Page 30 of Bound Enemies
“I told you,” he said. “I warned you, did I not?Brother.”
And then he wound up, swung, and laid Pau out on his own floor.
Chapter Seven
In the pantheonof things that Leontina had imagined might happen that day, Giaco appearing at all—much less to give her ahugand then follow that up by getting into an actual fistfight with Pau—would not even have made the top hundred possibilities she might have come up with.
At first, it was as if she couldn’t comprehend what she was seeing.
Because it didn’t make sense. Her brother was the life of every party. A bright sort of beaming creature whose primary weapons were his words and his insinuations—not his fists. She would have said he didn’t have it in him to throw a punch at anyone.
Yet here they were.
Leontina stood, frozen into place, as the two men engaged in a fistfight on the floor.
Though she retracted that word as soon as she thought it. It wasn’t afight. Pau was letting Giaco hit him. He wasn’t doing anything to fight back, and was only barely defending himself. It seemed her brother lost his taste for waling on a man who threw no punches himself, and fast.
“Asshole,” Giaco muttered, rolling off his best friend and then slumping there on the floor beside him.
The two of them lay there a while, breathing more heavily than usual.
By contrast, Leontina could hardly breathe at all. In fact, she didn’t think her nose was working the way it should have be—
She realized belatedly that she was sobbing.
But not because she was sad or upset. She was sobbing because she wasfurious.
She was outraged that they were fighting for her honor without even discussing it with her. She was furious that they hadmoved into another roomto discusstheir feelingsabout the decisions she’d made abouther life.
And the fact that her older brother had finally shown that he cared didn’t make it any better. Not now.
None of these competing furies diminished any as Pau rolled gracefully to his feet, then brushed himself off without seeming to be the slightest bit interested in the fact that he had a bloodied lip. To say nothing of what looked like the beginnings of a black eye.
And more intense emotion on his face than Leontina had ever seen there. Nothing cold. Nothing measured. Under different circumstances, she might have stopped and stared.
But this was not the moment for that sort of thing. Not with her brother here, messing with the delicate balance that she and Pau had managed to keep in place since she’d come to Calixto Estates to inform him about his paternity.
This was not the moment to ask her husband what could put that look on his face. What could make himsimmerandshinewith things she didn’t know how to name—
Or why, when his gaze met hers, he swallowed hard. Then let all that intensity fade away.
A lot like he locked it up somewhere inside him, but she couldn’t follow that line of thought, either.
Not right now.
“Are you satisfied?” Pau demanded of Giaco, turning his dark gaze on her brother and letting it stay there. “Because I don’t intend to do this again. So if you are not, this is your moment. This is youronlymoment.”
Giaco only sighed, and muttered a quietyeswith a few choice insults appended to the end. In three separate languages, for effect.
“I cannot argue with you on your character assessments,” Pau said darkly. “My brother.”
And then, without so much as a glance in Leontina’s direction, he stalked off, out of the room.
Leontina could not stop crying.Snufflingand crying, and it only made her angrier.
“Leontina,” Giaco began, though he did not bother to rise from the ground.
“You’ve never hugged me in your entire life!” Leontina threw at him, letting her voice do what it would. Which in this case was to threaten the chandelier above them. “Why would you do it now?”
