Page 81 of Intimately Faithful

How could he have such a precious daughter and treat her so poorly? He hated that she’d had a bad few years. Hated more that he hadn’t been there to help her.

“So that’s it. An obligated marriage of convenience to pay off a debt that wasn’t even mine. I sound like one of those regency novels your mammy loved to read.” A smile touched his lips at the same time he cuddled her deeper into his chest. “The day he died on the golf course, I was out of there, Danny. I wanted to come to you that very day, but I didn’t have anything. I wanted to be someone before I saw you again.”

“Aoife,” he rasped, feeling the weight of her words. “You are now and always will beeverything. Every star in the sky is jealous of how amazing you shine. If someone isn’t capable of recognizing that, then it means there’s more of you for me and you should know by now how possessive I’ve always been about you.”

Eyes so soulful looked up at him. “Can I be yours forever and ever?”

He’d heard that same sentence in her sweet voice at every age of her life and it still held the surprise punch that this phenomenal girl wanted to be his.

Danny Murphy was a former alley rat from Galway.

She deserved princes and someone so much better than he was.

Someone up there had blessed him. There was no other explanation for it.

He replied in the same way they always had.

“Only if I can be yours.”

Aoife Flanagan was a gorgeous woman under any circumstances. Freckles and red hair against creamy skin and limbs so long and lovely but she was completely breath-taking when she started crawling all over him, kissing his cheeks and eyes, giggling and crying in equal measure.

“This means you love me, my Danny-boy.” She declared, soaking him in her tears. He grinned and swiped both thumbs under her eyes and even used the hem of his shirt to clean her sniffling nose, because a man in love didn’t care about a bit of snot.

“Always have. Always will,” he told her, leaning in for a kiss. He needed to find a fresh breath before he asked about Misha’s father and how that relationship went. Being a capable man didn’t mean he was in any way emotionally mature when it came to accepting another man had touched his girl.

Her tongue only just wrapped around his with the promise of more to come when a thump sounded on the door.

Aoife groaned, laying their foreheads together. “Why do we keep getting interrupted?” She groused, clinging to his shirt, offering him her pouty lips right there for the taking.

Danny was of a mind to agree, but he never turned anyone away from his door, no matter how much his cock ached to be doing otherwise. It was often inconvenient for him to live on the grounds of the church, people took it as a personal invite to knock on the door at any time of the day and night for counsel, advice or just a chat.

Danny hadn’t minded until right then.

He did his own groaning, pressing a kiss to her lips, he told her to stay right there. Not because he was ashamed or didn’t want his community to see her.

He did, he wanted to parade Aoife around by the hand and tell everyone he had his heart back. But what with her only being in her little cotton pair of panties, he was possessive after all and also greedy to be the only one who saw her body.

No one ever expects a Renegade Souls member outside their door late at night, because he could reason it would never be good news for the person opening the door.

“Outside,” Lawless jutted his chin and walked a ways down the path. Closing the door behind him, Danny followed with his hands tucked into the front pockets of his pants.

“What’s going on?” Inhaling slowly, Danny could already taste on the colder air that Lawless wasn’t here for a social call. His face unreadable as usual, but there was a hardness to his slashed brows and coarse tone of voice.

“I told you when I let you call in the favor that I needed to know everything.”

“And we told you everything.”

“Wrong.Youdid. Your girl didn’t.” Confused, Danny waited for him to carry on. “I did a little digging. Something didn’t add up and I don’t like when two plus two comes up as five hundred, you understand? What I like about those Russians, they’re weak, they break like peanut brittle. I’m guessing that’s not something a good pastor like yourself wants to hear, am I right.”

It didn’t feel like a question in the tone he posed it, so Danny shrugged.

He could presume the MC didn’t perform any tasks within the lines of the law and he had gone to them for help so had to accept their means of business too.

“So imagine my surprise when one of the Russian bulls…Grigori Kuznetsov’s bodyguards—orbyki, if we want to be technical here—sang like a choking canary and confessed the dead girl was Yelena Orlov, who happened to be the daughter of some big drug kingpin back in the cold country. And then I cross referenced the American birth certificate of the kid. Misha Orlov. Father unknown.”

Breath evaporated from Danny’s chest.

How could this be?

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