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Pain slams into me, blindsiding me with emotions I’ve refused to confront. Leo’s funeral is today. I’d shut him off into a compartment of my brain, just so I could continue to function like nothing had changed, despite losing my best ally and my second in command to betrayal. My decision made in an instant, I state, “Well, it appears, then, you’ll have a plus one at this funeral.”
“You can’t possibly be serious,” she protests, her voice a blend of disbelief and amusement.
“As serious as a bullet.”
Attending Leo’s funeral is a debt I owe to our lifelong friendship. Yet it’s unthinkable that Don Vitelli would appear at a traitor’s farewell. So it’s just as well there’s another service today. It doesn’t matter whose it is at this point—dead is dead.
She pauses, her lips parting as if to speak, then closes them again, the room charged with a palpable tension as she contemplates her next words. “So, you’d accompany me to a funeral, all to keep Maria ‘safe,’” she air quotes.
“Correct.”
“Why does this woman mean so much to you? She has a husband, doesn’t she?”
I wonder if it’s the therapist in her that’s wondering if there’s something more between me and Maria. Or the fiery woman under that cool, unflappable demeanor. The woman whose heated gaze rakes over me like she can’t help herself.
“She doesn’t,” is my terse reply.
“Which are you denying, Mr Vitelli, that she doesn’t mean much to you or she doesn’t have a husband?”
I’m not in the mood to explain, but Sophie’s gaze seems to pull at me, demanding honesty. I find myself giving it because an irritatingly stupid part of me wants to encourage her to keep looking at me like she wants to devour me. “Maria’s husband was my friend.”
“Was…?” The word hangs between us.
I nod, watching a shadow cross her features and the slight widening of her amber eyes when she realizes that Maria’s husband is dead.
“Oh God. Poor Maria.” She turns away, her shoulders slumped as the fight drains from her stance. She slowly sheaths her dagger.
“All right,” she nods, though it seems the gesture is more for herself than me. “If you can wrangle yourself a last-minute plane ticket to Carlsbad—good luck with that, by the way—then you can be my plus one. But on one condition.”
“What?” I snap in irritation. The last thing I want from this sexy, sassy woman is her thinking she can make demands. She’s getting away with too fucking much already.
“To earn my professional silence and provide all the confidentiality your heart desires, then you’re going to talk, and not just about Maria Ricci.”
I snort, “You’re hoping I’ll talk myself right into something that lets you spill to the cops with a clear conscience?”
She shakes her head. “No. Not at all. I suspect you're too clever to give me anything useful. And I’m not as big on ‘spilling to the cops’ as you think. But I am big on helping people, in whatever form that takes.”
This time I let out an amused chuckle, “And you think you can fix me?”
She pauses, and I’m shocked to see her eyes get suddenly shiny with unshed tears. “No, I can’t fix you, Mr Vitelli. You’re not a vase or a broken-down car.”
“So what would I gain by spilling my guts to you?”
“I offer people the tools to better understand themselves, to make changes as they see fit. The real work, the ‘fixing,’ if you will, comes from within. I can’t force that on you.”
“And why would you want to give me those tools?”
The tears are back, dancing through her amber eyes and making them shine brighter. “Because you remind me of someone.”
I decide to go for blunt, “Oh? Someone who wanted to kill you?”
She doesn’t even flinch. Instead, she shoots back, “Yes. Well, he thought he wanted to. But now he’s dead.”
If I didn’t know better, I’d think she just issued me a threat.
Me. Nico Vitelli.
And do I wrap my hand around her graceful neck and show her what a real threat feels like? No. Instead, I look into her luminous golden eyes, transfixed by the single tear gathering on her lower eyelash, and my hand twitches. It’s taking every effort to stop myself from taking her face in my hand and swiping that tear away with my thumb.
