Nikki handed it to him and he held it out like it was plutonium. Within seconds it turned blue. Sunshine was holding her side from laughing so hard. After last night, I’d be happy to stay here all night listening to Tommy talk up a storm just to see her smile.
“Seriously, ladies! How can you possibly think this could replace the real thing?” Tom asked curiously.
“Do you think you could get yours to vibrate and change color?” Nikki asked him through her laughter. Tommy looked her up and down suggestively.
“For you Nik, I could make it stand at attention and dance to the national anthem.” The women erupted as they considered what Tommy’s dancing cock looked like.
Hauling my girl in for a hug. I called over to Kieran. “I think that’s our cue to leave,” I told him. He didn’t hear me. Smiles all gone, he’d locked eyes on the girl who’d just walked out of the bathroom.
“Hey, Marie,” he said softly. “It’s good to see you again.”
“It’s good to see you too,” she replied.
I looked from one to the other and felt like I was missing something. She was the girl who’d designed Em’s wedding dress, and since the wedding she, Em, Nikki, and a few of their university and waitressing friends had spent a lot more time together. Sunshine had been denied friendship for most of her life by that evil fuck Frank so I loved that she was building her own circle of friends, especially with me out training so much.
Then I spotted someone I never expected to see in our flat. “What’s Katrina doing here?” I asked Em. I spoke quietly but Katrina obviously overheard me as she turned to see me looking at her.
“We’re friends now, remember,” Em told me.
“No, we’re not,” Katrina replied. “We just don’t hate each other anymore. Apparently your wife has a bit of a guilt complex about how things went down between us and making me shop for sex toys and drink wine with her is going to make us BFFs,” she told me sarcastically.
“Making you?” I asked her.
“Have you ever said no to your wife when she’s made up her mind about something? She’s being nice to me now, and it’s even more fucking annoying than when she hated me,” Katrina said grumpily. Em turned to me with a grin, and I knew Katrina had a point. My girl had a real bee in her bonnet about her relationship with this chick. She wanted to make things right between them, and she was more stubborn than I was when she got it in her head to do something.
“Well, have fun,” I told them all and bent to kiss Sunshine on the lips.
“Especially you,” I whispered.
Turning to leave, I bumped Kieran to get his attention but what I found made me pause. His eyes followed Marie, who’d gone back into the fray, and I realized that I’d seen the look on his face in the mirror over a year ago. Kieran Doherty, joker, * magnet, corner man, and friend, had found his girl.
Chapter 14
For the first three days of Frank’s trial, it rained endlessly. It was winter in London so it rained pretty much every day. Those three days were different though. The black clouds were foreboding, like the bad weather was an omen for things to come. I was dog tired from training and worried sick the whole time about what was happening in that courtroom. The more of each day that passed, the worse I trained. My feet were slow and sluggish on the bounce, and my punches were hitting the mark but that was probably the best you could say about them.
“What the fuck, Con,” Danny said, throwing the towel into the ring. Kieran and I had been trading punches for an hour. He might as well have been trading fists with Danny for all the fucking good it was doing. The wall that I usually hit around four had struck me the minute I left Em this morning. She was facing Frank without me. The hustle and bustle of the gym, that felt so much like home, was gone because everyone else was either at work or with my girl. Until this trial was over and Frank was behind bars, my Sunshine was gone. Without Em by my side, nothing made sense. Not even in the ring.
“Jesus Christ, Cormac. In weeks, you’re fighting the goddamn world champion, and you’re not ready. You’re nowhere near ready because you can’t get your head on straight.”
“And you can?” I shouted at him. Kieran walked away and left us to it. I never raised my voice at Danny, no one did. But he needed to hear this. “I know this fight is important, and I know it’s what Em wants. Shit, it’s what I want too. But I feel like we’re throwing her to the fucking wolves not being there.”