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.
There was so much more to her poker-faced boss. Finding out just what lay beneath the surface should be the furthest thing from her mind. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but Ana.
But it was Dante dominating her thoughts tonight. She sighed and tried to focus on her dinner, and not think so much about the deep, overwhelming darkness that she’d glimpsed in his normally expressionless eyes.
Dante unbuttoned his shirt and took a hanger out of his closet. He put it on the hanger and buttoned the top few buttons, then put it in its place in the closet
He moved his hand to his belt buckle, then paused for a moment. He walked into his en suite bathroom and braced his hands on the vanity countertop, looking at his reflection in the mirror.
He didn’t look at himself often. He didn’t see much point in it. But he did now. And he wondered what other people saw.
He chuckled, the sound bitter, hollow in the empty room, and turned the sink on, running cold water onto his hand, splashing it onto his face. He knew what people thought about him. They wrote it in on society blogs and people, people from all over, were able to leave comments with their explicit opinions.
Sexy, but dead behind the eyes.
Amoral.
Italian bastard.
Impostor.
Yes, he knew what people thought of him. How they saw him. And he knew that it didn’t matter. Not because he was so at peace with who he was, but because he genuinely didn’t care.
A man makes his own destiny. If he is in control of himself, he can control everything around him.
Words from Don Colson when he’d first come to live with them. From the man he thought of as his father. The man he’d never felt worthy of calling father. It was what made him strive to be worthy. The Colsons were the only people who’d inspired that feeling in him.
Control was the key. It was what put him on Don Colson’s side. And not on the side of his real father. The man who’d spilled his mother’s blood. The man whose blood ran through his veins.
He shut off the water and turned, walking back into his room. His bedroom door opened and Paige stopped short, one foot in the room, a sharp squeak escaping