CHAPTER THREE
Declan
The meeting was taking forever.
I made another purposeful glance at my watch in hopes that the idiot doing all the talking would notice I was annoyed that he was going over his allotted presentation time, but either he wasn’t paying attention, or he didn’t care.
“That’s enough,” I finally said when he’d gone five minutes over. I didn’t tolerate people who didn’t respect my time. I showed up places when I was supposed to, and I left when our meeting was over. I expected no less from everyone else around me, even potential business partners. Especially business partners who wanted in on my real estate development deals that promised to make us both a ton of money.
“Are you certain, Mr. Casey?” The man — I thought his name was John or James or something, I’d never remember anyway — swallowed hard and adjusted his tie. I picked up the stack of papers he’d prepared for me and handed them back to him. I never carried papers around anymore. It was the digital era for a reason.
“Send these to my assistant, Clara, and if we’re interested in your ideas, we’ll call you.”
We held a plot of land close enough to the waterfront that was about to explode in development. We were looking for profitable businesses to put on its blank canvas, and Jim-John-Whatever-His-Name-Was had just spent the last half hour trying to convince me that I wanted to put another fast food franchise in there.
Foot traffic, profit margins, brand visibility — blah blah blah. Jim-John talked to me like I was an idiot, and I’d almost instantly decided that I wasn’t going to do business with him. I just hadn’t told him that. I’d still wanted to hear what he said, what his terms were, and what he stood to gain from his participation in the deal so I could use the data for negotiations in the future.
Jim-John was dead to me the moment he walked into Paola’s, a fancy Italian joint I happened to like, with a cheap suit and a wrinkled shirt underneath it.
For Christ’s sake, the gray suit jacket had threads dangling from the seams on his wrist, and one of the button holes in the lapel had all but frayed apart. And a wrinkled, dingy white shirt?
I didn’t mind his clothes being old or even cheap, because I knew that not everyone had the resources I did. But wrinkled and dirty? There was no excuse for that. And it was evidence of just how carefully he’d tend any business he put on my property. He wouldn’t.
Game over for Jim-John.
“Of course, Mr. Casey,” the man said, taking the papers in a shaking hand as I stood. Behind me, Brennan handed me my coat and sunglasses.
“So, I’ll give you a call in a couple days?” Jim-John was giving it one last go, probably seeing that he’d somehow missed the deal.
I held up a hand. “If I need to speak to you, I’ll be in touch. If you don’t hear from me, assume your proposal didn’t align with my plans.”
The man’s face visibly fell, and Brennan cleared his throat behind me.
No matter how much of a hardass I was, Brennan always found it amusing.
I shot my second a dirty look and started to walk toward the door, knowing my car was already waiting out front.
Outside, the fall air was crisp as I took in the activity out on the sidewalk. People were bustling back to work and chatting away on their cell phones. As I walked slowly toward the curb, I noticed a woman leaning close to the menu that Paola’s had posted outside. From that angle, all I could really see was long, silky raven hair that fell to the middle of the woman’s arm. She was wearing a navy-colored peacoat, jeans, and tall black boots. Her legs were perfectly shaped in those tight jeans, and I didn’t mind admiring them a moment, when she turned to look at me.
Holy shit.
I recognized her instantly — Amelia Byrne. She was younger than me, seven years to be exact, so we were never in school together. Her family sat two pews behind mine at St. Bernadette’s, a few streets over, so I saw her at least once a week.
Her father, Jack, had been a school friend of my old man, and they’d even done business together a few times when he’d finally gotten out of racketeering and started dabbling in being a businessman with actual, physical businesses.
Jack was a good man and his wife, Rosie, was a good woman.
And Amelia? Well, damn… she’d grown into a real good woman.
Her dark eyes scanned over me before widening in recognition while her pretty pink lips popped open in surprise.
She really was good, though, because before half a second passed, she’d fixed her face with a mask of bored indifference — as though she had no idea who I was. Like she didn’t remember the night I’d kissed her within an inch of her life after her graduation ceremony.
Yeah, she knew who I was, and the fact that she was dismissing me and striding down the street without a word really pissed me off.
The heat of her gaze and her rebuke simmered through my system, and I itched to take off after her and… what? Make her talk to me? Kiss her again? See if her skin was as soft as it was all those years ago?
My cock pulsed in my pants. Shit.
I nearly ripped the car door handle off before the driver could reach for it. Once inside, I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and punched in my assistant’s number.
“Yes, Mr. Casey?” Clara, ever the professional, answered.
“I need you to do a little research for me,” I said. “I just saw an old friend of mine in town, and I want to know why she’s here.”
I gave Clara the details of the Byrne family, everything I knew.
“I want to know if she’s in town permanently or just visiting. Also, look into the Byrne Brothers company. Tell me their profits, loss, everything.”
After hanging up, I searched the sidewalk, hoping for one last glimpse of Amelia. Or more truthfully, hoping that she’d changed her mind and was coming back to me.
I couldn’t see her anywhere. She was gone.
Not for long though.
Not for long.
***
As much as I tried to forget the fact that Amelia Byrne was back in Boston, as much as I tried to force myself to study the proposal in front of me, those blessed few seconds I observed her had etched some sort of groove in my brain, and she was a thought I couldn’t shake.
I’d always been aware when Amelia was around, even when she was a goofy middle schooler my younger brothers had the hots for. They’d only been a year or two ahead of Amelia in school while I had been a whole seven years ahead. I was in grad school, living the dream of women and booze when Amelia had come of age.
And man, had she. Even back then, I remembered stumbling upon her at one of the masses the parish had for graduating seniors. She’d shot up and filled out in all the right places since I’d last seen her the year before. I had done my best not to do a double take back then, but I sure as hell had done a double take today.
With a long exhale, I scrubbed my palm down my face and took a few sips of water from the glass on my desk.
Focus. I needed to focus.
Clara’s line lit up my phone, and I picked it up, probably a little too eagerly, thankful for the distraction.
“Yes?”
“Brennan’s here, sir.”
Good. More business to keep me from thinking about that long black hair hanging around her face so alluringly. Did she still have the freckles I’d liked so much all those years ago? God, I hoped so.
I’d been so lost in that train of thought that I didn’t hear Brennan stride across the thick carpet. “What the hell is putting that look on your face?”
Ever the observant pain in the ass.
“Don’t worry about my face,” I said stiffly, taking another swig of water, wishing it was something stronger.
“If you say so,” Brennan said under his breath, a smirk on his features. I didn’t like the look on his face now.
I straightened in my chair, putting the mask of professionalism back in place. “Did you come here for a reason or just to annoy me?”
“For a reason, obviously. Annoying you is a bonus.” When I opened my mouth to give some sarcastic reply, he held up a hand. “We have names from the arson incident.”
Lucky for Brennan, this was something I needed to hear, or I would have given him hell for trying to bust my balls. Especially if he’d found out about Amelia. It’d taken a solid two months to get him to stop making fun of me for kissing her after her high school graduation, and at twenty-five, it’d been pretty humiliating.
“What did you guys find out?”
Brennan took the chair on the other side of my desk and lowered his giant body into it. “It was just like you were worried about.” His face was grim. “Duffy family.”
My entire body went rigid at the name. Few families in Boston pissed me off quite like the Duffy clan did, and to hear my uncles tell it, they’d had the same relationship with the previous generations of Duffys too. Just my luck, the two younger idiot brothers wanted to continue the traditions their old man started thirty years ago.
“Any clue what they were trying to do? Were they really trying to burn the whole place down?”
It seemed like a crazy idea, given that people in these neighborhoods had long memories and would likely carry a grudge forever if they found out a family like the Duffys was trying to scare them.
But the Duffys weren’t brain surgeons, and a lot of the reason they were a second-class tough guy squad was because they were mostly idiots. Violent idiots.
“Intimidation is my guess,” Brennan said, “but they can’t hire for shit, and the morons they used nearly destroyed everything.”
It’d been close, but lucky for us, our local fire departments were equipped and responsive. In the end, a few of the units in the shopping center had taken pretty decent damage, but the place as a whole survived relatively unscathed.
They were lucky it had too. If anybody had been killed, or lost their businesses, there would have been hell to pay. As it were, though, I decided to see just how far the Duffys were willing to push before we acted.
I hadn’t made a pile of money overnight by overreacting and showing my hand too quickly.