“Intimidating?” she offers.
“You have no idea.”
“Do you want it?” she asks. “I mean, do you want to be the next O’Sullivan don?”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You always have a choice,” she points out. “Your brother made his.”
She’s right.
But that’s exactly why I can’t walk away from my family.
One brother did. I can’t put my parents through that again.
“Yes,” I concede. “But Sean is different than I am.”
“I know,” Saoirse says with a knowing nod. “You’d never walk away.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing, though,” I tell her. “I can keep you safe. You and your father. I can pay off his debts and make sure you never want for anything ever again.”
She frowns. “I don’t want to be a kept woman.”
“You wouldn’t be,” I say impatiently. “You’d be my woman.”
“That sounds like the same thing.”
I pause for a moment and consider my words. I need her to know just how much she means to me. I need her to know just how sincere my thoughts are when I think of her. Of us.
“Do you believe I would ever hurt you?” I ask.
She meets my gaze, her expression both scared and hopeful. “No.”
“Do you believe I would ever lie to you?”
“No.”
“Do you believe I would ever abandon you?”
“No.”
“Then there we go. When I say you’re my woman, I mean you’re mine. Just like I’m yours.”
Her eyes start to get misty, but she doesn’t shy away from my gaze.
“We’re equals, Saoirse,” I whisper fiercely. “Partners. And that’s what we’ll always be.”
“You mean that?”
“Completely,” I reply. “If I learned one thing from my parents, it’s that a strong partnership can conquer anything. Both my mother and my father are as tough and ruthless and as they come. But they’ve always been in it together. They’ve got each other’s backs. Even when they hate each other. And the only reason that’s true is because they’re partners.”
She smiles, but I can see the edge of sadness in the corners of her mouth.
“What’s wrong?”
“I was just thinking that an outsider looking in would see the two most naïve teenagers in the world.”
I growl at that one. “Then fuck them all,” I spit. “Fuck everyone else. No one knows how this feels. Tonight is ours alone.”