The more her thumb moved, the more the blood drained away from her face.
“You ran away from the mob so you could be a baseball player?” She breathed. “Don’t they kill people for doing that?”
I nodded.
Then understanding dawned.
“Your motorcycle accident.”
I nodded again, still not saying a word.
“I…you can’t expect that of me.”
“I’ll make it worth your while,” I immediately offered. “I’ll pay off all your debt, your school loans, and your medical bills. And the money that I get, half of it will be yours.”
Her mouth opened, then closed as astonishment washed over her features. “You know about my medical bills?”
I nodded.
Her medical bills were substantial…or at least her mother’s were.
When Henley was younger, her mother—her stepmother that was, for all intents and purposes, the only mother she’d ever known—had paid astronomically for Henley to have her surgery, and in doing so had put herself so far into debt that it wasn’t even funny.
That was why Henley lived as simply as she did. She was paying everything that she could toward those medical bills—but she’d never be able to pay them off in her lifetime. Not even her children’s lifetime.
And I wanted to fix that.
I wanted to make everything easier…but I needed her to do it by my side.
“But why? Why me?” she repeated.
“Why not you?” I countered.
“I’m…ugly.”
I laughed, which caused her to bristle.
I immediately started to explain my laughter. “You’re so far from ugly that it’s comical. You’re beautiful. But that’s not what draws me to you. What draws me to you is your inability to see the bad in people, and your willingness to spend countless hours with a walking dead man who has no positive outlook on life.”
She looked down at her hands with sudden interest. “I’m weird.”
“You’re everything.”
“What if I say yes? What then?”
“Then we get married. We buy a house—and if you want, I’ll be more than willing to add a pool house for your mother and your sister. Whatever you want. You’ll be my wife in every way. We’ll have kids. You’ll watch them—or if it pleases you, you go to work. You live your life, and I live it with you.”
“You don’t…love me.”
“I adore you.”
I didn’t say I loved her—because I didn’t. But I could. Maybe. Possibly. If I tried to get past the blocks in my mind that my uncle had established.
I was telling the truth. I adored everything about her.
And found her insanely attractive.
But love was foreign to me, and probably always would be. But that didn’t matter. You didn’t have to love someone to make a marriage work.
She looked so hopeful that it was hard to look into her eyes.
“What if we don’t work out?”
I stood up and cupped her cheek with my hand.
“What if we do?”
Her frown deepened.
“What if what you feel for me—this attractiveness you speak of—goes away?”
I traced the shell of her ear. “What if it grows stronger?”
She narrowed her eyes. “What if you meet someone else you love?”
“What if I never meet anyone else because you’re all I can see?”
She swiped away a few tears that had escaped angrily.
“What if you’re traded? I can’t leave.”
“What if we decide that I don’t want to play baseball anymore?”
Her eyes widened, and for once, she had no reply.
“What if I was born for you, and you were put onto this earth especially for me?”
She stared at me as tears continued to streak down her cheeks.
“What if one day we live happily ever after?”
Her mouth opened, and a soft sigh escaped.
“What happens if you don’t marry?” she whispered, sounding hopeful.
“Pablo gets the money via me being forced to marry his daughter, and his empire will once again be secure,” I answered honestly.
“You being forced to marry his daughter.” She paused. “You’re kidding, right? And why is all of this happening in the first place?”
And that was the million-dollar question.
“A long time ago, Pablo and my father worked together. Pablo was the front man and my father was the brains…then my mother started to screw around on my father in the form of pornos. Pablo thought my father was too soft, and if he couldn’t handle his woman, then he couldn’t handle the business,” I answered.
“And…”
“And my father was the one to have the last laugh. When he sensed Pablo turning on him, he hid money—a lot of it—most of the money that they had and put it in a trust fund for me once I married.”
“And if you don’t marry, that money goes to Pablo?”
I grunted. “No. Not technically.”
“Well, how about you enlighten me on how ‘technical’ it gets,” she ordered.
I liked that little bit of fierceness I could read in her body language as she crossed her arms over her chest.
“My father and his clauses on the trust fund are stupid. They’re not law-abiding, but the Italian mob doesn’t exactly deal with laws. The man my father used is known as a broker. He deals the money out in the way it was specified to dole it out, and nobody will ever question him. He’ll follow the instructions to the T.”