Page 111 of Reckless Seduction
“Well, we certainly aren’t your boyfriends, wildcat,” Seamus snorts. Bailey’s face falls, and it makes me want to punch the fucker, despite knowing what he is going to say next. “I’d say we are way past that. Don’t you think?”
FORTY-SIX
We sure asfuck are well past being “boyfriends.”
I don’t give two flying hillbillies if she thinks differently. That is the way it is. I’ve spent the last two weeks going out of my mind trying to find her and fix the shit we’ve landed ourselves in. I haven’t slept, I’ve barely eaten, and I’ve nearly lost my mind with worry that we might not get her back.
Boyfriends.I snort. No fucking way.
“Really?” She eyes us both skeptically, and that is enough for me to lose my shit. “Seamus.” She squeals my name when I pick her up and throw her over my shoulder like a goddamn caveman.
“You coming, bro?” I look back at Kiernan, who is caught somewhere between wanting to laugh and trying to figure out what the fuck I’m doing. When he sees the clear determination in my face, he smirks and nods his head, trailing after me as I take the stairs two at a time up to our apartment.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing, Seamus?” Bailey’s hands slap at my back. “Put me down, you neanderthal.”
I chuckle, letting Kiernan open the door before I slide in and march us back to the bedroom. Setting her down on her feet, Islowly begin peeling her layers of clothing off, starting with her shirt. She doesn’t try to stop me.
“You listen to me, and you listen well, Bailey Eriksen,” I growl out her new last name, my gaze never leaving hers as I continue to divest her of her garments. Everything but her underwear. “I went through hell looking for you. Wondering what happened to you. Every time I closed my eyes, all I could hear were your screams. Every night, I conjured up the worst things they could have done to you. I searched and searched without sleep, without food, because I care for you. Because I love you.”
I let that last statement hang in the air for a moment.
“You can’t love me,” she whispers almost brokenly. “We haven’t even known each other that long. Four weeks isn’t enough time to fall in love. Hell, it’s more like a week and a half if you count the fact that I was held captive for two of those, and the other days were spent spying for you.”
I slap my hand against her ass, causing her to jolt.
“You don’t get to tell me if I’m in love or not,” I hiss at her. “There isn’t a timeline for this sort of shit, wildcat. Call it love at first sight if you want to, but I know how I fucking feel.”
“He’s right,a stor,” Kiernan speaks up from behind me. “You can’t tell us how to feel about you, and we understand if you don’t feel the same way. But you need to know this isn’t some fleeting emotion. I love you, and I’m not saying that lightly, Bailey. We’ve never once uttered those words to anyone outside of our family.”
I nod my head in agreement. “When I first saw you, I knew I never wanted to let you go,” I tell her. There is no doubt it will take some convincing on our part to show her we mean what we say. Bailey doesn’t believe words; she believes the actions that come along with them. We can tell her we love her all wewant, but if we don’t show her how we feel, we might as well be blowing hot air, in her opinion.
“You gave me away,” she mutters sadly. “You set me up and let him take me.”
“That was the biggest mistake of our fucking lives, Bailey,” he chokes. “Neither of us suspected what he would do. We’d planned to come for you after we ruined him. I never suspected…” He swallows audibly. “I—” I nudge him.
“We will spend the rest of our lives showing you how much we love you,” Kiernan promises her. “We’re hard men, Bailey. We plan and plot and kill. We sell drugs and weapons. We’re not good men, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t capable of loving you.”
“You can’t expect us to change what we do,” I continue. “Or who we are. But we’re willing to make concessions for you. We’ll open up. For you. But out there, in the world, we have to be what we are.”
Bailey needs to hear this. She needs to know that we will always be who we are raised to be. Leaders. Killers. We won’t change that, but there are things we will change. No more women. No more extreme partying. She will be it for us. We’ll open up for her in ways we never could with other women.
Our family is different from most when it comes to women. They aren’t just figures to be brought out for social events and then put on a shelf to get dusty until they are needed again. The women in our family are integral parts of our business and our community. Bailey knows this. We just need to be sure she understands it.
“I don’t want you to change,” she whispers after a beat of silence. “I never wanted you to change.”
And that is all we need to hear.
FORTY-SEVEN
Love.
They love me. My eyes widen slightly as I stare at the two of them, searching their faces for any sign of deception. I don’t find any.
“We love you,” Seamus reiterates. He is making sure I understand how deep his words are. They aren’t superficial. They are bone deep and cutting. “We’re not sure when it happened, just that the minute we realized you were gone, we wanted nothing more than to get you back.”
“You’re everywhere,” Kiernan whispers, stepping toward me, his hand threading through my hair. “An itch we can’t scratch. An obsession we never intend to get over. Every moment of every day, you’re our first thought when we wake and the last when we go to sleep.”
Well, shit, a girl could get used to this. Hussy is cartwheeling herself around in my mind, and even my inner cynic has taken up poms-poms and is waving them around like a cheerleader at the Super Bowl.
