In less than a second, her eyebrows lifted and then her eyes narrowed. In this light, they were pure blue. Maybe it would’ve been easier to compare them to the sky or to water, but heaven was all I could think of—a blue only known to heaven. Peaceful. Her fierce red hair made the color seem even brighter.
Keely Shea Ryan was a beautiful woman. Heavenly, in fact. But there was also no doubt that she had a tongue that was made in hell. That temper, too. It matched her hair.
“You,” she said, and not nicely.
Hell, could I call ’em or what?
“Kee, this ismyboss,” Harrison said, standing taller. He was pissed at how she had spoken to me. He didn’t want to lose his job. Or worse.
He knew I was a testy motherfucker, and I didn’t put up with much. I might’ve just gotten out of prison, but I was still known on the streets. It was hard to forget a man called “the marauder”: a man who always took what he wanted, damn the consequences.
“Mr. Kelly,” Harrison continued, “this is my sister, Keely Ryan.”
Keely Ryan looked so fucking ridiculous in her vintage clothes that a smile that I knew pissed her off came to my face. One long curl came loose from the plastic crown adorning her red hair, and she blew it out of her eye with a harsh breath. It didn’t budge and she swatted at it.
“We’ve met,” she said, narrowing her eyes even sharper at me.
Her eyes were just as I imagined the gates of heaven would be: narrowed to a slit to men like me.
“Good to know you have a strong memory,” I said.
“Oh, it’sexcellent, Mr. Kelly.”
“Keely—”
I lifted a hand, stopping Harrison from whatever he was going to say. He was trying to communicate through narrowed eyes that she was being rude to his boss. It was something Killian would’ve done to me. Manners were never a strong point of mine, though.
“You can call me Cash,” I said. “We missed that part at the cemetery.”
“You were too busy scaring people, that’s why we missed that part.”
“I wasn’t being quiet. You’ve seen my feet.”
She looked down and then her eyes flew up, catching my grin and scowling at it. A flush crept up her neck and stained her cheeks red.
“They’re big and not ashamed of it.” I winked. “You were lost in thought. That’s why you didn’t hear me.”
“Cemetery?” Harry Boy said, his eyes moving between the two of us. “You met at the cemetery? When was this, Kee?”
“When I went to visit Roisin on the day she died.” She looked at him. “Yourbossscared the shit out of me.”
“I wasn’t his boss then,” I said. “And our meeting was happenstance.”
“Happenstance,” she repeated, like she didn’t believe me.
Good. She shouldn’t. My feelings told me she knew that. Something also told me that she’dthought about me since then. And she hated it. She loathed that I had somehow entered her mind, sifting through her thoughts for the most valuable ones, and marauding things she fought to keep—her time and attention, two of the most valuable things to a person.
I saw the way she was with Stone. Bored. And he had nothing in his eyes but floating fucking hearts when he looked at her. There was something off about the entire situation. Why she was settling for someone who didn’t do a thing for her was a mystery. But when she was around him, she played her part well.
She wanted to be an actress on Broadway. She acted every second they were together.
Her…softness when it came to him worked out well for me to a certain degree, though I knew when pressed—and she would be soon—it was only going to make her hard and more determined to see her resolve for Stone through. Like a child.
Too bad I refused to entertain the notion of reverse psychology, or this might be fucking easy.
Harry Boy cleared his throat, and I realized that the archer and me were staring at each other. “Staring” was a stretch on her end. She was aiming arrows at my head through telepathic wavelengths.
“You seem to have a strong dislike of me, Ms. Ryan,” I said. “I didn’t realize I shook you so hard at the cemetery. Next time I walk through, I’ll go through singing a song.”
