Fergus - An Irish Mafia Shifter (Boston Bear Brothers 1)

Charles smiled up at her in the rearview mirror. “Now, that is an offer I can’t refuse.”

Kirby groaned and looked at him. Charles immediately put his eyes back on the road and dropped the smile. Eimear had a feeling there was some sort of inside joke there, but she wasn’t sure what it was and probably was better off not knowing. Obviously, it was a guy thing.

“All right, Pizza Punks?” she suggested.

“Pizza Punks it is,” Charles replied, changing lanes to head toward the little hole-in-the-wall pizza joint Eimear was so fond of. “Definitely not leaving the car in that neighborhood.”

Kirby snickered and looked out the window. Eimear picked up her phone and began scrolling through her emails to make sure she didn’t have any appointments she’d forgotten. The last thing she needed was to get to a wedding to find out she was missing a priest or the cake order hadn’t been finished. Putting together this wedding had been a lot of work and Ciaron hadn’t been as involved as she would have liked for him to be, but he was a busy man, and what could she really expect?

Her one regret was that after having worked so hard to get through college and getting her dream job, he was insisting that she quit work once they were married. Granted, it was only an entry-level job as an administrative assistant in the accounting department, but it was a foot in the door of a good company—one she could work her way up in from the bottom.

If he had his way, she’d already have resigned. She’d averted his disdain by taking some of the vacation she’d been accruing over the past two years, giving her a full six weeks off with pay to finish the details of her wedding and go on her honeymoon. She’d yet to tell them she didn’t plan to return, and she had yet to tell him that she was thinking about not telling them at all.

She told herself she still had time to decide, but as she sat eating pizza with a bodyguard she hardly knew and contemplating what she would do alone the rest of the evening, she wondered if it would always be like this now. If so, she’d be bored out of her mind, so why quit her job? Ciaron had not been so busy when they first met, so maybe it was a temporary thing. At least, that is what she told herself. To think otherwise might make her reconsider whether her Prince Charming was really as charming as he once seemed.CHAPTER THREEFergus

It had taken the better part of a month to get down to the bottom of what was happening in their own territory. The men behind it were smart and discreet, limiting any details of who they were or their operation to only people who needed to know. They worked in circles that spiraled downward from an enormously powerful family and spread out among the poorest of the poor on the south side of Boston.

“Who do you work for?” Olcan roared at the man tied to a chair in the vacant warehouse they’d commandeered for the purposes of his interrogation.

The man glared at him but said nothing. He knew he was screwed, either way. If he talked, whoever he reported to would end him, likely after torturing him even further. If he didn’t talk, it ended here. They might be content just to pull out a few fingernails and give him a beating before sending him back as a message, but they could just as easily kill him to prevent him from warning anyone else.

He had been snatched from his office park’s garage wearing a crisp Italian suit and pristine leather wingtips, both now covered in blood. Fergus had hoped he would give up whoever was behind all of this. They’d managed to wind their way slowly upward toward the top, but they still weren’t there, and they weren’t sure how many more layers they had to peel back to find the end of it. Of course, they’d discovered a lot more than they’d bargained for in the process too.

“Bring ‘em in,” Fergus called out behind him.

The appearance of the two women, both blindfolded, gagged and hands tied with rope as they stumbled in with Niall and Ronan leading them was enough to finally break the man’s silence.

“You harm a single hair on their heads, I will see to it that every last one of you Irish bastards die a horrific death.”

“So you can speak,” Fergus observed, flashing him a smile. “Now, we’re getting somewhere.”

“I’ve nothing to tell you but what will happen to you if you hurt them.”

“Aye. They’re incredibly attractive lasses, your wife and daughter. It would be a shame to scar such perfection. I mean, what father wants to ruin his daughter’s hopes to be a beautiful, blushing bride someday? And how will you ever manage a wee boner if your wife looks like a map to Tipperary?”