Chapter 18
Bronte
Meirna hasn’t stopped stealing glances at me as we walk side by side along the bustling cobble streets. The atmosphere is bustling with music and movement. The crisp winter air smells like roasted nuts as we pass bundled-up musicians and people selling trinkets to tourists.
I brought Meirna through Old Town Square, known as Staroměstské náměstí, because there’s plenty to see without having to commit too much time. It’s like walking through a fairytale and a gothic novel all at once.
My princess at my side.
Her villain, on the other.
And, it’s literally the perfect setting for it because, besides the talk of people and the crunch of snow underneath Meirna’s boots, she’s been quiet since we left the suite.
“Bronte,” she mutters, moving closer to get out of the way of a small group coming the opposite way.
“Mhm?” I don’t miss the opportunity of grabbing her hand and pulling her a bit in front of me so she’s not knocked into.
“Why did you…tell Bobby about Prague?” She pulls away a little to fall back into step with me. “He’s going to come here.”
I know that.
I’m banking on that.
Bobby is desperate, and he doesn’t know she heard everything he said earlier. It wasn’t my intention to make her upset, but the truth of the matter is Bobby is ugly. Everything he’s done to her has been for his own benefit. Meirna was not going to reap any well-intentioned acts from my brother.
Only me.
“Let him.” I pull her hand up to my lips. “He’s not going to change your mind.”
Pressing a long and gentle kiss to the top of it, I tuck both of ours in my pocket as a chilly wind picks up around us.
“I don’t want to see him.”
That’s exactly what I wanted to hear.
However, Meirna isn’t bought on me yet, and if you threw me and my brother in a box, you could pile a bunch of fucked up things we’ve done to her.
I just don’t want her killed by the mob or drowning in financial ruin.
“You’re going to have to when you get to New York eventually.”
“There are a million people in between us.”
“And he knows exactly where to find you. Pull him out of his element, Meirna. He won’t have a leg to stand on when daddy isn’t there to tell him what to do.”
“Isn’t that what you did to me?”
I glance over at her with a dead stare. “No. I didn’t bring you here, marry you, then keep you away from everyone. I gave you your phone. You could’ve booked a flight already.”
“You pulled me out of my relationship, married me, then expect me to be okay with it.”
Since I’ve been used to the idea of all this, my first reaction is to roll my eyes at the dramatics.
However, this is fresh and impulsive. To some women, it could be categorized as reprehensible and too deranged.
“I never said I was the sweet version of Bobby.”
“Then what are you?”
“The insatiable one.” Then I narrow my eyes and say, “We’re not the same.”
Meirna lifts her chin, a telltale sign that she’s going to attempt to hand me my ass.
And my feelings.
“I’d say you’re the insane one,” she offers blatantly. “Bobby would never do something like this.”
I snort. “Because he doesn’t have the balls.”
“But I do. And I say, I should get on a plane right now and sort my life out.”
Looking ahead, we pass a small beer hall where a few men linger outside talking. She’s trying to draw out my crazy to see what she’s dealing with. If she should be scared, on guard, or in safe hands while she’s worlds away from home.
“Then I’d say good luck getting on the plane,” I manage finally. “Because I have until New Year’s.”
“You can’t seriously think that I’d—”
“Be in love with me?” I steal another quick look at her, already finding that she’s been studying my every move. “You sure about that, Daydream? Think of your happiest moments. Your favorites. And, ask yourself, who was I with?”
She glowers at me. “That’s not fair. You know I don’t.”
If she thought long and hard about it, she would. It amazes me that she’s been with Bobby for so long. But, on the other hand, it doesn’t because Meirna isn’t needy and understands the hustle means sacrifice and limited time spent.
I guess I should be grateful for that.
“Nothing about me feels like home?” I hedge, genuinely curious to know. “Holding my hand. Listening to me speak. How I smell or even the way I hold myself.”
She’s silent for a long minute while a violinist plays a merry Christmas song with a black bucket in front of him for tips.
“I think so,” she finally mutters. “It…feels like a blended blur, to be honest.”
I understand that.
She wasn’t expecting to organize moments in which one felt different than the other. It’s been two years since we first met and, for me, it feels like yesterday at times.
“You love me, Daydream. You just didn’t know my name.”
She openly gapes at me, implying that if I’m not on any kind of medication, I should probably go get checked out for some.
Thing is, I’m confident that Meirna’s most satisfied moments were with me. I normally only got an hour, two tops, with her.
And all she did was moan and smile.
You sure she never did that with Bobby and rode the high with him?
I fight back my own self-doubt in being able to pull this off with the woman at my side. I can woo her pants off, but it’s at the cost of dumping her ex-boyfriend because he’s a con and a cheater.
She’s still leading with the shock of it all—understandably—and trying to navigate where her life goes from here. If anything, I need to be patient as hell.
We pass the Church of Our Lady before Tyn. A medieval-looking building with spiky towers that dominate the skyline. Meirna’s attention is locked on the architecture, pulling out her cell phone to snap a few shots while I wave down a vendor.
She steps away for a better angle, but she never pulls her hand from mine. I revel in that when I pay the young man with a warm smile for the white roses just in time for her to turn back to me.
“Pretty flowers for my beautiful wife.” I hand them to her, and she takes them immediately as if she can’t help herself.
Meirna stares at them as if they hold all the answers to questions she hasn’t thought of before, as I move us along. Our next stop is the next bakery I see, so we can load her up on desserts and take them to the hotel.
“You bought the flowers, didn’t you?”
I push my lips out and reply, “With the note?”
“All of them.” Mindlessly, I stop in the middle of the sidewalk. Meirna turns to me and gets one of those answers I didn’t theorize she’d get based on random flowers. “It wasn’t Bobby’s assistant, slash his father’s assistant. He used to say she’d help pick them out.”
“She did help,” I mutter. “Me.”
Meirna frowns. “She’d help you pick them out?”
“No. She kept her mouth shut.”
I’m met with silence and more dissecting of my expression as though Meirna is going to get within my deepest, inner thoughts.
They’re not that complicated.
“Should we continue?” I suggest giving her a little tug, but her feet don’t move, and she doesn’t stop staring at me. “Are you trying out for one of the many statues here, Daydream? There shouldn’t be that much competition for them here, and it’s cold.”
“Tell me what else you did,” she breathes as if all the ideas in her head are suffocating her. “Christmas, birthdays, when else were you by me? How many moments did we share that I didn’t know about?”
“That’s it,” I reply. “Physically.”
Meirna’s brows pin on me as if in pain. “And the other stuff?”
“Since the moment I discovered you were with Bobby. My intention was to approach you, at first, and tell you everything. That I wasn’t Bobby.
That it was a mistake. But…you were so enamored by him, I felt as though I was going to be doing you a disservice by saying anything.
He already had six months on me…But I looked him up anyway.
To see if he was good enough. I discovered he wasn’t.
That you were going to become collateral damage—”
“Shut up,” she mumbles, but there’s no power behind it. “You could’ve come to me.”
“Like I said, I played with that idea, but all I had was he-said, she-said bullshit, at first. Then I saw the way you looked at Bobby. If I had approached you, you would have gone to him and believed all his bullshit. I needed to get you alone, remind you of me, then you got engaged.”
“You would’ve saved me time,” she argues. “If you had come to me and explained the mix-up, I could have—” She abruptly stops there, piquing my interest like a treat being dragged away by a string.
I instantly bite. “You would have, what? Dumped Bobby for me? Given me a shot?”
She wouldn’t have.
Loyalty is a beautiful thing when it works in your favor, but it doesn’t when her devotion was already almost six months deep with someone else.
“I said I don’t share, Meirna. Even if I had to gather all my receipts and wait, stall until your wedding day, it was all going to end up the same.”
“Me going back home to my life with a broken engagement?”
“With a husband, Daydream.” She squints at me, clearly not fully sold on me, my methods, and my shit. But before I allow her to bullshit herself out of giving me a chance, I pilot us back down the sidewalk again. “You cold?”
“No.”
“Hungry?”
“No—yes.”
My lips quirk, and it feels foreign on my face. “Then let’s go stockpile a bunch of desserts for later. Then I want to take you to the Klementinum.”
Meirna picks up her pace, and I’m assuming it’s to get there as quickly as possible. “What about the mob? Bobby said—”
“Bobby’s talking out of his ass.”
“But…how do you know? He said—”
I squeeze her hand lightly, meaning it when I say, “You don’t belong to Bobby anymore.
You’re married to another man. I took away his leverage and backup plan.
I run a multi-billion-dollar company in Boston.
I could own their blocks tomorrow if I wanted to and put them out of business.
Once they look me up, they won’t. They won’t even try or look at you a second time. ”
“Look you up,” she mutters. “If you’re not a Harding, what are you?”
“A Vasiliou.”
“Can you spell that?”
A smile protrudes across my lips. “Need to know how to spell your last name, Daydream?”
“No,” she sasses back. “I want to Google-stalk you and see if you check out.”
“Of course, you do. I’ll give that when we get back to the hotel.”
“And I want your phone, too.”
Okay…
“I don’t have a triplet, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
“God, I hope not. I just wanted to see if you had your own Jolene.”
“I don’t,” I return, fishing my cell out of my pocket and handing it off. “But, here’s everything you’ll need, so I can’t delete anything.”
Meirna takes it at a snail’s pace. “Do you have any others?”
“I’m not that important.”
“You just said you had a billion-dollar company. That’s important.”
“And that’s why I have three assistants who I pay very generously to manage dumbasses. I take care of the rest.”
“Sleep with any of them?”
“Viola scares me,” I answer honestly. “She’s fifty-two with three kids and a husband who would throw me out of my sixty-three-story building if I breathed wrong her way. I’m not an Italian, so Isabella thinks I’m basic and beneath her.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-nine.” Her age does nothing to help prove that I don’t sleep with her. “Look at her text messages to me and see if we’re sleeping together. They speak for themselves.”
Because last week, Isabella called me a Baby Boomer, and that shit actually hurt.
“And the third one?”
I lift my shoulders. “Darryl. I think that speaks enough on its own.”
“Not really,” Meirna hedges. “We live in a modern world.”
“I don’t like men, Daydream. So, you can count him out.”
“Shame,” she mutters. “I would’ve thought of you as more worldly and open.”
Even if I were attracted to men, Darryl wouldn’t be my type. If I hear one more fun fact about cheese or the ancient world of some treasure, I’m going to punch him in the throat.
“Sorry to disappoint,” I relay. “I’m a sucker for curly brown hair and freckles, though. Know anyone?”
“Not particularly. But I’ll keep my eyes open.”
She wouldn’t need to.
Because all I want, see and breathe is her.
“If you ever find her,” I put forth, running the pad of my thumb along the top of her hand gently. “Let her know my mother might die of a heart attack because I’ve never brought a girl home. And, my sister has been wanting a sister for years.”
“That’s cruel.”
“That’s reality. Because no one was you, and I was never going to fill my mother and sister’s heads with someone that would never last.”
Meirna glances over at me as we continue down the cobbled sidewalk. “That sounds…you’d never know.”
“I know,” I say confidently. “I knew from the first moment I met you, I was never going to look at another female again and want to own her. Even for a night. You were forever. It’s just that fate had other plans and I haven’t figured those out yet.”
“Maybe it was for the best.” Reaching over, I pluck the white roses out of her hands and receive a surprised, “Hey!”
“Sorry, Daydream. I only buy flowers for women who want to give me a shot.”
“I have given you a shot,” she retorts, extending her free arm to attempt to free her flowers. “I haven’t shot you yet.”
“Is that on the table?” I hedge inquisitively. “I didn’t think you were the violent type.”
“Only when provoked. I feel as though that side of me has been taking front seat with the ideas running through my head recently.”
“Interesting. May I make a request then?”
“Maybe.”
“Sit on my face when you kill me. The last thing I want to taste, smell, and feel is your pretty cunt before I go.”
I swear, I hear her mutter, Geezus Christ before I open the door to the bakery and buy her everything she wants.