Chapter Twenty-Seven
Angela
I wanted to tell Brady my name even though it was a shortcut to a dead end.
He can search my name on the internet now, find out everything about me and where I came from, but I don’t care.
I didn’t owe him that truth; it was just a gift, something to make up for not letting him in on the whole virginity thing.
Over the next few weeks, I drop other facts into his lap, out of the blue, without warning. Stupid things that don’t make a difference one way or the other, but they’re pieces of me that I don’t think he already knows.
“I have a dog.”
“My cousin taught me how to drive, but I’ve never had a license.”
“Everyone back home knows me as Lina.”
“I played varsity volleyball all four years of high school.”
“I had a driver.”
That one makes him snort with laughter. “Wow, Pines. You were one of those girls driving around Manhattan with a chauffeur?”
I’m typing my Legal Writing memo at the dining room table while he reads for class on the sofa.
I look up from my computer and smile. “No. My dad always has some of his younger…um…associates working around the house. They run errands, do grunt work like drive my mom and me places.” One of them was a kid named Paul.
I always had the feeling that he wouldn’t have leered at me even if I wasn’t the boss’s daughter.
He was young, maybe twenty, and he was in The Business only because he was born into it.
I never got the impression he had big ambitions.
Somehow, he’d gotten himself involved with one of the strip club girls.
I overheard him on a call in the car once, and it sounded intense before he remembered who was in the backseat.
That poor guy drove me all over three boroughs for a year, up until I took off.
“That’s some life, princess,” says Brady.
“It’s a shitty life. I’m never going back to that life.”
I’m always careful not to disclose facts that could prompt dead-end questions.
I never tell him, for example, that I went to college in the Bronx, at Fordham, not Columbia.
I never tell him that my father is Angelo Pini, the head of one of the most powerful crime families on the East Coast. He probably knows all of that, anyway, now that he knows my name.
What he doesn’t know, what I can never tell anyone, is how I betrayed my father.
Where I’m closed off and wary, Brady is an open book about everything except his big, dark secret.
I rarely think about it, it’s so implausible that he has anything on him that could top my shit.
He’s my sunshine and light, my freckle-faced boy next door who talks all the time about his parents, his trouble-making younger brother, his firecracker younger sister, his buddies at the firehouse, his buddies from high school and college, his buddies at the law school, his buddies all over campus, from students to staff and even a few professors.
My social life takes off like a rocket with Brady around.
He’s protective of me and my privacy, but he still has his guy friends over to watch football.
If I’m up for going out on my nights off, there’s always a party or a group of friends at a bar.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I belong somewhere. I’m not a pariah.
The truth is, I never want to leave—not this life, not him, not his (our?) apartment, not our relationship.
But I am who I am, for better or worse, and that means I prepare for the worse rather than the better.
I stay in touch with Lizette and let her know I might need a place.
She tells me her insurance is covering the repairs and she might have the garage ready in a few weeks.
But I don’t tell Brady, and I hope I’ll never have to move back to Lizette’s.
I’m at work on a Thursday night in late October, standing at the bar waiting for my order, when a voice close to my ear says, “Can I get a sambuca with three beans?”
I smile. “You think a place called Finnegan’s has sambuca and espresso beans? The hipster bar is around the corner, chief.” I feel warm arms wrap around my waist.
“I have it on good authority that there’s a secret stash of sambuca in this joint.”
“You look more like a Guinness guy to me,” I say, turning in his arms and looking him up and down.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look like one of those hot mutant chicks from the X-Men movies?”
I laugh. “This goofball Irish guy from the Bronx told me that once.”
Cliff puts the last of the beers on my tray and exchanges a handshake with Brady.
“Right now I’m going to use my mutant superpowers to drop off these beers,” I say. “Where’s your table?”
He points across the bar to the booth where his study group—three pretty, single, fawning females—sit waiting for him. They wave at me.
“I’ll bring over a Guinness and three Shirley Temples,” I say as I smile and wave back.
“You are wicked, woman,” he says, giving my ass a discreet squeeze. The kiss he gives me is less discreet.
“That boy loooves you,” says Kelsey after Brady strolls back to his table. She says it lightly, but I feel like I got whiplash through my entire body. Images and sound clips of Brady flash through my mind like old animation, faster and faster until I see the full truth of what she just said.
His smile when he catches me looking at him.
His hands unbraiding my hair.
His lips on a seek-and-destroy mission all over my body.
His expression when he saw my eyes for the first time.
This is the color they are when I dream about you.
There is nothing you can tell me about yourself that would make me run from you.
I wish you were here with me.
It’s true. Brady McDaniels loves me. I almost drop my tray when the next realization hits me.
I love Brady McDaniels.
Like, fire in my veins, sunshine in my heart, gaping holes in my logic, want him forever, love him.
I hand out drinks in a daze and head back toward the bar.
“Can you take Brady’s table for a minute?” I ask Kelsey. “I need some air.”
“Are you okay? You look weird.”
“I’ll be okay, yeah.”
I put my tray down and head outside to the back of the bar. I lean against the wall and breathe in the dry desert air. It’s cold at night now, but I feel too warm in my own skin. I’m lit up from the inside out, crackling with energy that I have no idea what to do with.
What am I going to do?
I bend over, resting my elbows on my knees and letting the blood rush to my head, hoping to flush out the insanity.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Brady is crouched down in front of me, his hands wrapped around my arms.
“Ange? What’s up? Are you sick? Do you need me to take you home?”
I wrap my arms around his neck and nearly topple him over, but he staggers upright, getting his balance at the last second.
“Whoa, princess. Talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I whisper, clinging to him. “Everything.”
“Did something happen? Do you feel okay?” He unwraps my arms from around his neck and looks at me with an expression of pure panic, his hands gripping my upper arms. “Holy shit, Pines. Are you pregnant?”
The shock of that question makes me gasp. “What?” I exclaim, shoving him. “No, you idiot! I’m not pregnant! I love you!”
I clap my hand over my mouth and feel all the blood that rushed to my head drain to my feet. I slump back against the wall. “Shit,” I whisper. I feel like I’m going to throw up.
“Is that what this is about? Jesus Christ, you scared the crap out of me, Ange.”
I feel myself being hauled upright and held tightly against Brady’s chest, my toes coming off the ground. “It’s a damn good thing you love me, Angela Pines, because I love the hell out of you.”
“I know,” I mutter. “It’s a disaster.”
“It’s a little bit of a clusterfuck, I’m not gonna lie.
” He sets me down but doesn’t let go. “But I don’t care.
We haven’t hit that dead end yet. And before we do, I want you to know.
” He holds my face in his hands and looks down at me.
“I love you, Angie. I’ll always love you, no matter what you end up thinking about me.
No one else will ever come close to you.
So just keep that in mind when we come to that dead end, okay?
You’ll be consigning me to a life of loneliness and meaningless hookups. Got it?”
“Yeah.” How he could make me smile in the middle of this terrifying turn of events is beyond me, but I guess that’s one of the reasons I love him so much.
That and the way he kisses me, which he’s doing now. It’s sweet and gentle and intense. Even if he hadn’t said he loved me, I’d know it from this kiss.
“I should go back to work,” I say, standing on my toes with my arms wrapped tightly around his neck. “And you need to get back to your little study group harem.”
“They don’t call me the Sultan of Civil Procedure for nothin’.”
I lightly slap the back of his head before disentangling myself from him.
Brady takes my hand, and we go inside. He slings his arm around my shoulder and pulls me close before heading back to his table. “I love you,” he says in my ear.
“I love you, too,” I whisper.
As much as those words mean to me, they won’t solve our problems.
An email I get a couple of days later confirms that. It pops up from my old account while I’m lounging in bed one late weekend night, organizing my notes into study outlines. It’s from my mom.
Lina, I hope you’re okay. How is the fasting going at the Buddhist monastery?
Sorry I haven’t written in a while, but I’ve been getting a head start on holiday wardrobe shopping.
You know how Bergdorf’s gets this time of year.
Anyway, it might be a good idea for you to come home soon.
Daddy’s having some issues with the clubs.
For some reason he thinks you can help. I told him not to be silly and to get one of the boys to help, but you know how he is once he gets an idea in his head.
Let me know when you’re flying back and we’ll send a car for you.
I hope you’re not drinking the water there. Love, Mom.
I shut my laptop, a rushing sound in my ears.
Some issues with the clubs? I quickly google my dad’s clubs.
What I see almost makes me throw up. His two largest clubs have been raided and the managers, my dad’s closest young associates, whom he’s grooming to eventually take over from him, have been arrested.
What does this mean for me? And what was that cryptic remark about me helping?
I hear the front door open, and I slam my laptop shut. A minute later, Brady comes into the bedroom, bringing the scent of the desert night in with him.
“Hey, princess.”
“I wish you’d drive to the gym at night,” I say, my voice catching.
“Huh?” He stops on his way to the bathroom and looks at me. Then he changes course and comes to sit next to me on the bed. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I just—you know, it’s dark out—you should drive…”
“Okay…” he says, looking at me warily. “Can you tell me what’s going on?”
I shake my head. “No,” I whisper. “But you need to be careful.”
The light in his eyes dims. “You need to be careful, too,” he says, pulling me against him. I breathe in his scent, touch his warm skin, feel the recently worked-out muscles of his body, and want nothing more than to lose myself in him. I don’t want the road to end.
We pull our clothes off each other. His hands on my body and his mouth on my skin feel like fire, like an uncontrolled, raging fire.
There’s a wildness to both of us, angst and foreboding mixed with passion.
My secrets are coming closer. I’m going to have to let him go.
One night, it will be the last night. Just not tonight. Please, not tonight.
Angela. My name on his lips, in my ear, is something between a whisper and a growl, a plea and a demand.
He’s inside me, gripping my hair with a fierceness and a gentleness that match the graze of his teeth on my lips as he kisses me.
I’m lost in the pleasure of it, bound and drugged by everything Brady, until I remember and freeze.
“Brady!” It comes out like a whimper, frustrated and angry, but not at him. “Condom.”
He barely pauses. “I’m clean.”
I tell him what he already knows. “I’m not on the pill.”
“I don’t care.”
“We can’t… Brady, we can’t.”
“I know.” It’s a whisper, a kiss. “I’m sorry.” He releases his grip on my hair and wraps his arms around me, presses his forehead to mine as I wrap my legs around him. He gets a condom on. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The wildness is gone, sadness and desperation in its place.
Afterward, I cling to him, too shocked and scared to do anything else. All of a sudden he doesn’t care if he gets me pregnant? There’s only one explanation for that. A baby is a connection to me that would survive a dead end.
I know it now. Whatever he’s done, whatever secret he’s hiding, it’s at least as bad as mine.