“Other than that small hiccup, I’ve finally gotten her to warm up to me.”
“What?” She paused her anger. “How?
“A few truths….and couple lies.”
DONATELLA
“Well?” Ethan asked me as I came into to the study where he and Wyatt were both waiting for me.
I said nothing as I took Wyatt’s glass of whiskey and sat down.
Wyatt sighed and turned to Ethan. “Let’s get rid of him and whatever happens—”
“He’s the devil,” I said, mostly to myself but loud enough for them to hear.
“What?” Ethan asked me.
I snickered and drank, not breathing until I finished. The whiskey burned my throat as it went down. “He’s convinced me to do something crazy…something I might regret.”
“What?”
“Give him chance.” How the hell did that happen?
“How the hell did that happen?” Wyatt questioned, reading my mind.
Handing over the empty glass, I stood up, facing Ethan; “Leave him alone. I’ll handle it from now.”
“That’s what you’ve been doing! Dona, he tried to kill you—”
“No, he didn’t.” He was afraid when I almost died. Looking to Wyatt, I hugged him. I didn’t have a reason; I just did it and let him go. Looking to Ethan, I said, “Let him do what he came here to do and we will see what happens.”
“We will see?” he questioned. “So, you’ll marry him?”
“Worst comes to worse, I’ll marry him, fulfill the contract, and then kill him. At least then I’m a widow and not a spinster,” I joked but neither of them laughed.
“Since when do you care about being a spinster?” Wyatt asked, brows bunched together, completely lost.
I understood why. I’d never thought about it. It had never crossed my mind. Until the Devil whispered into my ear. Now, the more I looked at them, the less I saw my brothers as my brothers and the more I saw them as men. Men who would have their own families. In the back of my mind, I’d known that would come but right now it was all I could see… It was all that was going through my mind.
What happened when they both had their own families?
What would people say of me?
At my age, my mother had already married and had Ethan. I told myself that I shouldn’t care. Screw what other people thought. A much bigger part of me remembered the fact that this whole family was built on what people thought of us. We were perfect on the outside, so why wouldn’t I get married? I tried picturing myself single for the rest of my life, and I remembered my parents together. I tried thinking of a man to stand beside me, and I didn’t have one…with the exception of this stranger. And all I knew about him was that he had balls to not only speak back to me but fight back.
My mind was a mess. I felt myself being pulled in ten different directions and the more I thought, the less I wanted to.
“Dona?”
“Huh?”
“Are you sure you’re alright?” Ethan asked me seriously.
I laughed. “Why? Because I said I’d give him a chance?”
“Yes,” Wyatt said, as if it were the obvious answer.
“You’re free to give him a hard time; I’m not going to go crawl into his arms. I’m going to find out why out of all the men in the world they picked him…”