Page 48 of Anti-Heroes in Love Duet
I was just a game as he’d told me from the very beginning. A game of corruption.
But my chest, it burned and burned.
“Be careful,amore, you are a lawyer for one of the most powerful criminal families in the country. I hate to put you in danger, but I know you are strong enough to endure. It brings me peace to know the smartest woman I know is protecting the bravest man and vice versa. Don’t do anything foolish and watch your back.”
A shiver sank pointed teeth into the back of my neck and dragged down my spine, leaving me flayed with fear. Suspiciously, I looked around the coffee shop as I picked up my coffee from the station.
It was only because I was looking that I saw the flash of red.
Red like a flag tossed before a bull.
Instantly my back went up, and my fight or flight impulse surged through my limbs.
“Cosima, I have to go,” I said before hanging up the phone and dropping it into my purse.
My eyes were still trained on that red.
A deep red that was almost black.
The same color as my own.
Seamus Moore continued to stare at me through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the coffee shop with the faintly interested expression of someone considering a work of art.
My own expression, I’m sure, was filled with horror.
Seamus Moore.
The father I hadn’t seen in nearly six years.
I wasn’t surprised when fight won out for flight. There was a reason my mother called me herlottatrice, her fighter.
Mouth pursed against the force of the fury building on my tongue, I stalked through the café, burst through the doors, and turned to face my father.
Only to find him backing away with his hands in his pockets farther down the street, a sly smile on his face I recognized too well. When he ducked into an alley, I allowed impulse to rule me, and I followed.
He was leaning against the wall deep in the shadows of the narrow brick corridor. I took a single moment to stare at him, noting with disdain that he was still as handsome as ever despite living hard for much of his life. He was classically beautiful; his coloring striking and features finely honed. His hair was longer than he’d worn it when I’d known him, brushing the upturned collar of his black peacoat, and there was a thick, deliberately groomed beard over his jaw, but the sight of those gray eyes sucking up the shadows were the very same ones that had haunted me for years, even after he’d gone.
He watched me silently as I unfroze and stalked toward him, but I knew he wasn’t prepared for what I did next.
I punched him.
As hard as I possibly could, remembering my years of self-defense classes in the torque of my hips and the angle of the blow to the underside of his left cheekbone.
Pain exploded in my hand at the same time air burst from his mouth at the impact.
When I recoiled to do it again, fury blazing over every inch of my scream, he grabbed my wrist in an iron vise and yanked me closer so that I didn’t have the space to strike him again.
“My little fighter.” He had the audacity to chuckle in my face. “I should have known you’d hit me.”
“Not hard enough,” I hissed as I jammed the hard spike of my six-inch heels into his tender instep.
He cursed viciously in Italian and shoved me off. I staggered, then caught myself on my back heel, fishing in my bag for the pepper spray I carried with me religiously.
When I aimed it at Seamus, he blinked in total shock then slowly lifted his hands.
“Dai, Elena, it’s me. What the fuck are you doing?”
It was my turn to blink incredulously. “I’m protecting myself from a man who is a stranger now and a monster from my past. What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”
