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“I’m not going to take out an ad and make their names and their problems public, honey.”
“Still, such a thing would be wrong.”
The good news was that she was back. No more stilted English. No more awful silence. No more emptiness in those beautiful eyes.
The bad news was that she was as intractable as ever. Or as determined as ever, depending on your point of view.
His point of view was that if getting into those files meant grabbing her laptop and breaking into it while she hammered him with her fists, that was what he would do.
But there was time. Not much, but some. She was with him, she was safe, and she needed enough breathing room to recover from what had happened a little while ago in her apartment. She was better, but she was like a guy crossing a mountain gorge on a shaky rope bridge.
Go slow. Go steady. One false move and you might fall.
It wasn’t just that he wanted to make sure she was okay before she set foot on that bridge; it was that she—she was important to him.
Important? That wasn’t really the right word.
She meant everything to him. Everything, in a way no woman ever had before.
A chill danced along his spine.
“Time to order lunch,” he said, because thinking about food was a lot safer topic than what was tiptoeing through his head.
• • •
He ordered whatever he thought might tempt her. No rhyme or reason. Just whatever seemed like comfort food.
French toast. Omelets. A couple of small steaks. Soups. Chicken salad.
Rice pudding.
Bianca laughed when she peeked into one of the covered serving bowls and saw the rice pudding.
“Universal comfort food,” she said.
Her laugh was what comforted him. It was the final assurance that his woman was beside him and in the world again.
They ate at the table next to the window.
He was determined they would only talk about upbeat, noncontroversial things. Movies? Yeah, but he wasn’t much for movies. Travel? The last place he’d been wasn’t high on anybody’s let’s-talk-about-interesting-places list.
Anyway, what he really wanted to talk about was her.
He wanted to know more about her. Everything about her. How she’d grown up. If she missed Sicily. All he knew was that she’d been raised there, which didn’t make much sense, considering that her old man was a four-star general and her family’s Texas ranch was
the size of a small kingdom.
And the double surname. What was with that? What little he’d gleaned about the Bellini-Wilde thing had come from listening to Tanner and from the conversation that had swirled around him when Alessandra had been kidnapped and the entire clan had descended on Camp Condor.
“You have a big family,” he said, when they were eating their French toast. “All those Wildes and Bellinis…”
She smiled. “Three half-brothers. Three half-sisters. Two full brothers and one full sister.”
“And the Wilde part of it is John Hamilton Wilde. General John Hamilton Wilde. Your father.”
Her chin lifted. “My father by blood, not by choice.”
Chay laughed. “Trust me, honey. Lots of us have fathers we’d never have wanted if we’d had a choice.”
