She went immediately to do it. The woman really was the best surgical nurse he’d ever worked with.
“How are you doing, Mat?”
“Hurts. Tired.”
“After you’re stitched, I’ll give you another pain pill and let you sleep it off. We’re almost done.”
Mateo laughed, and then immediately groaned. “Hurry, jefe.”
It took no time to complete the few stitches the wound would need. Once he finished, Lise pumped the pressure cuff up again and added, “I laid out bandaging supplies.”
* * *
Once they got Mateo doped and moved to the spare bed, Lise brought in a notepad, pen, the BP cuff, thermometer, and placed the lot on the dresser.
“I’m going to clean the back deck before the sun comes out and either bakes the blood into the paint or the neighbors see. And I may take the light around the house to make sure that it doesn’t start somewhere in a trail that leads to the back door. Then I’ll tackle the kitchen.”
“Just do the deck and the walk around. We’ll get the kitchen tomorrow. I know you’re tired. You should sleep. I’ll stick in here with him and keep an eye on him.”
Him—who was asleep, breathing steadily and deeply, while Dante was still too high on adrenalin and stress to even think of sleeping now.
She didn’t immediately leave, but stepped between his legs where he sat in the chair they’d dragged in right after putting Mateo to bed, and invited herself onto his lap.
His arms came around her and she returned the favor, giving him a warm squeeze. It was coming. She was going to ask for those details he’d not yet decided on telling her.
She should be mad at him for taking such a risk, but it didn’t look like she was. She kissed his temple and stroked her fingers through his hair. “Does he know you from the club?”
“I knew him a long time ago. He calls me jefe because of some illegal things we did to make cash when I was eighteen and he was fifteen.”
“What kind of things?”
“Criminal things. For money.” Suddenly too weary to bother lying, his mind refused to craft a more palatable alternative. He tilted his head back to look at her. “I organized, decided what posed acceptable risks, and usually kept us one step ahead.” The urge to get closer welled up and he tightened his arms so he could get his face nosed in against her neck, under her hair.
“Until one time you miscalculated,” she surmised.
“Mateo confessed to something they had me dead to rights for, but which we’d both done. He took full responsibility,” he muttered, laying it all out without the details of the crime that had precipitated his crime toward a friend. The one that mattered to the rest of the world didn’t matter to him. This was the worst part. “And I let him.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“WHAT HAPPENED?”
“They let me go. He got thirty days in juvie and a year of probation. And a criminal record.” He said the last part slowly, willing her to make the connection between that record and why Mateo would seek to avoid an official medical facility where they’d be under obligation to contact the police about a gunshot wound.
She nodded slowly, thinking it through. “And you were an adult at the time.”
“I was an adult,” he confirmed. Eighteen and always worried, always scrambling, always looking for extra money-making opportunities.
And his prison sentence would’ve been worse, whatever the crime. If they’d both been caught, he’d have also been contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
“My brothers don’t know that either,” he added, leaving unsaid the implied request that she not tell them either. “I couldn’t let him go somewhere where he’d end up in jail.”
She nodded. “I get it. But just because he survived the surgery...”
“I know.” She didn’t need to enumerate the risks of infection to him; that toxic soup was swimming through his head already. Were they at the hospital, he’d already have Mateo on IV high-dose antibiotics. They were very lucky that his bullet had more gone through the meat than the organs.
“Back then, if you’d been arrested and convicted, you wouldn’t have gotten to become a doctor, would you?”
“I’m not sure. Probably not. Why are you not asking what we did? You don’t want to know?”
Whatever her answer, he needed to see her when she gave it. This night had left him too mentally exhausted to think strategically.
She didn’t answer right away, actually stopping to consider whether she wanted to hear the truth from him. That also seemed new.
“I do want to know, but I’m not going to ask. When you’re ready, you’ll tell me. And I’m going to trust it’s in your past, and tonight was just...a bit of ghost chasing.”
She kissed him lightly and added, “I should go clean up before my body decides to sleep whether I’m ready or not.”
“Wait.” He wavered between thanking her and yelling at her for letting him drag her into illegal activities. The illegal activities part was what he should be focusing on. Suddenly, his mind sharpened.
Get her out. Give them a plausible story that she hadn’t been involved in case the cops did end up involved. Minimize her exposure to it.
“Go home to the cottage tomorrow. I’ll see to Mateo for the rest of the weekend, and then he should be fine to go home. But you don’t need to be involved anymore.”
“That’s a lot for one person to do, round-the-clock nursing.” She moved to stand and he held her tighter for the moment. She relaxed into his embrace again, and he knew he’d made another wrong move. He should be shoving her out the door, not clinging to her like a temperamental child. Unwrapping his arms, he grabbed her by the hips and lifted until she stood beside him.
Lise moved with him, but didn’t walk out. “Are you going to sleep at all this weekend?”
“I’ll stay in this chair tonight and keep a close eye on him, then spread it out tomorrow and sleep on the sofa in between.” A thought sprang to mind and he couldn’t ignore it. He needed those antibiotics and pain relievers for Mateo, and he couldn’t leave him alone to pick them up. Picking up a prescription was less risky than her staying with Mateo in his current condition.
“You can do one thing before you go home tomorrow—pick up a couple of prescriptions at the pharmacy. I want to get him on antibiotics in the morning and he’ll need a script for pain.”
She finger-combed his hair back again. “Yes, and then I’ll come back and help afterward. You shouldn’t be by yourself in this. What if he crashes?”
“It’s not your decision, Lise. This is my house and I don’t want you here for this. I’ll write the scripts, you can get them filled and drop them off.” To make sure she listened to him, Dante pulled her hand from his hair. No distractions.
“Your house, but you keep saying this is my home now. That I should feel at home.”
Mateo stirred, his medicines just not enough to keep the man out long.
Dante stood and steered her into the hallway to continue speaking. “This has nothing to do with that. This is for your good. I need to find a balance between obligations.”
“Obligations?” She repeated the world, but kept her voice low even if the timbre had gone up. “Obligation to him versus obligation to me?”
That was the wrong word. He tried again, “Would desires be a better word?”
“You pretty much can’t rewind away from obligations. But what about the chance this will come up again? In a year or ten years, when the past comes calling, will you just send me and our kids away? The cottage will be long gone by then.”
It shouldn’t come up again, not that he could really convince her of that right now, and it wasn’t really important anyway. “Yes. Hotels will always be available. My job will be to protect my family first.”
/> “We need to talk about this later,” Lise said, the words gritting through her teeth. The splotches of pink in her otherwise abnormally pale face this morning completed the picture of how angry she was right now. “Because I’m not for you to protect. I didn’t want that surgery in the kitchen, but I helped you because you needed me. I’m still helping you and I’ll go away because you apparently are losing your mind with worry right now. After the fact. Since you’ve had a moment to weigh the dangers. But if you take this need to protect to a lying place, this isn’t going to work.”
She didn’t wait for his response, just muttered something about blood and headed toward the veranda.
Dante returned to Mateo’s room. He was still asleep. But there wouldn’t be any sleep for Dante, and probably wouldn’t even if he could take his eyes off Mateo long enough.
More than anything, Dante wanted his family to be safe and happy. They were generally pretty safe these days, though he sometimes had to go on the offensive to take care of problems, and the biggest threat to them now was mental and emotional well-being. And he wanted to deserve them, something he’d ceased to do a long time ago.
He’d done so much for his family that they could never know about, Lise among them. He could use a gentle and sweet woman for their good, but he couldn’t justify having used her for his own good.
Helping Mateo wasn’t just helping someone who had helped him, it was his way of trying to become better than he had been. Putting himself into danger for a person he didn’t share blood ties with...had never happened.
He didn’t want Lise to be another black mark on his soul, but that was how the situation with her felt like it was shaping up.
* * *
The instant she saw the woman appear at the end of the hallway, Lise stood from the wooden bench outside Dr. Cassie Valentino’s office door.
One thing Lise could say about having a possible future family who already liked her: what other possible way could she have gotten a doctor to see her at eleven p.m. on a Friday?
“Thank you so much for doing this.”
“I’m going to have to tell Rafe if this goes the way you think it’s going,” Cassie warned, touching her arm briefly before she unlocked the office door and led inside.
Of course she’d have to tell Rafe, they probably had a very truthful relationship. Lucky.
“Just give me some time to tell Dante first. If I am, I mean. It’s possible that I’m just crazy. I pretty much feel like a basket case lately. Change stresses me out.” And that wasn’t even counting the kitchen surgery last week—something she was definitely not going to bring up.
They went through the office to the treatment areas. “I can do a few days without compromising my desire for an honest relationship, but let’s look at your calendar before we get into all that. See what we can make of things.”
Ninety minutes, a pregnancy test and a sonogram later, Lise walked out of Seaside Hospital with Cassie, unable to put the grainy black and white image of her baby away.
She was going to have a baby. She and Dante were going to be parents. And she really needed to learn to predict fertilization better after the baby came so it’d actually happen when planned next time, not a couple of weeks earlier.
She’d lied to Cassie about that, and the guilt of that lie was the only thing putting a damper on her current mood. She wanted to tell her everything that was going on. How in just under two months she’d gone from cowering behind her own walls to wanting desperately to give her trust to someone she barely knew.
“Are you okay?” Cassie asked, pausing at the juncture in the parking lot where they’d have to split up and go different directions to reach their cars.
“I’m great. Very happy. Just a bit shocked. Things with Dante...” What could she say? “He’s a complicated man.”
“They all are, but considering the paths most lives could’ve taken after what they went through... I’m pretty sure Dante can handle anything you throw at him. Even if it explodes a little at first.”
“You’re right.” Lise nodded. This was what they both wanted. He’d just been so stiff at work this week, and after the whole Mateo thing she couldn’t really blame him for being cross, but things had been different since then. It felt like he was pulling away when they had just been starting to really connect. He’d told her to stay away for a second week. When she’d asked why he’d said something about the most likely time for this situation with Mateo to backfire being within the first two weeks post-op. Somehow she wasn’t supposed to be at his house if Mateo—who’d already gone home—ended up with an infection or some complications. And then there was also something about the club that didn’t sound quite so ridiculous.
But she had no relationship manual to refer to, and she couldn’t talk about it to this kind, generous woman because she was still bound to this double life of his. Which left Dante as the only person she could talk to, and the one person she really should talk to, but who she didn’t want to talk.
“I’m going to go straight to his house and drag him out of bed if he’s sleeping. I have no idea what he’s up to tonight. Sometimes he ignores the world to play piano for hours...”
Cassie made some sound of understanding and that was all it took for Lise to rush forward and fling her arms around her. “I understand if you can’t stay my doctor due to conflict of interest or whatever—plus it’s not really your specialty, but thank you all the same.”
A couple pats on the back and Cassie stepped back, “Of course. How could I pass up being the first to know if my husband’s twin was going to be a daddy? And on that note, make sure to read that information I gave you about mosquitos. This is Miami. Don’t let Dante have open windows and use repellent. There are some recommendations on the literature.”
“Okay. I’ll read it all tomorrow and pick up the spray stuff.” Lise took a few steps back, looked again at her little baby bean, carefully stowed the image in her handbag where it wouldn’t rumple, then called over her shoulder, “Drive safe! Don’t want to upset the Valentino ecosystem.”
* * *
“Lise?” Dante gave her shoulder a little shake and she immediately came awake. The last night she’d spent at Dante’s house—just over a week ago—they’d been awakened by great drama. She was primed for that.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her, then brushed her hair out of her eyes.
Calming as quickly as she’d awakened, Lise pushed herself to a sitting position and focused her sleepy eyes on him. “Did you have a good night?”
“It was all right. Surprised to see you, though. I told you two weeks. This is one.”
“I wanted to see you,” she said, then frowned. “Oh, because...uh...are you sure you had an okay night?”
Dante felt a headache coming on. “It was a long night, actually. Lots of business junk I’ve been letting pile up.”
“Did you get caught up?”
“I have to go back in tomorrow and finish.”
She nodded again, glanced down the sofa to her handbag, and then looked back at him. “Did you get to play at all? I thought maybe you needed another music night with everything that happened with Mateo last week, and today was your first real day off since you spent last weekend taking care of him.”
“No playing. But there was a good band up tonight. We usually have all Fridays and Saturdays booked well in advance.” But he might as well have a good night since she was there. “Come to bed and make the night end on a good note.”
There was another hit of hesitation, another glance at her bag, and a thoughtful pause.
“Did you want to say something?”
“No, I’m just kind of fuzzy-headed.” She wiggled her fingers at her temple, then climbed to her feet and went with him.
* * *
She’d definitely been with him when he’d
gone to sleep.
Dante surveyed the empty bed lit by the morning sun. A quick check of the clock confirmed it was far too early to rise on a Saturday morning.
Had she listened to him and gone home?
Unlikely.
She thought his reasoning weak and she wasn’t wrong—the reason he’d given her had been weak. Because he couldn’t bear to tell her the real reason.
That he’d been having second thoughts about their arrangement.
That he couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t cause risk to her because of old debts that came knocking. He couldn’t think of anything else that could come, but he also knew himself and Mateo too well to think that this debt could be marked paid. If Mateo came to him with another traumatic injury or something that might cost the man his freedom, Dante was no longer certain he could turn him away.
She deserved better than a selfish man who put her into danger.
Pulling himself up, he grabbed shorts, slipped into them and shuffled through the house to find her.
“Crap!”
Her voice cut through the morning air as soon as Dante opened the bedroom door, but it sounded far away. And in pain.
He picked up speed and jogged through the house, not stopping until he found her with her back to him, standing over the kitchen sink, still muttering the same word over and over again.
“What did the sink do to you?” he asked from the doorway.
She looked over her shoulder at him, the short cotton shorts and T-shirt giving him thoughts about immediately dragging her back to bed rather than stuffing her into her car and sending her home. Her hair had been piled on her head in a sexy tangle and that did absolutely nothing to help his shifting mood.
“I like that you walk around without a shirt on all the time,” she greeted with her happy, morning smile. “And don’t go blaming the sink for the knife’s bad behavior.”
The word “knife” eclipsed the rest of her words, and pulled him urgently forward. Rounding her at the sink, he pulled her hand from the running water and watched the watery blood drip into the sink.
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