Page 140 of Love Without Control

My father made a little strangled noise beside me and I swiveled my head to take in the pain etching his features. “Are you okay, Dad?” I asked quietly. “Do I need to stop?”

With his thumb, he traced a soft stroke over my cheek. “No, baby. I need to know what you’ve been through.” I stared into his blue eyes and read the resolve there.

“Okay, but if it’s too much, we can save it for later.” He shook his head, and I returned my gaze to the black stones making up the fireplace, my eyes tracing the grooves between the rocks to give me something to look at besides the pitying looks I knew were on the faces of my loved ones.

“From what I was told, if Luca Cappitani wanted you dead, he wouldn’t stop until you were dead. So, Dane and I faked our deaths and went undercover.”

“How did you fake your deaths?” Auburn asked. “We never heard anything about that.”

“A friend took the helicopter up and then parachuted out before it blew up over the Gulf of Mexico. That made Luca think we had blown up too.”

“Wow,” Kassie breathed. “That was smart.”

Monty chimed in. “How did you know all that about Luca? How did you know he planted the bomb on the helicopter?”

“I had… an inside source,” I hedged and noticed the scowl of disbelief on my brother’s face. “We changed our names and appearances and went into hiding.”

Monty’s attention went to my husband. “So your name isn’t really Dane Osbourne?”

“It is now,” he replied, and Monty’s jaw tightened.

“What was it before?”

Fuck. I was hoping to avoid this topic of conversation, but my brother had been a detective for too long to let anything slip through the cracks.

Dane moistened his lips and announced. “My former name was Damiano Cappitani. I was Luca’s son.”

The room erupted in gasps and cries of shock, but the expression on Monty’s face turned absolutely volcanic. He boosted himself off the sofa and was on Dane in a second, yanking him up by the front of his charcoal-gray T-shirt.

“You son of a bitch.”

He cocked his fist, and with my heart pounding like a tightly tuned timpani drum, I jumped up and wedged myself between them. “Monty, stop!”

“Evie. Move,” he bit out, and I shoved at his chest until I formed the slightest bit of wiggle room between the two men.

“No. You’re acting crazy.”

“Me? Crazy? Jesus fucking Christ, Evie. You show up here after seventeen years, three months, and eight days—yes, I keep count—and you tell us you’re married to some piece of shit Mafia asshole. And you want us to just accept that?”

Dane’s voice was low and dangerous behind me. “Yes, it’s true. I was a piece of shit Mafia asshole, but you will not speak to my wife that way.”

Fucking hell.

I reached behind me and gripped his thigh—hard—in warning as I faced Monty. His face was murderously red, and his eyes were narrowed on my husband. This was a damn nightmare.

“Did you plant the bomb that was going to kill my sister?” Monty asked.

Before Dane could piss him off more, I answered. “No, he didn’t. His father directed someone else to do it. Luca was going to blow up his own fucking son, Monty. That’s the kind of depravity I’ve been running from for the past seventeen years, three months, and eight days.”

That took a bit of the wind out of his sails, and his body seemed to droop a little. “I feel like you’re skimming over things, Evie. Leaving out details. Like what happened to the men who took you?”

Dane answered that with a curt, “They’re gone.”

Monty threw up his hands. “What the fuck does that mean? They’re gone as in they disappeared on the streets of New Orleans? Moved to Zimbabwe? What?”

My husband’s voice was scarily low. “Gone as in you never have to worry about them again.”

Monty’s mouth dropped open for a second, and then he closed it, his eyes fixed on Dane. “Ever?”

---