He caught her tongue in a gentle bite, sucked it inside his mouth. “I’m agonizingly thrilled you approve...as you can feel.”
He ground his hardness against her and she mewled, became even more pliant against him. His head almost burst with the urge to forget his promise and just take her as she’d asked. But he had to wait. Had to deepen her involvement until she was as dependent on him as he was on her.
Insinuating a leg between his, she pressed her knee into his erection, wringing a growling thrust from him.
She chuckled, eyes telling him she considered them equal now. “But Sister Cecelia got it right, even if at the time I wanted to tell her that fallen angel would describe you better.”
“It would. I’ve done very, very bad things in my time. I still do, when the need arises.”
Her eyes grew serious. “But not to innocents.”
It was a statement, not a question. Pride expanded inside him that she trusted him again, and saw his fundamental truth.
“No. But the law still calls what I did and do illegal.”
“The right thing to do isn’t always legal. And as long as no innocents were harmed, as long as you help them like when you crush those corrupt people to save helpless children, then I call what you do heroic.” She sighed wistfully. “Sometimes I wish I could do the same, but I don’t have enough power. I’m only thankful someone like you who does exists, and that you use your power this way.”
Was it possible that once he destroyed her father—if she ever realized it was him who did it and she found out the reasons why—she’d find his actions heroic? At least, excusable and understandable?
“You can’t imagine how helpless I feel most of the time.” Her pain made him want to go out destroying everything that had ever made her feel this way. “I try to reach out to as many children as I can—to provide them with someone who cares, who’s there to listen to their problems and ideas, to take part in their activities, to encourage their interests and talents. But no matter how hard I try, I always feel nothing I do is enough. Thank God for people like the sisters who do far more. But someone like you? You can do the most.”
His throat tightened. “What you do will make a difference in those children’s psyches. I just throw my money and weight around, but I never made a child’s day better in person. Truth is, I never even interacted with one, until Diego today.”
“But without your ‘money and weight,’ we wouldn’t have the places and projects to offer any children anything.”
“So we complement each other.” She snuggled deeper into his chest, nodded. “We already knew that, just not how completely we do.”
Raising her face, her smile and gaze caressed him. “But you must now know everything about me since I sprouted my first baby teeth. And I know nothing about you.”
He rose on one elbow. “What do you need to know?”
“Tell me about your family.”
He’d been prepared with a fabricated history. But he couldn’t bear more lies between them than necessary. He’d tell her the truth—a carefully edited version of it.
“My parents divorced when I was ten. My mother remarried two years later and had three more children, two girls and a boy. My father remarried much later, and had two children, a girl and a boy. I exited their lives early and never reentered it. I sort of watch them from afar, keep my distance.”
“Is this what you want?”
“With my kind of life, with what I’ve been involved in, they were better off with me as far away as possible. When it became feasible for me to approach again, I still felt it wasn’t in their best interests for me to disrupt their lives.”
“How can you say that? I’m certain they’d love to have you be an integral part of their lives.”
He tickled her, trying to inject lightness into what was suddenly oppressively serious. “Who’s being biased?”
She grinned impishly, then turned back to seriousness at once. “But I really do imagine they would choose to be as close as possible to you if you gave them the choice.”
The talons in his throat sank a little deeper at her conviction. “It’s a bit more complicated than that.”
He expected her to probe this vagueness, but she only exhaled. “As long as you’re sure that it’s for the best. But even if it is, I still hate to think you’ve exiled yourself from your family. That you’ve chosen to be alone.”
“I’m not alone. I’m part of a...brotherhood, if you will.”
“One of them is that terror you have for a partner, huh?”
He guffawed at her wary-feline expression. “He was an addition to our brotherhood. He used to be my mentor.”
“He thinks he’s your father. Or your ‘Big Brother.’”
He laughed harder as she made the quotes gesture. “You’re uncanny. You analyze everything with such absolute accuracy.”
“He didn’t need analysis. He knocked me over the head with his ‘shining qualities.’” Another quote gesture.
“I assure you he hasn’t gotten and won’t get away with it. But speaking of family...I insulted your father almost as much as Richard did you.”
“Oh, no, there’s just no comparison. My father almost didn’t notice you, as anxious as he was about me.”
“I would still like to apologize. Will you please set up a proper meeting?”
A still look came into her eyes. “You want to meet him...as my father or as a potential partner?”
“Can’t I meet him as both?”
She grimaced. “You know where I stand on this issue.”
“Why don’t you let me handle this?”
“I’ve never been as miserable as I was last night, and I don’t want to risk something like that happening again.”
“It won’t. I promise.”
The troubled look that gripped her face almost made him tell her to forget it. But before he could say anything, she nodded, then nestled back into him.
As he received her into his embrace, that trust he craved, which she was bestowing on him in full again, weighed on him. It didn’t feel like a privilege anymore but a responsibility.
One he ultimately had to betray.
The meeting with Ferreira took place the very next afternoon. During lunch hour so it would be brief, at Eliana’s request.
Rafael
