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It was funny, the things you could miss until all of a sudden a situation pulled them into sharp, inescapable relief.
Eddie had found himself in such ball-kicking situations far too often over the last year, since his father’s death, and hadn’t particularly appreciated any of the realizations visited upon him regarding such subjects as his predisposition towards violence, his willingness to engage in casual criminality, and his natural flair for all associated tasks.
And now someone had strapped him back up into the metaphorical ball-kicking machine for yet another round.
“The lady doesn’t like having guns pointed at her,” he said, tone even, wondering how what should have been a simple dinner out to discuss the future expansion of their enterprises had gone so thoroughly to utter hell.
The boys who had interrupted were dressed as servers and someone was going to pay for the failure to properly vet new employees, he’d already decided, his trigger finger twitching against his thigh in reflexive anticipation for that upcoming lesson.
“She’s no lady,” said the fucker currently standing behind Susie and pressing the barrel of a pistol against her temple. Yes, someone was going to pay heavily, he was realizing, clarity sweeping through him at this very inopportune time, the man continuing, “and she can get fucked.”
Eddie had made it to his feet when the men jumped them, but that was as far as he’d gotten before they’d got a gun against the side of Susie’s head and drawn him up short, something inside him locked him still and bringing with it so very many unfortunate new revelations that must have been showing at least somewhat on his expression, because Susie tilted her head - just a little - and said, watching him with those sharp blue eyes, “Seems like maybe she can, but it won’t be by you.”
“Shut up, you bitch,” the man snapped, moving, which made no sense, these people had already shown they liked to hear themselves talk too much to just shoot her, so–
The man took the gun away from the side of her head long enough to crack the butt of it against her temple and, after that, things got very clear and started moving very, very fast.
“Are you alright?” Eddie heard himself ask, moments later. He’d decorated the space around their table with bodies, blood, and bullet casings, blood pumping fast through his body though he hadn’t worked up to breathing hard; they hadn’t been very good, these assholes who’d ruined a perfectly good dinner and made him realize all sorts of things about himself.
He looked over and found Susie sitting in her chair, wiping away a few splatters of blood that had ended up on her cheek.
“Why, your grace,” she said, looking at him with those eyes, like she could see right into him, the way she’d been able to since that afternoon after the funeral, blood from men he’d killed for her smeared on her skin. She kept her tone so light, he heard no hints of pain, though that twat had cracked her hard. “I had no idea you cared.”
He kept eye contact, knowing he should have broken it and looked away, just as he’d known he should have looked away in the woods when they killed Henry Collins. He hadn’t then, either, caught in the pull of something he hadn’t recognized that now seemed so painfully clear.
He wanted her. Oh, he’d wanted her for ages, hadn’t he, just papering over it and ignoring it because it was ever so inconvenient to want the woman he’d kept telling himself he was trying to get away from.
He wished he’d been more of a shit liar. At least when it came to lying to himself.
“Yes, you did,” he said, gruff, too exposed and revealed to even effectively play it off and - fucking hell - he found he didn’t even want to play it off, not really. Because he wanted her and he’d always been used to getting what he wanted, he’d grown up entitled and the past year had only made that so much worse.
He’d denied himself things, before, out of some attempt at nobility and a feeling that he ought to not just grab for everything he desired, hungry as a beast. He’d wanted to be good because that was what the world had told him he ought to be. He’d worked at it. But he was ever so much better at being bad, wasn’t he?
So, if he couldn’t - wouldn’t - play it off, what else could he do but call her lie. She knew. Of course she’d known, even before he had. She saw him.
“Yes, I did,” she agreed, after a long, breathless moment spent just watching him. She stood from the chair, finally, right into his space, her lips painted so very red and her stylish shaw - the newest thing off the runways in Milan - still draped so elegantly over her shoulders.
They were a matched pair, them: her a girl from the working classes who had inherited control of an empire, who styled herself finer than any capital L lady he’d ever met and him, some upper class twat who’d found his place right in the mess beside her.
He could only imagine what would have happened to him if she hadn’t found him. What life he’d have led, slowly wasting away, diminished to nothing, but he wouldn’t live that life, now, because she’d fucking saved him from it, despite all his best efforts to stop her.
God, he–
“And yet you failed to mention it,” he said, probing, blood pumping so hot through his veins, not cooled at all from the fight and, in fact, he thought his internal temperature might still be on the rise, just from standing there close to her. The rest of the restaurant was slowly starting to breathe again around them. Someone would call for clean-up soon, he had no doubt, if they hadn’t already. None of that mattered, not really.
“Well I had to let you get there in your own time, didn’t I?” She cocked her head to the side, staying there, so close he could feel the heat off her body. “No use rushing you, is it? You fly off, when people rush you.” She rolled her eyes, exaggerated, over to the nearest body.
Perhaps opening him from hip to hip with the steak knife provided with the main course had been a bit of flying off the handle, but Eddie couldn’t bring himself to regret it. It had gotten harder and harder to remember how to keep pretending to be the man who’d protested so hard against cleaning things up with a bullet and, anyway, “He shouldn’t have touched you if he wanted to keep his fucking intestines all inside.”
He watched her pupils dilate, impossible to miss because she was looking up at him again, standing there so perfectly balanced on impossibly tall heels. “Charmer,” she said, tone lower, smokier; his heart beat faster just hearing it, even before she added, “Well, your grace, shall we off to mine, then?”
He’d have rather swept the remains of their plates off the fucking table and sat her right there on the edge. It was a tall table, a supremely workable height if he just bent his knees a little and then he could get her legs around his waist and her heels digging into his back and–
“Let’s,” he said, instead of tearing his belt open right there; they both had an image to keep up, after all. He offered out his arm. She tucked her hand into the curve of his elbow, his lady, and God, he could make her a fucking Duchess, just like she deserved, the realization going through him clear and sharp as all the rest that had hit him in the past fifteen minutes and he wanted it so fucking much that he only just managed to avoid taking a knee right there.
It could wait. At least until they got to her apartment and sorted out a few other things.