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“Good, so you can’t feel this.” She swatted his arm with the force of a cotton ball. “I know I should be grateful, and I am. I promise you, I am. But me being in love with Joel doesn’t mean Adrían Delgano’s okay to die.”
He set the book down. “About that…can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“At your wedding, when I told you that had it been anyone other than Joel, I would have fought for you, you said, ‘and selfishly wormed your waybackinto my heart.’ Can you…elaborate? Specifically on the ‘back’ part.”
It wouldn’t mean the same thing, and Joel already knew, but it would still be hard to say, especially since it would feel like she was betraying him somehow.
“Adrían, because of when we met, I think I might have misjudged my feelings for you,” she said. “I…I think I do love you.”
His chest stopped moving. “I can’t tell if this is happening or I’m hallucinating from the painkillers.”
“Obviously, it’s a different kind of love.”
“I know, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Adrían, when I say I love you, it means I care about you. More than a little bit. I care about what happens to you. You’re important to me. When you got hurt, I freaked out, though,” she glanced at Joel, “not as much as Joel did.”
“Because we’re best friends.”
It was funny how things came full circle. Joel had gone from Gage’s tormentor to the one being tormented. The fact that he and Adrían seemed to get along, regardless of what Joel said, meant Adrían was precisely the kind of man she’d hoped he would be.
“So,” he circled a finger, “go back to you telling me you love me.”
“I didn’t think it was right, loving you before my husband had been in the ground not even two years,” she explained. “I thought it would devalue what me and Curtis had, but I’ve had some time to think about it. Looking at Joel, and after spending these last few years with him in my life, I know exactly why I feel the way about him I do. Why I feel the way about you that I do. You and Joel are people Curtis would have been proud to call his brothers. That’s how you both got into my heart. Joel, though…with him, it’s different. It’s like part of Curtis’ soul lives inside him somehow. Joel’s my soulmate. My everything.”
Adrían took her hand. “Say you love me one more time. Maybe he’ll wake up.”
She smiled. “I love you, Adrían.”
They looked over at Joel.
“Adrían, there’s something else,” she added, clearing a knot of emotion from her throat. “Lavigne told me something about you. Something I don’t think is true.”
“About my lack of sexual experience before you?”
“Something like that.”
“Querida, where I grew up, sex was never about pleasure or intimacy. Sex didn’t exist. Intercourse was always about power, control, and violence. My mother was the only buffer I had, and she was defiled in public and then killed. After that, I grew cold. Before I joined my team, I wasn’t good. I wasn’t good at all.”
“You might have done less-than-stellar things, but I don’t think you were bad,” she said. “You did what you had to do to survive, but someone ‘bad’ wouldn’t do what you did for me, my children, and the man I love.”
“Which is me, right?”
She swatted his hand.
“So, to you, Ayesha,” he swallowed, “I’m still good?”
“To me, Adrían, you’re wonderful.”
“Christ, querida. I’m trying to fall out of love with you.”
“Sorry.”
He sighed. “Ayesha, the merethoughtof people was enough to make me pull away. Still, no matter how far I fell, in my mind, there was a ladder or stairs back to the version of me my mother had tried to raise. But whenever I tried to be intimate, I saw what those men did to her.”
“What made you choose me?”
