her softness burning away to leave only steel in its wake. Callie recognized it because her mother had had the same thing. She’d like to think she did as well, but she was hardly unbiased. “I need twenty minutes.” It would be cutting it close, but she refused to leave the house without at least a shower.
Especially since she swore she could smell Teague on her skin.
“I’ll stall her, but you should hurry.”
She hurried.
Twenty-two minutes later, she was back downstairs, showered and dressed in a pair of slacks and a silk shirt. Aileen swept a quick look over her. “You’ll do.”
Callie tamped down on her irritation. She’d dealt with women like Aileen O’Malley before, though most of them didn’t actually have the power they seemed to think they possessed. Aileen actually did.
So she smiled and followed the woman out to the limo parked in front of the house. Five minutes in her future mother-in-law’s presence, and she was already exhausted. The woman might smile and fawn when it suited her, but it had to be a mask. Callie had met Seamus O’Malley, and he was the kind of person who chewed up everyone around him and left them bleeding in his wake if they weren’t strong enough to endure.
Aileen was anything but broken.
In some ways, that made her even scarier than her husband.
* * *
After his night with Callie, Teague was only more determined to put a stop to this bullshit war. He spent the morning trying to get a hold of James, and finally pinned the man into agreeing to drinks tonight. It was at Mickey’s, which was right in the middle of Halloran territory, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. It had the slight bonus that no one connected with the O’Malleys would see him talking to James. He doubted his father or Aiden would support it—not when it was growing clearer every day that they weren’t particularly torn up about the impending war.
Impending. He didn’t even know if he could call it that anymore. It was here, whether he liked it or not.
He walked into Mickey’s, stopping just inside the door to take in the room. On the surface, it looked just like a hundred other Irish pubs scattered around Boston—a little dark, a little dingy, and mostly empty. Or it did until he saw the crest above the bar—a shield, half-white and half-red, with a white horse on the bottom half—marking it as owned by the Hallorans. His family had something similar in the places they patronized regularly.
He’d suggested meeting somewhere in neutral territory, but James had shot him down immediately. For whatever reason, he wanted the home court advantage. Unfortunately, Teague wasn’t in a position to tell him no. So here he was, hoping like hell he wasn’t walking into a trap.
The bartender stopped wiping down the bar and looked at him, the man’s thick, bushy brows lowering until they practically covered his eyes. “Help you?” His tone said the only thing he was helping Teague with was to get his ass out the door.
“He’s with me, Tommy.” James walked through the door leading into the back—most likely to a private room—and stopped. “Been a long time.”
“Yeah.” He took in the man’s changes the same way he suspected James was surveying him. He’d grown in the years since they’d last laid eyes on each other, his blond hair now hitting his shoulders and a close-cropped beard covering his jaw. James looked closer to a biker than a businessman, but then his father had never put the emphasis on poise and surface manners the way Teague’s had.
“Nice suit.”
He looked down at the Armani clothing and shrugged. “It works.”
“Sit your ass down and let’s talk.”
He followed James to a booth tucked in the back of the bar and slid in. “I—”
“Hold on.” He raised his voice. “Tommy?” A few seconds later, the bartender set two beers down and lumbered away. James picked his up, his eyes never leaving Teague’s face. “Didn’t your piece-of-shit father teach you any manners? First you make small talk. Then you go in with your pitch.”
Teague grabbed his own beer, and grinned despite the clock ticking away in the back of his mind. As much as he’d like to spend time with the man under different circumstances, keeping the people he cared about safe was his only priority right now.
And James was one of the few people who could help make that happen.
But the man was right—there was a way to do these things,