“If we can’t tell him, then we’ll have to show him,” I said. “Even if it means something drastic.”
“Such as?”
My heart raced as I looked out toward bruise-colored mountains as dusk swallowed the day. I was too shy to say it directly to Diego in case it wasn’t anything close to what he was thinking. “We could always elope.”
When he didn’t respond, I finally chanced a look at him.
He stared at me with a tenderness that melted my insides, leaving me a puddle of need and longing. This was the art of life—the art of Diego—and what I would risk my father’s wrath for. Diego possessed a potential he would never reach here. He’d supported my decision to go away knowing he’d be left behind. And he wanted the best for me, even if it meant the worst for him. He would never make me choose between the two of them.
“Marriage, Tali?” he asked softly, almost reverently.
“It’s a lot, I know—”
“It’s everything.” He took my hand under the blanket. “You’re the only one who believes in me enough to trust me with your love. With the world. I have tried and tried to show your father the man I can be. I have no one else—my parents gone and a brother I no longer recognize. You and Costa are my family, but he continues to deny me. And you have never once failed to accept me.”
Moved by his openness, my throat thickened. “He won’t be able to deny you once he sees how devoted we are.”
Diego slid his hand up my arm and massaged my shoulder. “I don’t understand how Costa freely respects Cristiano but continues to hold me at arm’s length. Last night, we were three grown men drinking and talking business, and yet, it’s like I was a teenager at the ranch again.”
I hated that Diego had grown up feeling second best to Cristiano, who’d been treated like a prodigy just because of his size and capacity for brutality. “There’s no way my father can just switch his trust for Cristiano back on.”
“It feels that way—like I’m being replaced.”
“Never, mi amor.” I stretched over the arm of the chair to kiss him for all the times we’d had this conversation and I hadn’t been able to physically comfort him. “I’ll show you so much love and respect that you don’t need it from anyone else.”
He held the back of my head for another peck. “We will be married,” he said, “but I can already declare that I intend to love you until death do us part.”
And death would do us part.
The soothsayer’s unwelcome warnings shivered through me. Damn her and her bullshit fortune. I forced her voice from my head and replaced it with a glowing vision of myself in all white, facing a suited Diego. We stood before an altar, hands intertwined as we committed our lives and love to each other. I’d dreamed of it many times at school, but for the first time, calling him my husband felt within grasp. “I wish the day were tomorrow,” I said.
“Don’t tempt me.” He released me to recline back. “I may steal you away and officially make you mine.”
“Stealing implies I wouldn’t go willingly.” Under the blanket, I folded my hands in my lap and squinted up, hoping for a shooting star. We needed all the help we could get. “I’ll be on a plane soon, Diego.”
He nodded slowly. “What’re you suggesting?”
“I don’t know. Just pointing out that we don’t know when we’ll be together next, so if we were going to do something drastic . . .” It would have to be now. I absentmindedly picked at my fingernails as I thought. “If the Maldonados gave you twenty-one days, then you only have less than two weeks left until you’re out of that. Then it’s over, right? But I’ll be gone.”
He fell quiet as he stared at the night sky, but he didn’t seem to be marveling over its wonders. He was working through something in his head, and the longer it took him to figure out his response, the more concerned I became. “What is it?” I asked.
“You know what this reminds me of?” he asked.
I studied his profile. “Catching insects in the rose garden?”
“I don’t know why I’m still surprised when you read my mind,” he said with a sad smile.
“Up here and out there were the two places you could sneak to for a little bit to keep me company.”
“Your mom would always find us and send me immediately back to the ranch.”
“She had to. My dad would’ve been upset. You were supposed to be working, and I wasn’t supposed to be around you guys.”
“I got to have a childhood through you, hearing about your adventures while I was off doing unimaginable shit to my own people. I never told you this because you were so young, but once, Cristiano used me as bait to kidnap a friend we grew up with.”