Page 53 of Claimed By the Silver Fox

I bite my lip, looking up at him, and reach out to touch his cheek so I can bring his gaze around to mine. He glances down at me, and, though his eyes are on mine, his head is somewhere else entirely.

“You okay?” I ask him.

Seems like a stupid question, all things considered, given what has just happened. He cups my head in his hand and plants a kiss against my forehead, wrapping an arm around my waist and splaying his hand against my lower back. He doesn’t reply.

“Antonio…”

“Careful,” he remarks, a slight smile on his face. “You know what it does to me, when you talk to me like that.”

I raise my eyebrows, propping myself up on his chest, so he has no choice but to look me in the eye properly. “Antonio, we need to talk.”

“What about?”

He’s playing dumb, but I see right through him.

“You… I was there when it happened today,” I remind him. “And that’s not the kind of thing you can brush off. I mean, I thought—” I stop myself before I can go any further. I don’t want to burden him with my insecurities, but then, I can tell he has clocked on to it before I can hide behind some distraction.

“You thought what?”

His voice is curious, and I take a deep breath. In the name of being honest, I guess I have to start this conversation myself, and that means coming clean about what I imagined would happen when I closed my eyes back at the apartment.

“When Andreo was telling you all that stuff,” I confess. “When he—when he said that I was the problem between the two of you, and that things would go back to normal if I was gone. I thought that you believed him. I thought that you…” I swallow hard. I can still remember that sensation, the odd acceptance of my fate, and I know it’s not something I’ll soon be able to forget.

He leans up on his elbows, frowning. “You thought that I would…?”

“I thought that you’d…choose him over me.”

His face darkens, as if the very idea disgusts him. “Jesus, Julia,” he mutters. “You thought that I would choose him over you and the baby? After everything he’s done to me?”

“I didn’t know,” I protest. “And I—fuck, he’s your son, like he said. Your flesh and blood, I thought you would take his side…”

“He was my son,” he corrects me. “He lost that status the moment he went to Salamanca. And he knew it. He was just looking for some way out of it, some way to get back at me for marrying you.”

“You think that was what this was about?”

He sighs. “Some of it,” he concedes. “He’s never been good at other people having what he thinks belongs to him. And me, marrying you…it’s not as if anyone would understand it, no matter how you tried to explain it. He just saw it as me being vindictive, snatching something away from him that he thought belonged to him.”

I shiver at the thought. The idea of belonging to Andreo, on any level, is enough to make the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I hate the very notion of it, and it’s hard to believe how close I came to becoming his wife, even if I had been prepared to put the ring on my finger and vow myself to him for the rest of my existence.

“Is it really that much of a surprise?” he asks me. He gazes down at me for a moment, as though genuinely confused as to how I came to any other conclusion.

For a second, his question catches me off guard, and I find that I don’t have an answer to it. Because he has a point, I guess. I am carrying his child, I’m his wife, and I didn’t betray him the way Andreo did. But in the moment when I heard the gun cock and closed my eyes, I was ready for death, completely coming to terms with the way it felt to lose everything at the hands of a man who had sworn to protect me.

I shake my head, trying to conjure up some kind of reason for it. Finally, my tongue unstiffens and I manage to get something out. “I guess…I guess I’ve just never been chosen like that before.”

Antonio props himself up with a pillow behind him, eyeing me with obvious confusion. “What do you mean?”

I shake my head, wrapping the covers around myself as I trace out the pattern on the sheets below. A lump jumps up into my throat, and I swallow it back, not wanting to make this into something it isn’t. I hate talking about myself in these terms, laying bare all the wounds that I’ve done my best to forget over the years, but something about him makes me feel safe in putting at least some of them out there.

“I mean, when I was growing up, my parents…they would always take each other’s side, even when they were fighting,” I explain. “And they would look at me like I was the problem. Like everything would have been okay if they never had me. Even when they were deep in an argument, the one thing they seemed able to agree on was the fact that they didn’t want me around, and I…”

I shift slightly, shoulders hunching up before I can stop them. “I guess I just started seeing it that way. Seeing myself that way, I mean. Thinking…well, if I didn’t find some way to prove myself, then I wasn’t worthy of someone’s care, or attention, or time, or any of it. When Andreo came along, he made me feel like I actually had a place in his life at first, that’s why it was so easy for him to get me wrapped around his little finger. But he was always out, always flirting with other girls even when he was at home—his phone would go off and I would see the names of the people texting him, but he would leave the room before I could figure it out for sure one way or another.”

I’m surprised that recounting that part of it doesn’t sting the way it used to. Maybe because he’s gone, or maybe because I can see now that I was stuck in some fantasy of what our relationship could have been rather than what it was. Now that it’s behind me, it’s almost as though it happened to someone else, a fiction invented to explain away all those years before I finally met Antonio.

“And when he started spinning all that to you, I guess I just went back there in my head,” I admit. “I thought—I thought you would choose him, because I’ve always been the second choice for people in my life, and I just didn’t see that changing.”

He doesn’t take his eyes off me as I talk, his brow furrowing deeper and deeper with every sentence, as if he can’t believe what he’s hearing. I gaze at him, waiting for him to say something, anything. Anything to fill in the gaps that hang in the silence, anything to wipe away the sharp edges of that revelation I’ve just shared with him.