When she dropped her head, I folded my arms around her. Not in a tight embrace, so she had the space to rest her forehead on my chest. I loved every time she let herself go enough to lean into me, to give me every ounce of her worries to carry. Rubbing my hands up and down her back I waited patiently for her need to sob or scream in frustration pass. We did this often, too damn often for my liking, but I was desperately trying not to make this worse for her.
I couldn’t change who I was, nor could she. And neither of us could walk away from the bond that had so quickly and potentlybuilt between us. But the battle within her was strong, and I was tired of watching her fight this shit.
“Do you still love me?” We both knew the answer to that question, but I asked anyway.
Dakota was nothing if not decisive. In her career choice, in how she ran her business, how she walked in this world constructed by her family, then the one she’d built for herself. If she didn’t love me, she wouldn’t have married me. There was never any doubt in my mind about that. As persistently as I’d pursued her in the first few months after meeting her, I remained acutely aware of any signs that she might simply not be interested. She never showed any. Still, I didn’t make assumptions. In my line of business—both the legal and illegal—I liked to deal with the facts.
“Don’t do that,” she said, shaking her head, but still not looking up at me. “You always do that.”
I chuckled lightly. “And you always do this.” Bringing a hand up to tuck beneath her chin, I lifted it until her eyes locked with mine. “Aren’t you tired of doing this dance, baby? I know I am.”
“Then why don’t you walk away?” she asked, blinking to fight back more tears. “You don’t like inconsistency. You don’t play games. Not with the club or in your office. So why do you stick around for all my shit?”
“Because I love you and all your shit, Dakota. I don’t know how clearer I can be about that.” These weren’t new words. I’d told her all this before. Just two months after our first meeting, to be exact. I’d known before that, but had waited as long as I possibly could in an effort not to scare her away. “I know what you’re struggling with. I know how big a deal this is. But none of the shit you’re worrying about matters to me.”
“You don’t care that my family might disown me once they find out I’m married to the head of a criminal organization?” she shot back.
“One, I don’t think it’s going to come to that. I know your brother, remember. I know exactly who and what he is, and he knows me.”
“That’s not the same.”
“You don’t seriously believe that. I know you don’t.”
She couldn’t. Dakota was one of the smartest women I’d ever met. And not just book smart, which she was with not only that summa cum laude degree hanging in her home office, but in the business she’d built, and the chemical development work she was branching out into. All that and her affluent upbringing aside, she had an ear to the streets on a level that almost rivaled my own.
She attributed that to her close friendship with her now assistant, Emily Anderson. Emily wasn’t from the Donovans’ privileged realm, and honestly, outside of her cousins, Dakota really didn’t have friends in that world. The women she allowed in her circle were what she liked to call real and unblemished by the blinders money and advantage could apply.
“What Cade does isn’t the same as what you do. And even with its similarities, Cade is their prized son, the oldest, the best. While I’m?—”
I pressed a finger to her lips to stop the nonsense that was about to pour out. “You’re also not about to say that your parents love Cade more than you, so they’ll accept him living outside of the perfect lines of the Donovan name, but not you.”
She sighed, and I moved my fingers from her mouth, to brush the back of them over her cheek.
“No. That’s not true either.”
I noted her last word and waited.
“You’re right. And you know you’re right.” She huffed. “You always think you’re right, but there are parts of this you don’t understand, Fabian. My mother accepts Cade because she thinksshe’s only accepting the FBI agent. She doesn’t know he’s a part of the Alliance or what the Alliance even does.”
I wasn’t sure when or why Cade had told her about the Alliance. KC was right, to the outside world, the organization was a secret. When Charles Donovan retired from his ad agency, he’d also left the Alliance, passing his seat on to his only son. In the end, it worked out better for me that she knew, because then I didn’t have to keep it a secret from her. A big part of me being drawn to Dakota from the start was that she was a part of my world. She knew the ins and outs to what I did with the Ryders as well as the legal entities I tried to maintain. She understood me having a foot in both worlds because she was doing the same. We were a perfect match, if that were the only criteria for such a title.
“Look, you know I don’t believe in all this class shit. You and your family are Black, just like me and mine. At the root of it all, we fight the same wars in this world. You don’t fit the mold you say your parents want to keep you in. You knew that before you met me and you were already taking steps to break out of that mold. So, what’s really holding you back from doing it now? For us?”
“I don’t know how to do this.” She moved away, turning and crossing the room until she could sit on the bed.
“Do what? Be honest with me, with yourself?”
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve done nothing but be honest with myself in the last fifteen months since you slipped that big, beautiful ring on my finger.”
“You mean the ring you never wear.” I reminded her of that shit every time I saw her. On the weekends when she came to my house, slept in my bed, and rode my dick like it owed her something. And the very rare evenings I was allowed into her home for a quiet dinner or movie night.
A smirk accompanied her next sigh. Her gaze fell to her hands resting in her lap, to the bare fingers with nude paintednails. She loved those colors she called warm nudes, but to me they just looked like different shades of brown, and they complemented her buttery smooth skin perfectly. “I always feel it though.” Her voice was softer now. “I have this picture in my mind of how it looked the night we stood in front of that minister and adlibbed the sweetest vows. I remember every second of that night, of the commitment we made.”
Then, we came home and everything changed.
I didn’t say that part aloud. Dakota and I had gone through this conversation in different variations more times than I could count. A part of me, the younger me whose priorities had been blood family first, inked family second, and fuck everybody else, wondered why I didn’t simply walk away. Leave this woman and the drama she was creating in her head the fuck alone so I could get on with my life. But that was it right there, shewasmy life.
“I feel that ring on my finger every second of every day,” she continued. “Just like I feel you in my heart.”
