Page 24 of The Saint

“Are you okay?” he whispered, his grip on my face tightening.

Nodding, I peeked up and caught a glimpse of those slate-blue eyes. “Why are you leaving?” I asked, unsuccessfully hiding the anger in my voice.

“I’m so sorry,” Rolly told me, pressing sweet kisses all over my face. “I’ll make it up to you. I swear I will. But I have to go. My friend needs me.”

His friend.

Natalia Medina.

“I’m sorry,” Rolly told me, kissing me again. “Please, stay here. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He backed away from me, those pretty blue eyes hidden behind the red that colored my vision. Then he was gone, out the door.

Leaving me behind.

“You left me.” Anger and accusation laced my voice and my body vibrated with it.

Rolly raised his eyebrow at me, and something about him morphed before my eyes. He crossed his legs. Folded his hands in his lap. And he no longer looked like the boy I gave my innocence to.

He was his father, Lorenzo Giordano.

He was his uncle, Paulo D’Angelo.

He was hard and sharp and unyielding. A man who knew he held all the power.

I buried my face in my hands. “I know!” I yelled before dropping them to my lap. “I know I left you too. But you have to understand, Rolly. You left me for her. Again. You ran out without telling me a thing, and you went to her side.”

“I asked you to stay,” Rolly said, and his voice held that same quality I’d heard so often from the powerful men in my life. One I’d never heard from him before. As if, in my absence, he’d turned into a hardened man.

But I wouldn’t sit back and let him take control. “For how long? The last time you left me for her, you didn’t come back for days. I wasn’t about to sit around your house, waiting for your parents to come home and find me bleeding in your bed.”

His face pinched, but that hardened look returned. “So instead, you decided to hop a plane to Tel Aviv?”

“No, I…” I turned my face away from him, slamming my eyes shut as if it could keep out the memories, all the hurt that had followed him leaving my side.

When I continued, my voice was a fraction of what it was before, and I felt smaller than a child. “I went home. And I found my mother…”

The words caught in my throat, and I swallowed hard, trying to clear the way. Rolly shifted in his seat, but I couldn’t bring myself to look at him.

“Have you ever noticed how Paz and Eytan look a bit different than Arik, Avi, and Yosef?” And me, I wanted to add, but those were words I couldn’t bring myself to say.

Rolly didn’t respond, but when I finally forced myself to look at him, he was watching me with a furrowed brow.

“They…” I paused. Started over. “When I got home, I found my mother with a man. One who looks just like Eytan and Paz. She…”

The betrayal I felt had never left me. Seeing her with him, in the middle of the living room in our family home.

“She had an affair.”

I nodded. “And my brothers are his.”

Rolly didn’t speak again, and I couldn’t bring myself to look his way. There was nothing he could say to ease that particular hurt, and there was still so much story to tell.

“I’d always wondered,” I murmured. “But how do you voice something like that to your family? So, I stayed quiet and ended up being blindsided by it the way no one ever should. I walked in on them having sex!

“I was so angry, Rolly. My mother was cheating on my father for years, and she acted like she’d done nothing wrong. I couldn’t take it. I packed a bag and boarded a plane. I ran away to my father’s house, and it only got worse.”

Rolly uncrossed his legs, and for a moment, I thought he would come to me. I thought he might offer me comfort the way he so often had when we were kids.