Oh, she definitely hadn’t missed the fact that we’d spent the night together in the apartment… she probably just had an idea of the situation that was closer to my disappointed expectations.
Once she’d shut the door after herself and Caroline, I turned on Devin. “Is she just going to invite herself in whenever she feels like it?”
“It is her property,” said Devin. The way he spoke made me think he was paraphrasing what Angel would have said if I’d tried to call her out.
“That shouldn’t make a difference!”
“You’re right,” Devin replied, “but what are you going to do about it?”
“Am I really going to have to go out with your cousin tomorrow?” I was actually whining, and I hated it, but if I was going to (possibly) marry this man, I wasn’t going to start by pretending I was something I could never be. With people I was comfortable with, bitching was part of my process.
“Well I’m not going to make you,” said Devin.
I squinted at him and followed as he made his way over to the table—meticulously cleaned—where he seated himself in an excessively pulled-out chair and started going through his phone. “I get the feeling you don’t want to be having this conversation at all.”
“I don’t understand why I need to be having this conversation. And in case you’re thinking to accuse me of not understanding women, I’ve had a relationship with my mother all my life and she never expected me to engage with questions of how she should conduct her personal life.”
“That is the first reassuring thing I’ve learned about your situation with your mother today. I wouldn’t expect you to have a husband-and-wife dynamic with her, but I’ve started to question everything now that she can apparently just walk into a place you—or your future wife—occupy on a whim.”
“You’re going to have to work out a way of dealing with her by yourself, Julia,” Devin said without even bothering to look back at me.
“And you are going to have to work out how to deal with having an adult relationship with a woman who isn’t your mother.”
“I’m starting to regret extending this offer to you in the first place,” Devin told his phone.
I felt my back stiffen. “So are you going to go back on the offer now?”
Devin’s posture changed too. “No.” He got to his feet, caught me around the back of the head as I stepped back, and kissed me so hard I was reeling and gasping when he pushed me away. I couldn’t even get my head around how I felt about it, which probably said it all.
“I’ve decided you are going to go out with Caroline tomorrow,” Devin told me. “It’ll give me a chance to get something important organised without needing to worry about keeping you entertained.”
“I don’t need to be—you know what, actually I’m not going to fight you on that.” Maybe this would be my chance to get Caroline on my side against whatever Angel had planned. It had to really bug her that Angel ordered her around like a dog, but she probably wouldn’t admit it until she got to trust me. Until she could see I was the sort of ally she should take a risk to get… and I hadn’t been doing so well at being someone worth taking risks on, so far. “I guess I’ll be getting to know Caroline tomorrow. What will you be doing that’s more important than your future wife, anyway?”
“A secret,” Devin returned. I scowled at him, and he somehow managed to smirk without it ever looking close to a smile. “You have your things to do that I’m not allowed to be a part of… well, I have
mine.”
And considering the sorts of things I already knew he’d been involved in, that was my cue to stop asking questions.
I was shuffling by the time I made it back into the apartment after five the following afternoon. Caroline had an enthusiasm for beautiful clothes even I couldn’t really match—or maybe it was just an enthusiasm for having someone to enjoy beautiful clothes with.
“It’s hard to find lasting friends if you happen to be born into this extended family,” she’d admitted just before saying goodbye to me outside the apartment building. “Either your parents have a falling-out with their parents and you’re expected to cut off contact, or they end up with some reason to think spending time with you might be dangerous… and given who we all are, they’re probably right. Even when it gets worked out in the end, it sucks for long-term relationships.”
It had to be even harder to find someone you could enter into the sort of long-term relationship most people were especially keen on with. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised Devin had jumped at the chance to get me on board as a future wife.
And speaking of my future husband, I had half-expected he wouldn’t be there when I returned. Then when I saw him sitting on the couch in front of the TV where he’d been when I ran out to get in Caroline’s car—where he’d probably slept for all I knew, he’d gone out the night before and hadn’t been back before I admitted defeat and crawled to bed—I half-expected to spot Angel somewhere in the room in the next moment. Apparently she didn’t have anything further to add to her roster of manipulations for the moment: we were alone.
“What was your day like?” asked Devin without looking at me. I let my bag slip by degrees from my fingers, frozen in place by the psychological whiplash. How had he gone from being my kidnapper to sitting in my place of residence acting all domestic? He couldn’t have come up with anything more perfectly designed to wig me out, although I supposed I was wigging myself out just fine having the hots for him.
“Strange, to be honest.” I started approaching in tentative steps. “I know Caroline is your cousin, but I’ve only just met her, so it didn’t feel like I was doing this whole thing with family like you’re supposed to.”
“I don’t know Caroline that well myself,” Devin said. He was staring into the television screen with tremendous interest, which would have been a lot easier to accept if it hadn’t been there on standby mode. “My mother loves her, says she’s the daughter she never had, but that makes me feel less likely to want to spend time with her. She’s far from a sister to me.”
Caroline had been strangely noncommital about her relationship with Angel. Maybe she didn’t feel the mother-daughter connection either.
I’d been half about to probe Caroline while we were out for details about Devin’s former girlfriends, just to see if her reaction suggested he was generally weird about relationships, but now I was glad I’d decided against it. She would have thought I was the stereotypical tragic jealous fiancée, and I would have probably drawn conclusions from her reaction when she didn’t really know anything.
It was a stupid idea anyway. She was likely to tell Angel who would tell Devin, and he’d be pissed I was trying to give him the runaround. If I wanted to find out more about him, I was going to have to do it directly.