Sash had a tendency to freak out unnecessarily over things she later wholeheartedly agreed with. Why wouldn’t she want to do the one thing they couldn’t do before? Dante reasons. If anything, she’s likely to be just as excited as he is.
An hour later they are both ready. Sash has no idea where they are about to go, but she’s excited. A little nervous about what’s to come, but excited she’ll be doing something with Dante. Over the moon that he’s been thoughtful enough to get her a gift at all. If the flowers and the presents last night were anything to go by, this could be absolutely immense. Knowing Dante, it’s going to be significant. True to her word, she’s decided not to wear any panties, and Dante can’t think of anything more appropriate.
Hand in hand, they leave the apartment, ride the elevator down to the lobby and make their way out to the street.
They are no more than a half a dozen steps away from the hotel when she calls him. The word fired through the air like a bullet.
“Dante.”
Sash is the first to turn.
Tess is standing there with Oliver in her arms. Whatever she was going to say is postponed slightly by what she has seen.
“This her?” Tess asks, pointing as best she can at Sash. Sash is confused. She looks from Tess to Oliver and then across to Dante, who looks anything but calm and composed.
“This is not the time”, Dante says firmly.
“Who is-?” Sash begins to say but the words don’t fully form a sentence.
“I came to give you one last chance. He wanted to see you. I guess I made a mistake.”
“Dante?”
Sash looks at him with a face twisted by worry.
“Daddy”, Oliver says with his hand stretched out towards Dante.
The penny drops.
Immediately, the color drains from Sash’s face, and her skin goes cold. She feels a hollow in her gut like someone has just kicked a huge chunk of her out onto the road and can’t help but fold over uncontrollably, clasping at her neck, desperate for air, her knees so weak had she not been holding Dante’s hand, she would have clattered straight to the floor. That hand feels cold and unfamiliar in hers now.
She lets go of him as though suddenly realizing she’s touching something completely foreign to her, and staggers back away from him, the world moving in slow motion. She looks to Oliver and then back to Dante. There is no doubt about it. This is his child.
“No.”
She shakes her head, her hand going instinctively to her belly. “No.”
“Sash”, Dante says, trying to reason with her.
“You didn’t know”, Tess says, a penny dropping for her now too. “Why does that not surprise me?”
Sash wants the whole world to swallow her up. The information is a jumble in her head and all she knows is she needs to get away. She can’t process anything, she can’t think clearly, she can’t even cry. It’s like the whole world as she knows it has suddenly come to a grinding and abrupt stop. Who is this woman? Why have they got a child together? Why has he lied to her again?
Without even thinking about it, she turns away and begins to run, adrenaline kicking in.
Dante rolls his eyes, he points an accusatory finger at Tess and calls after his stepsister. When she doesn’t respond, he gives chase, but Sash is quicker than he is. Before he can get to her, he loses her in the crowd.
“Fuck.”
Dante spins around to look in all directions, unable to locate her.
Back at the entrance to the hotel, Tess is waiting.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
Oliver is crying. He has no idea what’s going on, but he doesn’t like it. Tess moves him from arm to arm, trying to calm him down. Before she can answer, Dante’s phone begins to ring.
They stand there for a while scowling at each other. The phone rings insistently. Oliver wails. Dante shakes his head.
“Are you going to answer that?”
“You’ll regret this, Tess.”
Out of his pocket comes the cell phone.
“This is not a good time”, he barks into the receiver.
In his office headquarters, Alex stands at her desk, a letter out on the surface in front of her.
“I’ve got bad news”, she says. “You’re going to want to hear this.”
“I don’t need any more bad news.”
Dante eyes Tess.
“Someone is blackmailing you, and they want a lot of money.”
“How is this news, Alex? Someone tries to blackmail me every other week. Burn it like we do all of the other ones.”
Tess smirks and shakes her head.
“Not this one. This one is for real. It’s about you and Sash.”
Dante’s heart skips a beat. The skin on the back of his neck goes cold and the hairs on his arm stand up on end.
“You have twenty four hours to deposit a hundred million dollars into my account”, Tess reads, “or these photos will be sent to all of the national newspapers”, Alex holds up a photo to get a better look at it. “My oh my. What on earth have you been doing, Dante?”
“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.”
There are a number of photos taken from long distance, some innocuous, others incriminatory. Alex’s eyes goes wide as she looks through them, Dante’s body flush with desire, Sash bent over the table in front of him in one, in bed with him in the next. They are grainy, but clear enough to see who they involve and what’s going on.
“I’ll send them to you.”
Dante cuts the call.
“Bad news?”
Tess takes great pleasure in asking him. In his pocket, Dante can feel his phone vibrate.
“This is not the right time, Tess.”
“Clearly. I shouldn’t have come.”
“Why the fuck did you?”
He sits down on the steps to the hotel, desperate to try and think clearly. Tess watches him. “What do you want?”
“Who is that?”
“No-one.”
“She didn’t look like no-one to me.”
“Tess, you and I are over, you need to realize that. I’ve moved on. Get over it.”
Dante takes his cell phone out of his pocket. Scrolling through the images, he can’t work out how they would have been taken. Who the fuck knew?
“Fuck. I need to find her.”
Tess watches him get up, go to the edge of the sidewalk and hail a taxi.
“This is it, Dante.”
When the taxi pulls away, she’s shaking her head and passing their crying child from one shoulder to the next, framed perfectly by the rear window.
***
In the restroom of a department store half a block away, Sash sits on the toilet seat, crying softly. In her hands is a recently purchased pregnancy test, the yes/no indicator patch covered by the tip of her thumb.
Chapter 26
He finally finds her several hours later, sat on a park bench with her knees pulled up to her chest.
When he sits down next to her, she doesn’t scream or try to run away, she just sits there silently, staring ahead at the very same point she’s had her eyes fixed on for the last thirty minutes, trying to work out what the hell has just happened. Although she’s not crying anymore, her eyes are red and puffy, and it’s clear she’s still shocked and very upset. Dante doesn’t speak for a moment either, deciding how best to approach the subject. He should have told her, but there never seemed like the right moment. Eventually, he reaches out to her, hoping in his touch she’ll soften. Sash pulls away as soon as he’s moved, crushing herself into the wooden arm rest of the bench.
Dante regards his stepsister. Still she won’t look at him. Still she’s shaking her head, focusing on the mud by her feet. In its brown edges, she sees much more clarity than she does in the man sat next to her.
“Was that it? My surprise? Is that why you brought me here, to humiliate me? I want an explanation, Dante. When you’ve given me that, we’re finished.”
Dante
lets out a long sigh. “Look, Sash. Tess is part of a history that has nothing to do with us.”
Sash shakes her head. She’s absolutely furious with him. More so than at any other point before. This is one lie too many for her.
“Nothing to do with us? If you’re fucking her, that has everything to do with us. Are you fucking her?”
Now she looks at him. In her eyes he sees a catalog of hurt.
“No.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me, Dante. I’ve had enough.”
“Sash, listen to me, I’m not fucking her.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I came to see Oliver, not Tess. I should have told you.”
“Oliver?-”
She can’t finish what she’s about to say. “-You asked me to trust you. How can I trust you if you lie to me?”
Dante hangs his head. He’s been rumbled and there’s no way out of it for him but to try and get Sash to forgive him. To try and get her to understand.
“You have a son, Dante. A fucking son.”
Just saying the words brings tears to Sash’s eyes. It makes her feel empty inside. It makes her feel like she’s no longer special for him. That what she believes to be growing inside her isn’t unique anymore, that it’s not enough.
“Please, Sash.”
Dante tries to reach for her again.
“Don’t touch me”, Sash says firmly, and Dante retracts his hand.
“I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you before we went back to New York. I didn’t have a chance before Tess turned up. I want to be with you Sash, I thought that was clear.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because it’s true. Please, Sash, look at me.”
Sash can’t bring herself to turn in her seat. All she can do is stare blindly at the ground and hope it swallows her up.
“I brought you here to give you a present. To give us both a present. Something we could never do the first time around. I need you Sash, no one else makes me feel like you do.”
“Yeah, right.”
Tears cloud Sash’s eyes again.
For the third time, Dante tries to get near her. As he edges a little closer on the bench, this time Sash doesn’t warn him away.
“I promise you I’m not fucking her. Tess and I weren’t even in a proper relationship together. Whatever we had ended almost three years ago. There is only one person I want to be with in this world, and that’s you. It’s only ever been you. Please, Sash, you’ve got to believe me.”
The cruel thing is, Sash knows she’s got no choice. Whether she believes him or not, or he’s lying to her or not, she’s never going to be able to tear herself away from him. Dante is almost alongside her now. Slowly, he reaches out to put an arm around her shoulder.
“Please come back to the hotel.”
Sash shakes her head.
“If you like, I can contact Tess, tell her to explain to you that there is nothing going on between us.”
“You have a child together.”
Sash still can’t process it. “A child, Dante.”
“I know. I was just as shocked as you are now when she told me about it.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Tess was one of the dancers in the club. We had a thing together for a while, and the next thing I know she’s pregnant with my child. After that, when I told her we couldn’t be together, she moved away. I’ve been coming to see Oliver regularly since then.”
Sash shifts a little in her seat. She takes Dante’s arm from around her shoulder and places it back in his lap.
“Why did you tell me you were coming here to work? Why did you lie to me?”
Dante sighs again. This is difficult for him. Tess and Oliver are a secret he’s worked hard to keep. If only she hadn’t turned up at the hotel like that, they’d be in the clinic now getting Sash’s virginity back.
“Honestly?”
The ridiculousness of that word almost makes Sash laugh.
“Don’t lie to me, Dante. I was this close to flying straight back to New York. I still haven’t decided whether I’m going to do it or not. As far as I was concerned this morning, we were over. Now you have to prove to me I can trust you again. Don’t fucking lie to me ever again, I mean it.”
“I didn’t think you’d understand if I told you about Oliver. I thought you’d react like this.”
“How did you expect me to react if not like this? Do you think I should be over the moon for you?”
“No, of course not. I didn’t tell you because I was scared of losing you.”
“Scared of losing me? Since when have you been scared of losing me? I was always there for you, Dante, always. I wasn’t the one who disappeared into the ether three years ago.”
Now it’s Dante’s turn to look at the mud on the ground.
“I made a mistake. I’ve thought about it everyday.”
“It’s not the only one either.”
“Sash, please, I’m trying to make it up to you. I’m trying to do the right thing for us both. I’m trying to show you how much you mean to me. I want to make this work.”
“When are you going to stop being such an asshole?”
Sash shakes her head again in disbelief at the idiocy of her stepbrother.
“I’m working on it. The hotel, the credit card, the presents-.”
“It means nothing if I don’t have you.”
“You have me, Sash, when are you going to realize that? You have me.”
“When are you going to show me?”
“I thought I was.”
“Rules, Dante”, Sash says, reaching out for him this time. “No secrets, especially something this big.”
“No secrets, I promise.”
Sash sighs. In his lap she grips his hand, interlocking her fingers with his.
“No running away.”
“No running away.”
“No fucking other girls.”
“Sash, seriously.”
Dante lifts her chin with his index finger. It takes her a while to look at him directly, embarrassed by the floods of tears that don’t seem to want to stop coming.
“When you came back to me, it was something I thought would never happen. I’ve never wanted something so much in my life. The first time I didn’t realize how strongly I felt about you, but when you came back, it was like everything fell into place. I didn’t come to you in that time because I needed to know you had forgiven me. I needed to know that you wanted me. Sash, when I saw you again, I knew we had to be together. I mean that. You are the most incredible person I have ever met and I need you. There is no one else. No one even close. I love you, Sash.”
“Do you mean it?”
Sash can feel butterflies in her belly.
“Of course I mean it. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t mean it. I’m here Sash, I’ve just spent two hundred dollars in taxi fares and walked over the city for the last two hours. I called you like a hundred times.”
“Thirteen”, Sash says, her eyes lighting up just a little.
“The point is, I’m not with Tess, I’m not with any other girls, I’m with you. I love you, Sash. I always have, I just didn’t realize it quick enough the first time around.”
“You’re a jerk.”
“I know I am. I should have told you.”
“About Oliver, or that you love me?”
“Both.”
Sash can’t help but feel a hollow in her stomach when she thinks about his boy. She can’t help but feel some divine right has been taken away from her. That what she believes she’s carrying will pale in comparison to what he already has.
“I wish you’d told me.”
She moves her eyes across Dante’s face. The fullness of his lips, the definition of his cheekbones, the perfect way his hair falls at the side of his head. Even when she’s furious with him, she can’t help but find him attractive.
“I love you too. Sometimes I wish I didn’t, but I do.”<
br />
“Will you come back with me?”
Now Sash lets out a sigh.
“Are you going to hurt me again?”
“I hope not.”
“You are the only one who can decide that. If I come back with you, you need to promise me you’ll take responsibility. I’m serious, Dante, if we are going to be together, you need to act like it.”
Sash pauses a while to prepare herself. She takes Dante’s hands and looks him in the eye.
“I don’t want us to be secret anymore.”
“Sash. You know we-.”
“I mean it. You need to prove to me that I’m the most important thing in your life. More than your work, or your reputation.”
“Look, if anyone found out about us, I’d be ruined.”
“I don’t care, and nor should you.”
“Sash, be reasonable, there’s a lot at stake here. We’re stepbrother and stepsister, they hang people like us in Texas.”
“I can’t do this, Dante, not unless I know for sure. I’ve been hurt too much already.”
“I’m telling you, Sash, isn’t that enough?”
“No.”
Sash shakes her head. “Not any more it isn’t.”
Dante sighs. “Lets go back to the hotel and talk about it.”
“Uh-uh. I’m not going anywhere until you promise me.”
“You really want to do this, Sash? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about Oliver, but I was going to do it eventually, when our relationship was stable enough for you to understand.
“Don’t punish us both for a mistake I’ve made. If the press know about us, every single aspect of our life will be under scrutiny. They will not leave us alone and we’ll have no privacy. You want us to have a relationship, the kind of relationship you have always dreamed about? We can only do that if we don’t tell anyone we are together.
“This isn’t a question of me not demonstrating how important you are to me by keeping you secret, it’s a question of me keeping our relationship private so I can demonstrate to you exactly how important you are to me. We tell anyone, we are as good as over. They’ll tear us apart. After that, forget about having any freedom. You’ll be lucky if your friends still talk to you, let alone your own family. You want to make a new life somewhere nobody knows us? Fine. I for one don’t want to lose that unnecessarily.”
Charged: A Stepbrother Romance Novel (With FREE Bonus Novel Heated!) Page 33