Page 57 of Beautiful Dangerous

“I didn’t want you put in any more danger, my darling. That’s why I came home earlier than planned, because you were close to putting yourself in the kind of danger I never wanted for you. And now the war with the Pino cartel has intensified… I had to be here, to protect you. To stop you from doing something you didn’t need to do.”

“Stop me from killing the men I thought had killed you? And I don’t need your protection, Javier.”

His face hardens for the briefest of seconds, but the smile quickly returns as he reaches out and cups my face, his thumb gently stroking my cheek. “They will never stop coming after us,mi amor. They are our rivals, our biggest threat, and yesterday was just the beginning of our plan to bring that family down. All of them. It’s been going on for far too long, there isn’t room for both of us, not anymore. And I refuse to lose. Anything.”

“So you, what? Came back from the dead a little earlier than planned to stop me from acting impulsively?”

He leans in to me, his thumb digging lightly into my cheek, his mouth almost touching my ear as he whispers,“Exactly.”

I take hold of his wrist and pull his hand away from me, stepping back from him.

“I have been consumed by this need to avenge your death, since the moment Lucca told me you’d died. It’s all I’ve been able to think about, the moment their filthy bodies fall to the ground, all breath wiped out of them. It’s what’s kept me going, because I missed you so much, Javier. So fucking much.”

“I know, baby. I know.”

“You don’t know a fucking thing. You haven’t been here…” I stop, and I shake my head, a cynical laugh escaping, and he frowns. “Youhavebeen here, though. Right? Lucca, he’s been your eyes and ears, your messenger.”

“If I’d stayed here, Olivia, what’s happening now, it wouldn’t have been so easy. I had to go, to make the Pino brothers think they’d won another round. Getting me out of the way meant that things could move on, before that all our time was spent trying to protect me while theirs had been spent trying to take me out. We were going round and round in this perpetual circle that had no end. So we had to create one. It was the only way.”

There’s a part of me – the part that’s had to become the woman I needed to be in order to run this cartel – that understands what he’s saying. The part that knows he’s right, but there’s another part of me – the part that is still his wife – that is so fucking angry that he left me the way he did. And I’m trying really hard to put her back in her box, I refuse to play the wronged party, this weak woman who should just be happy her husband’s back.

Areyou happy he’s back?

I really don’t know…

“You understand, Olivia? What needed to be done?”

That video he sent me, the one I received just hours after I’d thought he was gone; the one I’ve watched every single day, I get it now. I get the message.

You won’t survive, if you don’t remember me…

Was that a veiled threat of some kind? I don’t know. This man here, he looks like my husband, but the Javier I knew before, I’m not sure how much of him is here anymore.

“Olivia, please, the one thing you have to believe is that I never, not once, stopped loving you. Not once.” He takes a step toward me, and I let him. I stay rooted to the spot, but when his hand connects with the side of my neck I flinch, and he quickly drops it. “It broke my heart, what I had to do, and I understand that me being here…” He looks right into my eyes, and I am desperate to feel something, anything, but I’m not. I can’t. The numbness is still winning over every other emotion. “It’s a shock, of course it is. And I understand that you need time to get your head around everything…”

“I do. Need time.”

To get used to my diminished role. To being nothing more than his wife… No. I’m not taking that shit. I’m not. The woman he left behind, I’m only realizing now how very different she was to the woman he came back to.

“I can’t just go back to the way it was, Javier. You can’t just snap your fingers and expect me to be okay with this.”

“I know. I do, I know that.”

Does he? Really?

I’d started to move on.

Started to believe there was a life worth living without him.

Started to fall in love with another man.

Started to…?

“I just need some time, Javier. That’s all.” I try to smile, to show him something that might tell him we’ll come through this, but I’m not convinced that we can.

Not convinced that you want to…?

“Everything is going to be okay,mi amor. I promise.”

---