Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 91266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 456(@200wpm)___ 365(@250wpm)___ 304(@300wpm)
She shook her head again, the pieces clicking into place. “Your mother was pregnant.” Then his other words penetrated. I have no issue with your family. Which meant there was a family he had an issue with. The Sheridans.
She started shaking. “That’s why you’re here, why you’re in this house. You were waiting for Sorcha. But she’s hardly a Sheridan. She hasn’t been considered part of the family for decades. Callie only found out about her recently.”
His eyes went hard. “Sorcha is no innocent. You can trust me on that—though I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
Except she understood all too well. After Devlin had died, if someone had wiped out every single Halloran, she wouldn’t have shed a single tear. It would have been justice.
But that was before her sister became a Halloran, in everything but name.
“You have some sort of vengeance scheme in place.” She held her breath, waiting for him to deny it, to tell her that she was being dramatic.
He didn’t.
Jude crossed his arms over his chest. “I would hardly call my life’s work a scheme.”
His life’s work…
She ran her fingers through her hair, panic building with each heartbeat, a steady whoosh-whoosh sound that drowned out everything else. She couldn’t do this. She got out. She’d worked so incredibly hard to make a life for herself that had no strings leading back to Boston.
And yet she’d taken a man into her bed who had more strings than she did. No wonder Jude had told her that he had no room for a relationship—no room for her. She’d allowed her needs—allowed herself—to be put last time and time again.
She wasn’t going to do it now.
She lifted her chin, even though all she wanted to do was break down sobbing. “Please move.”
“Sunshine…Fuck, just give me a chance to explain this.” For the first time since he’d revealed who he was, he looked less than sure of himself. “I didn’t plan on this—on you. I knew you had some connection to Sorcha, which meant you had some connection to the Sheridans, but I had no idea that you were an O’Malley at first.” He scrubbed a hand across his face, half reaching out for her with the other before he let it drop to his side. “Fuck, Sloan, I like you.”
She barked out a laugh. “At first. That means you knew at some point. When was it? When you came over and let me throw myself at you? When you agreed to sleep next to me? Tell me.”
“After we had sex that first time.”
She waved a hand as if she could banish his words. “You should have told me. You lied to me.”
“No, I omitted. I know that might seem like the same damn thing to you, but we were on the same page—you wanted my cock and I wanted you on my cock. Simple. This wasn’t supposed to last, so it didn’t matter who I was or who you were.” He raised a single eyebrow. “And if we’re on the subject of lying, you sure as fuck weren’t offering up the truth to me, either.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
She opened her mouth to confirm that it was, but stopped. If the Sheridans knew that there was a MacNamara left alive—especially one as capable and filled with a need for vengeance as Jude—they would hunt him to the ends of the earth. The only way for him to pay Colm Sheridan back in kind would be to remove every living Sheridan from the equation.
Callie.
Sloan clenched her jaw to keep from asking him for details. Callie was pregnant and running the Sheridan empire with Sloan’s brother at her side. If Jude meant Callie harm, that would put him directly at odds with Teague.
With Sloan.
She shook her head again, slower this time. “Callie is my sister-in-law. She is desperately in love with my brother, and she has fought too long and hard to survive to fall victim to something that happened before she was even born.”
“There are no innocents in this game. If you think Callista Sheridan is one, then you’re even more naive than I could have guessed.”
She wasn’t naive. She knew the stakes better than anyone. She’d lost a brother, same as Callie…
A slow dawning horror rolled over her. She looked up into Jude’s face, as a part of her that had stopped praying a very long time ago began to pray. Please no, please don’t be true.
“Did you have something to do with Ronan Sheridan’s death?”
It was an accident. He drank too much and wrapped his car around a telephone pole. Please, please, please don’t have had anything to do with this.
The tightening in Jude’s jaw confirmed it even before he spoke the damning words. “He was a Sheridan, sunshine.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jude was losing her and he knew it. He couldn’t lie, though, not now, not when there was so much on the line. Maybe you should have thought about that shit before you set the bridge on fire while you were standing on it. He didn’t touch Sloan. She looked half a second from either going for his throat or for the nearest window.