I’d almost expected him to say something sexist. That was the response Jenny usually received when she shared her course details with a guy. They either said she was too pretty to be an accountant—because, yeah, no accountants were hot, right? Men were such dicks sometimes—or she got shit for not being able to go out during the evenings. Like her time belonged to them.
Jenny’s life revolved around work, school, and her man du jour. When work had included me, that meant we’d spent a lot of time together. I wasn’t offended that she was too busy to catch up every day.
She had shit she needed to do, and when I got my bakery up and running and could offer her a job again, things would roll back around.
“Jenny hopes so. She doesn’t want to stay in the city.”
He cocked a brow. “No? Why not?”
“She just doesn’t.” That was her secret to share, not mine. “Not everyone wants to stay in the city forever.”
He quirked a brow. “Since when?”
I grinned at him. “You want to be born, live, and buried here, huh? Well, there goes my dream of being a snowbird.”
“Sam wants to go to Florida when he retires.”
“When?”
“We don’t all live and die on the streets, Aoife,” he chided.
“If you die on the streets, I’ll make you rue the day you were born. I don’t intend on losing you now that I’ve found you.”
He grinned at me, looking far too pleased with himself as he purred, “Good to know.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “And they say romance is dead.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
Finn
I had to admit, I was curious.
Curious as fuck.
I didn’t even mind that even though Aoife got herself all worked up, and me too, she’d done too much today and ended up conking out on me when we migrated our make out session from the living room to the bedroom.
Sure, my dick was aching, but she needed the rest and I needed answers, otherwise I’d get no sleep tonight.
That was how curious I was.
I didn’t even mind the hard-on from hell.
When I grabbed my phone and scrolled through the messages and emails for the tenth time this hour, I saw one from an ‘Unknown Sender.’ Satisfied once more with Paul’s efficiency, I opened it and I scanned the contents of the file.
A standard hit and run. A witness had seen the green Jaguar drive off, but she hadn’t caught the registration. She had noticed that the driver was a woman.
When I saw the picture of Aoife’s mom, my breath caught in my chest because it was like looking at Aoife twenty years down the line.
Christ.
They were like twins. The same rich hair and the skin that was almost opalescent with its glorious sheen.
As I looked at a ‘future’ Aoife, I marveled at how fucking lucky I was, even as I felt sad that I’d never get to meet Michelle Keegan or Ellie Donahue as I’d known her. Seeing her was believing though.
I remembered her vaguely. My mom and her had hung out a lot, but I’d spent most of my time with Aidan Jr., avoiding not only my father, but her too.
My mother’s best friend, and my wife’s mom, had been crossing the street one day and out of the blue, a car hit her. She’d never have foreseen that, would never have been able to plan her life around it. Wouldn’t have said goodbye to her loved ones, to Aoife. Just boom. In an instant, everything had changed.
The witness claimed Michelle had been on her phone before she’d stepped out onto the road, and according to the report, Michelle didn’t wake up after the accident so the officers in charge of the investigation couldn’t question her to confirm that. She’d hit her head on the way down, and no matter what the doctors did, she never got back up again.
Still, there was something about the report that hit me as odd. Jaguars weren’t a common car in the States. Sure, they were here and there, but they were a luxury import, and most people who wanted that kind of status vehicle opted for Mercs or BMWs.
Then there was the color. Something the witness had stated was close to, if not darker than, evergreen.
And I distinctly remember Magdalena’s forest green Jag being in the shop back in January.
It was a leap, but, fuck, so was the suggestion that the Senator was behind his ex-girlfriend’s death in an attempt to keep his dirty secrets a