Her head turned. Her eyes found his, and whatever was in his face made the color climb from her throat into her face with the total transparency of a person who had never once in her life managed to hide what she was feeling, and the sight of it hit him with the blunt, inconvenient force of a thing he had no defense against.
He kissed her temple.
Turned back to the window.
The Marquez family,he said.There is a dinner arranged for next week.He kept his voice even.I would like you to come.
Her head turned toward him.Of course. Should I read a briefing file?
Yes. I'll have one prepared.
A beat.
Olivio.Her voice had shifted, softer but more certain. The voice she used when she had decided something and was choosing to say it despite the uncertainty.Are you sure nothing's wrong?
He was quiet for a moment.
I'm sure.
She didn't believe him. He could tell by the silence. But she didn't press it, and the not pressing was somehow worse than pressing would have been, because it meant she trusted him enough to leave a door open and wait.
He didn't deserve it.
He kept that thought at arm's length, where it couldn't do what it was trying to do.
The family dinner had been Selena's idea, naturally. She had produced the suggestion over the phone in her way, not as a request, not as a plan, but as a fact that had apparently already been organized, the implication being that Olivio was welcome to have an opinion about it after the invitations had gone out.
He had not had an opinion about it after the invitations had gone out.
The evening had gone better than he'd had any right to expect, and that was the problem. Chelsea had walked into a room full of Cannizzaros and Kontideses and had done what she apparently did everywhere, made people feel that they were the most interesting thing in the room, through the genuine and unperformable mechanism of actually finding them interesting. She'd asked Miguel about the rose garden in Sicily and had listened to the answer with the focus of someone who understood that a man talking about his dead wife's roses was not really talking about roses. She'd made Sienah laugh twice in the first hour, which was notable because Sienah's laugh was not cheaply earned. Shayla Kontides had taken one look at Chelsea during the pre-dinner drinks and then looked at Olivio with an expression that communicated, with the efficiency of a woman who had survived her own complicated marriage, that she knew exactly what was happening and was not going to say so.
He'd spent the evening with his hand at Chelsea's waist and his jaw set, because the alternative, letting his hand find her the way it kept trying to find her, settling against her with the possessiveness his body had apparently decided was simply how it operated now, would have been visible to every person in the room.
Miguel had found him first.
Olivio had gone to refill his glass, and his father was already at the bar, as if he'd been waiting for exactly this moment, the way Miguel waited for everything: patiently, strategically, with the quiet certainty of a man who had learned that timing was the only variable that mattered.
You knew.Olivio kept his voice low.About the proxy marriage. About her.
Miguel poured slowly. He did not look surprised by the question, which was itself an answer.
Edgar told me before he told you.
How long?
Long enough.
And you said nothing. Did nothing.
His father set down the bottle. The movement was exact, the way everything Miguel did was exact, but his eyes, when they met Olivio's, held something that was not control. It was the look of a man who had once slid a list of eight names across a desk and told his eldest son to choose a wife or lose his sponsorship, and had spent the years since learning exactly what that kind of intervention cost.
I have learned,Miguel said quietly,that my sons' hearts are not deals I can close for them.
A pause.
The last time I forced a hand, your brother spent ten years punishing a woman who loved him for a decision I made.He held Olivio's gaze.I will not do that again. Not to you. Not to her.
Olivio said nothing.
