But Corinne is missing and it’s bad enough for him to try to pull me back into the family.
And because he knows me, he doesn’t trust me enough to stay on my own.He’s trying to corral me with a wife so I have no choice.
He can admit that he needs me, but Christ help him, he still can’t treat me like he trusts me to do the right thing.
Actually, it’s kind of smart.He knows I don’t like him and that I’m not tied to the city.If I wanted to leave, I’d do it in a heartbeat, and this is his way to get around it.I’d actually respect that–if it didn’t include me being forced to marry, just to gain control of the family.
“The terms,” I say, my voice sharp.
“A wife,” he replies.“Simple as that.And one that I will choose for you.”
My teeth grind together so hard I’m surprised they don’t crack.Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse.
“I thought you wanted me to marry Brooks Landry.”
My father gives me a long, hard look.“The girl you ran to New York for?The one you wasted one hundred men protecting?I’ve heard she’s back in town, and that you went to collect her the moment she arrived.Did you marry her already?Is that what you’re telling me?”
My hand goes immediately to my cane, my thoughts of nothing short of murder.Have I mentioned how much I hate my father and his arrogance?Mentioned that he and Dominick Landry once cooked up a plan for me and Brooks to get married, supposedly to ally our families?
Brooks and I, already the best of friends and half in love, had thought it was the best idea in the world.
Until she decided it wasn’t.
“No, I haven’t married her,” I snap.
Half a second later, I realize that I should have said I had.It would have ended this conversation immediately–and, evidently, secured my spot as head of the family.
My father leans forward, his eyes narrowed and his nostrils pinched.“Then I suggest you get a move on, because I’m not giving you access to our family’s power gain until you have a wife.And suddenly Ive got an urge to have Dominick Landry’s baby girl under my thumb.”
He gets up and strides out the door, leaving his coffee unfinished and my mind reeling wit questions.
First among them, of course, is how the fuck I’m going to get Brooks to agree to anything like that.Because we’ve been engaged before, but she decided it was nothing more than a ploy on her father’s part to put a spy into the Boudreaux household, and she wasn’t going to do it.She left town to keep from having to, without telling anyone.
And then stayed away for five years of horrible, deafening silence.
I hadn’t heard from her at all during that time, and though I could have searched for her–should have, perhaps–I had just watched the love of my life leave me without so much as a goodbye kiss or a note.She’d escaped in the middle of the night, telling no one but her cousin where she was going, and I’d been so angry that I hadn’t been able to even say her name for a year afterward.
Yes, I could have searched for her.
But she could have searched for me, too.And she hadn’t.
Now, though...
Now she’s come back to me not once but twice, and we’ve been tearing through New Orleans like we were always meant to be together, our hands reaching for each other as we fight the devils running rackets down here.My hand on her back as we sneak through darkened catacombs, her lips to my ear as she whispers about her next move.
My name on her lips as I bury myself inside her, my cock so deep in her body that I can’t feel where I end and she begins.My teeth buried in her skin and her nails raking down my back when I make her orgasm again and again.
I breathe out slowly at the memory of her body surrounding me, the squeeze of her around my cock and her cries tearing down my throat, and shift as my cock starts to grow hard in my pants.
Then I remember that I’m in a fucking cafe in the middle of the day, in public, and that Brooks isn’t here.And she’s certainly not fucking me the way I’m remembering.
Though the memory of us working together for the last week remains.
Right, down to business, then.Brooks is in her father’s house, trying to get him to trust her enough to give her details and no doubt coming up with some truly bad plans for how to take him down.While I’m out here, being pressured by my father to settle down and get married.
Luckily, that pressure comes with new information.
My father wants me married and secured, with roots in New Orleans so I don’t leave.Because he doesn’t trust the business happening in this town–which makes me think he knows more than I realized about Dom’s new smuggling enterprises.I suddenly remember the message I was supposed to pass to Dom on that day fifteen years ago, when my father sent me to the Landry mansion with words for the head of the household.
