The position, and her life, was perfect in almost every way. Her brothers, Ian and Rory, worked close enough to stop by once or twice a week for dinner, and her parents only lived two hours away. She loved the estate itself: the great house with north and south parlors; a ballroom, dining room, kitchen, six bedrooms, and servants’ quarters; a barn/carriage, pool house, and aviary. She loved exploring the boxes of old letters and journals in the attic and occasionally creating a new exhibit in the entry hall based on her findings. She loved the autonomy. She loved her quiet little cottage. She loved her quiet little life…

  …mostly.

  Her hands were pruning in the sink, and she blinked, rinsing the soup pot and placing it in the drying rack.

  Yes, she did. She mostly loved her quiet, solitary life.

  Except…

  Except lately, when Rory and his girlfriend, Brittany, came to family dinner together, she felt an ache inside—deep inside, where uncomfortable truths can mostly stay secret and unacknowledged. Only once did she force herself to look at said ache, and what she saw was a young woman growing older, growing older, growing older, growing old…all alone, hidden away from the world. It made her feel something that Tierney didn’t feel very often: it made her feel lonely.

  For what? A partner, maybe. Someone to love and love her back. Children, perhaps. She didn’t know, really. She just knew the feeling, and she knew she didn’t like it.

  Suddenly her cell phone came to life in her hip pocket, dinging and buzzing, which told her that AT&T had been able to repair the tower and restore service.

  She pulled the plug from the sink to drain the soapy water and dried her hands on a dishcloth before taking out her phone.

  First, she checked out her text messages, starting with the text group that included her and her two brothers.

  RORY: Tier, you okay? Bad storm out there tonight.

  IAN: She’s fine. Tough as nails, our girl.

  IAN (less than a minute later): You okay, Tier?

  RORY: I thought you said she was tough as nails.

  IAN: You don’t have a monopoly on worrying about her, boyo.

  RORY: If you need us, shout.

  IAN: She’s probably asleep.

  RORY: I’ll check on you in the AM.

  Shoot. It was almost noon and the last thing Tierney needed was for one of her brothers to come by and find a strange car in her driveway and a tattooed stranger in her bed. Lord. Her fingers flew over the keys.

  TIERNEY: Power and cell service got wiped out. Back on now. Museum closed for today. All is well.

  RORY: Phew. You had us worried. Ian’s on his way over.

  Tierney’s eyes widened as she gasped. Shit. Shit. Shit. Ian was coming over? Her brother Ian was more playful than their other brother, Rory, but he was also bigger. And there was no way he’d be okay with a strange man in his sister’s bed.

  Racing through the living room, she took the stairs two at a time, turning left down the hallway and beelining into her room, where she found Burr flat on his back, the tray of mostly uneaten soup beside him.

  “I need your car keys,” she said.

  “Why?” he asked, opening one eye.

  “My brother Ian’s on his way over. I need to put your car in the garage.”

  “Why?” he asked again.

  “Because he’ll beat you to kingdom come if he finds you in my bed,” she answered.

  “Nothing happened between us,” he said, his eyes slipping to her breasts and lingering for a moment before sliding back up.

  She ignored the sudden and surprising warmth in her belly. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Pfft. I can hold my own against your brother.”

  “You don’t know my brother,” she said.

  “I don’t need to,” he said, cocky despite his injuries. “I know myself.”

  “You have a mangled shoulder and a fever. You’re weak, Burr. Think again.”

  He looked supremely annoyed over her use of the word “weak,” but reached for the keys and threw them her way. They clattered to the floor.

  Tierney reached down and grabbed them. She ran downstairs, opened the garage, backed her car into the driveway, then pulled Burr’s into the garage. Just as the garage door hit the ground, Ian pulled up.

  She took a deep, calming breath and waved at him. “Hi!”

  “Hey, Tier,” said Ian, parking the car and sliding out of the driver’s seat. “Came by to check on you.”

  “I just got all of your texts.”

  “Power went out?” asked her brother, giving her a giant bear hug.

  Her brother, Ian, had been sober since April 1st—132 days as of today—and he was mostly back to his hearty self. At six feet three inches tall and a little over two hundred pounds, Ian was muscular and burly, his face covered with a dark beard and his long, unruly black hair back in a man bun, both of which were at odds with the conservative cut of his dark-green Summerhaven staff polo shirt. But no matter how many times Rory asked him to shave his beard and cut his hair, Ian refused.

  Tierney held on to him for an extra beat, remembering how she’d felt last night when she’d briefly wondered if Burr would hurt her and if she’d ever see her brothers again.

  “Hey,” he said, “you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she sighed, finally releasing him. “I’m just…it was bad storm last night.”

  “I’ll say. Took out a couple of trees at camp. Rory and I were up at dawn with the axes and chainsaws.”

  “What group arrived yesterday?” she asked.

  Summerhaven’s camp schedule ran from Monday to Sunday, and since today was Tuesday, a new group was just settling in.

  Ian waggled his eyebrows. “It’s single parents’ week. Lots of hot looks across the oatmeal this morning. I imagine more than one woman was ‘comforted’ by a new friend during the storm.”

  Tierney snickered. “Better watch it, or you’ll be snagged by a cute divorcée.”

  “Not a chance, little sister.”

  Although technically Tierney was older than Ian by a few minutes—she’d come out between her two brothers—they always called her their “little” sister because she was so much smaller than they. At five feet four inches tall, she was almost a foot shorter than Ian.

  “Oh, no?”

  “Nah,” said Ian, who used to be a notorious player. “At the risk of sounding like a self-important, new age asswipe, I’m still working on me.”

  “Very wise,” she said, nodding her approval. There was plenty of time for Ian to meet someone once he was confident in his sobriety, and frankly, Tierney was vehemently against anything—or anyone—who might impede or derail Ian’s progress.

  Ian gestured to her house with his chin. “Aren’t you going to invite me in for a cuppa?”

  Stay calm. Stay calm. “Um…actually, I was on my way up the hill to see how AT&T was getting along.”

  “Ah,” said Ian, nodding in the direction of the barn. “Sure. Right. I’ll come along. Mind some company? I have thirty minutes before I need to be back.”

  “That’d be fine,” said Tierney, using the keys in her hand to unlock her car. Except…the keys in her hand weren’t the keys to her car, so despite three attempts, nothing unlocked.

  Ian looked down at them. “Um. Whose keys are those?”

  Shit! They’re Burr’s—uh, Suzanne’s.

  “These? Oh! Right! Ha. These are…I mean, I found them…in the road. No. Not in the road. Um, up at the barn? Right? Probably. Yup. The barn. I guess someone left them there. Yesterday or…sometime. Tourist probably.”

  Ian gave her a once-over. “And why do you have them now?”

  “I must have…um, dropped them, you know, when I found them. I brought them back here, and then I must have dropped them in the mud, and I just—well, I just found them again when you pulled up.”

  “But they’re not muddy,” he said slowly.

  “Oh! Right. I rinsed them off…you know, in the, um, the spigot? Behind the garage. Scrubbed them—um, uh, off.”

  “Tierney?” said Ian, rubbing his beard with his thumb and forefinger as he narrowed his eyes at her.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know that weird, spazzy thing you do when you’re lying?”

  She stared at him, refusing to answer.

  “You’re doing it now.”

  “What?” she asked, slapping him lightly on the forearm. “You’re crazy! I don’t have anything to…I mean—stop, uh, teasing me. I’m just going to get my…yeah. I’ll be back, um, in a sec!”

  Hurrying inside, she took her car keys off the hook next to the front door and hung up the ones in her hand. Standing against the front door for a second, she caught her breath.

  You’d best get a hold of yourself, she thought, flicking her eyes up to the ceiling, or you’re going to let the cat—erm, lion—out of the bag.

  She turned around and headed right back outside, determined to stop acting like a freak. But damn it, Tierney wasn’t good at lying. Never had been. Never would be. Especially not to her brothers, with whom she was exceptionally close.

  “Got ’em!” she said, holding up her keys and pressing the button that unlocked the doors of her Jeep SUV. “Hop in.”

  Ian sat down in the passenger seat beside her, and Tierney turned the key in the ignition before glancing at her brother. “See? My keys. All mine. Only mine. Ready to go?”

  “Something’s up with you,” said Ian, staring at her thoughtfully, his eyes slightly narrowed.

  “Nope,” she insisted. “Nothing. Nada. Nil. Niet.”

  “Humph,” grunted Ian as she pulled out of the driveway. “Something’s definitely up with you.”

  ***

  Damn. Tierney Haven’s brother is big, thought Burr, watching the brother and sister talk in the driveway from the upstairs window. Thick-big. Like an Irish boxer. All muscled meat on a massive, sturdy bear-like frame. Good man to have your back in a brawl.

  As Tierney’s car pulled out of the driveway, he shuffled back to her bed. A stain about the size of a baseball sullied her snow-white pillow in varying degrees of red and brown. Fuck. He reached over his shoulder and felt the dressing she must have put over the exit wound. The skin around it was hot. And it hurt. It fucking burned like crazy.

  The jeans he wore slung around his hips were still damp from last night’s rain. He flicked open the button fly and slid them down his legs, kicking them off in a heap and easing his naked body back into Tierney’s bed. He sighed as he found a comfortable position on his good side, the scent from her pillow rising up around him as he rested his head with a long sigh.

  Who was this girl anyway?

  She had a backbone, that was for sure—she was all of five foot and change, but she’d stood there telling him she wasn’t scared of him, and he could go fuck himself for asking her to smile, and they could take a nice field trip to the po-po if he didn’t stop harping on her safety. He chuckled softly, thinking about the sharpness in her green eyes; she didn’t miss a trick, this one. Her tongue was as barbed as any Irish granny’s, and she wielded it like a weapon.

  Brothers, he thought.

  Growing up with two brothers the same age meant learning how to hold your own. And if her other brother was as big as that monster, Ian, holding her own physically wouldn’t have been an option. It was verbal or nothing.

  He sighed, his smile disappearing as he thought about Suzanne. He wondered how she was doing. Was she in a coma? Unconscious? How was Bridey? Jesus, it would scar the kid for life, remembering her mother crumpling to the ground like that, men shooting it out on her front lawn. Never in his wildest dreams would he have taken the assignment if he knew the price his sister would pay last night.

  Burr and Suzanne had grown up in Dorchester, the kids of Frank O’Leary, a detective with the Boston Police Department, and Sheila Sullivan, an elementary school teacher. Their childhood neighborhood, where Suzy still lived, was chock-full of Carrolls and Farrells, Murphys, Shanahans, Sheas, Murrays, Doyles, and MacGuires. Mass on Saturday nights. Big supper at two o’clock on Sundays. CCD on Wednesday evenings. St. Paddy’s parades every March. Celtic Camp over in Canton, Massachusetts, for three weeks every summer, and a visit back to Limerick, in the “old country,” every three or four years to visit extended family.

  Like his father and uncle, Burr had applied to the police academy after receiving his BA from UMass in criminology and working part time for campus police during his junior and senior years. He’d been on the force for three years before he’d been called into Captain Donnelley’s office at the District C-6 “Southie” station where he worked.

  “O’Leary,” said the captain, “you ever think about going undercover?”

  “I’m open to it, sir.”

  “You have a good record. You come from a good family of cops. You know Dorchester like the back of your hand, but you’ve been stationed here in Southie. You’d be on loan to Dorchester.”

  “Okay.” He nodded for the captain to keep going.

  “You ever heard of the Killeen Gang?”

  “Sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “It was a south Boston gang started by three brothers in the 1950s. Mostly active in the ’60s and ’70s. Bookmaking, loan-sharking. The occasional body would show up bloodied, or dead, when a debt wasn’t paid. Fought it out with the Mullens and the White Hill mob. Whitey Bulgar ran with them for a while.”

  “Whitey Bulgar. Sure,” said Burr. “I saw the movie with Johnny Depp.”

  “Killeen was defunct by the 1990s, mostly taken over by White Hill.”

  “Okay…”

  “But now they’re back. Started up again in Dorchester over the last couple of years by two brothers named Shanahan—Killeens on their mother’s side. Called their crew the ‘New Killeens.’ They’re getting stronger. We need someone on the inside to start collecting evidence, so we can make a case against them.”

  “Me?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “How?”

  “We’ll plant drugs in your car. Stage a bust. You’ll leave the department in disgrace and reach out to Sean Shanahan, the boss. Tell him you want in. Tell him you want revenge against BPD.”

  “And then?”

  “We’ll pair you with Raymond Cooper. You know him?”

  Burr had nodded. Sure, he knew Ray Cooper—they both went to St. Gregory’s Parish. They’d been altar boys together there.

  “You’ll meet up with Ray once a week, give him photos, gang plans, names—whatever you get. He’ll make sure it all goes to Sergeant Seth Gunn, your gang task unit contact. I’ll keep an eye on things from this end too. Eventually, it’ll be enough to take them down and then you can return to Southie.”

  “How long is ‘eventually’?”

  “Three years,” said Donnelley. “Maybe four.”

  As a single, twenty-four-year-old man, the idea had appealed to Burr. It sounded exciting, and dangerous—a chance to flex his muscles and make a big difference in the city he loved. It would also fast-track his dream of making detective before thirty. If he could be instrumental in bringing down the New Killeens, he could probably write his own ticket later.

  “So? What do you think?” asked Donnelley.

  Burr only had one major misgiving.

  “My folks and Suzy. They’ll know that I didn’t really get busted for drugs, right? I’ll be able to tell them the truth?”

  The captain had sucked in a deep breath and grimaced. “Sorry, O’Leary. For the story to fly, you’re going to need to be disgraced, and your family’s going to need to have a genuine reaction to it. They’re known in Dorchester; their reactions to you will go a long way in cementing how you’re viewed. I need Shanahan to really believe that you’re not a good O’Leary anymore. Not in any way that matters.” He’d paused, looking Burr in the eyes. “I’ll be honest. It’ll be safer for your family that way too.”

  It was then that Burr had understood the full scope of the job in front of him. He’d be “busted” for drug use, fired from his job, get a shithole apartment somewhere in Dorchester, “run into” one of Shanahan’s guys, and wheedle his way into the gang.

  And he wouldn’t be able to make contact with his family for the next three or four years. It was a big price to pay. A huge price…especially because Suzy was pregnant with her first kid, and Burr wanted to be an uncle more than anything else in the world.

  “I’m not gonna lie,” said Donnelley, no doubt translating the play of emotions on Burr’s face, “this is gonna be a tough job, O’Leary. You’ll see some pretty fucked up things. It’ll be dangerous. You may have to compromise your own morals now and then. But…you could also be the man who brought down Sean and Declan Shanahan and kept the New Killeens from rising to power again.”

  Burr had nodded in understanding. “Can I have a day or two? To think it over?”

  Donnelley had nodded, but the reality was that Burr’s decision was already made before he left the captain’s office. He had joined the force to make a difference, and if it came in the form of going undercover to bring down the New Killeens, so be it. When he was standing on a stage receiving a medal from the mayor of Boston, his parents and sister would understand.

  Except, fast forward three years, and Suzanne was lying in a hospital bed. Bridey, whom Burr had never actually met in person, was probably scarred for life. His parents, who hadn’t spoken to him for years, no doubt blamed him. What a fucking mess. He knew what he’d signed on for, but he hated what had happened. And more than anything, he wanted out.

  “How’re you doing?”

  Tierney Haven’s soft voice broke through the misery of Burr’s thoughts, and he looked up to see her standing beside his bed.

  He cleared his throat. “You weren’t lying. Your brother’s a big guy.”

  “You look awful.”

  “Aw,” he said, “stop flirting with me.”

  She shook her head at him, her hand landing on his forehead. “You’re burning up. Burr, you need a doctor.”

  “No,” he said. “No doctor. Just…if you don’t mind, maybe you could disinfect it and rebandage it.”

  “You need antibiotics,” she said, opening her bureau drawer and withdrawing a bottle of ibuprofen. She poured two into her hand and placed them beside his glass of water on the bedside table. “You need stitches.”