Free SEAN: A Mafia Romance (The Callahans Book 3) by Glenna Sinclair

other, and then he ended it when she told him she was pregnant. I think she got pregnant on purpose in hopes that he’d leave his wife, but it didn’t happen.”
    “Have you ever met him?”
    “Yeah. He’s been in and out of my life since I was fifteen. More so lately for reasons I still don’t understand.” She was quiet for a minute. “My father’s not a good person. He’s involved in criminal activity, and he’s conceited enough not to try to hide it.”
    I nodded. She had Jack nailed perfectly.
    “Does it worry you?”
    “That he’ll be arrested someday?” She thought about it for a minute. “Not really. No one knows we’re related, so it wouldn’t blow back on me. And our relationship is just bizarre. I’m not even sure how I feel about him to be completely honest. He clearly didn’t want me, and he’s only coming around now because his other kids don’t want to have anything to do with him.”
    “I wouldn’t think that would be true.”
    “It is. You don’t know this guy. He’s a real piece of work.”
    I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her against my chest. I wondered what she would say if she knew what I did in my spare time. I wondered if she would send me packing if she knew the reason she met me was because Jack sent me to watch over her.
    That was the thing about Pops’ involvement in Jack’s business. The lies were everywhere, plugging up even the best things in every life they touched.
    I kissed her neck. “Everyone has secrets, Delaney.”
    “Yeah, but not every secret has the power to destroy everything it touches.”
    She lay there against my chest for a long moment, then she turned and crawled into my lap. We kissed, moving into a dance that was already familiar to us both. I ran my hand up her bare back, loving the feel of each and every bump of her spine. And then my hand wandered down, sliding under her panties. She sighed as I touched her, as I touched that moist place that had already brought such pleasure into my life. I couldn’t seem to get enough of her. I’d never wanted a woman as completely as I wanted her, as often as I wanted her.
    I knew she was aware of my arousal. She was moving her hips against me in a way that told me she was more than aware. I was thinking about bending her over the couch, thinking of how good it would feel to bury myself inside of her again, to experience that oblivion that was such a relief after nearly six years of guilt and self-hatred and this burden I hadn’t been able to put down. But then her phone began to go off, the same tone announcing itself over and over again until she couldn’t ignore it any longer.
    “Fuck!” she suddenly cried, the foul word falling from her lips like a ton of bricks landing in my lap, a word I had yet to hear fall from her beautiful lips.
    “What? Just ignore it.”
    She shook her head, pulling away from my touch.
    “It’s him.”
    “Who?”
    She got up and padded across the room, taking the phone from her bag where she’d abandoned it the day before when we came in from the fish market. Her face grew steadily pale as she studied the screen of the phone, her eyes widening with something like fear.
    I got up and slipped the phone from her hands. Even as I began to read the messages, more came across the screen. They were increasingly threatening, beginning with things like: I know you have someone in there with you to You better enjoy yourself because it’s the last time you’ll ever feel pleasure.
    And not all of them were quite that pleasant.
    “These are from Claude?”
    She nodded. “It started the week after I broke up with him, these threatening texts that came every morning in place of the morning greetings he sent me when we were together. They stopped for a little while after that night you stopped him in the parking lot outside the gym. But they began again Friday morning.”
    “And now this.”
    She nodded, gesturing weakly with one hand as she walked back to the couch,