His Mafia Queen

Confession

GABRIEL

Hearing Catherine's name on Riley's lips when we're about to fuck is like being doused with a bucket of ice.

I pause for a second so I can collect my thoughts. As a younger man, this kind of question would've made me angry, possibly sent me into a rage. But I've matured, and I like Riley.

A lot.

She's younger than me by about ten years — twenty three to my thirty three — and I suspect her question was asked out of jealousy. Not out of actual malice.

But it does remind me that she's a journalist, someone who could complicate my life immensely.

I stroke her cheek with my thumb. "Are you jealous?"

She rears back and makes a little snorting noise. "Pfft. Hardly. I have no claim on you."

"Then why are you asking? And how do you know her name?" Part of me wants to hear her say that she is jealous, that she wants to monopolize my time and my mind.

Riley licks her bottom lip. "Because I want to know about her. About why she disappeared."

I slowly pull my hand from her face. "How the fuck do you know her name? I never mentioned her."

Riley's eyes widen, probably because my tone is more of an angry growl than my usual, amused and measured cadence.

"I read an old newspaper article about her. About her disappearance. Your name was in it, and it said you were her friend and the last person who saw her."

"Goddammit." I move so I'm sitting with my back to the headboard.

Riley wraps the robe tight around her body. "You thought that a journalist wouldn't put two and two together and do some research?"

"But how did you know to look for Catherine?"

"You'd told me Donnie's last name. Then someone at the paper mentioned Catherine, a person who's been here her whole life and knows all the gossip. It was easy to look in the paper's archives with that information."

I blow out a breath, allowing my cheeks to puff out. "Well, congratulations. You're the first woman to ask about Catherine."

Riley scrunches her nose. "Look, there's no need to be sarcastic. You should be glad I asked about her, and didn't just jump to conclusions and think you unalived her or something."

"Unalived?"

"Another word for killed."

"You kids."

She snort-laughs. "Like you're so much older than me. Jeez."

Hearing her laugh melts a little of the ice that's formed around my heart, and I grab her forearm and gently pull her toward me. She acquiesces and leans against my torso, and I sling an arm around her while I ponder how much I should explain.

It's not that I don't want to talk about my friendship with Catherine — I'm fine with doing that. But answering questions about her disappearance unearths more baggage than the belly of a 747.

"You know what I do." This isn't a question, but a statement.

"Yes. I mean, sort of. I don't know everything."

"Obviously."

She turns to face me, staring at me like she's expecting me to go on. Her eyes are wide and trusting. Which scares the hell out of me, because I want to trust her. But I don't say anything.

"Look," she says, leaning toward me. "Since we started to, uh, get intimate, I've tried to ignore your business interests. That's difficult enough, but when I saw the article about Catherine, I couldn't get it out of my mind."