect us." Not just me. Us. "But parenthood is about more than protection."
"I know."
How can he? "You don't have children already, do you?"
"No."
"You sound like you think you understand what being a dad means though." And he certainly didn't grow up with a good example of one.
"I spent a lot of time on the Fitzgerald family security detail the first two years I was in the mob. Mick and Kara are good parents."
It's hard to imagine the terrifying underboss capable of torturing and killing a man playing the role of dad. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes how the family interacted, I wouldn't be able to imagine it at all.
"Thank you," I say again.
Kieran nods in acknowledgment.
He is trying to communicate more fully and all at once I have the rock-solid desire to help him learn that his words are not just necessary, but they are welcome. "I hope I never meet your stepfather."
"You won't."
"Good." I'm not a violent person, but I would be sorely tempted to punch him in the mouth if I did.
After a few seconds of silence, Kieran adds, "Can't."
"Why can't?" If the clarification between won't and can't are important enough for Kieran to verbalize it, then the reason matters.
"He's dead."
"Good," I say again.
"I killed him."
"I'm sure he deserved it." Before Troy died and I learned about the dark world he'd dragged me into, I never would have said that.
But after being terrorized by Kenneth for six years, and living in the fear that coercion would turn into rape for the past few months, I'm fully convinced that the death of a person who causes so much harm to others is not a tragedy.
Them getting away with the hurt they inflict is the tragedy.
"He did."
"My mom won't tell anyone about the reason why we're getting married." But even as I say the words, I don't know if they're true.
There's a reason I never told her about Troy's involvement with the mob. After she found out, Sadie didn't either. I asked her not to, telling my ten-year-old daughter that gran could get in trouble if she knew.
Sadie and I were already in the trouble bubble, only we didn't know how deep. Until today when it all crystalized into something imminent and threatening.
"She would have to meet with Mick and convince him she isn't a security risk," Kieran warns me.
The very thought of my mom having a conversation similar to what I endured this evening with the terrifying underboss gives me chills. Knowing there's a very real chance it would go much differently sends those frissons of fear straight to my soul.
Mom is one of those people who believes that right is right and wrong is wrong and there's no in between. She would go to the cops before she allowed me to be forced into a marriage with a mobster.
Putting her at risk and on the underboss's radar is not worth having someone to talk to.
"Never mind. She can't know about your connection to the mob either," I firmly inform him.
"Troy?" he asks.
"She doesn't know about him. Both Sadie and I have done our best to keep it from mom, Neeve and Joy. Though they'll probably find out the same way Sadie did eventually."
"No."
"You can't prevent children from talking," I say with a sigh.
I hate knowing that eventually all of my daughters will be subjected to the painful revelation Sadie has had to deal with since Kenny Jr. first taunted her with it.
"The parents of the boys who told Sadie will be sanctioned," Kieran says.
"That's not what Kenneth said."
"He lied."