Something stirs inside of me and I cut off my thoughts before my low-grade interest can turn into full-blown arousal. I try to focus on the task at hand instead of the amazing pleasure Sebastian has always brought me, but it’s hard. At least until it occurs to me how ironic life is, how fickle. How this thing between Sebastian and me—whatever it is—is going to end in the exact same place it started.
But then Sebastian is there, behind me, one hand stroking down my spine while the other curves protectively around my left hip. “It’s going to be okay,” he reassures me, pressing soft kisses against my temple.
I shrug, because it either is or it isn’t, and at this point there’s not all that much I’m going to be able to do about it either way. The knowledge should calm me down, but somehow it just makes me sicker. Sebastian has been suffering the sins of his father for ten years and has managed to hold it together. To be strong, in control, kind. I’ve only been dealing with them for fourteen months and I can barely handle it.
I’ve never felt more out of control in my life than when I open my mouth to speak. But then Sebastian puts his hands on my shoulders, squeezes, before wrapping his arms around me from behind. And somehow I have the strength—the control—to say, “My father is Gabriel Santini.” I don’t stop to ask if he knows who that is—if he knows Nico Valducci, he knows who my father is. Nico might have his hands in a lot of the casino’s pies, but my father runs Las Vegas and everyone who is anyone knows it.
“Gabriel Santini.” His hands don’t move from where they’re holding me but I feel him stiffen against me. Not that I blame him. It’s a lot to take in. “And you’re working as a cocktail waitress and living in a hovel?”
I start to take offense, to tell him my apartment isn’t a hovel. But truthfully, it is. And even if it wasn’t, that so isn’t the point right now. Not when there’s so much else that needs to be said.
“My father and I are…estranged.”
“Estranged? As in he kicked you out?” He still doesn’t move, but I can feel him fairly vibrating with fury. “Left you with nothing?”
“Estranged as in I couldn’t live with his way of life any longer and so fourteen months ago I walked away from almost everything. Including my last name.”
He seems to digest that for a moment and then he does move, spinning me around so he can look me in the eye. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to look at his face, afraid to see what’s reflected there. But if living as my father’s pampered princess for twenty-three years taught me nothing else, it taught me that burying my head, hiding from unpleasant things, never helps anything. The problem just gets bigger and more out of control while you refuse to look at it.
And so I force myself to look at Sebastian, to try to see what he’s actually thinking and feeling right now as opposed to what I’m afraid of seeing—or what I’m hoping to see.
But his face is impassive, his eyes carefully blank. Panic assails me and for a second, I feel lost. Sebastian has looked at me a lot of different ways in the days since we first met. But this is the first time there’s been absolutely no emotion there. Nothing that I can hold on to.
But his hands are still on my shoulders, and I can feel the warmth of his palms even through my shirt. It grounds me, makes it easier for me to answer when he repeats, “Almost?”
“Yeah. I thought of moving away, of going somewhere my father’s name was less recognizable. But my sister has brittle bone disease. One of the bad kinds and she probably doesn’t have more than a decade left unless there are some major leaps forward in biotechnology. We’re close and she depends on me to keep my mom from wrapping her in cotton and not letting her do anything. I couldn’t just walk away from Lucy, too.
“So I stayed in Vegas. I changed my last name to give me some semblance of distance from my family and got a job at the Atlantis. I’ve been working here ever since.”
“Why the Atlantis? Why a cocktail waitress? You’re obviously smart and well-educated—”
“At first, I didn’t want to show my degree around because it has my real last name on it. And by the time I got everything changed legally, I was comfortable here. Besides, my dad made it so that I couldn’t get a job many other place. The other casinos all asked flat-out about my family connections—I don’t know if he got to them or not—but the Atlantis didn’t. So when they were willing to hire me, I didn’t want to do or say anything that might rock the boat.”
“Because my father has been in bed with Nico Valducci for twenty-five years. And since your father and Valducci aren’t exactly the best of pals right now—”
That news shakes me almost more than the thought of the story I still need to tell him. As does the knowledge that Valducci has a hand in the Atlantis. But first things first. “What do you mean? Since when are my father and Nico at odds?”
“I don’t know. It’s just what I’ve heard since I put out feelers. Something happened last year that—” He breaks off. Eyes me with concern as he starts putting pieces together. “What happened fourteen months ago that made you walk away from the only life you’d ever known?”
I’m still reeling in shock from the information that my dad and Nico are no longer friends and business associates when for so long theirs was a match made in hell. But at least with those thoughts reverberating in my head, it’s easier to say what I have to. Easier to tell him what it still shames me to admit.
“I was engaged to Carlo Valducci.”
He does stiffen then, does pull away. It’s no more than I expect, though. No more than I deserve, so I don’t try to hold on to him when he steps back. No matter how much I want to. No matter how much my body aches for the comfort of his.
“Our fathers arranged it years ago, when we were young, like a couple of feudal lords. They wanted a union to cement their alliance and there Carlo and I were. And so it was arranged.
“The only problem was I never really liked him. We’d grown up together and I’d seen that he has a cruel streak. You know, when you grow up in the kind of family I grew up in, you learn about the different types of men pretty early on. The men who do their duty because they believe it’s the right thing to do, the men who don’t like the life but are too weak to try to leave it, even the men who do leave and end up crawling back later because they can’t make it without the family. Those men—all of those men—hurt others, even kill others, because they have to. Or because it’s expedient. Or because they need to make a point or a name for themselves. I’m not making excuses for them, but that’s how it is.
“And then there are men like Carlo. Like Nico. Who not only do their duty but who revel in it. Who enjoy bullying those weaker than them. Who like going in for the kill. Those are the ones you need to watch out for, because you never know when they’re going to snap. Never know when something is going to set them off and they’ll use it as an excuse…”
“An excuse for what?” Sebastian asks. His hands are clenched by his sides and though his face is still an impassive mask, his eyes are alight with a fury I haven’t seen in fourteen long months. There’s a part of me that wants to back away, but there’s another part—a more rational part—that knows that isn’t necessary. Sebastian might destroy me emotionally, might rip me to shreds with his unconcern later, but I don’t believe for a second that he’d ever hurt me physically. Not the way Nico and Carlo hurt people. Not when he’s been so careful to make sure his employees are taken care of the best way he can. Not when he’s been so careful to make sure that I’m taken care of.
I turn away from him. I’m committed to telling this story now, but I can’t do it looking into his eyes. And so I look out at the Strip that has been both my prison and my sanctuary and I tell the story Sebastian has already figured out. The story that’s so clichéd and unoriginal that it should be a late night women’s fiction movie—except in the movie you always see the warning signs and the way out. When it’s happening to you, it’s nowhere near as easy to predict…or understand.
“Carlo always had a temper. Even when we were kids. Little things would set him off and he’d pick fights with the other boys. He broke a few bones, gave a few of them concussions with how hard he hit—”
“And this is who your father handpicked for you to marry?” Sebastian demands.