Dante would take any advantage he could live with. Of course he had other reasons for choosing her than her womb vacancy and knowledge of the club, but even edging in on those thoughts made him almost as tense as she was, and he really couldn’t say them to her out loud. Probably not ever.
He decided not to say anything for the moment. Just holding her was dampening her initial reaction—which seemed to have been terror expressed as rage and which would definitely need a lighter hand. Hold her, calm her down, maybe actually do some walking, then take her home. Might be the best plan he could put together at this point.
“You wanted to get to know me better before you told me the truth of your motive, so you could decide if I was good enough?”
“No. So I could decide how to best present the proposal. But don’t worry about that right now.”
“Do you want to get to know me without marriage? Or was this friend thing all part of your marriage scheme?”
“I genuinely want to get to know you. I wouldn’t want to marry someone I didn’t at least like. I like you, I’m attracted to you. I don’t know if love could ever happen between us—my parents set a standard that’s impossible for me to live up to. But I want a family. And I’m attracted to you like no other. So I thought...people get married for love and it fails fast all the time. But lust could be a good foundation, as long as it also included friendship. It’s like love without all the darker aspects that can get in the way. Jealousy. Possessiveness.”
She started to relax in his arms and he felt her anger fade away. She even leaned against him for a moment, then nodded.
Truth? Was truth working? It might have been a modified version—there was definitely more to it than that—but no part of what he’d said had been a lie or orchestrated for a specific result.
“If you want to know me,” she said after she finally pulled forward into the surf, and turned to face him. “This is the most important thing you can know about me. I have a very hard time trusting people. You play games, and sometimes I understand that it’s fun—it is even probably kind of revealing. If you can get me mad—which you’re really good at—then you learn things about me that I might not otherwise offer up to anyone. But this is part of why I can’t trust you.”
“You can trust me. I wouldn’t set out to hurt you.”
No. He might set out to make her do something he wanted, but he’d try to minimize the harm that might come to her if he could. If. He. Could.
“I already figured out you have trouble trusting, but I don’t know why.” He tried to continue on straightforward.
“Secrets. I never know what you’re thinking, and I don’t know if that’s just because I’m terrible at reading people, or if you’re just really good at fooling people. I’m afraid it’s that you’re really good at fooling people. I know what that looks like in marriage, because that’s who my father was.”
He already knew her parents were dead—she had no family, the nugget of information that had allowed him to envision a mutually beneficial situation between them.
“When did your parents die?” he asked, and tugged her hands a little so that she stepped forward enough that their arms weren’t stretched to the limit between one another. Closer was better for these kinds of conversations. Sad stories were hard enough to share when you didn’t have to shout them over the roar of the ocean.
He watched her face go from pensive and pink from the remains of their red-faced argument to pale grief in an instant. He might’ve been able to distance himself enough from the telling of the story to do it calmly, but she couldn’t.
“Was it recently?”
She shook her head and lowered her gaze, first to his shoulders then his chest, then off to the side of him. “My father shot himself in the head when I was eleven, after lying to everyone for years. His business was in a shambles, afloat because of unethical business practices and over-extended credit.”
He wanted her to look him in the eye. The past week he’d spent his time thinking that her devotion to unwavering honesty was quaint and sweet, but could see that it came from a much darker place now. Nothing but looking her in the eye would allow him to see how much.
Her hands still in his, he stepped in again until they were inches apart, and lifted her hands to his chest to rest against him. It made her look up at him, and when he let go of her hands to put his arms around her, she left them there.
Shot in the head. There was a rawness in her eyes that let him know she’d seen it.
Redirect. Help her gain a little distance. “He killed himself over a failing business?”
“That was part of it. He also genuinely loved my mother, I think. But he’d started self-medicating his business worries with alcohol, stopped spending time at home, and she sought affection from another man. Men, actually. There were a couple. He found out, they fought about it, and after she went to bed he shot himself in the downstairs study.”
Downstairs study. She’d been born to privilege, even if it was a kind of fake privilege, wool pulled over their eyes.
He should stop asking her for details, but now that she was actually letting him see her, letting him inside, he couldn’t stop. It would be worse if he made her go through this twice in order to find out how to convince her to marry him. “Who found him?”
“We both found him. We heard the shot. We both got up, she stopped me at the stairs and told me to go hide, but my dad hadn’t come running from the room with her. I knew he wasn’t upstairs, and it was so late that he had to be in the house.” And the horror had never left her. “I waited for her to make it down the stairs before giving in and tearing after her. I got to the office while she was still screaming.”
It was in him to ask her about the gun, to know exactly how graphic a death it had been, but that look in her eyes told him what he needed to know. Small-caliber bullets could kill as effectively as shotguns, but big guns left the most horrific scenes, and they left a mark on anyone who saw them. His own father had survived a small-caliber shot to the head for hours before he died, but he’d only had a small hole in his head, he’d still looked normal but for that small red hole. But a shotgun...
Don’t make her say it. He closed his arms until she stepped in enough to rest her cheek on his shoulder, her arms folded against his chest, not hugging back but accepting the comfort he offered.
Change the subject. “How did your mom pass away?”
Losing both his parents at the same time had been horrible, but having two tragic traumatic death memories to deal with? It was too much. He could only pray because he couldn’t actually hold her any closer.
The wound he dug at helped him understand her and her aversion to secrets, but there was nothing here he could fix.
“Heart attack. It was quick.”
“And sudden?” Still tragic, but less devastating.
“Not really. She’d been feeling unwell for a while, but wouldn’t go to the doctor. And she smoked like a chimney. One morning she got up, and the rapid increase of blood pressure triggered a heart attack.”
“Did you find her too?”
Still tucked against him, she shook her head. “She called 911 but died before they reached her. I was at school and the police came to tell me. I didn’t have to find her. Her death was easier, and I’d learned very well how to adapt by then. Dropped out of the nursing program, signed up for the short surgical tech program, and after getting a job with that I went back to my RN program.”
She’d learned to adapt because even from a very young age her family had let her down. He’d had a hard path, but he’d never truly walked it alone.
“I’m not like your father,” he said suddenly, sliding his hands to her shoulders so he could push her back just far enough to look him in the eye. In that instant he knew that was the biggest obstacle to his proposal, and he needed her to unde
rstand the difference.
This wasn’t something he could charm his way past, it was a real, honest part of who she was—it came from too dark a place to be a noble whim.
“Lies and secrets.” She whispered the words, and the ocean stole the sound from him, but he saw the words on her lips.
He shook his head. “It’s not the same.”
“Lies are lies.”
This particular subject required the respect of honesty. Even if she claimed to never know when he was lying, she still responded as if she knew. That was enough.
“I understand why he lied to you and your mother about his failing business. He thought he was protecting you from it. But what I don’t understand is why he didn’t do anything to fix the situation, and I don’t understand how he could abandon you both. I would never do that.”
“It’s easy to say that.”
“I haven’t always been an upstanding citizen. Okay? When we were trying to stay together—not let Alejandro and Santi go into the system—I learned that double life that you hate. We needed money and I brought it in however I had to. I did things that I will...should forever be ashamed of. But I did them because I was taking care of people I loved and who depended on me. That’s how we’re different.”
“They let you do immoral things?”
“They didn’t know. I could always come up with a story. That’s what it is to be a man: you take care of your family. My father was dead, and our family needed someone to step up. Rafe stepped up too, just differently.” He didn’t want to get off on that tangent—she didn’t need to know all those illegal and immoral things he’d done in the name of taking care of his loved ones, she just had to understand that he was only like her father at a glance. “I understand that your family let you down from the very beginning. That’s not the Valentino way.”
Lise stepped away from him. He could’ve hauled her back against him, kept her there, with the fruity fragrant scent of her hair blending in with his every breath, but he couldn’t force his way through this.
She looked him full in the eye, and though she looked a little worried now, at least she didn’t look defeated anymore.
“Please don’t get mad,” she said, hand up in front of her, so wary of him minutes after she’d nuzzled into him like she needed him, like she trusted him.
“I won’t get mad.” He said the words she needed and waited, letting his arms fall lax at his sides.
“I know you mean that in the best possible way, but it places you above your brothers. It assumes that they need protecting from things still.”
“They don’t need to carry the weight of my sins, that’s why I don’t tell them now.”
“The club is a sin?”
“The club...” He didn’t want to get into that, the night had already been heavy enough. “It’s tied to my old ways.”
“Are you in the Mafia or something?” she asked suddenly, and Dante almost laughed.
“I am not now, nor have I ever been affiliated with organized crime. If anything, I was the organized one. Occasionally, someone from my past looks me up at The Inferno. I try my best to keep those people from circles where it could get back to my family. All that is beside the point. The point is this: whether or not you agree with my reasons for not being open about everything, you have to acknowledge that I don’t do it to hurt the people I love.”
“That’s true. I can accept that you think that you have to protect them—even if they’re grown men—but you have to acknowledge that you’ll do the same thing with your wife. Even if I was willing to take that kind of a risk on someone to get married, I couldn’t take it with you.”
“You already walk equally well with me in both worlds. You’re unique but also interesting. My family would like you.” He could feel the thread of this slipping away from him.
“Still, you’re not talking about dating, you’re going straight from one dinner to the altar!”
“I’m not suggesting that you immediately fall in love with me. You’re rushing headlong into pregnancy, can you fault me for acknowledging there’s a ticking clock on this? You’re not onboard yet, but I’m certain. We get along very well, and we have more chemistry than I’ve ever felt with anyone. We also have a common goal: to have a family, raise good kids, have a nice, safe life.”
One hand lifted and she rubbed at her forehead, then paced past him, then around, and as she spun he realized she was circling, moving to move, and if he kept following her, it might end in his first case of motion sickness ever, and very possibly the world’s worst proposal ending: vomiting on her wouldn’t help her come round.
He planted his feet and waited for her to come around again.
“I understand, but it’s too much too soon.”
“Are you willing to delay getting pregnant to give it a chance?”
“I don’t know, Dante. My first instinct is to say no. If you can’t understand that after all that I told you, my instinct is right.” She stopped in front of him and let her eyes connect with his. “If it makes you feel better, I haven’t picked the donor I want yet. I couldn’t even tell you what delaying would be since I haven’t got a set schedule.”
That was something to wrest from this evening.
She’d upset all his plans. Would she even if he planned, then planned the exact thing in reverse?
With one hand, she gestured behind them at the house—they had ostensibly gone to the beach to have a walk, but they’d taken root at the shoreline and proceeded to argue and open old wounds with one another.
“I’m tired. Really tired. I need to go home.”
CHAPTER SIX
LISE MADE A conscious decision to go into work somewhat later than her usual half an hour early, precisely because she didn’t want to be cornered by Dante—which she really didn’t think he’d do soon, but if they were alone, she’d see the question in his eyes. And the only answer she had for him wouldn’t please him at all. That was, if she could even get him to accept rejection.
The truth was, shutting down the idea entirely was equal parts relief and a kind of stomach-plummeting queasy feeling. She knew it wasn’t the right decision to say yes—there was no way for her to trust him right now, no matter how convincing he’d been at explaining the difference between his and her father’s secrets. She couldn’t say yes until she could tell whether or not he was for real or if he was just playing with her.
Even with the untrustworthy issues, she wished she could just say yes. He’d put his arms around her and talked her through the worst night of her life, and she’d felt safe. When they’d been fighting and stomping around on the beach, she’d still felt mostly safe. Or at least physically safe. It was the emotional safety that she couldn’t reconcile. He could be hiding who he really was. People hid the bad parts of themselves and she couldn’t spot a good liar.
And she couldn’t decide if her and her mother’s lives would’ve been better if her father had never been with them. There had been no recovering after that, it had just been getting through each day, learning to survive. She needed security for her future babies, even if she could weather a lot on her own now.
Tugging the hem of her new scrub top straight, she rushed into the scrub bay off the morning’s scheduled OR. As with every week, she’d be in surgery with Dante on Monday and Thursday, with her midweek spent with other surgeons. So she’d have a little time to come up with a way to say no to him and to give it enough time that it looked like she’d given the request the serious consideration it deserved. It hadn’t been easy for him to ask, and it wouldn’t be easy to say no.
He’d said he liked her, and she definitely liked him, almost as much as she regularly wanted to stomp on his toes.
When she stepped in, Dante was still at the scrub bay, but he turned and immediately met her gaze, stopping all movement where he’d be
en busily working his fingernails over with a scrub brush.
She smiled, tried to feign normalcy—whatever that was. “Good morning, Dr. Valentino.”
“Bradshaw,” he returned, as calm and focused in the OR as ever. She still had time to handle this. “We’ve had a change in patient and procedure this morning.”
“How did that happen? What are we doing?”
“We’re going to try and stabilize an aneurysm in a patient who came in through the ER early this morning, and then the plan is to bring our scheduled non-emergency patient in directly after.”
She grabbed a brush, unwrapped it and stepped to the sink to start scrubbing in, while trying to ignore the man at her side. Impossible task. Every inch of her body seemed to go on high alert when she was near him and it didn’t even go away when they fought. When he looked at her, she felt it, no matter how fleeting a glance.
Dante waited for the room to clear except for them before focusing on her. “It’s going to be a long day, and since you’re assisting me, it’ll put more stress on you than the rest of the team. If you get to where you feel you’re not giving your best, I want you to tell me. We’ll swap someone in for you.”
“You doubt my endurance?” Lise asked, tilting her head at him.
“Everyone gets tired sometimes. Especially if they’re mentally preoccupied with something else.”
“I’m not going to be preoccupied, Doctor, but to put your mind at ease—” because she could put his mind at ease about this, if nothing else “—that’s how I’d always work. My ego wouldn’t prevent me from telling you if I wasn’t able to give my best. You have my word on that.”
He looked at her a little longer than was necessary, but nodded. “I appreciate being put at ease. It’s always a good thing.”
There it was, the first allusion to their personal situation. But, ever the professional, that’s all he said about it, and then he was heading for the operating room.
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