LITMIR.BIZ

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than just live to commit another robbery, he should contact him.

      And that shockingly, Dante had.

      But that he had been a man who had committed a great many atrocities prior to his salvation and education that had been financed by Robert King.

      She had never believed the stories.

      Mostly because her father loved a story, and it was one he did not tell. Which forced her to believe that the truth of it must be less dramatic, and far less interesting.

      Now she wondered, though.

      Because she felt like she was staring down the very devil.

      “We have a lot to discuss, don’t you think?”

      Dante took hold of her hand, and lifted her from the limo, depositing her gently onto her feet. She looked past his shoulder, at Maximus and her father.

      “And when you’re done speaking to her,” Maximus said, “I think you and I need to have a talk.”

      “I’m sure this will give you time to rally the firing squad,” Dante said, his tone dry.

      He was still holding her hand.

      She could recall, with perfect ease, another time Dante had touched her hand. Not the dance, but earlier.

      She had been a girl. All of twelve, and she had fallen out of a tree in the backyard.

      Dante had found her lying pitifully on the ground, pondering her fate, and he had been afraid that she had broken her neck. He had yelled as much at her as he had lifted her up. His touch, hot and strong, had started to quiver low in her body.

      She hadn’t liked it. She had pulled away from him, then bent down to wipe the blood from her knee. “I’m fine.”

      “You are a menace,” he’d said back.

      She could imagine the exchange happening just that way now.

      “I have to get Isabella,” she protested.

      “Go,” he said.

      She did, stumbling as she went. With shaking fingers, she undid the seat belt and lifted her baby girl up from the seat.

      The thing was, it didn’t matter who’d given birth to Isabella.

      Minerva was her mother.

      She’d cared for her from the time she was born while Katie shrank away in increasing fear, self-medicating away the terror of the possibility of Carlo finding them.

      Min was not brave by nature. But she’d known someone had to be brave for Isabella. And since Katie couldn’t, it had to be her.

      They walked past her brother, who was looking at Dante as though he wanted to flay him alive, and her father, who looked stoic. Into the house. Up the stairs.

      Totally silent.

      Minerva clung to Isabella, thinking of her in some ways as a shield. Surely not even Dante would yell at her while she was holding a baby.

      He opened up the door to her father’s study, and ushered her inside, slamming it behind them. “Explain this, Minerva, because you and I both know that I am not the father of your baby.”

      Well, she was disappointed on that score. Dante was clearly fine yelling around an infant.

      She cupped the back of Isabella’s downy little head. “Did you tell them?”

      “No, I didn’t tell them. You’re going to have to tell them, because if I tell them they’re not going to believe me. In the hour it took you to get home from the press conference, I had to tell your brother about ten reasons he shouldn’t kill me where I sat. And the leading one was that I might be the father of your child, and that you might need me in some capacity.”

      “I do need you,” she said.

      Silence settled between them as he waited for her to explain.

      “I’m sorry,” she said finally. “I panicked.”

      “Why did you panic? What is happening?”

      “You were the only name I could think of. The only name that was big enough. I had to protect myself, Dante. I had to protect Isabella! And I thought seeing as you are so close with my family, it was believable enough that you and I...that we...”

      “Yes, well. The problem is, child, that the idea I would touch you in that way is laughable in the extreme.”

      Minerva had never felt so small, or quite so dull.

      Standing next to the brilliant Dante Fiori made her feel as plain and inadequate as she was.

      He was right. The idea that he would touch her was laughable, though it seemed as if Maximus and her father were more than willing to believe it. So why wouldn’t the rest of the world?

      She knew he’d only ever danced with her four years ago because he’d pitied her. Everyone knew it.

      Still, she held her head high.

      “Men are renowned for touching women that don’t make sense. It is common knowledge that the secret sexual fantasies of men are unknowable.” She leaned in and did her best to seem confident when she was very much not.

      “Is it?” he asked. “Well, mine are fairly knowable. Often plastered on the front page of newspapers here and there. You are plainly not my fantasy.”

      She thought of all the women he’d been seen with over the years. Sleek, polished and curvy. Brunette, blonde, pale or brown, didn’t seem to matter to him, but there was a sophistication to the women he enjoyed.

      Quite like her sister, and not at all like her.

      “Well, that is good to know,” she said.

      “Why did you do it, Minerva?”

      “I am sorry. I really didn’t do it to cause you trouble. But I’m being threatened, and so is Isabella, and in order to protect us both I needed to come up with an alternative paternity story.”

      “An alternative paternity story?”

      She winced. “Yes. Her father is after her.”

      He eyed her with great skepticism. “I didn’t think you knew who her father was.”

      She didn’t know whether to be shocked, offended or pleased that he thought her capable of having an anonymous interlude.

      For heaven’s sake, she’d only ever been kissed one time in her life. A regrettable evening out with Katie in Rome where she’d tried to enjoy the pulsing music in the club, but had instead felt overheated and on the verge of a seizure.

      She’d danced with a man in a shiny shirt—and she even knew his name because she wouldn’t even dance with a man without an introduction—and he’d kissed her on the dance floor. It had been wet and he’d tasted of liquor and she’d feigned a headache after and taken a cab back to the hostel they’d been staying in.

      The idea of hooking up with someone, in a circumstance like that, made her want to peel her own skin off.

      “Of course I know who he is. Unfortunately... The full implications of who he is did not become clear until later.”

      “What does that mean?”

      She could tell him the truth now, but something stopped her. Maybe it was admitting Isabella wasn’t her daughter, which always caught her in the chest and made her feel small. Like she’d stolen her and like what they had was potentially fragile, temporary and shaky.

      Or maybe it was trust. Dante was a good man. Going off the fact he had rescued her from a fall, and helped her up when her knee was skinned, and bailed her out after her terrible humiliation in high school.

      But to trust him with the truth was something she simply wasn’t brave enough to do.

      Her

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