Deep (The Pagano Family Book 4) (30 page)

“Maybe. I’m so tired of being scared and sad. Numb hurts. That sounds stupid—”

“It doesn’t.” He gave her a tight smile, almost a grimace. “Making somebody numb can be a powerful way to cause pain. It’s counterintuitive but true.”

Nick had still never told her, straight out, what his job was—except for being the chief of operations at the shipping company. He’d just let her come to know that he killed and tortured people. No big revelation, no gnashing of teeth, no shock. It was something she simply knew about him, organically. Like knowing he had a long scar across the back of his left hip. Like knowing the dark hair he kept short had a lot of curl in it. Like knowing his green eyes turned dark and almost grey when he came. And when he was angry.

And she’d accepted it just as easily. Even with everything that had happened, even knowing that who he was had put her in the position to be hurt, even in her deepest suffering, she’d never been able to sustain a serious question about her commitment to him. She loved him. He wasn’t a ‘bad boy.’ He wasn’t a bad man. He was a good man who did dark things.

That didn’t even feel like a rationalization. It felt like the truth.

“I want myself back.”

“Then trust yourself. Find your sun.” He pulled her close, and she snuggled against his the hard muscle of his bare chest. It wasn’t so easy a matter as simply making a decision.

Or was it? Wasn’t that the whole point of that prayer, and of the feathers on her wrist? To remind her that how she saw her life, what she felt, what was important, that these things were her choice?

~oOo~

Two weeks later, Bev pulled her Prius into the parking lot of Pagano Brothers Shipping. Nick had obviously been waiting for her; he opened the building’s front door and was crossing the lot to her before she’d turned off the car.

He opened her door and gave her his hand, helping her out of the car. “What is it,
bella
? I’m worried.”

She’d called him and asked to see him right away. Still dazed, her mind a muddle, she wasn’t sure how to explain. “He…he…”

“Who? Beverly, what is it?” His hand was clamped hard around hers.

She swallowed and forced her brain to make a complete sentence and send it to her mouth. “He left me everything.”

Nick frowned. “What? Who? Mills?”

Hearing his last name like that sounded odd. “Chris, yes. He left me everything. His life insurance was in my name. The bookshop. Everything. He left it all to me.”

Still holding her hand, her car door still open, Nick stared at her. Then he blinked and closed her door. “Okay. Come in. We’ll sit. You’ll tell me everything.”

She’d never been to the warehouse before. Frankly, she was unimpressed. The front office and reception area was modern and tidy, absolutely normal for a successful but not massive business of its sort. Bev had plenty of office work on her résumé, and it looked perfectly familiar to her. Then Nick led her past a closed set of wide, walnut doors and down a hallway and through another set of double doors.

His office. This was more impressive, large and decorated in a sleek style similar to his apartment. He sat her down on a smooth, black leather sofa and then sat next to her.

“Tell me.”

His typically terse way of starting a conversation like this made her smile. How many times had he said those two words to her in their months together? He always said them as if there was no question that he should know. Even when he’d been so careful with her, in this, in his certainty of his way, he’d been the same. That bit of normalcy cleared her head.

“I got a call from Chris’s lawyer this morning. He wanted to see me. We made an appointment for Friday afternoon, but then I remembered that Carmen’s rehearsal dinner is Friday, so I called him back. He said he’d squeeze me in at lunch today.”

She could tell by the twitch in his jaw that he didn’t want those details. But there wasn’t much to the story. Chris had been buried last week. Bev and Skylar had handled the arrangements, because Chris’s parents and older brother were all dead.

His friends had been his only family, and he and Bev hadn’t been speaking. He had died truly alone.

Today, his lawyer was executing his will. Just as when her father died, there was no big reading like in the movies. There was a phone call. And then there were papers to sign.

She hadn’t signed them.

“I don’t know what to do. He must have made that will before our fight. The way we left it, he couldn’t have wanted me to have everything.”

Nick pulled her sun pendant out from under her top and laid it over the fabric. “Are you sure? It’s been months since that fight. He had time to change it if he wanted to.”

“But why wouldn’t he?”

“He loved you,
bella
.”

She sighed, her chest aching. “And I let him die alone.”

He grabbed her chin, pinching it firmly between his thumb and the side of his forefinger. “No. He made his choices. How long were you friends?”

“Eleven years. More.”

“Were you a good friend? Were you loyal and…honest? Were you there for him?”

“Not the way he wanted.”

“Beverly, stop. You’re looking for a reason to blame yourself. I don’t give a shit whether you take what he left you or not. You don’t need it. But don’t make the choice because you think you don’t deserve it. You were a good friend. He let you think he was happy with that. You did nothing wrong.” He smiled. “Shake it off, sunshine. You’re past all that.”

She was. Somehow, Chris’s death had helped her. It was an awful way to think about it, but it was true. It had been the proverbial straw, but instead of breaking her back, it had broken the grip of dark fear that had kept her from feeling everything she needed to feel so that she could surmount her pain and get back to herself. All of herself.

Nick released her chin and pulled her under his arm, resting back on the sofa. “How much is it?”

“His life insurance is a hundred grand. I don’t know how much the other stuff is worth. The lawyer had a bunch of papers with valuation estimates and stuff, but I was too spun to think about it. I have them in the car. But it’s the store—there’s some kind of mortgage on it. The shop inventory and the van. And his house—that was his family vacation place, one of the little cottages in Quiet Summers Estates. It’s not much, but that was paid for when he inherited it.”

He nodded, and Bev could tell, looking up from his shoulder, that he was thinking. As he thought, his fingers traced the bare skin of her arm, making a slow, sensual circle. She sighed deeply, beginning to think of other things than what Chris had left her or why.

“Before you go, I’ll have Fred take a look at the valuations and any other papers the lawyer gave you. He’ll be able to tell you what’s yours, free and clear. And then you’ll decide what you want to do. It’s up to you,
bella
. Like I said, you don’t need any of it.”

“I’m still not working.” That was something she hadn’t yet been able to motivate herself to do. She knew for sure she never wanted to be a waitress again, and she hadn’t been able to figure out what else to do. She was making fifty bucks a week teaching her yoga class for the condo association. She owned the condo free and clear, but otherwise, she was living on Nick’s dime—which he loved, and with which she was becoming too comfortable.

As if to prove her point and to reiterate his, he said, “You don’t have to work. You know that.”

“I do need to work. I’m just having trouble getting ready. Maybe a job I wouldn’t have to interview for would be a good thing. Something I’m in charge of.”

“Wait—are you thinking about running the bookshop?”

Until he said it out loud, she hadn’t fully comprehended that yes, she was thinking exactly that. Now that she saw it, she liked it. It could be a way to remember Chris as she’d known him. The way their friendship had been through her eyes. She thought of the last day they’d really been close, sitting behind the sales desk, eating peach pie. That afternoon had ended badly for them, but they’d started it as friends.

“Would that be silly?”

“Have you ever managed a business?”

No, she had not. She’d been a waitress. A sales clerk. A receptionist. All of them, many times over. She’d never managed anything. “No.”

He was quiet, thinking again, and she finally ended the silence with a huff. “It’s silly. I can’t do it.”

“Stop that. If that’s what you want, we’ll hire somebody to help you. Somebody who knows the business.”

She liked that idea. “Okay. Yeah. But not…you know…” She lost her nerve before the next word came out. It had been stupid to start the sentence at all.

His eyes darkened, and she knew that he could see where she’d been headed. He asked anyway. “Not what?”

“Never mind.”

“One and only time for this conversation, Beverly. Say it.”

“Not a…wiseguy.”

He laughed, but there was a bite at its end. “How about a bentnose? A button? A goodfella? You watch too much television,
bella
.”

“You don’t use those words?”

“They’re used about us. We call ourselves Paganos. To your point, we don’t mix business and family. Now that I’ve told you that, you remember it, and you trust it. If you decide to keep the bookshop, my business won’t be part of it.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t ask questions about my business again.”

She didn’t like his tone. Often she found his simple imperatives endearing, and the confident power behind them hot. But this was a different kind of order, and there was a threat behind it. That pissed her off. A whole lot. “What happened at the diner, what those men did to me—that was your
business
mixing in my life. I spent a month with a
wiseguy
shadowing my every move, sitting in my apartment, eating my food, because your
business
was in my life. And still I got raped and butchered by men in your
business
. So don’t pull attitude because I don’t want it to happen again.”

Nick’s face had gone completely slack. She had never seen such an expression of dumb shock on him before.

He didn’t seem prepared to say anything. She really was angry, so angry her heart was pulsing in her ears. It actually felt kind of good. It was exhilarating, such a pure surge of powerful emotion.

“I’ll go get the papers from my car.” She stood, and Nick’s hand went around her arm and yanked her back down to the sofa.

“No.”

“What?”

“You don’t drop that and walk away.”

“Drop what? Did I say something you didn’t know?”

“I didn’t know you blamed me. You told me you didn’t.”

“I don’t. But then you make a big show of laying down the law about me asking about your business, when all I want is for your business to stay out of my life. I don’t want to know about your business. I don’t want any part of it. I love you. I love all of you, the bad and the good. I
need
all of you. I don’t care what you do, or what you’ve done. It makes you who you are, and I love you. I’m glad of what you did, whatever it was, to the men who came to the diner. But whatever happens in your work that isn’t moving teddy bears out of containers on the harbor and into toy stores in Boise, I don’t want to know. That’s why I said what I said. Don’t ask, don’t tell.” She took a breath, still feeling strangely excited. Then, she had a new thought and narrowed her eyes. “Where business is concerned. I won’t be okay with a ‘goo-mar-dah’ or whatever you call that—a mistress. I’ll ask about that shit.”