Aidan’s words had me braking to a halt. I’d been sliding cookies onto plates, and I didn’t even care that some fell onto the counter as I turned and asked, “I thought Declan and Deirdre were childhood sweethearts.”
“They were,” Finn confirmed as he forked up some pie I’d given the guys to try out first.
“So, what do you mean? How did she burn him?”
Aidan chuckled and he stabbed the fork my way. Finn, spotting it, walloped the back of his hand with his own fork. As he rubbed at the sting, he glowered at Finn before lowering the piece of cutlery, turning to me and saying, “She was insane.”
Conor winced. “That was never proven.”
Finn laughed. “How do you prove it? Have her committed?”
“Well, yeah. Or her shrink does.”
“She should have been committed. She was nuts. She followed him, Aoife. Can you imagine that?”
“She followed him?” My eyes widened. “What on Earth… why?”
“Because she was crazy,” Aidan repeated, like him saying it over and over again would make me believe it.
“Well, did she think he was cheating or something? It seems a tad extreme, but women have done nuttier things around the men they love.”
Conor nodded and moved onto his second piece of pie. As he chewed, he groaned, ”Fuck, Aoife. This isgood.”
I beamed with pleasure, so happy they were enjoying my creations. It was corny but I was looking to create the next big Instagram fad. It would put me on the map, I just had to settle on what that fad would be.
There’d been rainbow bagels and black soft serve, I was trying to figure out what my big break should be. I’d thought that my quadruple chocolate cookies would do the trick, but they were beyond rich and really expensive to produce.
“Thanks, Conor.”
“I told you before. She makes stuff so good the devil’s jealous.”
Aidan snorted. “Try not to say that around Dad next time, yeah? He’s let up on you going to church but the rest of us still need our asses on those pews at nine AM sharp.”
Finn pulled a face but didn’t argue. Things were still weird between him and Aidan, although every time I saw them together on a Sunday, they were relaxing around each other again.
Men. Too stupid to breathe sometimes.
“Anyway,” Conor interrupted. “You know Declan works around the docks, yeah?”
That was code for ‘deals drugs.’
It still boggled my mind that Declan did shit like that. He was so softly spoken, and in comparison to the rest of his brothers, gentle.
“Yeah, I know,” I replied, amused by his phrasing. They wanted to keep me in the dark, but they also treated me like one of the guys. It was odd, but fun. I’d never had friends that were guys before, and Conor and Aidan liked shooting the shit with not just Finn, but me too.
“So, one day, Deirdre gets it into her head that Dec’s cheating on her—like he would. His cock was in knots for that bitch, and she made him pay for it every single time.”
“She charged him for sex?” I choked out.
Finn snickered. “He means metaphorically. She had him on a very short leash.”
“Oh, okay.”
“Well, she follows him to this place by the water. He doesn’t know, starts to do the job. The dick he’s with is antsy. Probably hopped on the product himself. The guy sees something at the back of the warehouse, is paranoid as fuck it’s the cops. Gets trigger happy and the rest, as they say, is history.”
My mouth dropped open at that—considering my own history with being shot, Conor was pretty cavalier about his retelling of the story.
“She died?”