“Sweetheart—”
“It’s the food,” I interjected, knowing he wouldn’t let it go unless I confessed why I was so hurt when I’d spent the last hour laughing and smiling with him. “I just…”
Dropping the cash onto the table, he reached across the stained wood separating us and took my hand in his again, bringing me instant comfort. “You just what?”
Despite my efforts to keep them from falling, one tear fell, followed by a second. Soon my face would be marred with their tracks. “I feel guilty.”
“Why?”
“Because what if Little One is hungry?”
To my surprise, I’d been able to take more than a few small bites of food without feeling as though I’d vomit. Because of that, I was stuffed. And my full belly? It hurt, mightily so as I imagined Jade’s being empty.
It was a concern I didn’t share over Ashley because I’d seen Dominic, the bastardo, force her to eat—though I had no idea why—before he shoved her into District Attorney Ellington’s shiny new Mercedes earlier in the day.
But Little One…
I didn’t know if she and Faye had eaten.
Like Darcy, I was an evil perra.
How could I be so selfish?
Eyes filled with understanding, James held my gaze as he released my hand and pulled his phone from one of his pants pockets. “Give me Faye’s address,” he said, tapping away at the screen with his thumbs. “I’ll handle it.”
Unease unfurled in me. “I can’t—”
“You can,” he interrupted. “Little One will be mine as much as she is yours someday soon, beautiful girl. Faye too. So let me feed them.”
Feed them? “You’re sending them supper?”
His chin dipped in affirmation. “Pizza or Chinese. Your choice.”
More tears, these for a different reason altogether, slid down my face. “Pizza,” I replied, voice shaking. “With extra cheese and double pepperoni.”
Jade had once told me it was her favorite.
“Good girl. Now give me Faye’s address.”
Trusting him wholly, I didn’t hesitate. “Glen Hollow on Oak Street. Apartment seven.”
Clasped hands resting on my lap, I listened and watched as he ordered and paid for multiple pizzas, two to be exact, an order of breadsticks and a couple of Cokes to be delivered to Faye’s apartment within the hour.
Hearing and seeing him do that—I don’t have the words to describe how it made me feel. He’d gone above and beyond to care for me, that was true, but witnessing him help one of mi chicas more than once, and knowing how he planned to care for them both in the future wrecked me.
I owed him so much.
Not only for fighting to save me.
But for promising to love my bebés too.
“James,” I whispered, the waning hold I had on my emotions beginning to fray. “I’m so sorry.” Needing to fill his warm skin against mine, I reached across the table and laid my hand atop his free one. “I’m so sorry for all of it.”
“Sorry for what?” he asked, confused.
Coming unhinged and unable to hold it together any longer, the words spilled out of me, one after the other, in a garbled mess that was barely coherent. “I’m sorry for everything you were forced to endure as a child, and I’m even more sorry you weren’t taught to cope with any of it in a healthy way.”
My sobs drew attention from the tables nearby, but I cared little. As far as I was concerned, my guy and I were the only two people in the entire restaurant as cumbia music continued to play in the background, bleeding both strength and comfort into me.
“And I’m equally sorry that you blame yourself for your madre’s death even though it wasn’t your fault.” Just as Mamá and Alejandro’s fates had not been mine. It was a truth that after sixteen years, I was beginning to understand, even if the darkest parts of me didn’t want to accept such a verity. “But mostly, I’m sorry for being such a judgmental puta when I first learned of your past.”
“Baby—”
“I should’ve seen it,” I interrupted, shaking my head. “I should’ve seen how amazing your soul was despite it all, but I was too busy drowning in my own wrongdoings, along with the agony they’d inflicted to see that mi salvacion was standing before me, his fractured heart in need of my own.”
“Carmen—”
“Jade asked me if I loved you,” I said, cutting him off once more. “She asked me if I loved you and I told her it was too soon for such a thing, but I lied because even though this entire thing feels insano, I believe—no, I know—with every ounce of my heart that my soul recognized its mate the moment we met.”
Dios mío, it truly had.
I didn’t understand it one bit.
And I no longer cared to either.
I was tired, so tired, of fighting what I had known all along, which was that James Cole was mine in every sense of the word. And crazy or not, I wanted to keep him forever.
Just as he did me.
Eyes glazed over, James stood, knocking his wooden chair to the hardwood floor with a loud bang as he did. Uncaring of the noise he’d created or the multiple sets of eyes that were now trained on both him and me, he rounded the small table where I still sat and bent at the waist, slipping one arm beneath my knees and the other behind my back.
A second later, I was airborne…
And in his arms, the one place I felt safe.
“Say it, sweetheart,” he demanded, eyes pleading. “Say it so that I can hear—”
“I’m falling in love with you, James Cole,” I whispered as I buried my face in the crook of his corded neck. “And there’s no stopping it now.”
Each word I spoke was the truth.
There was no stopping it.
But even if there was, I wouldn’t have tried.
Twenty-Eight
Carmen
James took me to the beach.
Remembering the dream I’d confessed two days before, he’d taken me to the ocean, where I could both grieve and begin to heal from the trauma that had been inflicted on me, along with every
