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“I’m glad you’ve chosen to stay here,” I break the silence.
Sooner or later we’d have to have this conversation. I spent all night thinking about our situation, and now my whole body is vibrating with restlessness.
Grace turns to me, a playful smile on her lips. She looks beautiful with the sun shining its warm glow on her. But I already knew that. What surprises me is the lack of wariness on her lovely face. For the first time ever, she seems carefree. “I mean all my clothes are here. And all my other stuff too. So I kind of have to be here.”
I laugh. “If I’d known that was all it would take, I would’ve done that from the beginning.”
“When did you get those things flown in?” she asks, her hair floating in the wind.
I give Jack another wave as he pokes his head through a hole. “You seem to be very concerned about the timing of me doing things. Does it matter?”
“No. I’m more concerned about possible breaking and entering, as well as robbery,” Grace answers quickly, an unguarded smile on her lips. Her dress flaps in the wind, revealing glimpses of her smooth, porcelain thighs.
This is not the time to be ogling her. Distracted, I tear my gaze from her alluring legs, laughing. “I’ve faced worse charges.”
Her smile vanishes. “I don’t doubt that.”
Damn it. Me and my big mouth. Now she’s probably thinking about Gio.
I can still see it in my mind. My gun pointing at his chest. His gun pressing against my temple. If he squeezed the trigger, Franco and Hector would kill him right then and there. He knew he could walk away and go home to his warm bed, but he’d been drinking, and he’d always been reckless.
A sick feeling clenches my gut. Nausea rises through my chest. I had a bad feeling about this standoff. Then I felt it. A slight change in the pressure of metal on my temple. He was about to shoot.
So I did it first. I blinked, and he was on the ground, blood spreading across his shirt, his whole body twitching on gray asphalt.
“Fuck,” I curse.
I expect Grace to be glaring at me. But there’s no hostility in her gaze. Not even anger. And she still hasn’t put up any walls between us. “I’ve thought a lot about what you did. I’ve decided not to blame you for it.”
I stare at her.
“My mom told me all about it. About how Gio had been frustrated over something else that had nothing to do with you,” she says calmly.
I thought that might’ve been the case. We just met at the wrong place and at the wrong time. Hearing it straight from Grace’s mouth lifts a weight from my shoulders that I didn’t even realize I was carrying.
“And I’m confident now that you didn’t have anything to do with the kidnapping,” she says. “The way you glowered at your dad . . . I don’t think you’re that good of an actor.”
“I wanted to wait until you were ready. It was important to me that you make the conscious choice to be with me. It still is.”
Grace smiles, a merry twinkle in her eyes. Maybe it’s just my imagination, but they appear clearer than they ever have been. “If you’d told me you were going to take care of moving my stuff, I might’ve agreed to coming home sooner.”
I grin. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I want you to do something.”
Our eyes lock, and time seems to stop for a moment, until Jack’s piercing scream cracks the air, followed by fits of laughter. We look at each other and laugh too, relieved he’s okay, knowing we’re both sharing the responsibility over him now.
“I’ve been doing my own thinking, Grace,” I say. “I’m so sorry I hid some of the ugly stuff from you. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew it was going to come back to bite me in the ass. But I didn’t want to scare you off. That was selfish of me. I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” Grace nods. “To be honest, I think I was angry at myself too. As much as I tried to convince myself otherwise, I couldn’t stop thinking Gio would still be alive if it weren’t for me running away from my old life.”
“You don’t know that. He could’ve picked a fight with someone else and ended up the same.”
“I guess you’re right. It just seems so silly to me now that I ran away from this.” Grace sweeps her gaze around us then stares into my eyes. “From you.”
Is she saying what I think she’s saying? I reach across the gorge between us, bridging the space with my hand. “Have you decided to stay then? That would mean the world to me. Because I don’t know when it happened, but you and Jack have become the most important things in my life.”
