Page 24 of Married to the SEAL
She spun on her heel and started pacing. “That son of a bitch. He left me and he came back here without even saying good-bye and he went on with his life like nothing ever happened. Like we never happened.”
“Did he know you were pregnant?”
“No. I was waiting for the right moment to tell him.” She stopped in front of a tabletop display of glass sailboats, picked one up, and threw it against a far wall. It shattered with a loud sobbing sound.
“Nice shot.”
“I thought he loved me.” She picked up another boat. “I’m such an idiot. I thought we’d be a family.” She hurled it through the air. This crash had a higher pitch.
Matteo wondered what that glass boat collection was worth. “It’s not your fault this guy was an asshole.”
“I want to hurt him.” She picked up another boat, tossing it up a few inches and catching it in her hand before winding up for the pitch. “I want to slap that weasel in the face for every time I cried myself to sleep thinking he was dead.” The third ship hit the far wall and burst into pieces.
Grace put her hands on her hips, her chest heaving. “Fucking shithead.”
Matteo’s eyes were wide.
She was magnificent, with her fancy white dress and her everyman vocabulary, not to mention one hell of a shot with a glass boat. She didn’t need the sympathy he’d been feeling for her. She needed a bull’s-eye and a gun.
He shook his head to clear it.
She was straightening her dress and pulling herself together. “This complicates everything. I was three months along before I realized I was pregnant. He’ll know the baby isn’t yours.”
“Not if you say otherwise. More than one man’s been surprised to learn the baby they thought was theirs was really fathered by someone else.”
She shook her head. “He’ll take one look in my eyes and know I’m lying.”
“There are other ways to convince him.”
“Like what? Kissing? Sorry, but I don’t think the scene on the top of the stairs would do the trick. I feel like such a fraud, like everyone must see right through this charade.”
Hadn’t he just been thinking the same thing? But he suddenly knew he could do better, his anger with the father of her child making him want to up the ante, to do anything that was necessary to help her. “Trust me, Grace. When I meet your lover, that man will have no doubt in his mind who Nico really belongs to.”
15
Logan slidan eight-by-ten photograph across the conference table to Cowboy. “Grace Vasile rented a cabin in the Swiss Alps from October of last year until September of this year. Her name was the only one on the lease, but our friends at Interpol provided us with a forwarding order that was put in by Mason Petrovich to have his mail sent there from his home in Russia.”
“Nice work, Logan,” said Jax. “Do we have a picture of Petrovich?”
“Not yet. I’m still trying to get one from the authorities.”
“Sounds like we found Red’s wife’s baby daddy,” said Cowboy. “Now we just need to go on Springer to get the DNA results.”
“Any word from Red?” asked Jax.
Cowboy nodded. “Oh, yeah. I heard from him, all right. I think he might be banging his new wife. I mean, not yet. Probably. Probably not yet, I mean. Or maybe I’m just reading too much into the situation.”
Jax cursed under his breath “At this rate, I’m going to have to hire new people every fucking six months.”
“That reminds me. I hired a woman from NIS named Ashley. She’s badass, don’t let the frilly name fool you. And I tried to hire a dude from SEAL Team Twelve named Austin, but he doesn’t want the job.”
“Why not?” asked Jax.
“Apparently he’s considering other offers.”
Logan stood up. “I’d like to take a look at the satellite footage from the pedestrian bridge explosion. Go back in time, see if I can find our suspect when he planted the bomb.”
“Do it,” said Jax.
