Page 130 of Mafia Billionaire's Surprise Baby

I don’t want to be here. Not when I have so much at stake.

Not when I have a fucking baby inside of me.

“Well then. You’re looking a little less green around the gills,” Kieran murmurs.

“Why aren’t you dead?”

“That’s what you’re worried about?”

“I’d say being kidnapped by a dead man is pretty high on my list of worries, yes.”

He chuckles. “Jesus came back from the dead too, or so I hear.”

“Surprised you can say that without it burning your mouth.”

“Oh come now, Gia Rossi. I’m as God-fearing as the next Catholic.”

“Again. Waiting for the smiting to begin,” I say back.

He doesn’t respond. I move to be in a sitting position, so that I can see him. I still can’t really believe that Kieran is alive.

It’s impossible.

I take a deep breath, my eyes watering against the light in the boat.

Determined, I look at him.

I blink. “I’m still not sure, exactly, why you aren’t a maggot-filled bag of rotting flesh.”

He smiles.

But there’s a darkness there. Something bitter and vile.

My skin prickles.

“Look closer then, spitfire,” he murmurs, coming near. “See what you can, while you can.”

That sounds more than a little ominous.

Up close, he’s Kieran.

He has to be.

He has the same flashing green eyes, the same coal-dark hair that gets into his eyes because it’s just slightly too long.

The same pale skin that on a woman would look elegant, but on a man looks stark.

The hollows under his eyes are pronounced, like he’s been unwell, and the tattoos on his neck…

I freeze.

The tattoos on his neck are wrong.

Kieran, or the Kieran that I remember dying of a knife wound to the gut, was covered in thick, brutal-looking tattoos. Teeth and talons and the usual animal metaphors.

This Kieran has tattoos, but they’re not the same.

These ones are elegant.