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Thank you.

I didn’t explain what I meant. For the flowers and cake. For leaving the fire burning and music playing so I wouldn’t come home to a dark, empty penthouse. For giving me what I’d asked for even though I knew it had hurt him too.

His answer came a minute later.

Goodnight, Mouse.

That was all, but seeing those two words helped me sleep better that night.

The next night, I sent another message, and another the night after that. Lachlan always answered quickly and kept things light.

We never discussed what would happen when he came home.

Instead, I learned little things. He hated hotel coffee but drank it anyway, thought Boston traffic was designed by sadists, and had discovered that Uncle Jack could turn a simple family dinner into a three-hour argument about loyalty, territory, marriage, and everything Lucian and Lachlan were doing wrong with their lives.

One night, my phone had buzzed well past midnight.

Our uncle is an enormous pain in my arse.

I’d laughed at that.

Did you tell him that?

Several times.

How did that go?

Lucian and I are now in a pub. Draw your own conclusions.

A while later:

My brother claims I am drunk. He’s a liar.

That sounded exactly like something a drunk man would say.

Are you drunk?

I am Irish. There is a difference.

Twenty minutes later, he sent me a photograph of Lucian asleep with his forehead on the table beside an empty glass.

See? Im clerly the responsible borther. Lucian cant lift head. I still take pictures.

I laughed so hard I nearly dropped my phone. The spelling alone had required two corrections, and the rest wasn’t exactly helping his case for sobriety.

Those few minutes with him each night became my favorite part of the day.

I simply liked talking to him.

I liked getting to know Lachlan when no one was shooting at us and we weren’t falling into bed together before either of us could think too hard about what was happening.

One night, Lachlan announced we were playing fifty questions and started with harmless things before gradually getting nosier—favorite color, sweet or savory, coffee or tea, my favorite thing to bake, where I would go if someone handed me a plane ticket, and what people usually got wrong about me. There were so many questions, some rapid-fire and others that made me stop and think. The best part was turning the questions back on him. That was how I learned about the boy he’d been with Lucian, the things he missed about Ireland, what he loved about running Xyst, and which parts of his life he would change if he could. Somehow, even the silly questions ended up telling me things I hadn’t known I wanted to know.

Lachlan didn’t strike me as a man who normally sat around discussing himself for the pleasure of being known, and I’d spent years learning that the safest place for anything personal was inside my own head. I’d spent most of my life keeping even ordinary things about myself tucked away, because there had been so few people I could safely share them with. Now Lachlan wanted to know. And because he answered just as honestly when I turned the questions back on him, I began to think I was getting a version of Lachlan very few people ever saw. Somewhere between the ridiculous questions and the serious ones, what was between us became easier and more personal. We were finally learning each other without the rest of the world getting in the way.

Dr. Maria St. Clair had helped with some of the harder parts.

Lacey brought her over the morning after Lachlan left. I’d expected someone older and far more intimidating. Instead, Maria was chic, direct, and so completely unimpressed by the criminal world surrounding us that within twenty minutes, I understood why Lacey trusted her.