Page 3 of Broken Trust

I wait for it to turn into some other word. Some ordinary word that only sounded like her name in the dark. It doesn't. It stays exactly what it was.

I freeze. “What did you say?” He doesn't even lift the arm from his eyes. “Hmm?” A slow, satisfied breath, a man with nothing at all on his conscience. “Nothing. Come here.”

He pulls me back against his chest, my back to him, the way I've always liked, and murmurs at me to sleep. I lie there with my eyes shut and my breathing slow, already cold everywhere his hands aren't.

The fear I've carried for a year, the thing I kept flushing out and blaming on hormones, was never paranoia.

My husband is fucking our surrogate, my twin sister.

2

DANTE

Earlier That Evening

Ismelled her sister on me the whole way home.

Fuck.

I should have washed first. A shower at seven in the evening is exactly the kind of thing Gia would notice, so I told myself I'd risk the scent instead, and that was the first stupid decision of the night.

What am I doing?

I keep telling myself this isn't right, and then, like an idiot, I do it again anyway. This is wrong in more ways than I can count.

At the lights I grab the cologne from the door and spray it down my collar. It doesn't help. I bunch the front of my shirt to my face and breathe in, and there she is. Orange blossom. Amber under it. Mia, sitting on my skin like she owns it.

I could still turn off. Wash at the gym, buy myself an hour. Then the light goes green and I drive, because the one thing my hands won't do tonight is scrub her off in the bathroom that belongs to Gia.

My heart is going too hard. I feel it in my throat, in my wrists on the wheel. Ten years Gia has done nothing but love me past what I'm worth, and here I am carrying her sister home on my collar.

I take our street too fast, pull into the garage, kill the engine. I sit there while it ticks and cools, and then I make myself get out.

I come through the door, and the whole place is lit with candles, and something in me just lies down.

She's set the table the way she set it the first time she cooked for me. Sixteen, her parents away, her whole heart out on a plate. There's a slip the color of champagne on her, songs from our past, bringing back memories which have been long forgotten.

I'd give anything to be the man walking into that room. Instead I'm the one who spent the afternoon where he had no right to be, and I can't even hand her the one word she's earned, that she's beautiful, because it will come out crooked and she'll hear the crook in it.

So I say the stupid thing.

“What's all this?”

I watch her face fall, and I watch her hide that it fell, and I know I did that. I put it there. And I still haven't fixed it.

Gia comes to me anyway, like always.

“I'm missing my husband.” She's close now, close enough that if she turned her head she'd find Mia on me, and my whole body braces for it. She doesn't turn her head. She reaches up.

I take her face in my hands, so she'll keep looking up and won't lean in. A cheap trick. I've got a hundred of them now.

“I only wanted it to be perfect,” she says, and her voice cracks on the last word.

So I do what I always do. I talk. The production, the money, the late nights, and she listens attentively, like she always does.

“Stop talking.” She brings my mouth down to hers. “Let me have you.”

I freeze.