Page 32 of Still Burning

If he had some strange hallucinations or something, I couldn’t call him out on it. He’d get defensive or possibly violent.

“Ye were easier to keep track of in Boston. Why ye had to move to a city with a port like Miami…” He winced. “It’d be a gas if it wasn’t ironic.”

Nothing he said made sense.

“I thought Eamon told ye to go find the boy from yer past,” he said. “Ye should’ve done that. Not this biker tool ye ended up with.”

I paled. How did he know that?

He studied me for a minute, then seemed amused. “Believe me now?” he asked. “I know all about it. Eamon lived in a state of constant jealousy over ‘im. And ye didn’t even go find ‘im.”

For him to know that, then he hadn’t been estranged from his brother. Eamon had kept in contact with him. Told him private things. Yet I’d never known he existed.

“Why didn’t he tell me about you?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

I needed something to make sense to me. It felt like everything I knew was being snatched away from me, one piece at a time.

He stretched out his arm on the back of the seat and rested his left ankle on his right knee with a heavy sigh. “Because he didn’t trust ye to stay with him if ye knew our family secret,” he replied. “He always believed ye couldn’t handle it. And there was never a man more obsessed with a woman than my brother was with ye.” He cut his eyes at me then. “I never understood it. Not that yer not a stunner because ye are. But there are stunners all over the world. Why just one? Why not savor all the different flavors and never get bored?” His eyes gleamed wickedly when he laughed this time. “Not my brother. No. Once he got a taste of ye, that was it. No one else.” He shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe it. “Even in death, he has me watching over ye. He was so sure ye would go to the other guy.” He looked back at me again. “Is he dead? Is that it? The man ye loved died, and ye never got over him?”

I sat there, my mind racing through every moment, conversation, anything that could have been a clue that Eamon wasn’t telling me the truth about something. His family had seemed so normal. Elitist, but otherwise normal. I realized he was waiting on me to answer, and I started to lie and tell him that, yes, he was dead, but I feared that, at the moment, I’d be an even worse liar than I already was.

“No,” I said simply.

Rome was very much alive, and I’d go and do whatever I had to do in order to keep it that way.

“What does your family do that I don’t know?” I asked, afraid of what Eamon had kept from me.

“We’ll get to that, but first, let’s talk about this man ye love. I want to know why ye didn’t go find him. It would have left me with less responsibility. Ye went and got mixed up with people that made ye…well, let’s just say ye weren’t on the CIA’s or DEA’s radar until now. And although ye don’t realize it, if they asked ye the right questions, ye might give them answers that they can’t know. Ye left me with no choice but to come take ye back to the homeland.”

Homeland. Did he mean Ireland when he said he was taking me home? Oh God. I was leaving the country? Rome would never know what happened to me. He’d think I ran away. That I didn’t love him enough to stay. The thought of not seeing him again sent a wave of agony through me.

“It’s fine. I got ye, and they won’t find ye,” I heard him say, but I wasn’t following his conversation anymore.

The ache I’d thought couldn’t be worse when I found out that another woman was going to have Rome’s child had been nothing compared to this. I’d go back and suffer through that any day if it meant I had Rome.

“That’s not it,” he mused. “Wait…didye go to the other man? Please don’t tell me the man ye held on to all those years is the biker. Come on, Salem. A biker over Eamon Murphy? Jesus, Mary, ye don’t even know who ye were married to.” He ran his hand over his face with a groan. As if I’d done something incredibly stupid.

“The wife of Rí, the object of his obsession. He worshipped nothing and no one but ye, and ye couldn’t love him the way he craved because of a feckin’ biker?” He dropped his hand. “Theman wears rings. Did ye see that? Of course ye did.”

Who was he talking about now? He changed topics worse than Marlana had.

“Who is Rí?”

He looked annoyed, but not necessarily at me. I wasn’t sure at what though.

“Eamon. He was known as Rí.”

I opened my mouth to ask if that was a nickname he called him when he looked straight ahead out the front windshield and appeared relieved.

“Ah, we’re here. Good. Let’s get out of this feckin’ country,” he said enthusiastically.

The ginger man opened the door and stepped out, then waited for us to follow.

I stared out the open door at the jet that sat on the runway we’d driven up on. It appeared to be a private plane.

Brady waved his hand for me to get out and looked impatient. “Come on, Salem. We don’t have all day. This is the last place either of us needs to be.”

Getting out of the car, I tried to think of anything that would stop him from making me get on that plane.

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