“You blamed the Haitians for their deaths?”
“I did.” I pursed my lips. “I was fifteen and fucking terrified of Da. Too young to be armed, too goddamn naive to be rolling around with guys who were in their twenties, but that’s how it works. You know that.” I reached up and rubbed the bridge of my nose. “Me and the only other kid who didn’t die planted evidence that pointed at the Haitians, and because Da’s such a loose cannon, and because they were messing with our gun supply, it was a simple excuse.”
“Jesus, that war didn’t stop for, what? Another four years?”
Guilt filled me. “Yeah.”
“And you never said anything?”
“No. Not until last week. To Brennan and Conor.”
“Why?” she whispered, her eyes huge in her face.
“Because it’s the source of a threat and it needs stamping out.”
“That’s what you’re being blackmailed over? The cover-up?”
I nodded. “Ask me who the other kid who helped me plant shit on the Haitians was, Aela.”
She swallowed, and the sound was so audible, it had me wanting to give her a bottle of water. Only, I was in bed and out for the fucking count. I wasn’t moving anywhere.
“Cillian… I know that name,” she whispered under her breath. Then it clicked. “Cillian Donahue?”
“Yeah.”
Deirdre Donahue’s big brother.
“Fuck,” she breathed. “He told her?”
“He did.” I gritted my teeth. “He fucking told her, because he knew what would happen, knew what she’d do, and he knew I didn’t have a fucking choice, the piece of shit.”
“Cillian was mean,” she whispered, her eyes big in her face. “Really mean.”
“He hurt you?” I barked, unable to stop myself, ire flooding me, even though the fucker was dead, at the prospect of her being hurt by that cunt.
“No. Just freaked me out. I never let myself be alone with him, let’s put it that way.”
“Good,” I grunted. “Smart girl.” Relief filled me as I muttered, “It isn’t my proudest moment, Aela. It’s the most shameful thing I’ve ever goddamn done. It happened, though, and I’ve been paying ever since. First with that bitch Deirdre, who blackmailed me into being with her. Then with whoever the hell carried on in her place after she died.”
“Who could that be? What do they have on you?”
“Photos. Jonny’s gun, which would prove that the bullet in Paul was from his weapon, not a Haitian’s.”
She frowned at me. “Who were you scared of finding out?”
I shrugged. “Da, of course. At that point, jail would have been a fucking vacation. I was miserable, absolutely goddamn miserable until you and I started hooking up. Things derailed even more when Da made me his fists.”
Aela simply blinked. “Where did the paintings come from? Why are you showing me them?”
“They’re not really related to that night, but with Paul’s contact, the fence, these are what I bought, and they’re the only beautiful things that came out of my fucking childhood.” I winced. “Well, until you and Shay came back into my life.”
She didn’t react to that, just asked, “You bought them with the money you made?”
“I bought the Van Gogh with the contacts I made from that time,” I clarified. “We didn’t make enough on the heists to fund something like this, but it was where the habit started. Collecting things, you know?”
Her eyes bugged at me. “Things? Declan, these are priceless paintings. Not ‘things’.”
My grin was as sheepish as my shrug, but it darkened as I murmured, “It’s one of the reasons why I had to let that bitch blackmail me. I couldn’t stop…” Jaw clenching, I muttered, “Anyway, the guy I bought the Poppies from had the Feds chasing after him. He accepted just over four hundred grand. Crazy money. But it set him up in Aruba or someplace.”
“It’s worth over thirty million dollars. Minimum,” she squeaked.
My lips twitched. “I’m Irish. I like a bargain.”
That had her heaving a sigh. “This is nuts.”
“Sure is,” I agreed. “But, and it’s a massive but, you have to understand that if I was a cunt to you, I never actually meant to be. When Deirdre died, that fucking morning of the funeral, I got my first demand. Deirdre never asked me for money after she got her own way, but the person who took her place did. I had to scramble to get the ten K they wanted, and they wanted it every fucking month. I wasn’t making as much back then as I am now.”
“Evidently,” she whispered, her gaze back on the paintings. “Everything,” she mused slowly, “in this place is antique, isn’t it? Priceless, too?”
“Most of it.”
A breathless sigh escaped her. “My God, Declan.”
“I know,” I whispered.
“Why did you get involved in those heists?” she queried warily, like she was trying to find the answers to questions she’d long since been waiting to discover.
Maybe she had.
I just took it as a good sign that she was still interested after all this time.
“Because I was stupid, rebelling against Da. The first time, at any rate. I was shitting bricks after it too, but we had a couple of hundred to mess around with, and it was all without Da knowing about it because he tithes everything we earn.” That information had her eyes widening. “Then we hit a pawn shop.” I whistled under my breath. “See that little jade bottle over there?” I pointed to the window ledge. “That was what started it all.”
“The first piece in your collection?” she asked, then she winced. “Declan, you don’t have to tell me any of this. You’ve told me more than I expected—”
“I do,” I rasped. “Because, while I don’t expect you to walk on hot coals as an apology for keeping Seamus from me, I’m hoping that you want your son to know his father enough to not want him to be in jail.” I grimaced. “Or at the bottom of the Hudson.”
“Was it wise cluing your brothers in on all this if the reason you’ve been hiding it for so long is because of your father?” she whispered, her voice husky.
Finding a positive in the fact that she didn’t outright leap off the fucking bed and head for her cell phone, I told her wryly, “I was more worried about the blackmailer going to the cops. I stopped being scared of Da when I was nineteen.”
“What happened then?”
My jaw worked. “I’d just lost you and stopped giving a shit about most things.”
AELA
If there was anything he could have said that would blow me away, it was that.
‘I’d just lost you and stopped giving a shit about most things.’
I mean, everything about this afternoon blew me away. From the fact he had several lost classics tucked inside his wall, to how I’d rubbed one off on him against the frickin’ door.
I mean, the man was ill. Ill! I’d ridden him like a damn pony, but…
Inwardly, I sighed.
My trouble was I liked ‘naughty’.
I more than liked it.
It was exciting. He’d always excited me. I knew it was weird, knew it was a bit of sickness considering what he did for a living, but I’d never been frightened. The danger junkie in me enjoyed it… Okay, so my morals were questionable.
Without a shadow of a doubt, those classics should be in a museum. I knew that. They belonged to the public. That level of mastery, that joyousness, shouldn’t be owned by one person, coveted by one man. It should be in a world-famous collection somewhere…
Only it wasn’t.
It was here.
God help me, I wanted to fuck in front of them. I wanted to have him go down on me in front of something so magnificent it just elevated things to a whole other degree.
Not only were they majestic, awe-inspiring, they were stolen. They were illicit. They were tucked away, with only him and me knowing the truth.
All three of those things got my juices flowing.
Throw in that this wa
s Declan?
Only the fact he was injured was stopping me from climbing over him like ivy.
I wanted on him worse than poison oak, no lie.
Every issue, every concern, every goddamn circumstance that made this a whole sorry pile of shit, was immediately discarded in the wind.
This was what I’d felt when I was a kid.
And when I’d seen his cock? The only cock that’d ever fit me just so. So perfectly that ever since, no one had ever fit right to the point where, over the last year, I’d given up trying. I mean, I’d been no saint, but sometimes a woman just got tired of being gnawed at.
Declan had always savored me. I’d always felt like a feast and he, not a starving man, but a connoisseur.
When he’d gone down on me when I was younger, I’d felt like I was a four-course meal at the Ritz, not an order of burger and goddamn fries at the local fast-food joint.
“Talk to me,” he murmured, breaking into my thoughts.
So I did. I said the first thing that came into my mind. “I want to fuck in front of the paintings.”
His brows rose. “That can be arranged.” His hand snapped out and settled on my cheek. He curved his fingers around it, stroking back and forth along the upper slant, and the sensation sent tingles down my spine.
I was angry for him, angry at him. But everything we were discussing had gone down when he was Seamus’s age, and maybe because of that, I couldn’t be all that angry. My kid was one of the smartest people I knew, yet he couldn’t figure out that putting a red shirt in a white load would turn everything pink.
He was capable of debating current world issues in a way that decimated me into dust, but when it came down to figuring out which way was left and which was right? He had to make an ‘L’ shape with his left hand.
My kid was clever with a capital ‘C’. But he was capable of some monumental feats of stupidity.
Why shouldn’t his father have been the same way at the same age?
“I thought you were going to tell me I needed to donate them to a museum.”
“Why show me if you thought that was a possibility?” I queried huskily.
“Because I wanted you to know something about me, and that is one of the biggest ways I can show you.”
“What did you want me to know?”
“That I’m ruthless, that I’m a pack rat, that I don’t share.” He released a breath, not a shaky one, if anything, if a breath could be rueful, his was. “If I want something, I go after it. From a young age, I knew what I wanted and when, and it fucked me over because I got what I wanted, but lost you in the process.”
“You mustn’t have wanted me enough,” I said sadly, but I wasn’t offended.
We’d been young. So young. Too young.
“I did,” he countered, with an instantness that was soothing. “It was complicated. Back then, I never imagined you’d take off. I had to worry about Da, had to worry about the Haitians.” He sighed. “That goddamn war went on until 2010. It was a clusterfuck. One that fucking Cillian and I perpetrated.”
I blinked at that. “Is Cillian the one blackmailing you?”
“No. He died back in ‘09. In the war with the Haitians.”
“Ah, karma’s a bitch.”
“Yeah, it is. I didn’t die, but look what I lost out on because of what we did. You. Seamus. I fucked up. I fucked up badly.” He scrubbed his hand over his face, looking so weary that it hit me in the feels.
“Why did you look at me like you hated me that day of her funeral?” I whispered, my eyes on his. He’d answered this once, but I found it hard to accept that he could look at me with such loathing over his ex’s coffin. And that had only been the start. After months of him ignoring me, he’d struck the killing blow outside his local pub.
Just thinking back to that night had pain ricocheting inside me worse than a gunshot wound, and the memory of it was a shadow in comparison to the event itself.
“I told you already,” he rasped. “Because I’d just gotten my first ransom demand. They were asking for more than I could afford. Which meant I had to get a touch creative. Of course, as I moved up the ranks, things got easier. Now, it’s like paying Netflix.”
Even though the pain had crucified me before, I had to laugh at that. “You privileged little shit.”
“Less of the little,” he countered, but his grimace said it all. He hurt too.
Our pasts were mutually painful.
But whatever I could have expected when we got together, it wasn’t this.
Could never have been this.
But it felt right.
So right.
And so goddamn good.
His scent was in my nostrils, his heat beside me in a bed that was loaded down with more of him. His beautiful face, a face I’d depicted so many times in my art, was right in front of me. He had scars and nicks that hadn’t been there once upon a time, but he was still so fucking beautiful and so dark that it made me feel luminescent.
I was, by no means, a person who was light.
I was just as dark.
Back when I was a kid, less so. But now? Nah.
I didn’t mind working with criminals, didn’t mind having people buy my art to launder their cash.
The Lancaster family pissed me off because I hadn’t realized they were traffickers. The Irish Mob was many things, but they weren’t human traffickers. That was dishonorable.
The thought slipped inside me, and I knew, when we got up, I’d be making a call to my broker, asking them to release funds in the amounts of what Lancaster and his apparent associates had paid me, and I’d donate it to a human trafficking charity.
I’d find one, become a goddamn sponsor. I owed the women who’d suffered that much at least. I was a sponsor for over a dozen charities, and I tithed a massive chunk of my income to them, but one more just got added to the list.
“Hey, I lost you,” he rumbled, his fingers trailing down to smooth some locks of hair over my ear.
It felt so delicious that shivers rolled down my spine.
“I was just thinking.”
“About what?”
I spotted the tension in his eyes, then whispered, “About Caroline Dunbar. She said the Lancasters were involved in trafficking. I’m going to donate my earnings to a charity.”
He’d tensed at the mention of Caro’s name, not too difficult to fathom why considering our recent conversation, but then he relaxed. “How much does an original Aela O’Neill cost?”
I smiled. “I think you could afford it.”
He snickered, and as one, we tilted ourselves to stare at the wall. As silence fell between us, he murmured, “I should have known you’d get it.”
“I’m an artist. How couldn’t I? I studied these paintings in college, and I taught the artists’ techniques in class.” I released a shaky exhalation, wondering if I had a strange fetish because I knew I was getting wet again. Licking my lips, I gritted out, “I’ve never seen anything more beautiful in all my life. Which is your favorite?”
“That’s like asking me which is my favorite ball.”
I blinked then, utterly outraged, twisted to glower at him. “You did not just compare The Concert, Poppy Flowers, and Landscape with Obelisk to your testicles.”
His lips curved into a smirk. “I did. Because I can’t choose. How can I? It’s nothing to do with value, and everything to do with how it makes you feel.”
That answer satisfied me more than anything he could have said. “Where did you buy them?”
He tapped his nose. “I have my sources. People know I’m interested in certain things, and they find a way to get in touch with me.”
“How?”
Dec stared at me for a second, then his voice was gruff as he growled, “You’re wet again, aren’t you?”
I gulped then nodded. He released a groan before he slipped his hand between my legs and cupped me through my jeans. A hiss escaped him and I knew he could feel my slickness through the denim.
Rocking my hips, I ground into his fingers, loving that he didn’t ask, that he read my cues. I got so fucking sick of men asking me if I liked this or that—I mean, I knew it was sweet and all—but that was never how it had been with Dec.
He just knew.
It was like he’d read all the instructions to my body on day one, and after that, I was tied to him through ecstasy alone.
“I think you should strip.”
Somewhere in the apartment, Shay was doing his own thing. Maybe literally, knowing my sex-mad kid. But hell, I couldn’t just…
I mean, Dec couldn’t either.
Like he knew what I was thinking, he whispered, “Get naked, lock the door, and I’ll tell you everything you want to know. I won’t move anything but my hand.”
Ugh.
The promise in that—sweet Lord.
His fingers rubbed me again, and I knew I’d never felt so empty in my life.
I couldn’t have his dick, but his fingers were all mine.
Because I liked the precision of his command, I obeyed.
I wasn’t the perfect size two I’d been back when I was with him, but I was proud of my body. I had curves and I wasn’t ashamed of them. My tits were bigger, so were my hips, but I had a rocking ass and my legs were nice and toned, my arms too from all the physical work I did.
It was bright out, maybe a little too bright for comfort’s sake, but this was Declan. I knew he’d see the stretch marks, the pooch from carrying his son, I knew he’d see the scar from a mugging that had gone wrong, as well as the myriad new flaws because a connoisseur of art would see all those little details.
And I knew he’d love them.
I knew it. Just like I knew my son and he were like identical twins.
Unable to help myself, because I wanted to know the details and I really wanted to come, even though it was insane, I rolled off the stupid bed that was below the ground, goddamn below it because it was burrowed into the floor.
I swear, the guy had the best taste in art, but his decorating skills sucked. Grumbling inwardly at the bed, and the fact that somehow, the douche had been rolling in and out of it and again, somehow, getting onto his feet, I stripped. Top first, bra next. Followed by my jeans, and then, when I was sure he was looking, I stepped out of my panties.
Filthy Dark: A SECOND CHANCE/SECRET BABY, MAFIA ROMANCE (THE FIVE POINTS' MOB COLLECTION Book 3) Page 19
