Page 36 of A Love Most Brutal (Morelli Family #2)

MARY

Monday after the charity gala, I am still going through absolute mental gymnastics to convince myself that Maxim’s unhinged dirty talk accompanying the constant sex over the last three days is just that and nothing more.

The man is an enigma, guarded eyes and intense stares one moment and then feverish Russian phrases and muttered endearments in my ear while fucking me the next.

Whatever control I was trying to gain by jumping on him in the limo is now completely out of my hands. When it comes to sex with my husband, I have decided that bets are off . He may never have my heart, but so long as he has my hand in marriage, I might as well offer my body.

Because holy shit he knows what to do with it.

And so long as I can convince myself that he is not doing something stupid like actually falling in love with me, setting himself up for a lifetime of hurt and disappointment, then I can really just enjoy it.

When Samuel dropped us off after the gala, the night was not over.

I showered, he showered with me. I laid on the bed naked, he also came to bed naked.

Things progressed, and then progressed two more times, and neither of us woke up before seven.

I thought it might be a blip and we’d both get a lid on it by the following evening, but I was wrong. I’ve kept being wrong, in fact, five times since then.

I tell myself it’s because he’s getting serious about making a baby, even when he’s giving me orgasms through decidedly non-baby-making means. It’s all part of it, I reason.

This morning I woke up with his hand beneath my underwear and his mouth kissing up my neck. Again, because he is getting serious about making a baby, not because he likes hearing me come, as he said . It’s the baby thing, really.

That’s it.

The whole “ I will love her if I love her ” was just, like, something he said without real meaning. We all say things we don’t mean. That was certainly one of those things.

It’s the middle of the afternoon, and, in an attempt to not think about the sex-filled weekend with my husband, I meet both Leo and Sean on one of the sites.

They make me wear a hard hat and glasses even when we’re just walking around not even really close to any of the action.

Sean’s job at Morelli construction is especially boring, full of logistics, planning, and monitoring situations.

Not even juicy situations, either, like today he’s been trying to determine if the employees taking too-long of lunch breaks is actually a positive investment because they might be doing better work when they come back.

Riveting stuff.

Leo is halfway through explaining why this job site is the most interesting of all of our current projects (I do not care nor am I really listening) when my phone buzzes with a call from Nate. He should be in school, so I pick up right away.

“What?” I’m already imagining the worst of things that can happen in a school.

“Aunt Mary?” a soft voice says through the phone. I stop walking and wave on Sean and Leo who I think are glad to be rid of me so they can do their jobs.

“Angel? What’s the matter?”

“Will you come pick me up from school?” she asks, sniffling.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, but please?”

I blink for a moment, glance over at her dad standing twenty feet away from me.

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

The school lets me check out Angel without incident or parental approval since Willa put the whole family on the kids’ lists.

Nate brings her up to the office and she looks unhurt, though also unhappy.

Her eyes are puffy like she’s been crying; she takes after her dad in that her pale complexion hides nothing.

I pull her into a side hug. She’s already as tall as me, probably taller in her platform sneakers, which is startling.

I nod at Nate who gives me a meaningful glance, the meaning of which I cannot decipher beyond “godspeed.”

“Should we go to my fancy new house?” I ask and she smiles. Not her gap-tooth grin, but I will take it.

“Yes, but Artie is going to be so jealous, we have to bring him later.”

“Deal.”

She throws her backpack in the back seat and sits with me in the front, grabbing and unlocking my phone from the console to put on a playlist. “Who told you my password?”

“It’s my birthday, it’s been your code for a million years.”

“A million,” I agree, and don’t point out that it’s Artie’s birthday too. “So, do you want to talk about it?”

The song is almost halfway over before she gives a heavy sigh. “It’s stupid.”

“I bet it’s not.”

“This guy in my science class was talking about how probably none of the girls in the class would be owners of big companies, and I told him that Vanessa is a CEO and my mom is a lawyer so, like, obviously that’s not true.”

“Obviously.”

“And he said that she probably only got to be CEO because of nepotism and that Mom would probably quit being a lawyer because she just had a baby. But, literally, that’s so dumb because she became a lawyer when she had two babies and—” Angel throws her hands up and makes a frustrated groan.

“I told him that he’s an idiot and should stop listening to his sexist senator dad and his golf partners and pick up a book for once.

And then he called me sensitive and told me I couldn’t take a joke. ”

I give her a sympathetic look and shake my head at the bull headed confidence of a kid so obviously repeating after his parents. Kids aren’t born misogynists.

“I hate when people say that.” In fact, when I was in high school and people said that I couldn’t take a joke, I was getting suspended for fighting. So it appears Angel is at least more level-headed than I was. Her mother is to thank, I think.

“Me too! Gah, it’s like,” Angel looks out the windshield, searching for the words, “sometimes I get so mad and I don’t know where the feelings should go.

I almost started crying in there, so I just left the class and he was acting like I was so unreasonable for calling him out for being an asshole. ”

I don’t chastise her for cussing because her mom’s not here, plus, I also think he sounds like a little asshole.

“Nate didn’t have a class so I went in there and he let me use his phone.”

We’ve reached the end of the story, and I am quiet while I think hard about what to say.

I don’t want to rile her up more because it’s obvious to me she’s feeling big feelings.

It was always my impulse to channel big feelings into rage, and that got me into trouble.

In fact, it’s still getting me into trouble.

I pull up to the apartment and scan us into the parking garage beneath the building before turning my shoulders to face her.

“I’m sorry, Little. That sounds really, really shitty,” I say, and her shoulders sag a little.

“Thanks,” she says, but isn’t looking at me. She looks so beaten down, my heart hurts for her. “I think I was embarrassed.”

I squeeze her arm three times. “Come on.” She follows me out of the car, quiet while we make our way to the penthouse.

She’s confounded by me having to use a key to even hit the button for the top floor and her jaw drops open when the metal doors slide open into our foyer.

“The elevator opens into your house?”

“I think that’s weird too,” I admit and lead her inside, letting her gawk at the tall ceilings and huge windows.

“Grandma’s house is fancy, but this place is like. . .different fancy.”

New fancy, she means. Shiny walls and white counters and lots of light flooding the space.

I head straight for the tea kettle, a habit I hadn’t realized I’d picked up until I’ve already pulled down two mugs while Angel walks around the house unabashedly looking at everything. This must be how I looked at first as Maxim stood still as stone watching me invade his space.

“Maxim reads?”

“Yes, what did you think he did?” I ask. She giggles.

“I don’t know—” She gasps so loud and dramatically I let a spoon clatter to the ground in my move to see what’s wrong. She’s just discovered the cat.

I catch my breath while she coos over the fluff ball. “You got a cat?”

“Maxim’s cat. Her name is Greta.”

“She’s a baby ,” Angel drops to the ground in front of the couch and pets Greta who, while not in fact a baby, looks thrilled to preen in front of someone who will lavish her in attention. Dream come true for the little creature.

“Do you want tea or hot chocolate?” I ask.

“Do you have soda?” she asks. “Mom stopped letting us get soda.”

There were three cavities between her and Artie last time they went to the dentist, but I do not remind her.

“I have green juice?” I offer and she looks excitedly into the kitchen.

“I want that, it sounds weird.”

I nod and pour us both glasses, the mugs forgotten on the counter. She winces and scrunches her face at the first taste, but immediately goes back for a second and looks like she likes it a bit more this time.

“Kinda sour.”

“She puts lemon in it,” I explain.

“Who?”

I lower my voice. “Elise. Our chef. She is very nice, and very blonde.”

“Is she your friend?”

I think about the question for a moment instead of defaulting to no. I don’t call many people my friends, all of my friends are my family. But I suppose Sasha has become friendly enough, and something about Elise makes me loathe myself, but she is very sweet to me.

“I don’t have many friends,” I say simply. Angel takes a bigger sip, leaving a green rim of juice around her upper lip.

“Nate is your friend,” she says. “Mom told me you guys hang out all the time.”

“Nate doesn’t count,” I deny.

“Are you friends with Maxim?”

“Maxim is my husband.”

“But mom always calls Dad her best friend. I asked her if Nate and Vanessa were best friends though and she said no because Nate is your best friend.”

I laugh out loud at this, and she joins me, her giggle still as sweet to me as it was when she was a tiny baby and laughing at anything.

“Then yes, they’re all my friends, except for on the days Nate annoys me. Then he’s my enemy.”

Angel smiles, takes another sip, but then her smile slowly falls as I assume she remembers her sour mood. It’s tough being a teenager, I don’t think someone could pay me enough to return to that time of my life.

I take a big breath and try to parse through the words I want to tell her, the assurances I wish I had then.

“When I was your age, I was really. . .angry,” I start.

“But when guys said stupid shit, I would beat them up and get suspended, and then your grandma would ground me for a week, and sometimes that made me even more mad, because I felt like maybe they didn’t know how hard it was to be in high school. ”

Angel nods like she might know what I mean and agree with me.

“It’s okay to get mad. People are annoying sometimes,” I admit, and Angel snorts. “And crying is okay, too. It’s okay to feel things.”

“You sound like Mom.”

“Yeah, well,” I smirk. “She is a lawyer, so. She’s pretty smart.”

I’m not the best at consoling, probably because people don’t usually turn to me with their emotional woes.

Not many people would say that I have particularly good coping skills, but then again, not many people know how quickly my brain summersaults from one horrifying what-if to another.

So, I probably have more to contribute on the topic of managing emotions than they think.

I spin my wedding ring on my finger. “Sometimes when I’m feeling really overwhelmed and I don’t know what to do with my feelings, I run. Or hit something. Or I convince Nate to fight with me so I can hit him.”

She rolls her eyes, smiling, and my heart squeezes. I used to think I hated kids, but then these two came to be. If every kid was like them, they wouldn’t get such a bad rep.

“Dad says starting this summer we need to start learning how to fight.”

I nod, having been involved in those conversations. Like Vanessa, I was in the camp of keeping these two as far away from fighting as possible, but the safest thing for them isn’t keeping them in the dark.

“How do you feel about that?” I ask.

She thinks about it, chewing on her bottom lip, just like her mom does when she’s thinking, just like all of the Morelli girls do.

“I want to get good at fighting. In case something like what happened to Aunt Ness happens again.” Her chin wobbles a little, the memory still too tender.

We were all betrayed by Cillian, but the kids were the most blindsided by the whole ordeal.

They got a much abridged version of the events, leaving out some key details.

For instance they know their uncle Cillian died, not that Nate shot him through the brain.

They know that he was trying to force Vanessa to marry him so that he could take her company, not that this company is also tied to a massive crime conglomerate.

This was their first foray into the truth that their families are . . .well, criminals.

“I want to learn,” she says decidedly, braver than she knows.

I drain the rest of my juice and set the glass down on the counter with a clack against the stone. “Should we start today?”

Angel gives her big grin this time.