This stopped him. Rarely did I ask questions—even though lately it seemed like they were coming up more and more regarding my kids.
He sat up taller in his chair. “Yeah, I’m a man.”
I nodded. “Silvio will take your—Sue home. We’ll talk.”
Sue shook her head, refusing to leave, until finally he coaxed her up and they stopped in the hallway, having a private argument.
“You caught him here with her.” It was no question.
“Sì,” I said.
Scarlett blew out an angry breath. “You’re going to talk to him about it.”
“Of course,” I said in Italian.
The fact of the matter was, beside his judgment being disrespectful of us and our home, it was unsafe. There was a reason we left it empty from time to time. Just to see if Nemours would take the bait. I refused to even entertain the idea of Peter being here at the same time as that monster. Nemours wasn’t tall, but he was stocky, and stronger than one would think.
“I don’t like her,” she almost breathed out. “She’s using him.”
“For?”
It took a moment for her to answer me, and I tugged on her hand, pulling her around the chair and setting her on my lap. Finally, after a minute or two, she met my eyes.
“Everything she thinks she’ll never have. If she truly loved him…” She bit her lip, shrugged. “Why not? It’s not the age difference. But she doesn’t love him, Brando. I can feel it.”
With the admission, I heard relief in her voice. She’d felt the truth strongly enough to speak on it. The most important point was this though: if Peter would listen. He didn’t have to, and I doubted that he would. It wasn’t hard to spot a man blinded by his feelings—true or not.
If someone would have warned me about Scarlett—
“I know,” she said, studying my face. “I’m the effing plague. B—ah!”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I said, narrowing my eyes against her wide ones.
“You bit me!”
“Ah,” I said, kissing the side of her breast that my teeth had pinched. “We do worse in bed.”
“Brando…you’re getting me off topic.”
“No, I’m refusing to listen to yourI’m the plaguebullshit. You can’t twist the truth, Scarlett. No matter how fucked up it is to begin with. We all have choices, and we have to live with them if we decide to act and not listen to warnings.”
“I don’t want to break his heart. And I will.”
“You won’t.”
She sat still for a minute, almost like water in a jar, and then she sighed.
“You mean you’ll have Mitch talk to him.”
“Yeah. Unless you want to tell him straight up.”
“I don’t think—” She bit her lip even harder, and I gently freed it. “I don’t want to. Besides, if I do, he’ll run to her even faster, thinking we don’t like her because of her last name. Which, by the way, is no coincidence.”
“He knows.”
“He knows something.”
“You felt that?”
