Page 66 of His Forced Irish Mafia Bride

I realized it was his shirt, which made me even angrier. My legs were unsteady and there were papers stuck to my feet. I didn’t care. Sean tried to steady me, but I slapped his hand away. The sound was sharp in the quiet room.

“Don’t touch me,” I said, my voice hoarse and shaking.

My hair was a mess and my body was still feeling the effects of what had just happened. When I looked at Sean, anger rose again. It was a familiar feeling. I felt exposed, used, and furious at myself for letting it happen, for wanting it to happen.

Sean was pulling his pants up and watching me with an expression that I couldn’t read. The room felt smaller now. The silence was thick and ugly except for the sound of the rain. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to rebuild the walls that had come crashing down a minute ago. My thighs were stillshaking and my eyes were stinging. Sean looked like he wanted to say something, but I didn’t give him the chance.

I turned away from him and stared out the window as the knot in my stomach got tighter.

What did I just do?

The silence between us was heavy with all the things we hadn’t said.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Sean

The rain was coming down hard now. The office looked like a war zone. A chair was lying on its side and there were papers all over the floor. A pen was broken near the desk. I looked at it for a moment, and then I picked it up.

The plastic part of the pen had broken in half. I wonder how the hell we could have done that without noticing. The silence in the apartment felt different now. I walked over to the desk and picked up some papers from the floor.

Some of them were useless now, dotted with spilled ink. I straightened them out anyway.

I found one of her earrings under the coffee table. I stood there looking at it longer than I should have—a small thing, cheap and nothing special. Yet somehow it was the only thing I cared about in the entire room. She was the only one I could think of.

I bent, picked it up, and turned it over in my palm. The way she’d looked at me before she left…I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I could still hear her voice. Every angry word she said. I leaned against the desk. For most people that argument would have ended differently. They would have slammed doors, made threats, and cried. Maeve did something worse. She said things that I couldn’t just ignore. That was dangerously annoying, because now I was thinking about what she’d said.

I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. I wasn’t hungry; I was just feeling restless. I looked toward the hallway that led to her bedroom.

That was a mistake. I immediately thought of Maeve wearing my shirt and walking around barefoot with her messy hair. She’d looked at me like she wanted to hit me and kiss me at the time.

Fuck.

I wished that image would go away, it didn’t, so I poured myself a drink. The whiskey just sat there in my hand.

I thought of everything she’d said, and the corner of my mouth started to smile even though I didn’t want it to. My God. Maeve had actually been jealous.

I should have found that funny, but instead it felt like something was stuck deep in my chest. That was when I knew I was in trouble. Because for the first time in years, I cared more about someone else’s feelings than my own. I cared about what Maeve thought of me. I was no longer in control of this situation. At least not completely.

I’d spent most of my life believing that every problem had a form. If you studied it long enough, identified the pressure points, and controlled the variables, the outcome became predictable.

People were no different. Most of them followed the same rules—needs, fears, ambitions. If you learned them, you could control them.

Maeve wasn’t someone I could easily control. That should have bothered me. Instead, it was intriguing.

I crossed the apartment and picked up my phone. Enough of all this. Samuel Anton was still out there, and every hour I spent thinking about anything else was another hour my enemy spent moving. I needed to get moving. I called Declan first, and he answered before the second ring.

“Boss.”

“I want everything again.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.”

No more explanation was needed, so I ended the call. In a few minutes, I received all the files I’d requested.

Five minutes later I was in my office. The city lights glowed beyond the windows and the desk lamp cast a pale circle across the room. I sat down and started at the beginning.