Page 53 of When Sinners Dare

I break free and swim around him to the side of the pool. “Come on. Cut the crap.” I wait for him to respond, but he doesn’t. Fine. “You’ve seen me. All of me and my business. You came when you could have ignored my invitation. You don’t get to say we’re not seeing each other, then do all of this and pretend like you’re not involved. You are. We,” I signal with my hand between us, “are involved. No more bullshit. No more hiding.”

“I’m not hiding.”

“Maybe not, but you made it pretty fucking clear you didn’t want trouble. Yet here you are. So, you better decide pretty fucking fast because I deserve more.”

I splash my hand through the water, dowsing him. He doesn’t answer, though. He just looks at me like he’s weighing the decision in his mind. “There’s a time limit on this, Kai. You know that I come with the Cortez name. That’s my blood. It won’t change. You just need to make the right call.”

“The right call?”

“Well, yeah. I’m not going to advocate for you to walk out on me twice.” I walk out of the pool and take a seat on one of the Adirondacks positioned in the sun.

“I won’t get drawn back in, Mariana. I can’t.”

“And what makes you think you will?” I answer behind closed eyes, blocking out the sun.

“Last night. What you do. It’s hardly clean. Your brothers don’t strike me as the stay away from trouble kind.”

I hear the swoosh of water from the pool as he gets out, but I force my eyes to stay closed. This is on him this time. “Just as well I’m not planning on pimping you out to my brothers then.”

“Why is it so hard to say no to you?” It sounds like he’s complaining, but I take it as a compliment. “There’s too much at risk if we’re not all in. So, no bullshit. The truth. Anything else I should know about?”

“This isn’t a marriage proposal, Kai,” I deflect as I run through if I should tell him why I was in the bar, let alone the rest of the business. I should. If I expect him to be honest with me, the least I should do is be honest with him. And fighting with my mother and causing her death… that is something he might want to know about.

“Maybe not, Mariana. But if things go badly, it could mean a death sentence for me.”

My eyes open, and I find him standing beside me. He's right and far from stupid, and my gut is telling me he wouldn’t hurt me. He has that possessive vibe down, and if he’s prepared to nearly kill a man for a woman he’s not involved with, I can see him taking protection seriously. But, if things do go sideways, how would my brothers treat him? It’s not just my mother who's kept men away from the house.

“I think it’s time for that drink.”

“Drink? A little early, isn’t it?”

I pull up and sigh. “Fine. I’ll drink. You can listen. How much time do you have?” I stand and wrap the robe around me, now dry from the time in the sun.

“Not much. I’m due at the shop at three.”

“Wait here.” I head inside. There’s a bottle of unopened Don Juliotequila in the drinks cabinet, and I grab it and two glasses and take them back with me.

Placing the glasses on the table with the bottle, I set to pouring just one glass and down the double quickly. “You wanted to know why I was in the bar?”

He looks at me – I can feel his eyes in the back of my head as I set to pouring myself another drink, but I avoid the stare. I need a certain amount of distance to admit and tell him what I did without the risk of seeing judgement there.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Remember what I said to you at the hotel? About having a complicated relationship with my mother?”

“Yeah.”

“That wasn’t the full truth.” I look out over the pool. “The last man I brought home to meet the family she had killed.”

“What?” He pulls my arm around so I’m facing him.

A wave of sorrow washes over me. “Yeah.” I start. “He wasn’t the right match. Or rather, there was no benefit for the family by my dating him. She arranged Abel’s marriage to Lexi to better our position. That’s the kind of woman she was.”

“Right. Okay.” I can hear the concern in his voice.

“Well,” I clear my throat. “After I found out she had Antony killed, we got into a huge fight.” I pace away, back to the table for another shot. “She was provoking me. She hit me, which wasn’t uncommon, but this time I snapped. I pushed her. She fell. Her head hit the countertop before hitting the ground.”

As I describe what happened, the images stutter behind my eyes, playing out each frame as if in slow motion on a film, but it keeps the tears from falling. The gulf of pain and emotion seems to grow in the pit of my stomach as the memory surfaces again, but I lock it back away and focus on the silence from Kai. It only makes it harder to wrangle the weight of my guilt. Dante told me it was an accident. Abel did the same. It was. But deep down… I wonder if it was. “I got scared, and so I ran. And wound up at the bar.”

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