I was all out of excuses, and it was time to man up and start trusting her.
“Callum hit the nail on the head earlier when I spoke to him at the bar. I was a sensitive kid, and Da used to put me down for it. Thinking back, I can see I built walls even then, more to keep him out than anything else, but over time, nobody could get through them. Then I joined the Army, and those walls suited me. I had friends; I’d even go so far as to say I looked at some of them as my brothers, but nobody knew me completely, and that was the way I wanted it. Emotions were redundant in my job, so it suited me and my superiors to keep them in check.”
“I get that,” she assured me. “But you’ve got to be careful that you don’t start bottling everything up, honey. Breaker did the same, and his PTSD took over.”
“I have PTSD,” I admitted. “Saw and did things in the military that I couldn’t and wouldn’t talk about to anybody, but it’s mild and it’s under control. I have meds that help me sleep if I’m having a hard time, and when things get tough, I go with Breaker to the Vet Centre in Rock Springs.”
“And they don’t help you open up about things?” she asked.
I shrugged and laid my head back on the pillow, pulling her body close to mine. “It’s never been an issue until now. I talk about the things that affected me in the Army, and I talk about how it made me feel at the time. I even talk about the residual effects those things left on me. But what I don’t talk about is my da or my childhood.”
Rosie fell silent for a moment. She didn’t offer hollow reassurances or try to stroke my ego. She just lay beside me withher fingers tracing the lines of the tattoos on my chest, and her brain working overtime behind her eyes.
“I always wondered about your dad,” she blurted out. “I liked him as a person; everybody did. He was fun, the life and soul of the party, but I often used to watch you watch him with a look on your face I couldn’t fathom.”
My mouth quirked because I knew exactly what she was talking about. Whenever I was home on leave, I’d study him for hours in the bar, watching the way he behaved with Callum and Tadhg, even the customers.
“I was jealous,” I admitted. “I know this’ll sound pathetic, but I used to wonder why my da was so fucking great with everybody else, but he was such an asshole to me.”
She sucked in an audible breath and whispered, “Baby.”
I let out a quiet snort. “Told you it was pathetic. It’s why I don’t talk about it.”
“You’ve got me so wrong,” she murmured. “I don’t think you’re pathetic at all. I think that if your dad were alive now, I’d kick his ass for making you feel that everybody else came before you, especially when you’re such a great guy.”
I chuckled quietly. “In Da’s defense, Posy, I went out of my way to piss him off. He was a young man in Belfast during the troubles in the seventies when the British Army was sent in as a peacekeeping force. He got caught up in a lot of shit and wasn’t treated well by the same people who were stationed there to keep order. That stayed with him. He probably suffered with more PTSD from back then than I ever did. Seeing me in an Army uniform probably brought up a lotta pain for him.”
“Did you join the Army to piss him off?” she asked curiously.
“No, baby. Though I gotta say, Da being pissed about it didn’t make me mad. I never wanted to run the bar, and I didn’t want to be a biker, but if I’d stayed in Hambleton when I graduated, they were my only real options. Other than that, it wascollege, farming, or construction—none of which appealed to an eighteen-year-old kid who had too much energy to burn and nowhere to burn it. The military seemed like an obvious choice, and it promised me a way to travel and gave me experiences that a small-town boy could only dream of. But honestly, I considered a lot of careers; I even mulled over going to New York and joining Patrick and Liam in the family business.”
Rosie’s eyes widened. “Really?”
I pushed out a laugh. “Yeah, even that was preferable to working behind a bar, but I went to an Army recruitment day that was being held locally and liked what I saw. The rest is history.”
“Being a gangster wouldn’t have suited you,” she announced.
I smoothed her hair back from her face. “How so?”
“You’re not ruthless and you have a conscience, thank God, because I couldn’t be with a man who could kill and beat people up indiscriminately.”
“Yeah,” I murmured. “I get your point, though I did it in the Army.”
“Donovan,” she breathed. “Following orders to protect your country is very different from being in the Irish Mob.”
“Depends who you’re talking to. My da would’ve disagreed. I think he would’ve preferred me to join Paddy’s business rather than the Army.”
She continued to trace her fingertip over my chest. “I’ll tell you what I think, O’Shea. I think that your dad wasn’t fundamentally a bad guy, and I don’t think you believe that either. So maybe you should just come to terms with the fact that some people clash, especially in families. Let yourself take the good parts of Lorcan and leave the bad shit behind because it doesn’t serve you, and it never will. You’ve come a long way from being that eighteen-year-old boy who never felt he fit in.Everybody loves you and rightly so, seeing as you’re so easy to love.”
My stomach warmed, because honest to God, the only woman who had ever said shit like that to me was my mam, and I always believed that was only because she was biased.
Ma had to love me. I was her son.
Rosie’s fingers touched my jaw, and she pressed in firmly and angled my face down to look at her. “You know that, right? That you’re loveable.”
I grinned. “I do now.” I slid my free arm across her belly and scooped her toward me until we were skin to skin from chest to hip. Even after our wild fucking on the stairs, she still smelled amazing, and immediately my cock started to harden.
Her eyes snapped to mine, and one eyebrow raised. “Again?”
