Page 67 of Meet Me in Montreal

“We did but it wasn’t a big deal. We were having dinner anyway, might as well go with the group. We’ll meet you guys out there.” Satisfied he’d gotten his invitation, Bobby fell quiet again. Then he speared Santino with a sudden piercing look. “Let’s get to the point. Standard line: what are your intentions toward my sister?”

Santino didn’t even have to think about it. His automatic response was, “I intend to reclaim my wife.”

“Well, damn. That was straight up,” Bobby said with a chuckle that was tinged with sarcasm.

“We should have never broken up. It’s not what I wanted. You know that.”

“Yeah, I remember how upset you acted,” Bobby replied, folding his arms thoughtfully.

Santino’s jaw tensed. “I wasn’t acting. It fucked me up.”

Bobby seemed uncomfortable with that brutally honest answer, but he didn’t argue back.

“Alright. Next question: did you cheat on her? I know you said you didn’t, but I still have a hard time understanding why a man would take an ex-girlfriend to a romantic island resort overnight if he had no intentions of fucking her. I mean, I’d be fucking.” He shrugged. “Man to man. Be honest. I don’t want my sister hurt, but I also understand that after a few years of marriage, when you’re that young and you don’t know what else is out there…well, I get it.”

“Are you playing good cop right now?” Santino asked with a short, disbelieving laugh. “You’re trying to be all ‘I’d cheat too, bro,’ to get me to admit to something that didn’t happen? Come on, man. You really don’t know me better than that?”

“Good cop? Not at all.” Bobby shook his head. “I’m saying that I know what it’s like. I’m saying that…” He trailed off, staring at their surroundings, at the pair of blonde girls at the next table over, giggling shyly and eyeing him and Santino like they’dwelcome them if they asked to join them. But Bobby wasn’t smiling back.

“Alright, this is the deal,” Santino said, deciding to spill. “Me and Antoinette were boyfriend and girlfriend since we were fourteen, but we never took it past a certain level. She was a ‘good girl’ saving it for marriage like she’d promised her nonna on her Italian side.” He used air quotes. “Daddy’s little princess wouldn’t let me get farther than feeling her up over her clothes for four years and I went along with what she wanted because my Pop said —”

“You don’t push a girl to do stuff she doesn’t want to do because that would make you an asshole,” Bobby finished with a sigh. “My dad died before he could pass on the gentleman’s rules for dating, but my uncle stepped in and did it for him.”

“Yeah. I mean, I did try a couple times ‘cause I was a horny young man,” he said, making Bobby chuckle. “But she was just never comfortable, and I really didn’t want to be an asshole about it.”

And that was the dead truth. It had been frustrating as fuck, but he couldn’t ditch Antoinette to go fool around with anyone else. By senior year, she’d mastered the art of getting him worked up with kissing and grinding fully dressed and the promise of more “someday.” In return for the vague “someday,” she extracted a promise from him to wait for her until the wedding bells rang. But when she left for Boston, she admitted she didn’t know what she wanted.

“I don’t want you to move on and forget about me. But…we’re both so young.”

He and Antoinette were a done deal. Tommy had advised him to run out and do it with a random new girl just to “get it done,” but that didn’t sit well with him. He didn’t want to admit it to any of his brothers or even Dominic that he wanted it to happenwith someone special. Santino had already been used to waiting. It wouldn’t kill him to wait a while longer.

“I purposely waited for the one. That was Vanessa. When I met her, I knew she was it. My first and my last.”

“I don’t know how much I want to hear,” Bobby said, fake shuddering. “But that doesn’t mean you didn’t start getting that itch after the wedding. I mean, getting married doesn’t mean your eyes fall out of your head.”

“No, no, no fucking itch,” Santino said, shaking his head resolutely. “You don’t want to hear shit, and I really don’t want to share details, but I was happy at home, trust me. Yeah, we fought, and yeah, there are pretty people in the world, but it never occurred to me to start looking elsewhere. If it came to that, I would’ve fucking left rather than do that to her.”

“So, why would you take your ex to Aruba? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Because she got engaged to a psycho billionaire who she said she was scared of. When she first mentioned him, she said he swept her off her feet. Said he reminded her of me, even looked like me, a tall, blond motherfucker.Occhi azzurri e capelli biondi, except he was Norwegian or Danish or something.”

With a wry grin, Bobby remarked, “Nothing like a few billion to change someone’s mind about premarital sex. But Van already told me the ‘what’ part of what happened. I want to knowwhyyou thought it was okay to risk jail time or worse for someone you’d never been into when your wife asked you not to.”

“First of all, Vanessa didn’t ask, shetoldme. I felt like she was talking to me like I was her kid and I didn’t respond well to that. But I did it anyway because she Ant was my friend, and I wanted to help. Now I see how fuckin’ dumb I was to do it, but I can’t change what I did. I’m just trying to fix it.”

“Whoo! Yeah, that was a fuck up right there,” Bobby said after absorbing what he’d said. “So, what happened to Antoinette? Three years later, is she still down in Aruba?”

“Nope. She went back to the psycho.”

Bobby’s response was an intake of breath followed by explosive laughter, clapping his hands until he was breathless and crying. Santino let him take his time getting it out.

“Yeah, real fuckin’ funny. She called me like four months later to say she’d made a mistake leaving the psycho, she realized she loved him, it hadn’t really been as terrible as she’d made it out to be, blah blah. She said he promised he’d never hurt her. I washed my hands of the whole thing, and I blocked her. After what she cost me, I was fucking done,” Santino said harshly.

“What about the psycho?” Bobby asked with his brows drawn, the thought dawning on him that there might be a lingering problem. “Does he know it was you who helped her?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Bobby shrugged. “I guess all’s well that ends well.”

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