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Her cell phone chimed with an incoming text, snagging her attention and making her heart tap faster in her chest. Who on earth would text her this early on a Sunday morning?
A quick look at the screen answered that question with ease. Someone with a three-month-old baby, that’s who.
Dinner tonight at Mami and Papi’s. Everyone will be there. Don’t even think of making another excuse.
She had to give it to her sister, Marianna. She didn’t pull any punches. Kind of a Garza family trait, actually. Still, it didn’t make the tension that had just set up camp in Camila’s shoulders any easier to manage.
In order to avoid family drama and create worry while she’d been in protective custody, Camila had given Matteo permission to text their family thread from her cell phone with messages she’d scripted. He’d sent them with enough frequency to keep the rest of the Garzafamiliafrom suspecting that anything was amiss, but it hadn’t changed the fact that she’d been noticeably absent from their weekly family dinner for over a month now. The excuses she and Matteo had come up with had been as decent as possible—one week, she’d been “sick” and hadn’t wanted to share germs with either her parents or the baby, another, she’d had an online certification she’d needed to complete for work, and yet another, a friend in need of help. Her family had been giving her an increasingly difficult time about not being there, and even though Matteo had acted as a buffer, saying he didn’t want her germs, either, and actually skipping one of the dinners himself so she wouldn’t be the odd person out, now that Camila was actually back, she wasn’t going to be able to avoid them any longer.
She was going to have to suck it up and be scrutinized from head to toe at yet another Garza family dinner.
“Whoa,” Roman said, his dark brows tugging down in concern as he walked into the kitchen and caught sight of her before she could rearrange her expression to something more neutral. Or, at least, less pained. “Are you okay? You look upset.” After a beat, his expression grew more serious. “You didn’t get a threatening message or anything, did you?”
“What? Oh, God, no.” Camila shook her head. As promised, the Intelligence Unit had kept watch over her for the past week via regular check-ins, and she’d worn her lavalier tracker twenty-four seven even though the idea of it still ruffled her nerves.
“I’m fine. It’s just…” Fuck it. She was never going to get away with sugar-coating this. Not with Roman. “Every Sunday, my family does a dinner thing. All of us together, usually at my parents’ house. I obviously haven’t been for a while, so let’s just say my presence is expected and will probably be picked apart in the first five minutes of my attendance.”
“Ah.” Roman considered this as he made himself a cup of coffee, then brought it into the dining area to sit down across from her. “I know you said they’re…”
“Nosy and meddlesome and highly opinionated about every aspect of my personal life?” Camila supplied.
Roman tilted his head, taking a sip from his coffee cup. “I was going to go with ‘difficult sometimes’. I take it your brother came up with some good excuses for your absence these past few weeks?”
“He did,” she agreed. “And his and Delia’s wedding is only a few months away, so I might be able to deflect a little bit of the spotlight from shining on my failures. Still. It’s going to be agonizing.”
“Want a wingman?”
Camila’s coffee cup hit the table in front of her with aclunk. “What?”
“A wingman. You know, someone to go with you and—”
Her laugh arrived from out of nowhere, knocking the tension in her shoulders aside. “I know what a wingman is, Roman. But you don’t seriously want to go to a family dinner where you’ll be asked no less than six thousand questions by my family, who—oh, by the way—have absolutely zero filter, either individually or as a collective unit.”
“Am I wild about the fact that things will probably get uncomfortable? No,” Roman said, probably because he knew she’d call him out on it if he tried for a full-on “sure, sign me up”. “But I’m wild about you, so, yeah. I’ll go with you if you want me to. Plus”—he grinned, sending a shot of heat all the way through her—“the look on your brother’s face when we walk through the door together will be worth every minute.”
Camila laughed again. “You have a point.”
She slid from her chair to his lap and let him kiss her like they had nothing but time to do exactly that, and suddenly, her brother, her whole family and all of their disapproval, were the last thing on her mind.
23
Roman had over a decade’s worth of specialized training under his belt. He’d faced more hardened criminals than he could even count, had interrogated cold-blooded killers—for Chrissake, last year, he’d been shot in the chest by a guy who had stolen and laundered millions of dollars from his own company (and still thanked God every single day for the body armor that had saved his bacon). But as he looked at Camila’s parents’ house, with five cars already parked in front and people visible in every backlit window on the first floor, he was starting to think he might be out of his depth. His family had always been just him and his parents, except for a few distant great-aunts and uncles living all the way in Hawaii, and now that his mother was gone, his family-gathering skills had definitely grown more than a little rust.
“We can one hundred percent still run,” Camila said from her spot in the passenger seat of his BMW, and he knew her well enough by now to understand that she genuinely meant the offer.
Roman shook his head, his resolve turning to cement. “We’re not running. Unless you want to,” he added, because he’d have her back no matter what that looked like.
“Ugh, if we did, they’d find us eventually. Or, at least, they’d find me. We might as well go in.”
“I’m ready whenever you are,” Roman said. Camila slid out of the passenger seat, and he paused just long enough to take a covered dish from the spot where he’d secured it in the backseat, then joined her on the walkway leading to the house.
“You really didn’t have to bring anything. Trust me, mymamihas probably made enough to feed a football team,” Camila said, but here, he laughed.
“Oh, yes, I did. My mother taught me to never attend a party empty-handed. Plus, even if the whole evening turns into a steaming dumpster fire, at least we know there’ll be cobbler.”
His words made her laugh, just as he’d intended, and they headed to the front door together.
“Knock, knock,” Camila called out, stepping over the threshold. There was so much chatter sounding off from further inside the house that Roman was certain no one had heard her, but then a dark-haired woman in her mid to late thirties bearing a very strong family resemblance to Camila and Matteo appeared in the foyer.
