Page 67 of Her Irish Savage

“I wasn’t keeping blood money.”

She’s half-drunk by now. Her words are slippery in a way that might mean her mouth is cold from the ice cream. But I’m willing to bet it’s the four shots of Glenfiddich that have softened her lips, especially after her adrenaline-fueled flight from Dowd’s office. She stares at me defiantly, like she thinks I’ll say she was wrong to give to charity.

Instead, I say, “I’m sorry.”

She focuses on transferring the last of her second malted from the silver cup to her glass.

“Your father should have protected you,” I say.

Her straw makes a slurping sound as she polishes off the dregs.

“Your da should’ve been the one to get revenge.”

She shrugs, like she doesn’t care. But she pushes her glass toward me. “One more?”

I don’t know where she’ll put it, but I know she can eat me under the table with pizza, so I shouldn’t be surprised. Once I’m up at the counter, I think about ordering some food, French fries or a burger, something to soak up some of the booze.

But Fiona doesn’t want food. She wants another malted. That’s what sheneeds, and the only reason I’m in Boston is to help her, to protect her, so another Millionaire Malt it is.

This time, she’s drinking to get drunk. She doesn’t bother with a straw. That’s a shame, because the shape of her lips closing around that bit of plastic is a feckin’ work of art.

Then again, when she drinks from her glass, she ends up with a healthy dose of cream on her upper lip. I think about wiping it off with a napkin. I want to taste it with the tip of my tongue. But I settle for watching her swallow.

“Mmm. Like mother’s milk.” She fakes an Irish accent. Or maybe that’s supposed to be Scottish. I can’t tell.

“Your mam fed you Scotch by the glassful?”

“My mother died the day I was born.”

Somewhere in the back of my brain, beneath the leaf litter left by all the squirrels, I knew Kieran Ingram’s wife died giving birth to his only child. “I’m sorry,” I say, which is part a condolence on her loss and part an apology for forgetting it.

She shrugs. “Can’t miss what I never had.” She peers at me over the rim of her glass. I’m not sure what she sees, but it makes her want to talk. “What about you?” she says.

“Whataboutme?”

“Were you close to your mother?”

I don’t know how to answer the question. My mother moved toBoston when she was twenty-five years old, after a fire burned down her house in Providence, Rhode Island. She caught Da’s eye her first morning, walking down a street in Southie. Tommy Moran marched her to the altar, she had me, and she never looked back.

Mam knew all my favorite foods, and she made them on my birthday. She spent hours poring over doctor’s reports and fighting with my schools to get me even a fraction of the help I needed. She did her best to hide my father’s violent world until it became clear I was walking in his footsteps, as close as I could follow.

After Da died, and Jenn and Athawn too, Mam took a header off the Longfellow Bridge, the night before her forty-sixth birthday.

Christ. I’m older than Mam ever was.

Fiona’s not too drunk to see she’s touched a nerve. She makes a show of finishing off the drink that’s in her glass then, with the careful precision of a driver at a sobriety checkpoint, works the metal-cup transfer one last time. She gives a sly glance to my long-empty bowl of vanilla ice cream and makes a show of licking her lips. “Want a taste, Daddy?”

Iwantto pull her onto the table between us. Iwantto shove a hand down that corset. Iwantto squeeze a hand into those trousers, to see if she’s as wet as I think she is.

I think about telling her she’s a marvel. She’s smart and she’s strong and she’s gorgeous, and I’m lucky to be the man she’s taunting.

But as intriguing as the game would be—can I get her off without actually laying a finger on her?—I won’t take advantage of her when she’s drunk.

So I shake my head. I load up one last round of songs on the jukebox—“Hit the Road to Dreamland,” and “Let Me Go Lover,” and “Fools Rush In.” I tell her to drink up.

By the time I get her to the Back Bay apartment, she’s unsteady on her feet, like Bambi on an ice-covered pond. Fourflights of stairs are a lot longer when I’m half-carrying a girl who’s trying to get her hand past my zipper.

Once I work the lock on the squeaky front door, she’s a lot more docile. Back in the bedroom, she stares at my fingers as I strip the laces on her corset. She raises her arms when I ask, and she lets me slip off the boned leather. She sits on the edge of the bed and gives me one foot and then the other, watching as I toss her shoes into the closet. The trousers are a bit more of a struggle, but I finally get her under the sheet, and under the blanket too, resting her head on her pillow.

---