Page 79 of Beautiful Dangerous

His eyes are back on mine. “Because we have our own secrets, remember?”

“There isn’t a thing Javier could do if he found out we slept together. We thought he was dead. I’m not saying we should shout it from the rooftops, but it’s hardly a deadly secret. Is it?”

“I don’t know. Is he not the kind of man who thinks cheating on a dead guy counts?”

I stare at him, the corners of my mouth lifting upwards slightly. “Doyouthink he’s that kind of man?”

He shrugs. “Can’t say I’m willing to find out, to be honest. I’d quite like to keep my balls exactly where they are.”

I can’t help laughing, once again I’m just so comfortable in Angel’s company. “He wouldn’t hurt you, Angel.”

“But he’d hurt Lucca.”

His words thump into me like an unexpected punch. Does he know? Or is he just taking a lucky guess?

“Javier’s back and you don’t seem as happy as you should be. I mean, you’ve spent most of today avoiding him…”

“I haven’t been avoiding him.”

“So why haven’t you gone home sooner? There was no need for you to be hanging around the restaurant all day, everyone else had it all in hand, there was nothing special happening. And now we’re here, on this detour to the beach when you should be going home. The man you mourned for, sought revenge for, he’s back, and you’re doing everything you can to avoid spending as little time as possible with him.”

“That isn’t how it is.”

“I think it’s exactly how it is.” He stares out ahead again. “And I saw you and Lucca disappear into the back office together, earlier today. At The Garden.”

I swallow hard, and down a long mouthful of beer, my stomach churning with guilt and fear and cold, blind panic. But then I think about Lucca, and all those feelings are swept away and I’m left with nothing but this dangerous, beautiful love for him. A man who can never be mine, and yet, he’s all I want.

“You can talk to me, Olivia, that’s all I’m saying.”

And bring someone else into this mess? But the urge to get even the smallest part of this off my chest…

“Lucca, he… Maybe he’s all I’ve wanted, for a long time,” I say quietly, twisting the neck of the beer bottle round and around between my fingers. And I keep my eyes fixed forward, but I can feel Angel’s on me. “Maybe I finished grieving for Javier sooner than I realized, and everything that came after that was just me going through the motions; doing what I thought was expected of me as the grieving widow hell bent on revenge.”

“And Lucca, he feels the same.”

He doesn’t even phrase that as a question, it’s as though he already knew how Lucca felt. But I nod anyway, and I turn my head to look at him. “Yes. He does.”

Angel sighs, because he knows that just being privy to this knowledge puts him in danger. But he was the one who brought it up, not me. He invited himself to be a part of this secret.

You still should’ve stopped him…

“I don’t even know when it happened, when I knew I loved him, because it’s like it happened all of a sudden, or that’s what it feels like, anyway.” I down another mouthful of beer and trail my fingers through the rapidly cooling sand. “For so long all I could focus on was getting that revenge for Javier. And it wasn’t even real, was it? They didn’t even kill him.”

“But they would’ve done, and you know that. They would’ve killedyou. They needed to go, Liv.”

“I know, I just…” I drag a hand back through my hair. “He lied to me, Angel. And I can’t forget that. Everything I went through, all that pain, all the shit that followed, it wasn’t even real.”

“Lucca lied to you, too.”

Our eyes lock again. “I know he did.”

“So, what are you gonna do? ’Cause you know you’re playing with fire here.”

And so many people could get burned…

“I want to be with him, Angel. I want to be with Lucca. And he wants to be with me, but we can’t do that here. We can’t be together, here.”

He frowns, and I think I might be telling him too much when neither me nor Lucca have any real idea of what we’re doing ourselves, not yet.

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