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I smiled. He was the best. “Love you, too.”
“I have to warn you to be careful,” Dane told him. “Travis or Hope may get the bright idea to approach you and feed you some tales. Please don’t be quick to believe what they tell you.”
Wyatt leaned forward. “If Vienna had asked you to wait and marry her at a later date, would you have agreed to that?”
“Yes,” replied Dane. “I’d hoped that she wouldn’t ask that of me, because I wanted her tied to me as fast as possible. But I would have waited and given her the fairytale wedding if she’d asked for it. She didn’t.”
Wyatt licked his bottom lip and sat up straight. He slowly nodded. “All right. I believe in giving the benefit of the doubt where it’s due. Just … don’t hurt our girl.”
“I can’t promise that,” said Dane. “But I can promise that it’s something I’d never want to do.”
All eyes turned to Melinda, who was biting hard on her lip and staring at the ground.
Finally, she looked up at me and weakly flapped her hands. “If you truly believe he married you for the right reason, I’ll trust that.”
In other words, she didn’t entirely trust him anymore, but she’d back down and let the situation lie. Given Melinda’s character, that was really the most I could have hoped for.
It was another half an hour before my family announced their intention to leave. The goodbyes between Dane and my foster parents were a little stiff, but Simon made an effort. My father was probably so willing to give him a chance because, having heard Dane claim his own father wasn’t a good man, Simon suspected he’d been abused. It was easy for your mind to go there when you’d been through it yourself. You knew it happened; knew what scars it could leave behind.
Dane had told me that he hadn’t been sexually abused, but he hadn’t said there’d been no abuse at all. I suspected that some awful shit had gone on in his house when he was a child. I just didn’t know what. And it wasn’t my place to ask.
After my family left, I stacked the empty coffee mugs into the dishwasher. “I’m sorry that you were put in a position where you felt the need to share all that stuff with them,” I told Dane, who was leaning against the counter, staring into space.
His gaze snapped to mine. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know. It’s Travis’s fault. And don’t think I don’t want to throttle him.” I closed the dishwasher. “You could have given me a heads-up that your father committed suicide—I almost fell off the sofa in shock.”
“I only wanted to talk about it once.”
I could understand that. “What are you going to do to Travis? Don’t tell me nothing, I won’t believe that. He’s ignored every warning you’ve given him. There’s no way you’ll simply issue him another one.”
Dane closed the distance between us and settled his hands on my hips. “I won’t do anything to him that he isn’t attempting to do to me.”
I frowned. “You plan to try to wreck his marriage?”
“Not quite.” Dane dipped his head and kissed the side of my neck. “Come take a shower with me.”
I swear my entire body brightened at the idea. Still, I pushed, “What are you going to do to him?”
“I already told you.”
“No, you replied to my question, but you didn’t actually answer it.”
Dane slid his hands down to palm my ass. “He’s not important. We’ve wasted enough minutes of our day talking about him. Let’s be done with that.” Tightening his grip on my butt, he hauled me up.
I curled my legs around his waist. “Translation: you’re not going to tell me?”
“Translation: I want to fuck you, and I don’t want him in your head while I do it.”
“Oh. All right, then.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I was sure he did these things just to keep me on my toes.
With the exception of going to meetings or business-related events, Dane mostly stayed home. I’d originally thought that was purely because, being a workaholic, he preferred to be in his home office when not at o-Verve. But I’d come to realize that, actually, he was a home bird. He seemed at his most relaxed when on his own territory.
He never took off on his own to do “guy stuff” or ever proposed that we go anywhere together. So when he’d picked me up from the bridal boutique after my final fitting to take me straight to a very popular restaurant, it had been something of a surprise.
Other men might take their wives out for meals all the time, but not Dane. It not only meant coming away from work, it meant leaving the house. Plus, he preferred home cooking—he didn’t even like takeout much, the weirdo. And considering I wasn’t the true definition of a wife, he had no need to romance me or anything, so there was really no need for him to put himself out—something which, as a rule, he rarely ever did.
