Resistance

CHAPTER SIX

The media had been overly generous when they labeled Agnes Belinski “plain,” Nate decided the moment he set eyes on the girl his father meant to shackle him to for the rest of his life. Her body was pear-shaped, and the clingy blouse and flowing skirt she wore made that shape more obvious, rather than camouflaging it as she probably hoped. Puffy cheeks and a receding chin made her face look round as a soccer ball, and her thin, fine brown hair was cut in an unflattering bob. Even if he liked girls, he wouldn’t want her in his bed.

Nate made little effort to hide his distaste when his father introduced him to Chairman Belinski and his homely daughter. He made his handshake as brief and limp as possible, and after looking Agnes up and down once, refused to meet her eyes. He wondered idly why Mrs. Belinski hadn’t come to dinner—he knew she had come to Paxco with her husband and daughter—but he wasn’t interested enough to bother asking.

“Chairman Belinski and I have some important matters to discuss,” Nate’s father said. “We’ll leave you young people to get to know each other, then we’ll rejoin you when dinner is served.”

Though he wasn’t looking straight at her, Nate could see the look of near-panic Agnes shot her father; he could also see the reassuring smile Chairman Belinski gave her.

Nate grimaced. So not only was Agnes homely, but she didn’t have the grace and self-assurance to fulfill her social obligations without her daddy holding her hand. She was probably the kind of girl who burst into tears if anyone said anything even remotely unkind to her.

In short, she was nothing like Nadia, who would have been as close to the perfect wife as it was possible to get.

The two Chairmen left the room, both looking pompous and self-satisfied—Nate’s father because he knew just how poorly Agnes stacked up against Nadia, and Chairman Belinski because his daughter would be marrying well above her station. Synchrony was one of the smaller states, and not a particularly wealthy one. They produced great tech, but they kept too much of it to themselves to realize anything close to their earnings potential. Their elite and exceptionally well-equipped military was envied worldwide, but in the hierarchy of states, rich outranked well-defended by a mile. Paxco could have gotten a bigger financial boost by creating an alliance with a much wealthier state, and Nate was convinced his father had picked Synchrony because he knew just how Nate would feel about Agnes.

Nate had never thought of himself as a mean or cruel person. He was careless of people’s feelings sometimes, but it was rarely out of malice. But the anger and resentment burning inside him were almost too much to bear, and he just couldn’t bring himself to make friendly with Agnes in even the most superficial way. She was the enemy, and he would give her exactly the kind of consideration an enemy deserved. When their fathers left the room, Nate stood rooted to the floor in stony silence, daring Agnes to break it.

Agnes licked her lips nervously. A couple of times, it looked like she was going to say something, but she either thought better of it or just plain didn’t have the nerve. Nadia would have handed Nate his ass on a silver platter if he’d treated her like this, but Agnes just stood there. He might have hoped that if he was being forced to marry a homely stranger, she might at least have a decent personality to make up for her shortcomings, but it seemed she had the personality of a frightened mouse. Maybe Nate would get lucky and she’d start begging her father to cancel the engagement plans the moment Nate was out of her sight.

Giving Agnes one more disdainful look, Nate walked past her and plopped himself down in an armchair near the fireplace. If there had been a fire he could stare broodingly into, he would have done it. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Agnes still standing in the same spot, shifting from foot to foot. If she couldn’t even make a show of standing up for herself with him, how the hell was she going to handle people like the Terrible Trio, who so loved to publicly embarrass other girls to make themselves feel more important? This was the girl his father wanted to be Chairman Spouse of Paxco someday?

The awkward silence eventually became so uncomfortable that Nate was forced to break it himself. If he were being extremely generous, he might think that had been Agnes’s plan all along and she’d actually won a battle of wills against him. But he was hardly in the mood to be generous to anyone, much less the girl his father would force him to marry.

“What kind of a name is Agnes, anyway?” he asked out of nowhere. Agnes jumped at the sound of his voice, her eyes going wide. No, she definitely had not been engaged in a battle of wills. She’d just been incapable of speech. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone named Agnes who wasn’t at least eighty years old.”

Splotchy color rose in Agnes’s chipmunk cheeks, and she looked at the floor instead of at him when she answered. “I was named after my grandmother.” Her voice was high and thin, almost like a little girl’s. It was a voice Nate knew would grate on his nerves in no time flat. Not that everything about Agnes didn’t grate on his nerves already. “She was the first Chairman of Synchrony.”

The first Agnes Belinski must have had an impressive backbone to have been Chairman of a corporate state, even a small one like Synchrony. Too bad her namesake seemed to have inherited none of it.

No, not too bad, Nate reminded himself. If Agnes were a girl like Nadia, the kind of girl who always stubbornly fought back, he’d have no hope of frightening her out of the marriage. After all, the status and money and power she would get out of being Chairman Spouse of Paxco were well worth fighting for. Nate knew any number of Paxco girls who would stab their grandmother in the back if that meant they got to marry him, and it wasn’t because they were so all-fired fond of him. Better for him that Agnes be a wimp.

Walking gingerly as if to keep her shoes from clacking against the hardwood floor, Agnes proved herself capable of movement and took a seat on the sofa. She sat straight and primly, with her knees locked together and her hands folded in her lap. Nate thought she was going to give him more details about her grandmother, to try to fill the silence with meaningless chatter, but she didn’t. He imagined Nadia, sitting alone at the retreat, waiting patiently for visitors who would never come. She wouldn’t know why, and she’d be both hurt and angry.

“You’re going to ruin an innocent girl’s life,” he blurted, glaring at Agnes. She just blinked at him stupidly, as if she had no idea what he could possibly be talking about. But unless she’d been living in a cave, she had to know Nate had already been informally engaged before she’d entered his life. If she hadn’t known it by the time she first set foot in Paxco, then someone had certainly told her by now. He kept glaring at her until she bowed her head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, proving she did know.

Nate waited for more, but obviously Agnes wasn’t much of a talker. “You’re sorry? That’s all you have to say for yourself?” He looked for some hint of spirit and defiance in her, but there was none. If he hadn’t despised her so much, he might have felt sorry for her.

“When your father’s a Chairman, you don’t get to pick whom you marry,” she said. It was a statement of fact, not a complaint. If her lack of choices bothered her, she certainly wasn’t letting it show.

“Tell your father you won’t do it.”

She looked shocked by the very suggestion, as if he’d told her to fly to the moon. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “Solidifying the bond between Paxco and Synchrony will be advantageous to both our states, and—”

“Because if you don’t fight it, you’ll be stuck with me,” Nate said as ominously as he could. “You won’t like that.”

He thought he detected a hint of unease in Agnes’s eyes, but she shrugged as if it hardly mattered to her. “You’re the Chairman Heir of Paxco. Surely you know that what you and I would like is irrelevant. I didn’t much like it when it looked likely I’d marry a fifty-two-year-old marketing director with two children older than I am, but the match made political sense and I didn’t complain about it. I know my duty.”

Nate sneered at her. He didn’t care if she married a ninety-year-old geezer with no teeth or a nine-year-old boy who was years away from shaving. Anyone but him.

“Of course you don’t want to fight it,” he said. “It’s a sweet deal for you, isn’t it? You’ll go from being a little nobody from a little nothing state to the Chairman Spouse of the richest, most powerful state there is. You don’t give a shit how many lives you have to ruin to get what you want.”

Nate had the satisfaction of seeing Agnes flinch at his language. He had the brief thought that if Nadia could see him now, she’d tear into him for being such a bastard to a girl he didn’t even know. He certainly wasn’t playing his preferred public role of the charming rake. But if being a bastard was what it took to get rid of Agnes and save Nadia’s reputation, then he had zero qualms about it.

“I’m doing what’s best for my family and my state,” Agnes said, with all the spirit and fight of a lump of clay. “I’m sorry if it means someone will get hurt, but—”

“What if I tell you I can make your life far more miserable than your fifty-two-year-old marketing director would?” He fixed her with the coldest look he could manage, letting every bit of his fury show in his eyes.

She quickly averted her eyes, but instead of fleeing in terror she merely shrugged again. “People are mean to me all the time.” She made a sweeping head-to-toe gesture. “Look at me and ask yourself how much joy I’m expecting from a marriage.”

For the first time, Nate felt the tiniest twinge of genuine sympathy. He’d seen the way other Executive girls treated Nadia, who was beautiful and poised and strong. They were jealous of her status, eager to stab her in the back whenever they had a chance. Even if Agnes wasn’t prime marriage material outside of Synchrony, she was the daughter of the Chairman, in the top echelon of the Synchrony elite. She’d have been the object of the same kind of jealousy, and so far he’d seen no hint that she had the tools or the confidence with which to defend herself.

But just because Nate felt a little sorry for her didn’t mean he had the least interest in marrying her, even if the marriage arrangement wouldn’t have destroyed Nadia. She was a sacrificial lamb, being offered up for the slaughter by her power-hungry father. And the worst part about it was that she didn’t even seem to mind.

Threatening Agnes with the prospect of a miserable marriage wasn’t going to work, if that was what she’d expected all along. Nate was going to have to find some other way to sabotage the arrangement—preferably in such a way that his father wouldn’t see his hand in it—before Agnes turned eighteen and signed the papers to make it legally binding.

If only he had the faintest idea how he was going to pull it off …

Nadia had pulled out the phone Dante had snuck to her three times while she waited in her room for midnight to come. The lack of visitors had filled her with a sense of foreboding, and the temptation to call Nate and ask him why he hadn’t come was almost overwhelming. But there was always the remote chance that someone might hear her talking, that the staff would find out she was in possession of a contraband phone and take it away from her. It was a chance she wasn’t willing to take, and so each time the temptation hit, she managed to fight it off.

Nadia bundled up in a sweater before slipping outside for her midnight walk. Her nerves were even more fraught this time, and she found herself jumping at every sound, startled by every shadow.

What if Dante didn’t show up? No one else she’d been expecting had come for her today. What if everyone she knew had now abandoned her, leaving her to rot here in this gilded prison?

Nadia battled against the worries as she made her way through the lawns and flowerbeds toward the wall of trees. She was probably making something out of nothing. There was probably a benign explanation for why she hadn’t received any visitors today, and she was going to drive herself insane if she didn’t stop speculating. She should ignore the squirmy, uncomfortable feeling inside her that told her something was horribly wrong.

Her attempts to calm herself met with little success, and by the time she emerged from the trees into the clearing before the fence, her pulse was racing and her hands were clammy. If Dante didn’t show up, she didn’t think she could possibly resist making a phone call. There was no one to hear her out in the woods, and she needed that sense of connection as much as she needed to breathe.

“Dante?” she called out softly, already half-convinced that he wouldn’t be there. She peered into the trees beyond the fence, crossing her fingers and holding her breath. There was no sign of movement, no man-shaped shadows hidden among the tree trunks. “Dante?” she called again, a little louder, though her voice was shaky with nerves. He had promised to be here, and even if unforeseen circumstances had somehow prevented her family and Nate from visiting her, surely those circumstances wouldn’t affect Dante.

“I’m here,” Dante’s voice answered, and Nadia feared for a moment she was going to burst into tears of relief. She now saw the man-shaped shadow she’d been looking for—inside the fence.

“How did you get in here?” she asked, then wanted to slap herself for the silly question. It wasn’t like the fence was electrified or topped with barbed wire or anything. The spiky fleurs-de-lis at the top looked intimidating, but they wouldn’t stop a determined intruder.

“I climbed the fence,” he answered simply, as if her question hadn’t made her sound like an idiot. “It’s more for show than to actually keep people out. People stay away because they don’t want to be sent to prison for trespassing on an Executive retreat, not because they can’t get in.”

Nadia bit her lip as Dante came closer, close enough that the moonlight illuminated his face. “You should go back to the other side,” she said, looking nervously up and down the strip of grass. “If someone saw you…” The wheels of Paxco justice had never turned fairly, and a low-level Employee like Dante, caught trespassing on an Executive retreat with an underage Executive girl, would be ground into dust.

Dante dismissed the threat with a careless wave of his hand. “I’m a spy for Paxco security, remember? If I get caught, I can talk my way out of it.”

Nadia wasn’t as confident of his safety, and standing out on the grass where anyone could spot them—if anyone actually wandered around this part of the grounds at this time of night—struck her as tempting fate. She glanced over her shoulder at the trees behind her.

“Come on,” she said, putting a hand on Dante’s shoulder to urge him forward. “Let’s at least get you into some cover.” Touching him like that was an overly familiar gesture from an Executive to a servant, but it felt right and comfortable, and Dante seemed to have no objection.

Together, they entered the protection of the trees. Nadia led Dante to a fallen tree she had noticed on her way to the fence. It would give them something to sit on, and the gap in the canopy allowed moonlight to filter through. She wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him, or what they were going to talk about. Whining about her lack of visitors seemed petty, and Dante was unlikely to know what any of them had been thinking when they’d failed to show up. In fact, she wasn’t sure what she was hoping to get out of this encounter, except that she’d longed for contact when she felt abandoned.

As they sat together on the fallen tree, Nadia felt suddenly and surprisingly awkward. None of her highly polished Executive social skills had prepared her for a situation like this, for having a clandestine conversation with someone who was of such a different social class that it was almost as if they were from different worlds. He probably thought living in a retreat where you had no responsibilities and were waited on hand and foot was the pinnacle of luxury and Executive excess. No doubt he thought it was whiny and childish of her to complain about a life so many others would envy.

But when she looked Dante full in the face, with moonlight chasing away the shadows that had hidden his expression, she realized with a sinking feeling that he wasn’t here for social reasons of any kind.

“What’s happened?” she asked, dreading the answer. If something bad had happened to one of her family members, that would explain why they hadn’t shown up for visiting hours. Though it wouldn’t explain why Nate hadn’t come. Unless something had happened to Nate again.

Dante didn’t answer immediately, and the look on his face was far from comforting.

“Dante, please! Tell me what’s wrong. You’re scaring me.”

He cleared his throat nervously. “I’m not supposed to know about this, and I’m not sure I should be the one to tell you.”

Nadia would have reached out and shaken him if she had any reason to suspect that would make him cough up the news sooner.

“Is someone hurt?” she asked, her voice going rough and tight. She remembered all too clearly the threats Dirk Mosely had made against Gerri’s children, and she couldn’t help worrying that he’d somehow reached out from beyond the grave to get his revenge.

“No, no. Nothing like that,” Dante hastened to assure her, and Nadia let out a breath of relief. As long as Nate and her family weren’t hurt, she could survive anything else he had to tell her.

“Then what?”

“I, um, overheard your parents arguing.”

Even under the circumstances, Nadia couldn’t help a small smile. “I’m sure it was entirely accidental on your part.” She doubted a professional spy and double agent would be able to resist investigating the sounds of an argument in the household where he was employed.

Dante ducked his head and looked uncomfortable, but he didn’t deny her assumption. “It’s not public knowledge yet, but apparently the Chairman notified your family in advance as some kind of supposed courtesy.”

“Notified them of what?” Nadia asked, losing patience with the slow buildup. “Just spit it out already!”

“All right,” he agreed softly. He raised his head and met her eyes, and the sympathy in his scared her even more. “Sometime next week—I didn’t catch exactly when—the Chairman is going to announce the official engagement between Nate and Agnes Belinski.”

The floor dropped out from beneath Nadia’s world. She’d been unofficially engaged to Nate for literally as long as she could remember. Her entire life, she had striven to be the perfect Executive, her behavior always exemplary, her every decision colored by the knowledge that a misstep could ruin her and her family. Her family’s entire future had rested on her shoulders, and she’d lived in constant fear of letting them down. She’d done everything she possibly could to protect her reputation—a sometimes difficult task with someone like Nate in her life—and to fulfill her every duty.

Until the original Nate Hayes had been murdered, and Nadia had allowed herself to become embroiled in the quest to clear Bishop’s name. She had defied Dirk Mosely, and defied the Chairman himself. And now she was paying the price.

Tears burned in her eyes, and there was a tremor in her hands she tried to hide by tucking them under her arms and hugging herself as if she were cold.

It came as no surprise that the Chairman was a vindictive son of a bitch, and she probably should have foreseen this the moment she’d made an enemy of him. Maybe she should have extended her blackmail to protecting the marriage agreement. Maybe she still could, although locked up here in the retreat, it wasn’t like she had access to the Chairman to threaten him, or to the recordings to release them. She’d need Gerri’s help for that. And Gerri hadn’t shown up.

“They were arguing about sending me away for good, weren’t they?” she asked, holding herself together through sheer force of will. No wonder no one had come to visit her today. She had destroyed the ambitions of her entire family. Her father would never be promoted to the board of directors, and the stink of scandal would cling to the Lake family name for years to come. Her mother would host no more dinners or parties in the foreseeable future, nor would she be invited to social events other Executives hosted. The same was true of Gerri. Even their closest friends would shun them, afraid the taint of scandal would rub off on them. And, fair or not, the blame would rest squarely on Nadia’s shoulders.

Dante nodded. “Your father is against it. Adamantly.”

Nadia stifled a half-laugh, half-sob. “Like that’ll do me any good.”

Dante hadn’t been with their household long, but he surely already knew that Esmeralda always got her way. If she thought sending Nadia away to some upstate retreat where she would never be seen again was necessary to salvage the shreds of the Lake family’s reputation, then that was where Nadia would end up. Regardless of what her father thought about it.

“Maybe it will,” Dante said, reaching out and squeezing her hand. “He fought for you. I’ve never heard him get so worked up about anything before. I’ve never heard your mother back down from anyone before either, but she did this afternoon.”

But they both knew that her father had only won the first battle of the war. There would be more to come, and long experience led Nadia to believe she and her father would end up on the losing side. Her life as she knew it was now over.

A tear trickled down her cheek. Ordinarily, she would have tried to hide any sign of weakness, especially in the presence of a social inferior, but she supposed there was no reason to keep up appearances right now. Thinking about what her future might hold made her want to curl up in a hole somewhere and die. Dante squeezed her hand a little tighter, but he didn’t have any more comforting words to offer.

“What happened when you were arrested, Nadia?” Dante asked. “There’s no way Chairman Hayes thought Agnes Belinski was a better match for Nate than you. The change in plans has spite written all over it. What I don’t get is, if he hates you so much, why did he let you out of Riker’s?”

Nadia shook her head at him even as tears continued to fall and she clung to his hand. “You never take off your spy hat, do you?”

It was hard to tell in the darkness, but she thought he might have blushed. “Sorry,” he mumbled, scuffing at the ground with one foot. “I can’t help noticing this stuff. And wondering about it.”

For a moment, Nadia was sorely tempted to tell Dante everything, to tell him about Thea, about her experiments, about Mosely’s mission to procure test subjects from among the lowest, most powerless citizens of Paxco. She wanted to thrust a dagger through the Chairman’s heart and laugh while he bled.

But it wouldn’t be the Chairman who bled if word of his crimes got out. Dante’s resistance movement claimed to want to change the government slowly and peaceably—or at least that was what Dante thought the eventual goal was—but despite the Chairman’s ruthless quelling of protests, there were plenty of malcontents out there who would gladly turn to violence if given sufficient cause. Triggering a rash of riots that could potentially escalate into full-out civil war was not the way to punish the Chairman for his sins. Which meant, she realized with a sinking feeling, that she wouldn’t be able to blackmail her way out of this even if she could reach the Chairman. Any threat she made to release the recordings would be a bluff, and he was too savvy not to know that.

“I can’t tell you what happened,” she said. “But you’re right that the Chairman hates me. He can’t kill me or put me in Riker’s.” As long as the recordings existed and were hidden. Nadia had arranged for them to be released to the public should something happen to her. “But he can—and obviously will—hurt me in other ways.”

Just as he would hurt Nate, in any way he could.

The thought of Nate made her chest ache, and the tears flowed more freely. Why hadn’t he come to tell her the dreadful news in person? How could he leave her here in ignorance?

How could he let the Chairman marry him off to someone else?

The tears burst from her in an uncontrolled gush, no longer demure and ladylike. Dante drew her into his arms, cradling her head against his shoulder, and she didn’t even think of resisting.

“I’ll spend the rest of my life locked up in a retreat somewhere up north,” she sobbed, not sure how she would bear it. Five nights at Tranquility had her wanting to scream. How could she live in a place more restrictive and more isolated than this for the rest of her life?

“Maybe not,” Dante whispered soothingly, holding her tightly to him. “Your father may win in the end. And even if they do send you away, it might not be forever.”

She appreciated his attempts to comfort her, but it could never work. She could see her fate stretching out before her all too clearly. She would be sent to a distant retreat, where everyone was way older than her and female. She would never be seen in public again, might never see her family or Nate again. They could keep her at the retreat against her will until she was eighteen, and then they could keep her there by refusing her access to the family’s funds so that she had nowhere else to go. She would never marry, never have children. Hell, she would never even know love, because there would be no boys or men in her life.

“You don’t understand,” she hiccuped against Dante’s jacket. An Employee like Dante would never have had to face the specter of a retreat, couldn’t possibly comprehend what such a gilded cage was like.

Dante sighed and stroked her hair. “I do understand,” he said softly. “And I’ll do whatever I can to help you. I’m sure Nate will, too.”

Nadia shook her head and tried to pull away from Dante’s arms, but he wouldn’t let her. She went limp against him. Propriety didn’t matter anymore, and if she wanted to let a male servant hold her and comfort her, then she would. His arms felt solid and strong around her, and she liked hearing the steady thump of his heart when she pressed her head to his chest.

“Nate can’t help me,” she said, feeling the truth of her words down to her bones. She didn’t know how the Chairman had convinced Nate to agree to the match with Agnes Belinski, but she knew he hadn’t done so willingly. Somehow, his father had gotten a hold on him, and if he was determined to make both Nate and Nadia suffer, then he would be sure to keep them apart.

“Probably not directly,” Dante agreed. “I don’t know what’s going on under all this, but I do know the Chairman will be watching Nate’s every step. But he won’t be watching me.”

He finally released her from his embrace. Nadia would have regretted the loss, if he hadn’t cupped her wet cheeks in his hands and stared intently into her eyes.

“We’ll find a way, Nadia,” he said, with such certainty that she could almost believe him. “Nate and I don’t like each other, but we both like you. A lot. We can work together to help you.”

“Help me how?” It wasn’t like she was in some kind of physical danger they could save her from.

“Help you escape, if it comes to that.”

“Escape.” Somehow, the thought had never occurred to her. Maybe because it was so wildly impractical. “Where would I go? How would I live?” She would have no money, and no way of getting access to money if her family didn’t want her to. It wasn’t like she could just get a job somewhere. Jobs went to Employees, not Executives, and it wasn’t as if she could hide her identity. Especially once the latest scandal broke. Her picture would be plastered over news feeds and gossip columns everywhere.

Dante made a face. “I don’t have the answers, at least not now. But we’ll figure something out. It might take time, but if you get sent upstate, we’ll find a way to get you out. I promise.”

Nadia fervently wished she could believe him. Maybe someday, when Nate became Chairman, he would have the power to free her, but not before. Not when the only place she could flee to was the Basement, where she could have food and shelter for free, if she didn’t mind living among drug dealers, prostitutes, and gangs who would see her as fresh meat.

“Thank you,” she said, because she really did appreciate his kindness and his intentions, even if she didn’t believe he could succeed.

Dante nodded gravely, then put his arm around her, snugging her close against his side. Her tears were drying—for now—so she didn’t technically need his shoulder to cry on anymore, but she leaned easily against him anyway. His body felt warm and solid and safe against hers, and right now she needed warm, solid, and safe.

There was a long, companionable silence, until Dante suddenly broke it.

“Do you love him?”

She’d been asked that question by reporters dozens of times, and she’d always refused to answer on the grounds that it was private. However, her refusals had always been phrased in such a way as to make the interviewer believe the answer was yes. It was on the tip of her tongue to answer Dante the same way, but he wasn’t a reporter. He was a friend and a confidant—the only one she had left to her—and he deserved honesty from her, at least when she could afford to give it.

“He’s my best friend,” she said, “and I love him like a brother.” Even as she said it, Nadia wasn’t sure she was being entirely honest after all. There had never been any hope of a romance between her and Nate, but sometimes she suspected she was at least a little in love with him anyway. “But if we were Employees and could marry whom we chose, we never would have ended up with each other.” And that part was entirely true. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yeah. And sorry if that was too personal.”

“If it’d been too personal, I wouldn’t have answered.” She angled her head so she could see his face. Moonlight limned one side of it while leaving the other cloaked in shadows. The freckles over his nose had faded since he’d started working for the Lake family and spent most of his time indoors, but they were still faintly visible, even in the moonlight. They would be considered an unsightly blemish on an Executive, but Nadia found herself fighting the urge to reach out and touch them.

She licked her lips, aware of how close she was to Dante’s sensual mouth. She and Nate had kissed many times, but they had always been sham kisses, meant to help strengthen the illusion that he was into girls. Nadia had no idea what a real kiss felt like, and she suddenly wanted to find out in the worst way. She looked into his eyes and saw the answering spark there, but he didn’t take her up on what she felt certain was a blatant invitation. He smiled at her and stroked one hand lightly over her hair.

“You’ve just had some bad news and are in an altered state of mind,” he said gently. “I’m not the kind of asshole who’d take advantage of that.”

“Oh, now you’re going to turn all gentlemanly on me?” she asked, her cheeks heating at the rejection. He’d worded it nicely enough, but why should she expect a guy who thought Executive girls were akin to pampered poodles to want to kiss someone like her? Sure, he seemed to like her just fine now that he’d decided she wasn’t cut from the same cloth as most of her peers, but that didn’t mean he’d forgotten what she was. What she would always be, even though she would live the rest of her life in disgrace.

It was embarrassingly hard for her to stop leaning against him and put some distance between them on the log, but she managed it, wishing she could sink through the ground in her humiliation. Dante’s eyes widened, and he took her hands before she could jump to her feet.

“I’m not saying no,” he told her earnestly. “I’m just saying not now.”

She appreciated his attempt to spare her feelings, but she knew a rejection when she heard one. And it probably served her right, anyway. Kissing Dante as some kind of secret act of rebellion, or just because he was there, didn’t say much about her strength of character. Even if the yearning in her belly suggested there was more to it than that.

“I mean it, Nadia. To tell you the honest truth, I’ve wanted to kiss you ever since the first time I met you.”

She gaped at him. “You thought I was a spoiled, privileged, self-centered Executive bitch, remember?”

One corner of his mouth lifted in a sexy smile that revealed a dimple on his cheek. “No, that’s what I thought of the others. I knew you were different from the moment you ever-so-politely tore Jewel to shreds with your words.”

Nadia smiled a little at the memory. She lost almost as many verbal skirmishes with the Terrible Trio as she won, but the victories were sweet. And she remembered how Dante had visibly fought off a smile when Nadia cut Jewel down to size.

“If you still want to kiss me when I come visit you tomorrow, believe me, I’ll be more than happy to let you.”

Nadia swallowed hard, realizing he meant it. “You really mean to keep showing up here at midnight every night?”

“Of course I do. I told you I would.” Once again, he cupped her face in his hands. “No matter what it feels like, you’re not alone in this. Okay?”

Damn if Nadia’s eyes weren’t stinging again, but for very different reasons. No doubt she should be trying to talk Dante out of coming. There was risk every time they met, and he had to be running himself ragged. But she needed him too much to do the right thing. And besides, she doubted she was capable of talking him out of it anyway.

Words couldn’t express how grateful she felt, so she recklessly threw her arms around him and hugged him.