“Reeve!”
Dante only looked at him as if to say, Go ahead.
Reeve looked tempted but shook his head. “I’m going to be a surgeon. I’m not going to shatter my hand no matter how much you deserve it.”
“It wasn’t him, Reeve. He’s as much a victim as we are.”
“He took ten years to look at anyone but Dad. He fired you without even blinking.”
Cami pressed her clasped hands against her navel, thinking that wasn’t all he’d done.
“I want you to come back to Sicily with me,” Dante said to her. A pang of fearful hope soared through her, abruptly falling when he added, “To make a statement.”
“Like hell,” Reeve muttered. “We’ll communicate through lawyers. Stay the hell away from both of us.”
“Reeve.” Her brother didn’t know there was another party in this who had some rights. Someone for whom she had to get things right to the best of her ability. How? She felt as though she was plummeting from an airplane without a chute, unable to grasp at anything solid.
“When are you leaving?” she asked Dante.
“As soon as you’re packed.”
“You don’t owe him a damned thing, Cam.”
“I have to give notice at my job. We owe rent in four days.” She dug in her purse for the tips she’d brought home, intending to put it in the jar, but Dante halted her by speaking to Reeve as he pointed at the envelope he’d brought.
“There’s enough to cover your tuition for the next few years along with significantly better housing. You sleep wherever you want, but she’s either coming with me, or going to a hotel. I won’t have her living like this one more night.”
“We’ve already started looking for something else,” Reeve said defensively.
It was true. He’d been pushing through exams and she’d been saving up for the damage deposit. His standards for himself were considerably lower than what he wanted for Cami, but now they were together and combining resources, they could afford something slightly better.
She hadn’t told him yet that they would need room for one more. It struck her that all of her plans, once again, were being shaken apart.
“My grandmother would like to see you,” Dante said. “She has never known anything about this until I had to tell her that Arturo was being arrested and why. She’s extremely upset that you were hurt and would like to apologize. I want to put her mind at rest sooner than later.” “That’s emotional blackmail,” Reeve interjected.
“Look.” Cami held up staying hands. “This is too much to take in. I can’t think when I smell like spilled beer and nachos. I’m getting in the shower, then going to bed. You go to your hotel or wherever you’re staying. I’ll text you in the morning.”
* * *
Dante was still there when she emerged fifteen minutes later. She hadn’t come up with anything fresh while she’d been under the weak stream of hot water. In fact, she’d only realized how exhausted she was. How worried and ill-prepared she was for a baby. How terrified she was of Dante’s reaction.
He and Reeve sat at the kitchen table, each with a cup of fresh coffee steaming before them. They had the paperwork open. The tension was so electric it crackled.
“You should have told me,” Reeve said as she searched out her hairbrush.
“What?” She rarely kept anything from him so couldn’t imagine—
“That you two were involved in Whistler.”
Her heart took a plummet into her bare feet. She glared at Dante. “Why on earth would you tell him that?”
“He asked.”
“What made you—?” She shot a look to her brother, the budding doctor.
He glared at her, and she realized he was remembering this morning, when he had asked with concern, Did you throw up again? It was the second time he’d caught her, but probably the tenth time it had happened.
He looked ready to spit nails. “He wasn’t accepting your transfers. I couldn’t figure out why.”
Lovely. Now he knew the sordid depths she’d sunk to.
“I’m entitled to a private life,” she muttered, digging through her bag for moisturizer, wanting to cool her hot face.
“Cami.” Reeve waited until she looked at him. “We don’t need this.” He flicked a finger at the papers before him. “Whatever you think you have to do, you don’t. With this debt off our backs, we have options. I’ll take a couple years off school if necessary. We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
She had never loved him so much as she did in that moment. With a lump in her throat, she nodded. “Thank you. But... I should go. For Dad.”
She hadn’t consciously thought that through until the words left her, but she did want their father’s name properly cleared.
Reeve’s mouth tightened. “I’ll go, then.”
She shook her head. “No, I will.” She also had to think about what her child might need. Dante’s child.
She couldn’t look at him. Her hands shook as she began to pack.
CHAPTER NINE
ADRENALINE HAD KEPT Dante going until he’d seen Cami. When he finally had his eyes on her, his world shattered along with the glasses she had dropped. The cold fog he’d barely acknowledged, the one that had encased him in the last month, since finding her gown on the floor, had finally lifted—only to be replaced by a more poignant, misty one. She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, radiating light and warmth, looking soft and natural and sweet.
Until she’d seen him.
She’d closed up like a flower, a trampled one, turning away and refusing to speak to him. He had hated Arturo, then, genuinely hated his cousin for costing him this. Her.
Much as he’d loathed watching her sling beer past midnight, he had ignored his own ale in favor of drinking in the sight of her.
Until Vito had thrust her into the forefront of his mind again, he had refused to let himself reflect on his time with her. Not consciously. He had had flashes of concern, though. Was she okay? Eating? How was her leg? Every time he received a notice of a money transfer, he wondered where she was working. Where she was living.
She had seemed to favor her leg as she spent the next several hours on her feet, looking brittle and pale. Her hair had been piled in a messy knot so her neck was a fragile stem, her face closed and intent as she worked.
She smiled at her coworkers, but any sort of humor quickly died the moment her attention was forced to turn his way. Gone was the woman who had tilted cheeky grins at him and let him see inside her when they were alone.
God, he had missed her.
Now she sat beside him, but a silence had grown between them, impenetrable and thick.
He had expected more of a fight to get her on the plane, but of course she wanted to clear her father’s name. Dante was anxious to do so himself.
Speaking with Reeve had been the strangest experience. Stephen’s voice had come out of a face that looked so much like the man it was uncanny. Dante’s throat had been thick with apology, as he saw his old friend in Reeve’s demeanor. When Reeve had asked him point-blank if anything had happened between him and Cami in Whistler, pinning him with a sharp gaze, Dante had been so surprised, his face had told the truth before he could dissemble.
He’d felt stung under Reeve’s disapproval like a callow youth, aware that any attempt to claim honorable intentions at this point would be met with disdain. Suspicion even.
Cami sure as hell didn’t want to rekindle things. She’d made it clear she wasn’t interested even before he’d told her about Arturo. She thought they were toxic.
Yet here she was. Quiet and compliant beside him. Subdued almost. If not for the hint of steel in her as she’d spoken to her brother and agreed to come with him, Dante would have thought she was on the defensive. Wary. Feeling as though he held all the power again when he had definitely lost the high ground.
She was probably tired. He was. Sick and tired. From the moment Vito had told him Arturo was behind the theft, Dante had been nauseous. Absolutely gutted at the cost to Cami and her brother. Seeing how they lived had made it worse. He’d been completely sincere in saying he wouldn’t let her live like that for one more night.
Along with fresh betrayal, fresh grief had hit. Stephen’s loss was that much more unjust and difficult to bear. All the things Dante had seen in the man a decade ago, the belief in his ideas, the encouragement and desire for him to succeed, the fatherly pride, had been real.
He swallowed a lump, trying to feel lucky that he’d had three excellent father figures in his life, but a sense of being cheated remained.
“I won’t forgive myself for cutting your father out of my life,” he told Cami as the plane leveled off and the flight attendant left to bring the chamomile tea Cami had requested. “He was a good friend. I shouldn’t have left his children to fend for themselves.”
Cami turned from watching the lights fade at the edge of the black blanket that was the Pacific.
“I can’t do this yet.” Her voice was as wispy as the smoke of a snuffed flame. “I’m too tired to make sense of it. I just want to drink my tea and fall asleep and unpack all this when we get to Sicily. Do you mind?”
“No.” He wanted to take her hand, console her. Say all the things that were weighing on his chest. “Use the stateroom.” He nodded at the door behind them.