“Yeah, that’s right,” she agreed, and she took a sip of her champagne and eyed me over the top of the glass. I wished I could work out what was going on in that head of hers. I wanted to reach out and grab her, to shake it loose, but I knew I had to play the long game and—
“Kristo!”
As soon as I heard that voice, my stomach dropped, a learned reaction from all those times that very same voice had cursed me out for having my hand in the cookie jar when I was a kid. I spun around and found myself face-to-face with my nonna.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I demanded, and I shifted so that I was standing in front of Amaya. It wasn’t that I thought my grandmother would actually try to physically hurt her, but the brunt of whatever she was dealing with was going to hit me and not her. Nonna stormed toward me and jabbed her finger into my chest, a motion that would have been funny if it hadn’t been so deadly serious.
“A contract?” she yelled, her voice cracking. “You married this woman, and she took money from you for it?”
Fucking Cleo and her big mouth. My stomach dropped. Well, the secret was out now.
“It’s not like that.” I brushed her away from me, not liking the way she was coming at me like I owed her something. Hadn’t enough happened in the last few days? Didn’t I get some kind of cosmic fucking break for a minute?
“Good grief,” Amaya breathed behind me, and I handed her my glass and pointed to the stairs.
“Go back to the apartment,” I told her.
“But—”
“Trust me, you don’t want to be around to see this,” I warned her, and she took my advice and ducked up the stairs and left us behind. Balaban grudge matches were legendarily bad-natured, and I could see that my grandmother was seething with a barely-contained fury.
“You were lying to me all this time,” she continued, her voice threateningly low. “All this time, when you brought that woman into our house, when you brought that girl into our house, it was all a lie.”
“It wasn’t all a lie,” I protested as best I could. “Jolene really is Amaya’s sister, and I really am supporting her.”
“Then why the contract?” She tossed her hands in the air and began pacing back and forth. It was the most animated I’d seen her in months, maybe even years, but then, my grandma did love a bit of righteous fury when she got the chance.
“It was a mistake,” I told her. “The contract, I mean. It doesn’t matter now. We dissolved it.”
“You lied to me for months.” She shook her head, and I could see the genuine hurt in her eyes, and my stomach twisted as I thought about how I’d hurt them, all of them, my family, pulling this new person into the mix and acting as though it wasn’t going to unsettle everything they’d built. If they just hadn’t liked Amaya so much, none of this would have been happening. Hell, Nonna would have been popping the champagne if she hated my once-wife and found out the whole thing was a scam. But I could see the hurt painted across her face, and it pained me to see it, knowing I was the one who put it there.
“You’re a bastard of a grandson.” She jabbed her finger back into my chest again, and I let her. I deserved that, at least. “You lied to your own grandmother. To your own family.”
“I know, I know,” I conceded. “But I thought—”
“I don’t give a damn what you thought.” She drew herself up to her full height and, even though she was a good six inches shorter than me, she seemed to spread to fill her surroundings. “You brought this woman into our lives, this woman none of us knew, and you told us—”
I caught her by the arms and brought her back down to earth, and she deflated at once as though I’d punctured her.
“Sit down,” I told her firmly. “You’re going to give yourself a heart attack if you carry on like that.”
I guided her to a seat, and she reluctantly sat on the very edge of it as though she was preparing to leap into action once again and start chewing me out as soon as she got the chance.
“It’d be your fault,” she muttered, a classic grandmother guilt trip. I closed my eyes for a moment, gathering myself, and then spoke again.
“I know I messed up,” I promised her “I know I did, really. But I’m going to make things right.”
“How?” she demanded. I wracked my brains. How much did I tell her? I needed to keep this brief. Cleo had already given away more than I had ever wanted any of my family to know, and I was going to play the rest of my cards as close to my chest as I could get away with.
“You’ll have that big wedding, Nonna.” I touched her hand lightly. “We’ll get married properly in front of all of you.”
She eyed me for a long moment, and I could tell there was a part of her that wanted to launch into full flow all over again, but she thought better of it. She sniffed, leaned back in her seat, and finally let her mouth close.
“Fine.” She shrugged. “But I want to plan the whole thing.”
“Anything you want,” I promised, even though I knew there was no way in hell Amaya would let someone else plan her wedding for her when the time came. At that moment, all I needed was to get my nonna to quiet down, and for the time being, I seemed to have succeeded.