“More perfect, I hope.”
“That’s not possible.”
Frankie smacks me with a playful hand, her smile widening even further. “Look at you, flirting shamelessly with me. Sir, you have already put a ring on it and knocked me up. I’m not going anywhere.”
I kiss her forehead and can’t stop myself from reminding her, “You left once before.”
Shit. I sound like an asshole. And I definitely didn’t mean to sound so emotional about it, either. Frankie just stares at me, her hand loosening in mine.
“I didn’t leave you, Dante. You drove me away. There’s a difference between being safe and protected, and being in a cage. Being controlled. Being kept in the dark.”
Her hand leaves mine completely as she looks out the window. I don’t have a good rebuttal, but I steel myself to ask the one question that’s been bothering me most since I collected her in Miami.
“Would you have come back if you weren’t pregnant?”
Silence pulses between us.
Still refusing to meet my gaze, she says, “I’m here now, and this kid is on the way.”
“But—Frankie, I love you.”
She smiles sadly. “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
“What more is there?”
Finally, she looks over at me again. “There’s trust. Communication.Choice. A whole host of things. Compromising from time to time, even. But the biggest thing is trust. You don’t trust me. Yet you’ve set this marriage up so that I have no choice but to trust you. How is that fair? How is that ever going to be…livable for me?”
I don’t know what to say as her words tumble in my mind. She’s right. But if I tell her the truth, tell her everything, it will change the way she sees me, feels about me. Irrevocably.
“I’ve seen the posters around town,” she adds. “Of Bregman. I know he’s missing. And I know that…that I’m the reason why he’s probably dead.”
My jaw goes tight. “He signed his death notice the moment he fucked with my father’s car.”
And I won’t apologize for that, even if it makes me sick to think about what happened to him for doing it.
“So he is dead, then,” Frankie murmurs.
Contemplating, I look at her, hesitating as I try to decide what to say—something, anything besides the truth. But she wants the truth, and my trust. I really have no choice.
“…yes,” I answer.
Her face goes blank and then she turns back to the window, shrouded in silence. I watch her, wondering what she’s thinking as we make the turn into the drive of Bellanti Vineyards.
And I make up my mind.
20
Frankie
Without a word,Dante pulls my chair back from the dinner table and takes my hand, pulling me to my feet.
I guess this means no dessert.
His brothers look at us conspicuously, but no one says a thing as we exit the dining room and take a left down the hall. My curiosity is piqued, but I don’t ask any questions—I’m still pissed about the “talk” we had in the car earlier. The talk where I laid out exactly what was bothering me and he just sat there and said nothing. Nothing about trusting me or granting me personal freedom or even simply understanding where I was coming from. Asshole.
He turns into a doorway and I realize he’s led me to the library.
“Sit,” Dante says as he pulls out a chair facing a heavy mahogany desk. There are stacks of papers spread neatly across the desktop.
