Page 120 of The Bad Wedding Date

Something about Dad’s tone made my thoughts shift to the other men at the wedding, the one’s he chose to surround himself with in his everyday life, especially the man who’d hurt so many women along the way, including Fraser’s mother.

“Speaking of good men, I was wondering about someone else who was there at the wedding that day,” I said. “Matteo Vega came to talk to me. He seemed… different.”

“Different, how?”

“Would you think badly of me if I said he came across a little creepy?”

Dad’s silence may as well have been a trumpet going off down the receiver. It was the kind of silence a person took to consider their next words, and people only ever did that when they were walking on eggshells around a topic that could cause a whole lot of mess for everyone.

“Is he a good person, Dad?”

“Did he do something to you?”

“No. Like what?”

“I… never mind.”

“No way. You don’t get to shut that conversation down.”

“He’s not someone I feel I can discuss, Charlotte.”

“Why not?”

He inhaled sharply, blowing the exhale into the receiver in one long breath. “There are some people we keep in our lives because we have to, not because we want to. Matteo is a businessman, and an astute one at that. He holds a lot of power in this city.”

“Even though he hasn’t lived here for years?”

“Darling, we live in an age where a man can wield a proverbial knife from the other side of the world, and his victim will still feel the pain of that weapon in the most destructive of places. Location has nothing to do with power anymore. Money is where the power lies, and that can be sent from one end of the earth to the other in less than a second. When it comes to money, that man has more than most. Unfortunately, those people are able to make their own rules for their own empires.”

“That doesn’t sound like a good man to me.”

He sighed softly. “It doesn’t, does it?”

“If he’s so bad, why has he been a part of our lives for so long? Why was he at Emmie’s wedding, of all things?”

“The mayor is a good friend of his. Matteo is Lucas’s godfather.”

“I wouldn’t care if he was my bloody brother, mother, or father. He wouldn’t be at my child’s wedding if I doubted him as a person, no matter what.”

“And that, my darling, is why I’ve never worried about you as much as I worry about that sister of yours. You have morals. You have integrity.”

“I have no desire for money or power, you mean.”

“Yes. The most impressive trait of all.”

40

Fraser

My knuckles throbbed as I stretched out my fingers before I curled them back into a fist.

It hadn’t taken long for the first guy to break, which might have had something to do with the fact that I’d never held so much power behind my punches before. I guess that’s what happened when you were fuelled by the need to protect someone you cared for.

The dark-haired man with the tanned skin had his chin to his chest, his eyes now closed, blood dripping from both corners of his mouth. His hands were tied behind his back and around the chair, with Ray standing behind him, looking a little too bored by the whole thing.

That didn’t surprise me.

Ray lived for the kill, not the build-up. He’d been hoping the two men in front of us would have held out a little longer so he could no doubt take over and inflict more serious injuries to extract the information he needed.

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