“Good.” Ronan pauses. “Who’s the guy?”
My heart thumps in my chest. That’s not a question I want to answer right now… not one I’m really prepared to answer anytime soon, actually. At least not until I know if this is actually going somewhere.
“I—” I open my mouth to answer, frantically thinking of some way to deflect without outright lying to my brother, when a firm knock at the door interrupts me.
Ronan’s attention switches to the door, and relief floods me as he calls out in his brusque, Irish-accented baritone: “Come in.”
He’s not going to grill me about my love life in a meeting. In fact, my first thought is that he didn’t say Ihadto stay for the meeting, only that I might want to. I could slip out now, and I wouldn’t have to answer any more potential questions about?—
My hand is reaching for my bag when the door opens, and I freeze in place.
I know the man who walks into my brother’s office… and I don’t, all at the same time.
He’s almost offensively gorgeous. Tall—definitely a few inches over six feet—dressed in a tailored dark grey suit that clings to a frame that I can tell is rippling with lean muscle. He moves like a cat, graceful and confident, his green eyes sparkling in the cold January sunshine. His jaw is strong and shaved smooth, his face chiseled like someone sculpted him into an example of masculine perfection. His hair is a deep brown, medium length, and curling softly just beneath his ears and at the nape of his neck. I’m struck with a sudden, alarming urge to reach out as soon as he’s close enough and run my fingers through his hair.
I wonder if it would be as soft as I remember it being twelve years ago. Or eleven, when I touched it for the last time, just before we said goodbye.
His attention is fixed on Ronan, and I catch a glimmer of what I think is uncertainty in his eyes, something that looks like self-doubt. Like he’s not entirely sure he should be here.
I don’t know why he is.
And then he sees me.
He’s midstep when his gaze flicks over to the seat I’m occupying, as if to take in who else is in the room. There’s a moment of questioning in his face, as if he’s not entirely certain it’s me—all grown up now, eleven years after he left Boston when he was eighteen and I was seventeen.
The realization that itisme slides into his eyes. I see the light of recognition there, see the stunned look on his face, and something else too—a heat that darkens the brilliant green of his eyes and sends an answering heat flooding through my body.
My lungs suddenly feel too tight, my skin too small. Every muscle in my body is tight, my heart hammering against my ribs, and it’s as if time winds to a halt, as if Ronan and everything else in the room has vanished, and it’s only me and the boy-turned-man that I thought I would never see again.
“Annie.” He breathes my name, and I feel dizzy from the sound of it. I feel the blood rush to my face, my cheeks heating. My lips part to say his name, to make the shape of it for the first time in eleven years.
“Elio.” Ronan’s voice cuts through the air before I can speak, flat as he levels a hard, stern gaze at the man in front of him. Not the boyish friendliness of over a decade past, when Elio was practically part of the family. This isn’t Ronan, my brother, and in some ways, Elio’s. It’s Ronan O’Malley, the now-patriarch of the O’Malley crime family, and his voice commands both respect and obedience from the man who is still staring at me.
Ronan clears his throat, and the moment breaks. Elio’s attention snaps back to Ronan, his cheeks pinkening slightly as he blinks. Like he was momentarily stunned, and he’s coming back to his senses.
It’s how I feel, too. I draw in a breath, trying to disguise how shaky it is, and sit up straighter in my chair.
“Ronan, what is he doing here?”
The words come out too harsh. I see Elio stiffen. It sounded like I don’t want him here, when that’s the furthest thing from the truth.
Ronan looks at me. “That’s why I thought you might want to stay. As the financial manager for the family, his new position will affect you as well as the rest of us.”
My heart thumps harder against my ribs. “His new… position?” I have to struggle to moderate my voice, to have the words come out in the cool, professional tone of a woman in charge of a mafia’s money, instead of the squeak of a girl seeing the boy she was in love with eleven years ago, all grown up and standing in front of her.
“Elio has been called back from Chicago to take over Rocco De Luca’s place as the don of the Italian mafia in Boston.” Ronan looks at Elio, his expression taking on a hint of disapproval. “Sit down, Cattaneo. You’re a don now. Act like one. You don’t need my permission to take a seat.”
Elio’s cheeks flush a little deeper, and he clears his throat, keeping his gaze fixed away from me as he nods and sits down across from Ronan’s desk. That puts him in the chair next to me, and I feel my entire body go tense again as a waft of his cologne washes over to me.
It smells like citrus and rain, a clean, fresh scent that puts me in mind of the beach, or what I imagine an afternoon in Spain might smell like, with warmed stone courtyards and orange trees everywhere. My pulse flutters rapidly in my throat, and I feel myhands tighten against my thighs, the tips of my fingers digging into my slim-cut, dark green pants.
I want to tease him about the scent. I want to remind him of the first time he ever wore cologne, some of my father’s tobacco-and-vanilla scented cologne that he snuck in and practically doused himself in before a dance at the private school we both went to. He tried to kiss me for the first time that night, and I pushed him away, telling him I might have let him if he didn’t smell like he’d taken a bath in my dad’s cologne.
He doesn’t smell like that now. Now, I want to bury my face in the crook of his neck and breathe him in, find out if under that scent there’s still the same warm smell of his skin that I remember all too well from a summer afternoon when, a little sweaty and out of breath, he backed me up against a tree in our backyard just out of sight of the mansion, and kissed me for the first time.
“Annie.” Ronan’s voice cuts through the fog of memory. I blink rapidly, and he gives me a slightly confused look. “Are you alright?”
He wouldn’t understand. Of course he wouldn’t. He thinks my reaction is just the shock of seeing someone who I grew up with again, years after we parted. He doesn’t know how I felt about Elio. How Elio felt about me.
