“His wife and child were with him. I don’t know if he suspected something and brought them along as a deterrent, or if he just happened to have them with him that day, but my intelligence had said he was going to be alone. Instead, they were there. And I knew if I let things go as planned, I was going to kill a woman and child along with the man I was contracted to kill.”
“Oh god, Sean,” Maeve whispers, and I swallow hard.
“I looked at her, and all I could see was my mother. That little girl might as well have been me. I couldn’t kill a child, and I couldn’t be responsible for taking another child’s mother away. I could have taken out Brennan then with a sniper shot, but I couldn’t make a child watch their father die in front of them, either. So I fired a warning shot to get them away from the car.”
Maeve covers her mouth with one hand. “Did they get away?”
I nod. “But the bastard tried to use them as a human shield. Put his own wife and daughter in front of him. The bomb didn’t go off—it was ignition-triggered—and I disabled it once I was able to get down there. But I couldn’t stop seeing him put them in harm’s way. I wished I’d killed the fucker after all, even if it would’ve scarred his kid for life. But I couldn’t let them get hurt.”
“Of course you couldn’t.” Maeve pushes her plate aside, reaching to take both of my hands in hers. “Maybe you’re not a good man, Sean, not by others’ definition, but you’re not a monster. I don’t believe for a second that you’d hurt a motherand her child. You did the right thing.” She lets out a breath. “Even if we’re in danger now because of it, itwasthe right thing to do.”
“I know.”
We sit in silence for a moment, her hands in mine, and I feel something shift. Like by telling her this, by letting her see the darkest parts of me, and having her not run, I've crossed some invisible threshold.
As innocent as she is, I’ve wondered if she could ever bear knowing who and what I really am. I still remember the horror in her face when I beat a man in our driveway. I remember how afraid of me she was.
But somewhere along the line, in seeing other parts of me—parts I’d forgotten existed or had never seen before at all—her fear of the darker places in my soul seems to have faded. As if, by seeing the man, she can also love the beast.
Something constricts in my chest, something tight and painful at the thought of losing the only person I’ve ever been able to open up to like this. I went so long without tenderness, without affection, withoutacceptance, and now that I have it…
This is why I didn’t want to open myself up to it.
Now that I have, I don’t know how I’ll go back to the loneliness of before.
—
The day unfoldswith an ease I'm not used to. We clean up from breakfast, talking about more of ourselves than we have before. She tells me about growing up in Boston, about the things she loved to do alone that kept her occupied, about her piano lessons and her favorite books and her rides on Atlas. I tell her about Dublin, about the places I like to go when I have time to myself—most of them, anyway. There's a lightness to it all, a domesticity that should feel foreign but doesn't. Like we've been doing this for years instead of weeks.
Flynn texts me around noon, checking in, and I tell him everything is fine, which feels strange to say. But for today, at least, it is fine. I can’t go after Brennan again until I’ve had a chance to recover at least a small amount from the injuries I sustained last night, and I know Flynn is following up on leads, as is Connor. I can have this day—this one day with my wife before everything devolves into chaos again.
We end up on the couch, her curled against my side while we watch a movie neither of us is really paying attention to. My hand traces absent patterns on her arm as we lie there together, and every so often she'll tilt her head up to kiss my jaw or my neck… anywhere she can reach. Before long, she’s turned toward me, her lips soft on my throat, the feather-light touch making my cock hard in an instant.
This could be forever,I think as she leans against me, her mouth moving up toward my jaw as her hand over the hard, ridged plane of my bare abdomen. When Brennan is gone, it could always be like this. I could come home to her, spend every moment that I’m not working with her. We could go back to Boston and I could learn to run that damned fucking estate, tell Connor that I’m too fucking busy with it to kill for him any longer.
I could be happy.
The thought is so foreign that it distracts me for a moment. I’ve never thought of myself as miserable, but I’ve also never sought out what I would consider happiness. I’ve never thought about what would make me happy in the long term—I’ve never known if there was going to be a ‘long-term’ to worry about. Not when my entire life is death and violence.
But now… now there’s the possibility of something else. She’s already mine.
All I have to do is tell her that I want to keep her.
Maeve’s hand is sliding under the waist of my sweatpants now, her fingers slipping into the slit of my boxer briefs. I let out a hiss of pleasure when her fingers graze my cock, the shaft twitching against her hand, and she moans softly, wrapping her delicate hand around me as she starts to stroke.
“Oh, Christ,” I moan, arching into her touch. “Fuck, Maeve?—”
“I want to play with you again.” She leans over to kiss me, careful of my injuries, her fingers still trailing up and down my cock. My hips jerk, eager for more, and I feel pre-cum start to leak down my shaft.
“You can play as much as you want,” I promise her, my eyes closing as she kisses me again. “But I can’t promise how long I can hold out.”
I’ve always prided myself on being able to hold off as long as I wanted to or come as quickly as I pleased, depending on the woman I was with, but with Maeve all my control is gone. Just her small hand on my cock is enough to make me feel as if I could come before long—if she stroked me for a few minutes I’d erupt all over her fingers, even though I haven’t come from just a handjob since I was a teenager.
Maeve shifts, moving between my legs as I put one foot on the floor and lean my other knee against the pillows to give her space. She drops a series of kisses down the middle of my bare chest, avoiding the bandages, careful not to bump my injuries as she moves further down and then reaches to tug my sweatpants a little bit down my hips.
Her mouth on my cock is the sweetest thing I’ve ever felt. She laps up my pre-cum, licking around the tip and beneath it before scattering kisses down the side of the shaft, all the way down tothe base before trailing her tongue over my balls. By the time she makes it back up to my cockhead, I’m trembling with pleasure.
“I want you to teach me how you like it,” Maeve whispers, and I let out a hoarse laugh, my fingers stroking through her hair as she takes me in her mouth.
