Page 108 of Sins of Arrogance

“One has noth­ing to do with the other. I told you. I’ve got busi­ness with Dier­dre.”

“Busi­ness more im­por­tant than mak­ing love to your wife?” The words hurt com­ing out of my mouth, but I want an an­swer.

“We al­ready had sex, mo chuisle.”

“You’re say­ing once was enough for you?” It never is.

Why this time?

“I’m say­ing I have to go. Lis­ten, you stay here and rest. I’ll make sure Hope keeps Fitz un­til bed­time.”

“Don’t do me any fa­vors.” Feel­ing raw and too vul­ner­a­ble in my nu­dity, I stand up and put on my robe.

But when I turn around to face him, Mick’s not lis­ten­ing. He’s not even there.

He’s al­ready in the bath­room, the sound of the shower run­ning through the open door mak­ing it clear he has no in­ten­tion of be­ing late for his din­ner with Dier­dre.

Chap­ter 28: Din­ner, Drugs, and Delu­sions

MICK

Dier­dre prat­tles on over the ap­pe­tiz­ers and I let her, wait­ing for the drug in the wine she’s drink­ing to take ef­fect.

It took more self-con­trol than it should have to leave my wife naked on the bed. It helped that she de­cided to go to din­ner af­ter all and wasn’t there when I came out of the bath­room af­ter my shower.

If she still had been, be­ing here would not be a given.

“I’m sur­prised Kara didn’t mind you tak­ing me to din­ner.” Dier­dre plays with the stem of her wine­glass and looks at me with what is prob­a­bly sup­posed to be un­der­stand­ing. “She’s very jeal­ous of you.”

“Why do you say that?” I hadn’t no­ticed Kara act­ing par­tic­u­larly jeal­ous.

At least not af­ter my stupid at­tempt to trig­ger her into re­turn­ing to her more af­fec­tion­ate be­hav­ior of our early mar­riage.

If you had asked me five years ago if I would miss it, I would have said no. A man like me doesn’t need af­fec­tion.

In fact, I pretty much ig­nored the change in her be­hav­ior and when I thought of it, wrote it off as symp­to­matic of her post­par­tum de­pres­sion.

It took an­other year be­fore I re­al­ized the vul­ner­a­ble young woman I had mar­ried was ei­ther gone or hid­ing pretty ef­fec­tively be­hind the façade of the per­fect mob wife.

“Oh, you know.” Dier­dre waves her hand and takes a sip of her wine.

“No, I don’t know. Ex­plain it.”

She gives me an al­most pity­ing look. “I sup­pose it’s some­thing you’ve learned to live with.”

“That is not an ex­pla­na­tion.”

Dier­dre blinks, her fo­cus go­ing hazy.

Good. The drug is tak­ing ef­fect.

“You don’t have to pre­tend with me, Micky. I know how over-the-top jeal­ous she got af­ter the birth of your son.” Dier­dre waves her hand air­ily again, mis­judges the dis­tance and nearly knocks over her glass of wine.

I grab it and set it to rights on the ta­ble.

“Thank you. I’m not usu­ally clumsy, but then you know that.”

“What do you know about Kara’s be­hav­ior af­ter the birth of our son?” I’m sup­posed to be grilling Dier­dre on why she’s here and if her da or mine is work­ing with Ilya Darakov.