Page 193 of Handsome Devil
“Because she chose to be with a man the family didn’t approve of.”
“And you couldn’t just tell me that? What was I supposed to think when I find some beautiful woman here and you rush her out of here, and you don’t tell me who she is or what she’s doing here?”
He picked up his scotch and took an angry sip. “I didn’t tell you because I’m not supposed to be talking to her.”
“Really?”
“No one in my family speaks to her. Lex does. But no one except Lex knows that I speak to her.”
“Why do you speak to her if no one else does?”
“Because she’s my aunt. She’s not a bad person, Devi. My grandmother disowned her for reasons that have nothing to do with me. Or with her, for that matter. I care about my aunt, so she’s in my life. It’s as simple as that.”
I considered that.
“There’s nothing to worry about here,” he tried to assure me. “Lex has never been recognized as part of the family by our grandmother.”
“So? Just because she doesn’t want to recognize that he has a position in the family doesn’t make it not so.”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters because you didn’t tell me everything. Why didn’t you tell me that Lex stood to take your inheritance from you?”
“He doesn’t,” he said firmly. “Lex isn’t out to steal my inheritance.”
I made a frustrated sound, and Dane took a few steps toward me.
“I’m going to get our security team on this immediately,” he told me. “There’s no need to worry about this. They’ll want to talk to you about what happened today, because that shit is not okay. It should not have happened. But I’ll be honest with you. It does happen. My family gets threatened, attacked, all the time.”
“And that shouldn’t worry me?”
“We’re targets, Devi. And you learn to live with it. We get sued. I have to drive in an armored SUV sometimes. All my life people have wanted to take what’s mine. This is no different.”
Sued?
Armored….?
He couldn’t have mentioned this to me before we got married?
“But it is different, isn’t it?” I said. “Have you ever had a wife before?”
“No. I haven’t.”
Right. I let that sink in for a moment.
“She didn’t warn you or threaten you, Dane. She warned me about you. And it definitely felt like a threat. It was ominous and it was meant to scare me. This isn’t just about a sex tape. It wasn’t a fluke that this happened. I think someone is out to get you.”
“I would never let anything happen to you because of me,” he said. “I’ll have the security detail increased. We’ll be fine.”
I stared at him. He seemed to have an answer for everything.
Why didn’t it make me feel any safer?
“Don’t lie to me again.”
“I never lied to you,” he insisted.
“I asked you why Lex was disowned more than a week ago when we went to dinner, and you never actually told me. If you’re keeping things from me, in my books, that’s a lie. Here, I’ll give you a hard example. You fuck another woman and don’t tell me, that’s a lie. You see how that works?”
