Page 36 of The Irish Arrangement

“Are you heading home now?” he asked.

“Yes.” Time to make a baby. Once and for all.

“I was talking with Riley earlier,” he said.

“And?”

“She heard Cara asking Frank for her phone back.”

I rolled my eyes. “Tough shit.”

“I doubt it would do any harm to let her have it,” he argued.

“Are you going soft now, Brother?”

He huffed. “Compared to you, I’ve always been soft.”

“What does it matter? If I don’t have to worry about her calling someone to come pick her up, that’s one thing I won’t have on my mind.”

He chuckled. “Come on. Call someone to pick her up? Like any unannounced visitor would be permitted to drive close to the castle?”

He had a point, but I wasn’t so lax to give in.

Deep down, I suspected she wouldn’t run. I wouldn’t let her think that I’d changed my mind about her flight risk, but now that I had the impression she’d married me with the intention of sticking around for at least six months, I doubted she’d go back on her word.

She wanted to marry me for some reason. She saw a motivation in something, and whatever it was, I bet it would keep her married to me.

Maybe she wasn’t eager to run.

It wouldn’t kill me to give her that phone back.

But this was how I stayed balanced. In power, knowing she couldn’t thwart me.

“I’ll consider it. Later.”

For now, we had to focus on fucking. And I intended to, nonstop, until her belly would swell with my child. Knowing she could take my darkness and ante up to my need for being rough was just a bonus.

14

CARA

Iwas alone. Again.

I didn’t know if my husband understood that it usually took more than once to get a woman pregnant. A normal one.

I had no chance of conceiving anyway, but still, could a man expect to get an heir when he only tried weekly?

Ever since that one time when my mom demanded that my father pay for more specialized medical care in the city, I knew that my likelihood of ever having a child was slim or next to none.

Knowing that I had no actual odds of fertility shaped my views on my future. I never counted on having children, and once I had that thought in my head—when I was still a young teenager myself—I never really let myself get carried away with fantasies of having a nice, big family.

While I stayed in this huge home, this magnificent castle with no one for company, I wondered what Declan actually imagined it would be like to add a child here. Would he hire a nanny? Would he remain aloof to his own flesh and blood and obtain staff specialized to rear him or her? Because the man was never here. Never. He made no moves to stay for more than a day.

At first, I thought it was because of me and evident with the way he treated me at our wedding. I wondered if he wanted to avoid my presence, as though the reminder that he was connected to me in any way was so awful.

Maybe he was simply that busy. This castle was as old as it was large, and it was stuffed with all kinds of very expensive-looking items. The clocks to the side tables. The chandeliers to the fine forks laid out for meals. More than once, I whiled away hours in the hallways and in the many parlors, lazily looking at the artwork that likely belonged in museums. All of it had to have cost a fortune, and I understood that the Sullivan name represented great wealth. And to achieve that rich status, they had to work, right?

You’d think.

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