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This wasn’t how I planned to tell her. I was supposed to explain before she figured out there was something else brewing.
Fionn’s shadow falls across us as Eilish slowly pulls her wrist from my hand. Her gaze moves between us, but she isn’t laughing about the flirting now.
She thought she was forcing two enemies to make peace. With Fionn at my back and Eilish in front of me, there’s nowhere left to hide from the shame of wanting the man she has to marry.
Chapter 20
Fionn
Sera’s once follows me as I flex the hand I had around that bastard’s throat, my gaze sweeping the bar.
My men are where I expect them, spread through the bar and watching the entrance, the by-standers, and the rear corridor.
Chairs scrape into place again, drinks are lifted, and conversation begins because no one else has a reason to interfere.
I come up behind her. “Just once?”
She turns, her chin raised and her mouth already set for battle.
Good. Let her defend it to my face.
Her forehead wrinkles. “That’s the part you object to?”
“It’s the only lie in the sentence.”
Eilish looks between us, shock morphing into confusion. “Sorry. I’m trying to catch up. You two are fucking each other?”
Sera doesn’t look away from me. “Were. As in past tense.”
“So, the fighting is fake?” Eilish asks.
“Not in the slightest,” I tell her, putting my baseball cap back on. “And it changes nothing.”
The wedding goes ahead, and the orders attached to it, but knowing all that doesn’t stop my eyes from dropping to Sera’s mouth.
Her fingers close around the back of the chair, and her stare cuts clean through me. “Nothing at all.”
My gaze drops to her hand, to the white pressure at her knuckles, then all the way up to her mouth again because I can’t seem to look anywhere else.
Eilish frowns. “But you two hate each other.”
“Yeah, we do,” Sera says at once. “Fucking him was a mistake.”
I hold Sera’s stare. “Is that so?”
Her breath changes for a beat before she laughs under her breath, but it has no humor in it. “Yeah, Harrington.”
Eilish’s gaze flicks between us again, slower this time, as if she’s finally seeing the scandal. “Wait. Is this like Saint and Keira?”
Sera looks genuinely horrified. “God, no. Those two are in love. Saint protects that girl from the rain.”
The corner of my mouth twitches. I’m sure she remembers the man I put down in the barn. I guess murder ranks lower than a golfing umbrella.
Eilish blinks. “Right. So, what is it then?”
Sera opens her mouth, and for once, nothing comes out.
The silence gives her away better than an answer.
