Page 1 of Cosmo

Chapter One

Sitting in the boothin the darkest corner of the pub, Connor Murphy, whom everyone referred to by last name, poured his friend another shot as his sister set her hand over her own glass and whispered, “No more, thanks.”

“Enough for you, Tally?”

Her bright sky-blue eyes, that were exactly like his own, sparkled as she laughed. “I’ve got errands to run in the morning and I’d rather not do them with my head splitting apart.”

“Lightweight,” he said, laughing. “Dad will be disappointed in you.”

Murphy’s friend, Clifford Mumford, came to her rescue. “If you tell Mick, that makes you a snitch, which means our association is over.”

They all got a good laugh from that. “Fine, I won’t tell the old man.”

“Old man,” Cliff scoffed. “You have as much gray in your hair as him and he can still outdrink you.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

Clifford was a good friend, but also a business partner of sorts. He worked in the prison system and his wife worked in social services. Together, they found the young men that Murphy needed to work for him.

“So, Cliffy, tell us about this new one. Is he a petty thief that I’ll have to train in both bartending and in everything else?”

Cliff lost his grin and took the shot, then poured himself another and swallowed that too before he got on with it. “Nah, this one is… special. I don’t even know if he’s going to want to work for you. Your boys and you all, you become family, and this boy, he’s not into that. Ran from every foster home he had after running away from his home at ten when his father remarried. His father didn’t want him back. That’s all Lori could find out from his records.”

Tally’s empathy was strong, and she became a mother to the boys that most of them needed badly. Her hand went to her throat as she asked, “Bad?”

“Real bad. Liam’s his name, Liam MacManus, and he had to have had one of those nightmare childhoods that you usually see in horror movies. With the records sealed, we won’t know exactly what it was, though.”

“Records sealed? His criminal activity?” Murphy asked.

“No. His criminal records start when he was twelve and Lori got into those easily enough. She’s the head of her department, so she needs to access them, as you know, for placement in foster families. They don’t cut her off when the kids age out of the system. Loophole, I guess.”

“He might talk about it, or he might trust no one,” Tally surmised.

“Cliff, he could be, well, I hate to say it, dangerous. What was he in prison for? What if he, I don’t know, is one of the psycho kids with no conscience?”

Cliff smiled at him. “Grand theft auto.”

The reason for the smile was obvious. Murphy had a special place in his heart for car thieves. “How good can he be? He got caught.”

Those were words that had come from him many times. At least half of the boys who worked for him had come from prison. Cliff had been expecting the question. He was so used to it.

His deep laugh lines creased, and his brows shot up, exposing even deeper lines across his pale forehead. “The only reason he was caught was a snitch. One guy he worked with got busted and he took the whole crew down with him.”

That was a familiar story. It was exactly how Eazy, Murphy’s husband, had been caught doing the same line of work. Tally even chuckled. “Ouch, you got him hooked now.”

“No, now, I’m not hooked! Just maybe a little more interested.”

“Really, he’s skirted the law all his life. The car theft happened when he was seventeen and he did his time in juvie, then they moved him to prison to do the rest of the time. I have the means to get the parole board to release him into your custody, per our usual agreement.”

Murphy sat back and played with his empty shot glass until Cliff refilled it again.

After slugging it down, letting the warmth soothe him, Murphy ran fingers through his long, trimmed beard. It was so much thicker now that more than half of it was white. Coarser, thicker, and Eazy loved feeling it on his back when Murphy kissed a line down his spine.

“My brother wants him, I can tell,” Tally commented with a smile.

“I might. I’ll have to talk to him first.”

Cliff nodded and said, “I know. I’ve arranged it for Thursday. You’ll have him in a room meant for attorney/client conferences,along with the cameras and mics off. You just need to give me the word.”

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