Page 3 of Malicious Marriage (Mafia Lords of Sin #9)

DEAN

C lover.

It’s been two days and I can’t stop thinking about her.

Why? It’s not the first time I’ve seen a beautiful woman.

I’m surrounded by them on a daily basis.

Everywhere I go, there they are, vying for my attention and my money.

I’ve done that song and dance before and I know it’s not real. It’s never real.

People will do anything if they know you’re rich enough.

But Clover.

She haunts me in the best way.

The sight of her sitting in that chair looking an absolute vision in a sleek black dress that clung to all of her voluptuous curves in the most tantalizing way is burned into my mind.

Her warm face with eyes sparkling with tears and the fullest, reddest lips I’ve ever seen in my entire life flash in my mind every single time I blink.

But it’s not just her unbelievable beauty that haunts me.

It’s the way she spoke to me. After her initial shock at seeing me, she spoke to me like I was a real person—an individual.

She didn’t immediately try to appease me or blow smoke up my ass.

She didn’t ask about business or money or even the party, to an extent.

She expressed a very human feeling of being alone, and it’s a feeling I painfully resonate with.

Even now as I sit at the head of the conference table listening to old men snap back and forth about the benefits of this new weapons deal with the Russians, and the issues we’ll run into with border control and the cops, all I want to do is walk back into my office and find Clover sitting there.

Don, my advisor, smacks his hand down on the table and immediately launches into an argument with one of my generals about the best course of action in tackling shipments from state to state.

It’s a non-issue because I’ve already made up my mind.

We’ll ship them in bourbon crates. Easy to hide a couple of hundred weapons in crates securely designed to cart alcohol across state lines.

Our only concern should be the Russians themselves, considering how often they screw over their own families, never mind complete outsiders like us.

But our money is good and hopefully, that will keep the Russians on our side for a while longer.

If they’re distracted by this weapons deal, they won’t notice us feeding our drug supply into the territory they stole while the Savoy family was under the rule of my father. Territory I plan to reclaim when the time is right.

Clover .

She pops into my mind once again, so I slip my hand into my pants pocket where her compact mirror rests.

She left it behind in her rush to escape my party, and I tried to chase her down after I found it, but she had already vanished from the party.

So now it’s mine. A mirror that’s gazed upon her face as often as I want to, one that’s witnessed everything from her smiles to her tears.

My fingers still ache from the urge to reach across to her and stroke away her tears. That would hardly have been appropriate. We’re strangers and she was sad, in need of an ear, not a man hanging over her like that.

And yet I constantly wonder, if I had done that, would she have stayed? Would I have been able to spend the last hours of that party deep in conversation with her and feeding my soul the best meal it’s had in years?

Would I have learned her last name? My people are looking into her, but it’s taking as long as this blasted meeting.

Running my fingertips around the edge of the compact mirror, I trace the twisted metal pattern just as Don wins his argument and looks to me for approval.

I smile as if I’ve been listening the entire time and thankfully, before he can say anything, the door opens and one of my guards slips inside.

“Boss.” He speaks low with his lips half an inch from my ear. “Found what you were looking for.” He quickly slips a piece of paper into my open palm and steps back.

The table falls silent and the weight of curious expectation lands on me in the form of eight pairs of eyes. They expect something on this paper to do with the family, the business, or even the Russian deal.

It’s none of those things. In black pen is a single name and an address.

Clover Byrne.

I know that name. Byrne is one of the Irish families, if I recall correctly. Not exactly in the same circles as mine, but they had a handle in the drug market decades ago before moving on to money laundering, rigged casinos, and more.

So, my Clover is a Byrne.

Interesting.

“Dean?” Don’s voice cuts through my thoughts, and I immediately scrunch up the paper, then stand.

“That’ll be all,” I say as I button my suit jacket.

Several disappointed sighs follow me out of the room, but I no longer have the desire or patience to listen to them all argue among themselves.

I already have a plan in mind and it’s their job to follow it, not question me at every step.

Half the men in that room just want to feel more important than they actually are.

I make it as far as the kitchen before Don catches up with me. “What was all that about?” His eyes dart down to my hands, likely seeking out the paper.

“Nothing.”

“It’s hardly nothing,” Don snaps. “We still have to discuss whether we’re letting the Russians handle the entire overseas shipment or not.”

“We’re not. I already locked the Kuznetsovs into a seventy-five, twenty-five favoring us. It’ll be our people on the ships. We take the bigger risk and we get the better stock.”

“And when were you going to tell me?” Don plants himself in the kitchen doorway, forcing me into a conversation I really don’t want to have.

With little choice, I head for the fridge and grab a bottle of water. “If you’d asked me this morning, I would have told you, but you kept insisting everything should wait until the meeting. Listening to everyone clash isn’t exactly how I want to spend my morning.”

“But it’s necessary to hear your people out.”

“Is it? The idiocy alone is enough to make me want to fire them all.”

“Dean.” Don’s tone turns sharp. When he talks like that, he really tries to emphasize that he’s four years my senior and thus somehow knows better.

“ Don .”

“You need to listen to them. These are the people doing the legwork on this deal and if they’re unhappy, then you risk that trickling down to their involvement with the Russians. Do you really want to stoke that fire?”

He’s right, annoyingly. “I’ll deal with it.”

“Will you?”

Uncapping the chilled water, I nod. “I will.”

“Like you dealt with Trisha?”

I pause, simply holding a mouthful of cold water between my lips and the bottle.

Trisha.

The one name I can’t stand to hear and yet everyone insists on bringing her up. For good reason, mostly, but that doesn’t mean I gotta like it.

I swallow hard and focus on the bite of the cold water as it trickles down my gullet. “What about her?”

“She called for you again.”

“So?”

“Dean, be serious. She’s carrying your child.”

“And she’s a cheating cunt who broke my heart, burned my car, and tells everyone this family is out to kill her. Excuse me if I don’t have a good word to say about her.”

“I’m not saying you have to like her.” Don moves from his stationary spot and approaches. “But Dean, she is carrying your baby .”

“I know.” My snapping response doesn’t soften Don’s gaze so after another drink, I sigh deeply. “Listen, I know. And I stand by what I originally said. I will take care of my baby.”

“That’s all well and good, but do you really want to be raising your child in a split family? As terrible as Trisha has been in the past, she is from a good, strong family and she wants to try again. Surely, you see how strong a union like that will make you?”

I see it. From a business and family perspective, it’s a good match.

The Wilcox family are old money and would turn us into quite the powerhouse if we married.

That had been the goal at the start, but things didn’t work out that way.

It became clear painfully quickly that Trisha only cared about burning through my bank accounts, and catching her in bed with another man for the third time was three times too many.

“She made a fool out of me,” I say tightly. “How can you stand there and tell me marrying her will make me look any better? As if the whole world doesn’t know why we broke up in the first place.”

“But the baby ,” Don insists. “Babies change everything. Situations and people. You can’t risk her leaving and your child ending up in someone else’s hands.”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I push past Don, but he still catches my shoulder.

“Dean, please. This is just another thing to take in stride.”

I’m tired of taking things in stride. Hit after hit, betrayal after betrayal.

I’ve seen loss after loss and I am tired of it.

As the head of the family, everyone expects me to be the bigger man.

Take the pain on the chin and do what’s best for the family as a whole rather than me, the individual.

It’s that kind of attitude that turned the deaths of my older siblings into a fucking circus act.

I’m tired of it.

One call to Jack, my head of security, and we leave the estate behind with Don to deal with the influx of calls now that my shipping plans have landed in everyone’s inbox.

I need to escape. I need to get out and breathe, so Jack drives me to the only place that won’t make me feel like I’m being smothered.

The Byrne mansion.

It’s a twenty-minute drive by Jack’s standards, not that he ever drives with the law in mind, but when we pull up to the driveway of the mansion, there isn’t a single car in sight.

Climbing out with Clover’s compact mirror weighing down my pocket, I cast my eye around the slightly overgrown garden, the dusty wooden trellis that stands over a dusty, muddy slab path, and the flowers lining the mansion under the windows that look in desperate need of a drink.

This early into May, the rain is still common but it looks like these poor things haven’t drunk in weeks.

“You sure this is the right place?” Jack leans against the open car door and gazes around. “Maybe they’ve left for the summer.”

“I don’t think so,” I reply as I walk up to the front door. “At least I hope not.”

“How strong is this hope?” Jack chuckles as I knock on the front door. “Place looks abandoned.”