Unshackled

More specifically, the art of imitation. Learning different personality traits, accents, regional differences in culture, the ability to blend in… And nothing topped walking into a situation where I was the outsider and ending up owning the entire room. It was why I loved working with Finn and Eric at auto shows. We’d been stealing cars for as long as we’d been able to drive, and the smaller, exclusive events were the best. Not that I didn’t enjoy massive spectacles like the Geneva International Motor Show, the one in Frankfurt, or NAIAS in Detroit, but they were essentially tourist attractions in comparison.

The perfect auto show displayed twenty cars. It was invite-only, and the guests made millions in their sleep. They wiped their asses with money. They talked a certain way, regardless of language. The women wore illegal furs and were at least thirty years younger than their husbands who worked in the oil business or in crypto currencies. Entering a room full of those people… I couldn’t describe the rush it gave me, because I had to sell it. I had to become them in order to gain their trust. Just enough trust to get invited to their vacation home to view a painting, or the car they were interested in selling, or the yacht they just wanted the world to see.

They were my gold mine. Once you were in, you were set for life. They always had something you could steal.

If I was brutally honest with myself, becoming someone else held an appeal because it gave me a break from being me, too. By borrowing another identity, I could be anyone. I could have a wife, a husband, four kids, no kids—I could be happily in love. I could belong to someone.

As I inhaled the fragrance again, I knew without an ounce of doubt that I could become Shannon’s anonymous hookup. A notion that hadn’t existed for as long as I’d been alive. I’d barely even fantasized about it because… I mean, it just hadn’t been on the radar. At all.

Now it was more than a fantasy. It was a decision entirely up to me.

It was both terrifying and exhilarating. Almost so it made me nauseated. Talk about violating some trust…but at the same time, what if I could make it better? What if I could push him, patiently, slowly, to open up? Because right now, Shan accepted affection as the role of father and grandfather. He hugged Finn tightly whenever they saw each other. He hugged me too. He was quick to offer Emilia a break and carry around baby Ryan. As soon as Autumn needed something, Shan was there too, at her side, ready to comfort, to advise, to hang out. But as a man…? The man he’d once been, the man who’d been married, yeah, he was gone.

Would it be so fucking bad if I tried to reawaken him? He’d never know it was me. To him, I’d be a faceless person, and as that guy, maybe I could make him remember what it was like. Intimacy. Closeness. Sex. Passion. The latter of which he’d specifically said he hadn’t shared with Grace.

My heart began pounding, and before I could talk myself out of it, I grabbed a new bottle of the cologne I’d tried and headed to the register.

“Nessa!” I called. “Time to go.”

Chapter 5

An hour later, we were back at Mick’s for a repeat of yesterday’s lunch, and it was really fucking difficult to focus on Nessa’s rambling.

Before she started with her three questions, she wanted to “just make sure I know the whole story,” which resulted in a harangue about our past. Our history. And yeah, I wanted every damn soul in our family to know it, but I was currently more interested in thinking about the fact that I might actually have sex with Shannon soon.

It was unbelievable.

“…and then we kinda immigrated to the US, right?” Nessa continued. “In the 1800s or something?”

I forced myself to concentrate. “Correct, we sent our first two families from Killarney to New York in 1847. Worst year of the Famine.”

Nessa made some notes in her book. “Dad says I have to call the Famine a genocide.”

“He’s right.” And he wasn’t right about a whole lot, that scumbag. “We settled in Chicago and Philly over the next decade. The families who stayed behind in Ireland are still with us today because we sent money and goods to them during the hard times.”

“Right.” She looked up from the notebook. “And then everything was good until my grandfather was boss or something?”

Not quite. “Is that your first question?” I smirked.

She scowled and bit her lip. “I guess it has to be.”

I’d prefer it, because that part of our history was still harmless to share. “Your grandfather was never boss,” I said. “You know how we’ve always had the O’Sheas and Murrays take turns? So if we have a Murray in the top seat, when he dies, the next boss will be an O’Shea.”