The Wedding Pact (The O'Malleys #2)(56)

Her mother would have killed him on the spot.

She forcibly loosened her grip and finished getting dressed, fury all twisted up with sadness for the boy he used to be. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe it hadn’t been Victor who’d hurt his boy. Whoever did it hadn’t broken James. The more she found out about him, the more amazed she was that James had grown into the man he was. A man of worth. He might not see it that way—and she was pretty damn sure he thought the exact opposite—but it was the truth.

By the time she made it out of the bedroom, he was flipping his keys around his finger and staring out the window at the ocean. Carrigan paused a few feet away, not sure what the protocol was. Did she kiss him? Touch him? Just smile and head for the car? Throwing herself at him and hugging him and promising vengeance on whoever hurt him wasn’t an option, no matter how much it was exactly what she wanted to do.

He glanced at her, his expression shuttered. “You ready?”

“Yeah. Sorry about hauling you out of bed and forcing you to drive me back.” This was so wrong, so stilted. She hated it. She cleared her throat. “Look, we don’t have to talk about your scars. I’m sorry I mentioned them at all.”

He crossed to her, stopping within arm’s reach. “It’s fine. It’s not something I want to get into.”

Maybe it was something he needed to get into. But she wasn’t a shrink, and he couldn’t have made himself clearer if he’d turned on a neon sign that read, Back the fuck off. He’d shared about his mother last night. That was unexpected enough. This whole baring-of-the-souls thing wasn’t what they were about. It couldn’t be. “I understand.”

“Okay.”

“Good.”

“Great.” He snagged the back of her neck and pulled her in for a kiss that curled her toes. “Let’s get you home.”



Carrigan barely made it through the door when Aiden appeared, grabbed her elbow, and hauled her upstairs. He didn’t say a word, and she kept silent because yelling at him right now would undoubtedly bring one—or both—or her parents down on her. Aiden and she might not be as close as they used to be, but his anger was still preferable to Seamus and Aileen.

As soon as he closed her bedroom door behind them, she shoved him away. “Get your goddamn hands off me.”

“Where the fuck were you?” He took a step toward her, but seemed to think better of it and circled her instead. “Those are the same clothes you were wearing last night, aren’t they?”

“You’re not my keeper.”

“Wrong.” He ran his hands through his dark hair, making it stand on end. “Jesus, Carrigan, I know you’re having a hell of a time with the way things are going, but can you stop being so goddamn selfish for one fucking second and think?”

For the first time since he’d towed her up here, she actually looked at him. Aiden had always been the classically handsome one of her brothers. Teague was dark and brooding. Cillian was the edgy, too-gorgeous one that made women lose their minds. Aiden was the rock.

He looked like he was cracking under the pressure. There were dark smudges beneath his brown eyes, and he’d lost weight recently—weight he didn’t need to lose. She reined in the impulse to yell at him like he was yelling at her, and sat on the edge of her bed. “Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not fucking okay.” He paced from one wall to the other and back again, each step jerky with barely restrained fury. “You disappeared without a trace from that restaurant and turned off your phone. The only message you got out was telling Liam not to worry.”

She was going to have to send Liam a gift basket of whiskey. “It’s fine. Obviously I’m okay.”

“It is not fine.” He looked like he wanted to shake her. “Last time you disappeared like this, that bastard Halloran threatened to send us your head in a basket if we didn’t comply. He would have, even though Callie turned herself over in exchange for you. Do you have any fucking idea what it did to me to sit here all night, wondering if I’d ever see you again, or if one of our goddamn enemies—who seem to be multiplying by the day—had gotten a hold of you?”

No, she didn’t have any idea. She hadn’t stopped to think that anyone would worry about her. She’d assumed that they’d be so caught up in their own dramas that she could slip back into the house without a word. “I—”

“You can’t keep doing this—the clubs, the men, the drinking. I know how much these little escapades mean to you, but it’s not safe.”

She knew that. Of course she knew that. But she’d weighed her growing panic over the approaching deadline against what could possibly happen to her while she was out and about.