Page 380 of Romeo

Her fingers loosened from my shirt before she stepped just far enough to look around my shoulder. Every instinct in me wanted to put her back where she had been, especially because she had made it clear she wasn’t ready for this meeting.

I didn’t stop her.

Angel went completely still.

I’d watched that man face down people who made insane men rethink their life choices. I had seen him bloody, furious, cold enough that the room around him changed.

I had never seen him uncertain.

Fiona stared at him, and I knew she recognized the face from the photograph she had studied days earlier. She’d searched that picture for pieces of herself when he was only a name and a story.

Now he stood less than ten feet away.

“Angel?”

His throat moved before he answered.

“Yeah.”

Fiona’s fingers found mine, and I closed my hand around hers.

Angel noticed.

His gaze dropped briefly to our joined hands before returning to her face.

“You hurt?”

She shook her head. “No.”

He nodded once.

Nothing more.

He didn’t step closer. Didn’t call her Kaitlyn. Didn’t reach for something she hadn’t offered him.

He simply stood there with Mac dead between us and looked at the daughter he’d spent months trying to find.

For once, Angel waited.

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

Fiona

For several seconds after Angel lowered his gun, nobody seemed to know what to do with me. That was probably unfair. Nobody seemed to know what to do with any of it. Mac lay face down on the floor with blood spreading beneath him. The table Jasper had driven him through was broken in the middle, one leg kicked halfway beneath the couch. Something ceramic had shattered near the kitchen, leaving white pieces scattered across the boards. Jasper stood beside me with blood drying at the corner of his mouth and one side of his face already beginning to swell. Men filled the doorway and porch, all carrying the kind of tension that said whatever had happened outside had been almost as bad as what happened in here.

And ten feet away stood my father.

My biological father.

Angel.

The man from the picture. The man whose face I had stared at until I knew the lines around his eyes and the shape of his mouth, searching for something that might tell me whether we belonged to each other. It had been easier when he was trapped inside a photograph. I could put the phone down when it became too much. I could hand it back to Jasper and decide I would think about him tomorrow. There was no putting this away. He was real. He was staring at me. And he had just killed a man because that man pointed a gun at me.

Jasper’s hand tightened around mine. Not enough to pull me anywhere. Just enough that I felt him. I looked at his face instead of Angel’s, and the blood, swelling, and split lip snapped something into place inside me. “You’re hurt.”

Jasper blinked as if the possibility hadn’t occurred to him. “I’m fine.”

“You’re bleeding.”