In the salon, Clara served us tea and pandoro. Ms. Sterling sat with her back straight, her pinky lifted in the air over her tea cup, and her lips pursed with barely restrained fury. I stared into my cup of tea, wishing she’d both talk and never open her mouth at the same time. What if she came to tell me Wolfe and I were over? She certainly didn’t look pleased.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I finally asked her when it became apparent that we could sit like this for long, soundless minutes.
“Because you’re a fool, and he is a complete idiot. Together, you make the perfect couple. Which begs the question—why are you here and he is there?” She slammed her tea cup on the table, causing the hot liquid to swoosh from side to side.
“Well, the obvious answer is because he hates me.” I picked invisible lint from my pajama pants. “And the secondary one is because he married me so he could ruin my father and everything he cares about.”
“I can’t sit and listen to this nonsense any longer. How could you be so dense?” She threw her arms in the air.
“How do you mean?”
“Wolfe never entertained himself with the idea of marriage and a wife. Not until he saw you for the first time. You were never in his plan. He never spoke of you. Barely even knew about your existence until he saw you. Which leads me to believe that his spontaneous decision had less to do about your father and more to do with the fact that he simply wanted you for himself and knew that courting you was out of the question. Since he had leverage on your father, he thought it would be a win-win scenario. But it wasn’t.” She shook her head. “You made things harder for him. Messier. He could have had your father locked in prison for life if it wasn’t for you. The minute you stepped into the picture—he wanted something of your father’s, and they both had things to bargain. You didn’t help Wolfe’s plan. You sabotaged it.”
“Wolfe is doing the best he can to ruin my father’s business.”
“But he is still out and about, is he not? Your father tried to assassinate him, and Wolfe still held his wedding in this house. The boy has had it bad for you from the moment he saw your face.”
I didn’t know whether I should laugh or cry. I’d seen Ms. Sterling going to extreme measures to try and patch things up between Wolfe and me, but this was stretching it, even by her standards.
“What kind of leverage does he have on my father?” I changed the subject before my eyes decided to spontaneously leak again.
Ms. Sterling raised her tea cup to her mouth, glancing at me from behind the rim.
I didn’t think she’d actually answer, much less that she would know what was going on, but she surprised me on both matters.
“Your father is paying off the governor, Preston Bishop, and Felix White, the man in charge of Chicago’s Police Department, a handsome monthly fee in exchange for their silence and full cooperation. Wolfe’s investigators found out about this not too many months ago. Since Senator Keaton was always in the habit of playing with his food, he decided to torture your father a little before airing his dirty laundry. Have you ever wondered why he never hit a home run?”
I munched on my lower lip. My father had murdered Wolfe’s brother and then his adoptive parents. He then tried to assassinate him right after burning down an entire pub just to get rid of Wolfe’s briefcase.
Yet Wolfe never striked back.
And it wasn’t as if he was incapable of ruining my father.
“I’m guessing the answer is me,” I said. She was relentless.
Ms. Sterling smiled, leaning forward. I thought she was going to pat my thigh as she often did, but no. She clutched onto my cheek, forcing me to look into her eyes.
“You took a hammer and broke down his walls, brick by brick. I watched as they collapsed, how he scrambled to try and rebuild them every time he left your room. Your love story was no fairy tale. More like a witch tale. Wicked and real and painful. I swooned when he began to seek you out in the house. When I noticed he was spending less time in his office and more time in the garden. I was thrilled when he gave you gifts, took you places, and showed you off, barely able to contain his joy every time you entered his vicinity. And I must admit, I was relieved to see him breaking down in your room, devastated and guilt-stricken, when he found your pregnancy test in your pillowcase.”
My head reared back, and I shot her a helpless glance.
“How are you feeling, sweetheart?” Her eyes crinkled with naked joy.
He knew. They both knew. Yet Wolfe still hadn’t come for me. Contradicting, fierce emotions of excitement, dread, and fear stunned me into silence.
“Francesca?” Ms. Sterling probed, nudging my hand. I ducked my head down, not daring to see what was on her face.
“It doesn’t matter. Too many things have happened. I cheated on him, and he cheated on me.”
“Love is stronger than hate.”
“How can he love me after all the bad blood between our families?” My head shot up, tears clinging to my lower lashes. “He can’t.”
“He can,” Ms. Sterling insisted. “Forgiving is one of his more beautiful virtues.”
“Right.” I snorted out a laugh. “Tell that to my father.”
“Your father never asked for forgiveness. But I did. And Wolfe? He forgave me.”
She put her tea down and straightened her spine, delivering the information with a schooled chin and a steady voice.
“I’m Wolfe Keaton’s biological mother. A recovering alcoholic who was too busy drinking herself to death to fix my son dinner on the night he watched his brother, Romeo, get shot to death by your father. After that happened, the Keatons took him. I couldn’t fight the system, and Romeo’s death shook me out of my addiction. I went to rehab, and after I completed my time in the facility, I trickled back into Wolfe’s life—his real name is Fabio, by the way. Fabio Nucci.” She smiled, looking down. “At first, he wanted nothing to do with me. He was blind with anger about my alcoholism, getting thrown into the system, and about how I couldn’t bring myself to fix him dinner so he dragged his brother to Mama’s Pizza. But as time passed, he allowed me back into his life. His adoptive parents hired me as his live-in nanny even though he was a pre-teen. They just wanted us to be together. After they were killed in that explosion…” She sucked in a breath. Tears glittered in her eyes when she spoke of her late employers. “It was two years after I completed my work at the Keatons. When Wolfe turned eighteen. I was working at Sam’s Club when he rehired me to run his mansion. He is taking care of me more than I’m taking care of him after I betrayed him in the worst possible way. I wasn’t able to protect him and his brother from the cruel neighborhood they grew up in.”
I sat back, digesting.
Ms. Sterling was Wolfe’s mother. Biological mother.
That was why she loved him so dearly.
That was why she begged me to be patient with him.
That was why she drove us into each other’s arms. She wanted her son to have the happy ending his brother never got.
“His brother was married.” I sucked in a breath, collecting all the pieces, fitting them into the screwed-up puzzle my father had created. “He had a wife.”
“Yes. Lori. They were having fertility issues.” Ms. Sterling nodded. “Went through several IVF treatments. Then she finally got pregnant. She lost the baby when she was six months in, the day after they delivered the news that her husband had died.”
That was why Wolfe didn’t want any children.
It was also why he knew so much about ovulation and when to have sex. He didn’t want the heartache, though heartache was all he knew. He’d lost the people he cared about the most, one by one, and all by the same man. It felt like someone ripped my chest open with a knife and watched as my organs poured out of me.
I plastered a hand over my mouth, willing my pulse to slow down. It was neither good for me nor for the baby. But the truth was scandalizing and too harsh to digest. That was why Wolfe didn’t want me to know—he knew I’d hate myself for the rest of my life for what my father did. Hell, I wanted to throw up right now.
“Thank you for sharing this with me,” I said.
Ms. Sterling nodded. “Give him a chance. He is far from perfect. But who is?”
“Ms. Sterling…” I hesitated, glancing around us. “I’m devastated over your revelations, but I don’t think Wolfe wants a second chance. He knows that I’m here and that I’m pregnant, and he still hasn’t showed up. He hasn’t even called.”
Every time I thought about this fact, I wanted to crawl into a ball and die.
By the way Ms. Sterling winced, I knew that it didn’t look good for me. I escorted her back to her car. We hugged for long minutes.
“Always remember, Francesca—you’re worth more than the sums of your mistakes.”
As she drove away, I realized she was right. I didn’t need Wolfe to save me, or for Angelo to come to my rescue, or even for my mother to grow a backbone or my father to start acting like he had one.
The only person I needed was me.
WOLFE
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE pure, unadulterated torture.
The stuff we should bottle up, write down, and use on convicted child molesters.
Three days in, I caved and picked up the phone to call Arthur. Now he was playing hard to get. The tables had turned. The only person I wanted to speak to—my wife—was tucked in Arthur’s kingdom, and the place was gated and guarded more heavily than the Buckingham Palace.
I arrived at my wife’s parents’ house every single day, at six o’clock sharp, before boarding my flight, then again at eight o’clock at night, to try and talk to her.
I was always stopped at the gate by one of Rossi’s muscle, and they were beefier and stupider than his usual variety of Made Men, and showed no signs of stopping, even when my own bodyguards flexed their biceps.
Calling, or texting her was ball-less and inappropriate altogether. Especially since Sterling admitted to spilling the beans about all the things that happened between our families. Considering Francesca was under the impression that my original plan consisted of tossing her in a dark tower and killing her father slowly by stripping him and his wife of everything they owned, I knew I needed a little more than a fucking “Sorry” GIF. The conversation was too important not to be conducted face to face. There was much I needed to tell her. Much I’d found out in the days since she departed.
I was in love with her.
I was dreadfully in love with her.
Ruthlessly, tragically mad about the teenager with big blue eyes who talked to her vegetables.
I needed to tell her that I wanted this baby no less than she did. Not because I wanted children, but because I wanted everything she had to offer. And the things she didn’t offer—I wanted them, too. Not to own necessarily, but to simply admire.
The realization that I was in love didn’t happen in one glorious, Hallmark-worthy moment. It spread across the week we spent apart. With every failed attempt to reach out to her, I realized how important it was for me to see her.
Each time I got turned down, I looked up at the window of her room, willing her to materialize behind the white-laced curtain. She never did.
And that was why I avoided connections, in general. That whole climbing-the-walls thing? It wasn’t for me. But climbing, I did. Kicking things. Breaking things. Rehearsing words and speeches I would say. Avoiding suits who called and called, telling me that I needed to make a statement about my current family situation.
It was my issue. My life. My wife.
No one else mattered.
Not even my country.
A week into the delight called heartbreak, I decided to bend the rules and rush fate. She was going to hate me for it—but frankly, she had enough reason to want to spit in my face even before my next stunt.
On the seventh day of separation, I dragged Felix White in all his sweaty, shiny-faced glory to accompany me to Arthur’s house, carrying an urgent search warrant.
The thing missing? My fucking wife.