Page 134 of Scorned Beauty

I didn’t feel the need to defend myself.

“Oh, but you might move on to medicine, right?” Carlotta quickly interjected. “Be a surgeon?” Dom’s mother attempted to mold me into a more palatable light, but it only made me feel worse.

“That’s not happening,” Dom cut in. “Sloane wants to be a nurse. What’s wrong with that?”

“Nothing,” his mother said. “But it’s a logical next step.”

No, it wasn’t. At least, not to me.

My throat tightened, trying to keep my emotions from reaching my eyes, but my entire face was on fire.

“A nurse is a noble profession,” the woman’s husband said and shot me an apologetic look.

She shrugged her elegant shoulders and took a sip of her wine. “Well, Miss Scott, Harvard has a health management program. It’s one of the highest-paid professions in the healthcare industry.”

Lucy gave an unladylike snort, prompting a glare from her mother.

“Highest paid? Riiiight,” Lucy scoffed. “It’s because their bottom line is not patient care but how to make money for their stockholders.”

“Lucy!” Carlotta hissed.

But my girl had my back, so I had to put in my two cents. “Yes, I prefer to remain a nurse, thank you very much. Nursesput the care in healthcare, not the administrators who decide how to make money for the hospital. Remember that when your children put you in a nursing home, who’s going to make sure you…you get the right meds…” This is the wrong place to mention changing their diapers and bedpans. “Or who will train the staff in patient mobility?” I was getting fired up. Because fuck them.

“You tell them, baby.” I could feel Dom’s gaze on me.

“Yes, Mamma,” Lucy laughed. “Be careful. We’ll decide which nursing home to stick you in.”

“Lucy,cara mia.” Paulie De Lucci’s admonishment to his daughter was laced in humor.

An older couple at the table, who looked to be in their seventies, were nodding their heads. The woman said, “I love my nurse more than my doctor.”

“Hey,” her husband said. “I’m your doctor.”

I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a laugh.

The man regarded me with what was akin to reverence. “I can attest nurses are the true heroes. I would be lost without my nursing staff.”

Our server arrived with the second course and effectively changed the uncomfortable topic.

When dessert was served, Lucy grabbed my arm. “Let’s powder our noses.”

Dom’s brows furrowed, and he oddly checked his phone, but nodded.

I followed Lucy, apprehensive of what was going down. I knew this was about Tomlin, and I’d overheard the siblings arguing the other night that Dom didn’t want me anywhere near him. That detestable couple was part of my past, and if Tomlin was a pedophile, I was a hundred percent behind what Lucy had planned for him. She dragged me into the ladies’ room and checked the stalls.

“What’s going on?”

“Vivienne wants a deal,” she said. “Someone from the media informed them that there was going to be a headline tonight that would prove scandalous for the Tomlins.”

“You can’t give them a deal. Her husband is a sicko, and she’s protecting him.” Which made her a sicko too.

“We’re not.”

Her phone pinged again. “Shit. The headline is out. You need to brace,” she told me.

My whole body locked up when the ladies’ room door swung open and the woman I hadn’t seen in years walked through.

“This is cozy.” The woman of my nightmares sneered at me. She hadn’t aged well. Botox and fillers had taken their toll. I used to admire her delicate features, but in her attempt to stop time, she’d almost become unrecognizable. I thought I’d recognized her earlier, but since her lips were plumped up way past how I remembered her, she didn’t even register. Apparently, she couldn’t say the same. “I thought it was you, Sloane. And, girl, I am impressed. Dominic De Lucci? Does he know you used to scrub my toilet and dumpster-dive behind my building? I still have the picture, you know.”