“I’m not a fan of it, either, but food poisoning doesn’t usually give you the choice.”
“You’ve had it before?”
“Just once. It was disgusting.” He glanced away, shaking his head as if remembering. “Of course, Anna used to spit up on me all the time, so it doesn’t bug me as much now.”
“Baby spit up is way cuter than grown up barf.”
He chuckled at that. “Well, I don’t know if I’d call it cute, exactly.” His grim expression had relaxed into bemusement. Things between us felt almost like they had before. Almost.
But what the hell was I doing? Talking to him? Sharing funny anecdotes?
Really?
Maybe he could read what I was thinking through my facial features because the grim stoniness came back. “Do you need anything?”
Well, you telling me you love me back would’ve been nice, but that ship has sailed. “I’ll be fine, Luca.” In other words, leave me alone.
Taking the hint, he left, but within a couple of minutes he was back with an insulated glass and a package of unopened saltines. “Ginger ale,” he said. Damn him. Didn’t he realize he wasn’t supposed to do this sort of stuff? Kind, sweet, nurturing stuff?
It was starting to piss me off. Or it would have, if it didn’t make my heart ache for him all over again.
“Thanks,” I said begrudgingly.
“Feel better, Molly,” he told me. And then he was gone.
23
Luca
I’d contacted Matteo who’d reported that he’d had to shunt a postal delivery from Cuidad Obregon to another location due to a new taskforce searching trucks at the border. Much of our product came through using this process, which tended to be the most efficient.
The postal service packaging appeared generic enough not to draw attention, and each box had a tracking number, useful for keeping tabs on it. But since these patrols had brought drug sniffing dogs to check all deliveries, we’d had
to redirect to another route. Sounded like we’d need to meet with a few members of this taskforce to see who we could bribe.
This sort of thing happened sometimes, but since law enforcement officers made very little in the way of a paycheck, there was nearly always at least one of them who could be paid to look the other way. Typically, a single conversation would allow me to identify which cops would be amenable to an extra couple thousand dollars every week.
Reading people had always been easy for me. I’d planned to teach that skill to Molly in greater depth than I already had, but that door had been shut tight.
I thought about how tough she’d been the first day I’d met her, how she’d taken the hand she’d been given and turned it into something extraordinary. She remained tough to this day, even while obviously sick, and I knew that would never change. What had changed was the level of trust between us.
I’d broken that trust by lying to her, by hiding how I truly felt about her. And ever since I’d let her believe that lie, it’d made being around her hard. I wanted to come clean. I wanted it desperately.
An unmistakable example had been earlier today.
We’d only spent a few minutes together, but that’s all it’d taken for her to sneak in under my guard. And hers had been down, too. We’d slipped right back into the effortless relationship we’d previously had, and it’d felt so right. But that effortlessness had been short lived.
All because I’d torched what had once been between us, and now it was gone forever.
To get past that fact I’d been concentrating as much as I could on the day to day goings on of the business and on Anna’s progress. She’d begun to walk more confidently, sometimes too confidently, as she’d started to get into things. I had to put her in her walker to keep her entertained. She’d also begun to pick up more and more vocabulary.
Greta had been thrilled and had pulled out the same children’s books all the Varassos had grown up with. I was surprised we hadn’t retained more of her Italian accent since we’d all been taught our fundamental speaking and reading skills by her.
“So Queen Molly’s hurling hard, I hear,” Marco said from the door of the nursery. I’d come by to feed Anna her lunch like I did whenever I could. I was surprised to see him here. While my brothers visited their niece, Marco seemed almost intimidated by her.
“She’s not that sick. I saw her about an hour ago.”
“Oh, well, I’ve got an update for you, then. She’s a lot sicker now. You probably shouldn’t let her get too close to the baby.”