though he couldn’t say he understood her. Or her choices when she must have known the whole of the world would be watching her—but then, perhaps she hadn’t had that pounded into her head from a young age the way he had.
“Love is a very interesting word to use in these circumstances, I think,” Sarina said. “I’m not certain how I would feel if my brother chose to express his so-called love for me by planting his fist into the face of the father of my unborn child.”
“Do you have a brother?”
He knew she didn’t. Sarina Fellows was the only child of a British linguistics professor and his Japanese biochemist wife, who had met in graduate school in London and ended up in California together, teaching at the same university.
“I don’t have a brother,” she replied, seemingly unfazed that he’d caught her out. “But I was raised by people who prize nonviolence. Unlike you, if I’m understanding your family’s rather checkered past correctly.”
He could have asked her which checkered past she meant. The San Giacomos had dueled and schemed throughout the ages. The Combes had been more direct, and significantly more likely to throw a punch. But it was checkered all around, anyway he looked at it.
“If I’m guilty of anything, it’s being an overzealous older brother,” Matteo said. And then remembered—the way he kept doing, with the same mix of shock and something a great deal like regret—that he too had an older brother. An older brother his mother had given up when she was a teenager, yet had dropped into her will like a bomb. An older brother Matteo had yet to meet and still couldn’t quite believe was real.
Maybe that was why he’d done nothing about it. Yet.
He tried to flash another smile.
Not that it was any use. The doctor didn’t change expression at all. Instead, she sat there in silence, until his smile faded away.
He understood it was a tactic. A strategy, nothing more. It was one he had employed a thousand times himself. But he certainly didn’t like it being aimed his way.
He felt the urge, as everyone always did, to fill the silence. He refrained.
Instead, he settled there in the ancient armchair where he remembered his own grandfather sitting decades ago, shrouded in bitterness because he was noble, yet not royal. Matteo lounged there the way he remembered the old man had, endeavoring to look as unbothered as he ought to have been. Because this was a minor inconvenience, surely. An impertinence, nothing more.
He was submitting to this because he chose to. Because it was an olive branch he could wave at his board to prove that he was both conscientious and different from his father. Not because he had to.
It didn’t matter if the doctor didn’t realize that.
Besides, the longer she stared at him, letting the silence stretch and thicken between them, the more he found it impossible to think about anything but how distractingly attractive she was. He’d expected someone far more like a battle-ax. Fussy and of advanced years, for example.
He suspected her beauty was another tactic.
Because Sarina Fellows didn’t look at all like the kind of woman who could hold such supposed power over his life. She looked a great deal more like the sort of woman he liked to take to his bed. Sleek and elegant. Poised. Matteo preferred them intelligent and pedigreed, because he liked clever conversation as well as greedier, more sensual pastimes.
If she hadn’t been sent here to judge him, he might have amused himself by finding ways to get his hands up beneath the hem of the elegant pencil skirt she wore and—
“Toxic masculinity,” she pronounced, with something like satisfaction in her tone.
Matteo blinked. “Is that a diagnosis?”
“The good news, Mr. Combe, is that you are hardly unique.” It was definitely satisfaction. Her dark eyes gleamed. “You seem unrepentant, and think about what we’re discussing here. A funeral is generally held to be a gathering where the bereaved can say their final goodbyes to a lost loved one. You chose to make it a boxing ring. And you also took it upon yourself to draw blood, terrify those around you, and humiliate the sister you claim to love, all to assuage your sense of fractured honor.”
He didn’t sigh at that, though it took an act of will. “You obviously never met my father. There were no bereaved at his funeral and furthermore, he would have been the first to cheer on a spot of boxing.”
“I find that difficult to believe. And, frankly, more evidence of the kind of cowboy inappropriateness that seems to be part and parcel of the Matteo Combe package.”
“I am Italian on one side and British on the other, Dr. Fellows. There is no part of me that is a cowboy. In any respect.”
“I’m using the term to illustrate a strain of toxic male vigilantism that, as far as I’m aware, you haven’t bothered to apologize for. Then or now.”
“If I felt the need to apologize for defending my sister’s honor, which I do not, that would be a discussion I had with Pia,” Matteo said quietly. “Not with you. Certainly not with my board. Nor, for that matter, with the clamoring public.”
Her pen was poised over her paper. “So you do feel remorse for your brutality? Or you don’t?”
What Matteo felt like doing would, he suspected, inspire her to call him names far worse than cowboy. He spread his hands out in front of him, as if in some kind of surrender. When he didn’t have the slightest idea how to surrender. To anything or anyone.
“Remorse is a lot like guilt. Or shame. Both useless emotions that have more to do with others than with the self.” He dropped his hands. “I cannot change the past. Even if I wanted to.”
“How convenient. And since you can’t change it, why bother discussing it. Is that your policy?”
“I cannot say that I have a policy. As I have never subjected myself to these, quote-unquote, ‘conversations’ before.”
“Somehow I am unshocked.”
“But I am here now, am I not? I have promised to answer any question you might have. We can talk at length on any topic you desire. I am nothing if not compliant.” He made himself smile again, though it felt like a blade. “And toxic, apparently.”
“Compliant is an interesting word choice,” Sarina said, and he was sure there was laughter in her voice, though he could see no sign of it anywhere on her face. “Do you think it’s an adequate word to describe you or your behavior?”
“I have opened my home. I have invited you into it and lo, you came. I have agreed to have as many of these conversations as you deem necessary. And for this, I am called toxic instead of accommodating.”
“That word bothers you.”
“I would not say that it bothers me.” What bothered him was the pointlessness of this. The waste of his time and energy. And yes, the fact that she was distractingly beautiful—which, he had to remind himself, was nothing but another weapon. “But it is not as if one wishes to be called toxic, is it? It is certainly not a compliment.”
“And
