“And, then, when I saw her, I was gone. Of course, being a teenage boy, I thought I could immediately charm my way into her pants.”
“At fifteen?” she squeaked.
“Well, I think I was closer to seventeen by the time I noticed her.”
Still . . . yikes. She’d wondered what a teenage West was like. Now she had some idea. A player.
“I’d dated a few times, and the girls I usually went for were, uh, more experienced, older.”
There was the proof that teenage West would never have looked at teenage Flick. Mind you, when he was sixteen, she wouldn’t have even been in double digits.
“With Lana, I quickly learned I had to change my game. She was so quiet she barely even spoke to me the first few times I approached her. I finally managed to get her number. Alec warned me away from her. Said nothing good would come from getting involved with Lana, but, like an idiot, I ignored him. I thought nothing could come between us. I thought we were keeping it all quiet from her family, that they had no idea. Until he pulled me into his office.”
“Who? Alec?”
His gaze met hers. His reflective, full of regrets. “No, sunshine. Her father. Tony Marceras.”
She sucked in a breath. “Her father was the head of the family? The one who cut off Beau’s finger?”
“Yeah.”
“What did he want?” she asked.
“For me to work for the family. Told me how happy he was that Lana and I were together. He made it clear, though, he’d never let her marry someone who wasn’t in the family. Which I took to mean I had his approval to date Lana so long as I started to work for him. I was an idiot.”
“You were just a kid.”
He shook his head. “In our family, we never had a chance to be a kid. Well, except maybe for Tanner. He was still young when we got out of there. Alec is more like his father than brother. If it wasn’t for Alec, we wouldn’t
be alive. I pulled us all into a dangerous world.”
“Seems like your father did that when he got himself into gambling debt,” she countered.
“Yeah, he started the ball rolling, but I brought it all to a head. I started doing jobs for the family; they started small but gradually became bigger.”
“Like what?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Ain’t ever gonna tell you that, sunshine.”
Hurt filled her. Didn’t he trust her?
“It’s to keep you safe, baby. To keep us all safe. It’s also because I don’t want you to know about the terrible things I did. All in the name of the family. The reason I have a slight limp is because I got into a knife fight with a dealer from another gang, got infected, lost a lot of muscle. I did anything he asked, because I thought it was getting me close to Lana. He let her go on dates with me. Let me spend time with her. And I thought that was all worth it. Four years he strung me along. Four years I lived in the dark, doing things I detested, but all because I thought Lana would be my reward.”
“And Lana just let this all happen?” she asked hotly.
He blinked, stared at her for a moment, then he shook his head. “Baby, in this family, well, they’re not enlightened. Women don’t have a say. Lana, she had no power with her father. She had no way of stating her opinion. And, even if she had, she was scared of him. I needed to shelter her from him.”
So she’d just let him get pulled in deeper and deeper into the darkness? That didn’t sound like something you let happen to the man you loved. But, then again, they’d both been young, and who was she to judge? Look at her own life.
“Even if she’d wanted to speak up against him, I would never have allowed her to,” he said arrogantly.
She raised an eyebrow at that statement. Yikes, seemed like even teenage West had an abundance of egotism and bossiness.
“You guys never thought about leaving together? Running off?”
“It crossed my mind,” he said honestly. “But where would we go? Neither of us had much money and running would have meant new identities because he’d come after us for sure. And I’d seen firsthand what he did to those who betrayed him. I’m not sure Lana could have run, although in hindsight, maybe we should have tried.”
She heard the pain in his voice. She only knew a fraction of that pain. Sure, West was her one, but at least he was still there and alive. She couldn’t help but draw parallels between their situations. She knew what it was like to be stuck in a nightmare.