"Is she?" Sam didn't seem like type to cheat on his wife, but then again he was married to Ginny so….
"No. No, she's not."
"How do you know?" I asked.
She looked away.
"You did a DNA test?" I couldn't believe it. "Does Elika know you did that?"
When Felicity continued to keep her face turned from me, I had my answer.
"Fee, whatever happened between your father and her mother has nothing to do with Elika." I sat next to her and took her hands in mine. "I don't understand why you're cruel to her. I don't like seeing it. I really don't like it."
And if this is who you are, I can't marry you.
Fuck! Where had that come from?
"I'm so sorry," Felicity whimpered. "I'm so ashamed of myself. Mama gets so upset, and she cries all the time and…." She pulled her hands away from mine and wiped her tears. "You're right. You're so right. I've been behaving very poorly when it comes to Elika."
I felt like I was in some chick flick having a conversation about mean girls. I fucking hated it.
"You're not your mother."
She smiled at me. "Thank God, right?"
I laughed. "Yeah."
"You still love me?"
"Yeah, I do." For the first time since I'd said those consequential words to her, which I hadn't said to any other woman, I wondered about their veracity.
Seeing Elika again was playing havoc with my head, I admitted. I feltsomethingfor her.
Not something, asshole, you feel lust. Good, old-fashioned, garden variety lust.
"I love you too, Dean. So much." She hugged me tight, and I inhaled her perfume and held her. I'd made a choice, and I had to have the moral courage to stand by it. We'd been engaged for just a few weeks; I should give it time to settle. Cold feet. That's all this was. Or was it?
"You sure about this? You don't even live together,"Damian said when I told him about my plans to propose to Felicity.
"We almost do. I mean, we travel a lot. I stay at her place in New York, and she stays at mine in Hong Kong."
"That's visiting one another's home, not living together," Damian pointed out. "Trust me, living with someone and loving someone are two different things."
"You like living with Emilia," I remarked.
"Fucking love it." I could hear the satisfaction in his voice. My cold and calculated brother had changed since he married Emilia. She'd made him a better person, we all agreed, just as Elsa had made my brother Duncan semi-human.
"I may want to live in the US full-time after we get married. Would that be okay?"
Damian was, after all, the CEO of the company and my boss.
"We can promote someone in Asia, and you can manage US operations, if that's what you want. I can then just keep the CEO job. Emilia would like that—would mean less work."
"It's going to take a minute," I warned him,"so don't get yourhopes up that I'll carry your workload. Already spent months doing Duncan's job while he was sorting his shit out with Elsa."
Damian laughed. "And you did a stellar job. Dean, you can work from anywhere or not work, if that's what you want."
"I love the company," I simply said.