Page 35 of Loyalty

It was not as easy to let that insult roll off her shoulders, but she tried.

“Which club?” she asked.

Andino smiled, and this time, it was warm.

• • •

Siena was fifty pages into her new novel about a mercenary hero and heroine thrown together by circumstance when a knock on her apartment door interrupted her. She had all she could do not to glare at the door from across the living room.

The few minutes she was allowed to sit down and relax, and someone had to come over. It wasn’t like she had a lot of friends or anything, and her brothers barely wanted anything to do with her unless it related to work somehow.

“The door is unlocked,” she called out.

Siena went back to her book.

However, she eyed her father as he slipped in her apartment. Matteo practically swallowed the space with his large stature. His dark gaze looked over the place, and then skipped to where his daughter sat with a book in her hands.

“Don’t you lock your door?” he asked.

“Why would I?”

“Because it’s safer, Siena.”

“Safer for whom?” She smiled sweetly. “Pretty sure if someone wanted me out of here for whatever reason, they would just break it down, Dad.”

Matteo clicked his tongue at her. One of his many signs of annoyance or disappointment. “This is what you do with your free time—read?”

“Reading is good for the brain.”

She didn’t bother to add how reading also helped to shut off her brain when she spent eight or more hours a day looking at numbers, and falsifying them. Being a bookkeeper and accountant was only made harder by the fact that every book she opened, she had to scrub it clean, and cook it up.

It added more work and time.

Matteo came closer, and seemed to be peering at the cover. “There’s a half-naked man on the cover. What is that garbage?”

“It’s not garbage. It’s a romance.”

“Mmhmm.”

“He’s a mercenary.”

“That so?”

“Apparently. What do you want, Dad?”

Might as well get right to it, she thought. For the three years she had lived in this apartment, she could count on one hand the amount of times her father had come to visit her. Typically, her mother came over a couple of times a month, but Matteo never joined her.

Besides, Siena spent enough time with her father through the week when she worked. Him and her brothers.

She didn’t need more time with him.

“I can’t visit my daughter?” he asked, taking a seat on the couch beside her.

“You don’t typically make an effort to, no.”

Matteo chuckled, and the force rocked them both on the couch. “Perhaps I’m making an effort to do just that, Siena. Your mother is always telling me how there’s more to you than the numbers in your head.”

She side-eyed her father, and doubted every single word he spoke.