Mistresses: After Hours With The Boss: Her Little White Lie / Their Most Forbidden Fling / An Inescapable Temptation

“No,” he said. “You?”

“Two. My sister is a pediatrician and my brother is a second-string quarterback for the Seahawks. Impressive, I know.”

“Very. So how did you get into art?”

She fought off the sting of embarrassment that always came when she had to talk about Jack and Emma. It wasn’t fair, really. They deserved their success. They earned it. They had talent, and they worked hard.

They didn’t deserve for her to make it about her. Still, it was never fun to talk about. But talking about it was better than living in a town where everyone knew that you were, without question, the big letdown of your family.

“I’ve always been interested in it. Started drawing and painting really young.”

“Did you go to school for it?”

“No.” She shook her head, kept her tone light. No big deal. It was no big deal. “I never really liked school. Just wasn’t my thing.”

“And what did your parents think of that?”

“Would you like me to lie down on the couch before you continue?”

“Just a question.”

“Well, uh … they’ve never been that impressed with my interests. My grades in school were bad, and they were spending a lot of money sending Jack and Emma to school already, even with the help of scholarships and … and they didn’t want to pay to send me too when they knew I wouldn’t apply myself. So the not going to school was a mutual decision.”

She could feel Dante’s dark gaze boring into her. “A mutual decision?”

She shrugged. “I mean, I might have gone if they …”

“But they wouldn’t.”

“No.”

“Should we tell your parents about the wedding?”

The subject change threw her for a moment. “Oh, it’s … No, probably not. It’s not like it will be huge news outside of our circle here. Your circle here, I should say and anyway … they won’t really approve of the whole thing with Ana.” An understatement. She could just hear her mother’s skepticism.

Do you think you can handle it, Paige? Filled with concern, and a bit of condescension.

But she could handle it. She was sure she could. She was almost completely sure. Again, the bigness of it all threatened to swamp her completely. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d really wanted something. The last time succeeding had been so important, if it ever had been.

It was so much easier to just not care. But with Ana, she couldn’t.

“They don’t approve of you adopting?” he asked.

She shrugged and put her focus back on her food. “I haven’t talked to them about it, but I figure if I save it until everything is final I can spare everyone a lot of angst. It still might not work out.” Her throat tightened, terror wrapping icy fingers around her neck.

“It will,” he said, total confidence in his tone. “We have the media involved which, now that I think of it, is very likely going to work in your favor. I doubt social services want reports out about how they denied an adoption to a child’s lifelong, primary caregiver.”

“You may have a point. I have to ask, though, what’s really in it for you? Because I don’t have any guarantee that you won’t back out. I know you talked about easing business deals but clearly you make deals just fine without me, so I can’t fathom why it would suddenly be important.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I have opportunistic tendencies. This opportunity presented itself and I decided to follow it to its conclusion. There were two options in this situation—do what was expected of me, accept the negative press. Or, try to change things.”

“And that’s all? Because truly, with that as your only motivation, I’m not really filled with comfort and warm fuzzies.”

His gaze sharpened, his dark eyes intense. “It’s important for you to know something. When I say I will do something, I do. There is no going back.”

He said it with such purpose, such unequivocal certainly that she couldn’t help but believe him.

“You didn’t have to do this,” she said. It was the truth. She was the one in the stranglehold. She was the one who was in a situation that was too big for her, nothing unusual there. She was the one who needed help.

But instead of giving up, like she usually did, she’d done whatever she’d had to in order to secure her success. Unfortunately, that had meant lying. It had meant dragging Dante into the situation, and she really did sort of feel bad about that.

“I am doing it. I made the decision. I won’t change my mind.”

“But is the media thing … that’s all you want?” she asked. Seriously, it was a stupid question because she didn’t exactly have anything to give him if changing his image in the press wasn’t enough.

He put his fork down, and took in a deep breath, his expression one of barely contained annoyance. “I have been the target of malicious rumor and speculation by the media since I was fourteen years old. I came onto the stage a villain. I thought it might be interesting to see if I could end up a hero.”

There was no real venom in his words, none of the emotion that was so easy for her to think should be there. That the media had been attacking him since he was a young teenager seemed unforgivable. But he just said it like it was an interesting fact. And he talked about changing public perception as if it were no more than a fascinating experiment.

“What did they … say about you?”

“That I had somehow tricked the Colsons into adopting me. That I was holding something over their heads, that I was a plant for the Mafia—racially motivated attacks are always nice. That I might murder the poor, trusting older couple in their beds.”

He spoke so casually, without inflection. Cold horror settled in her stomach, making her shiver. He continued. “Some thought Don Colson had ‘imported’ me because I was some sort of financial genius and he lacked an heir.”

“But you knew the truth,” she said, her heart tightening, aching for him. Things with her family were hard, and sometimes she felt like she didn’t belong, but she didn’t have the media weighing in on it.

He paused for a moment. “That’s the thing. Paige, I don’t know the truth. Why they would take me in is somewhat beyond me. A fourteen-year-old boy with no people skills and no inclination to find any. But I was smart,” he said, as if trying to reason it out. “I did well in school.”

Oh, good, he was a genius, too.

“I’m sure it was more than that,” she said. Because she really needed to believe that getting good grades in school wasn’t the deciding factor on a person’s value. Otherwise she was sunk.

“Perhaps. I’ll have to ask them sometimes.”

“You never have?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But it does.”

“No,” he said, his voice hard, “it doesn’t. They gave me a future, the best education possible, the best job opportunity possible. They gave me the means to support myself.” He chuckled. “That might be an understatement. They gave me the means to thrive. They owe me nothing. No explanation. No frilly words. I don’t need them. I have everything I need. And I think you and I have everything we need, too.”

He stood from the table, his food less than half-finished. “I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll all drive to work together. It would look wrong to go separately.”

She nodded and watched him walk out of the room. She picked up her fork and started eating again. She wasn’t going to go to bed starving just because he’d decided to get upset about something and leave.

And he was upset. For all that he’d stayed calm, she could tell that the conversation had disturbed him.