“Stressful, hunh?” I asked. “So stressful you suddenly lose your ability to be a decent human being and when your patience snaps because your wife is asking you simple questions like,

‘Honey, what’s stressing you out?’ you take your hands to her. And when she says no to sex, you lose your mind and rape her. It must have been tough for you dealing with all that stress as you climbed to the highest heights of the criminal underworld, Damian. I feel bad for you that you didn’t have a different woman in your life who’d eat your shit. Sorry I was such a crap wife.”

“You weren’t a crap wife,” he whispered.

“I know,” I bit out. “I was being sarcastic, you moron.”

“I made some bad decisions and let my emotions get the better of me, Tess, I’ll admit that,” Damian said.

“Big of you,” I retorted. “Though bad decisions and emotions getting the better of you don’t entirely destroy lives, Damian, something you’ve been doing to people you care about and people you don’t even f**king know for over a decade now.”

“I –” he started, his jaw clenched and he looked away, tearing both his hands through his hair and I noticed belatedly he looked good. Like his father, age barely touched him. And like the ass**le he was, impending incarceration didn’t faze him. Fit frame at least three inches shorter than Brock and probably more than thirty pounds lighter. Light brown hair. Dark brown eyes. A sharp crease in his well-tailored dark blue trousers. A light blue shirt that I knew had been made specifically for him because he always spent a whack on his clothes.

Polished, dark brown, Italian leather shoes.

Even now, he had it. Even now, even as detached as I was, I sensed his magnetism. Decent looks, great clothes he wore well, undercurrent of charisma never switching off.

Toxic charisma.

Poison.

He dropped his hands and leveled his eyes on mine.

Then he stated, “If you gave me a moment to explain at lunch before you took off, I got in touch with you because I was trying to make it up to you.”

Make it up to me?

Maybe he was high.

He kept talking.

“I asked you to lunch to explain…” his eyes moved to Brock then back to me and he carried on, “about the money. To go over the bank documents with you. I wanted you to have…” again he looked to Brock then back to me, “if something happened to me, I wanted you covered.”

“You wanted me covered?” I asked, my voice filled with derision mixed with shock.

“Yes,” he clipped.

“Why?” I queried.

“Because you were my wife, because I still love you, because I f**ked up and because I wanted to make it up to you.”

“You thought…” I whispered but stopped, momentarily unable to go on then I went on.

“You thought that you could make it up to me by infiltrating my life and saddling me with your ill-gotten gains and when I didn’t hang around long enough to say yes to this super generous offer, you forged my name on the documents anyway so you could be certain to continue infiltrating my life at the same time f**king it up when the best thing you could do, bar building a time machine so that you could go back and make sure you never met me, would be to leave me… the f**k… alone?”

He pressed his lips together and said not a word.

I turned to his father.

It killed me to see this was killing him.

But I could not help that. I couldn’t. I had enough on my plate.

So I wasn’t even going to try.

“I love you,” I said softly. “I always will. I think of you often, so often…” I sucked in breath and decided to leave that because I couldn’t go there. “Your son took a lot from me, all of it hurt, so much you wouldn’t believe me even if I described the pain. And losing you was part of that pain.”

Tears filled his eyes; I watched them as I felt the same happen in mine.

“Honey,” he whispered, taking his hand from the wall and turning away from his son to face me.

“I love you and miss you but I’m not coming back, never, no matter what happens to Damian. I can’t have anything that reminds me of him in my life. It’s toxic. I just released it and I can’t take it back. I can’t have it poisoning me anymore. Not anymore. He took eighteen years of my life. He can’t have any more.”

I watched him swallow.

“This man holding me is the man of my dreams, Don,” I told him quietly. “Tonight, someone shot at him. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to follow that trail to Damian. He has family. He has children. And he has me. Talk to your son. Make him stay out of my life and leave me and everyone I love alone. Please. Please do that for me.”

He sniffed, his eyes still wet and getting wetter then he nodded.

I looked back at Damian and stated in a firm voice that still shook, “I never want to see you again. If you can, for once, listen to what I say rather than what you want to hear then hear this. I never, never want to see you again. Never. No matter what. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your guilt. You cannot make up to me what you tore from me or the years I lost because your poison infected me. Do not call me. Do not come to my house. Do not f**k with my life. Do not f**k with people I care about. Go away and stay away.”

“Tess,” Damian whispered and it was there, right in his eyes, pain and regret.

Pain and f**king regret.

The motherfucking ass**le.

“Go away and stay away,” I whispered back.

Then without looking at Don again, I moved my body toward the door. Brock felt my movement and let me go. But he grabbed my hand, led me out, through the yard and to the passenger side of his truck that was parked behind my car.

He bleeped the locks and opened the passenger door before I noticed what he was about.

I locked my body and looked up at him, saying softly, “I’m okay to drive.”

He shook his head, gently pushing me toward the seat, saying, “Get in, baby.”

“I don’t want to leave my car here,” I told him.

“Get in, don’t worry about it. I’ll deal with it.”

“Brock –”

He closed in on me and I had to tip my head way back, he was that close.

“Up into the truck, Tess,” he said softly.

I bit my lip, nodded, he moved back and I climbed up.