Page 26 of Honorable Sins

It's decision time. "What's it going to be?"

"I'll marry you Kieran Lleshi," Áine says directly to Wraith. "But God help you because I gave up being the accommodating and adoring wife once I learned the truth about Troy."

Chapter seven

Making Christmas Cookies…in June

KARA

The mansion's industrial-sized kitchen hums with life, our cook and her crew nowhere in sight. I'd planned to make the Christmas cookies in our personal kitchen, but it's not nearly big enough to accommodate my four children plus Áine and her three daughters.

Mixers whir, laughter bubbles, and the scent of sugar, butter, and vanilla permeates the air.

Fitz has claimed one of the big stainless steel counters as his station, carefully rolling dough with the focus of a general plotting battle strategy.

Cormac, on the other hand, moves like a whirlwind, darting between cookie stations to "check" on everyone’s dough. Sneaking pinches of the safe-to-eat-raw dough when he thinks I’m not looking and popping it in his mouth.

His front is covered in flour, and there’s a suspicious smear of red frosting across one eyebrow. Suspicious because the frosting is still in bowls with their lids on, waiting to be used after the cookies are done and cooled enough to ice.

Mavey stands beside Sadie, shaping her dough ball with intense concentration, watching the older girl’s every move. When Sadie rolls the dough to a quarter inch thickness, Mavey does her best to do the same with hers.

Sadie sweetly offers to help when Mavey's dough ends up paper thin on one side and thick enough to make doorstops on the other. Then, they start cutting out the cookies. When Sadie uses a star cutter, Mavey uses a star. When Sadie switches to the tree, Mavey does too, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in focus.

Sorcha, my solemn little darling, sits at her own spot with a neat pile of untouched flour, a tiny ball of dough she has yet to try to roll flat and a single round cookie cutter. She wears the children's size blue latex gloves we keep just for her, but she's still hesitant to touch the dough.

"Would you like my help?" I ask her.

She looks sideways at Sadie and Masey and then back at me before nodding. Once the dough is rolled out to uniform thickness that pleases her, she presses the cutter into it with precision a two-year-old should not be capable of. Every cookie is perfectly symmetrical.

Áine’s five-year-old, Joy, her own station abandoned, flits around the kitchen like Cormac without his chaotic energy and chatting a mile a minute to everyone.

"Those look so pretty. Is that an angel?" she asks Neeve, her shy ten-year-old sister.

"Yes," Neeve answers quietly but with a small smile. "I like angels."

"Me too," Joy says before skipping off toward Fitz.

Somehow, instinctively, though she includes Sorcha in her delighted babble, Joy never invades my daughter's personal space.

I glance toward Áine, standing stiffly near the ovens, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. She’s wearing the look of a woman trying to breathe through too much at once.

It's not every day a woman outside the mob gets railroaded into a forced marriage. I can admit that's what happened in the sunroom, but I also know it was necessary.

To protect Mick, we must know who Kenneth has gotten to with his Mick shouldn't be boss rhetoric, but keeping Áine and her girls safe in the interim is also important.

I'm enough of my father's daughter to put my husband's safety ahead of the other woman's emotional comfort though. That doesn't mean I don't feel for her.

I remember what it was like to be pressured into marriage with a virtual stranger. It worked out for me and I can only hope it works out for her too.

Wraith is a good man, but is he a man who can love?

I don't know.

Áine's daughters are thriving in the warmth of the kitchen, but she’s adrift and I need to do something about that.

Leaving Sorcha to her perfect circle cookies, I walk over to Áine.

She meets my eyes and forces a tense smile. "The kids are having fun. But Christmas cookies?"