Page 148 of Forbidden Romeo

I can’t help it. I step forward, reaching for him.

“Aimee? You’re okay?” Connor says, pulling me to the floor.

The embrace is everything and nothing at all.

Even blood-stained and sweaty, he smells like Connor, like home.I remember Connor as a boy, standing up to the kids that made fun of my hair. Of the teenager who scared off men from giving me unwanted attention. I remember my brother—who was, in many ways, the only positive male role model I had growing up.

“Where is Roisin?”

“She was never here. She’s safe.”

“It was always you?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve been looking for you… looking for you both. I thought they’d… I thoughthe’dcaptured you. I thought they were torturing you.”

The nothingness seeps into the embrace. It was there before, but the more I remember it, acknowledge it, the worse it becomes. Connor’s face when he told me Roisin was overdosing. When he said he wasn’t leaving with us for LA. When I found out he had murdered Graham Duffy in cold blood.

This is not the boy I knew. This is a stranger in a man’s body.

I pull away. “I’m fine. Jack told you I was fine.”

I can barely force myself to look at Jack’s unconscious body behind us, but I risk a glance. Still breathing. Good. I stand to go examine him further.

“Forgive me for not believing a word out of his bastard mouth.”

I turn on him, irritated. “But you’ll happily side with Padraic, then?”

He stares at me in disbelief, “I only did that to get you back! Aimee, please. We need to leave. Now.”

Connor reaches for my hand, but I snatch it away.

“No.”

In my peripheral, I see a skirmish beginning at the edges of the ring.Dead Eyesand Maguires clash as some attempt to enter the ring.

“We don’t have time for this.”

Connor doesn’t give me a choice. He looms over me and grabs me by the arms, lifting me clean off the floor.

“No!” I screech as he starts to carry me away from Jack. “Let go of me!.”

“What, to stay with the bastards who kidnapped you? Have you lost your senses, Aimee?” He doesn’t stop.

“Put me down, you gobshite!”

Connor only hesitates a split second before beginning to pass me over the rope to someone on the other side. The dark-haired man from before seems to have managed to fight his way to the side of the ring.

I’m not sure whose hand it is, but I bite down on it. The Italian man yelps and is suddenly lost again to the skirmish. I try to slam my head back against Connor’s broken face.

“Aimee!” Connor says, desperation lacing his voice. “We don’t have time for this.”

I try to wriggle loose. “I’m not leaving.”

“Yes, you are. It’s not safe for you here.”

“He won’t hurt me.”

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