He had amazing teeth.
And he’d called her his girlfriend.
Did men like Stellan Lange have girlfriends?
It was he who called it.
So she guessed they did.
And that was her.
Seriously.
How was this happening?
When he tossed the cucumber in, mixed it all up, put it in the fridge, and went back to the tuna steaks, she tried to sound casual as she noted, “You’ve mentioned your dad, but you never speak of your mom.”
He didn’t look up from whatever he was doing to the tuna as he murmured, “Ah, so M has a big mouth when she sips tequila.”
He didn’t appear tense or pissed or hesitant, so Sixx kept at it.
But she did it covering for Margarita.
“She let something slip, freaked, I moved her past it, but she didn’t really say anything.”
He stopped with the tuna, put the heels of his palms to the counter, and looked to her.
“What did she say?”
“She just mentioned her.”
“How?”
Sixx lowered her voice and replied, “If you don’t want to talk about this, Stellan, that’s totally all right.”
“She’s a bitter alcoholic who’s managed to burn through the enormous settlement she obtained from my father, the healthy additions I’ve given her in the interim and, regularly, prior to the end of the month, the monthly alimony she still receives. Thus prompting my healthy additions. She’s the reason his prenups are extreme. He’s still supporting her and her excruciatingly slow commission of suicide, but this isn’t why he chafes against it. He simply wishes she’d fade from memory. He’s not a fan of being confronted with his failures since he vastly prefers kidding himself that he doesn’t have any.”
“Baby,” Sixx whispered.
“I understand her bitterness,” he carried on, seemingly effortlessly. “I even understand her addiction. She adored my father. In early years, I remember us all being very happy. However, I think she got a wrinkle, and his love for her died. She was completely unprepared. She thought she’d live the fairy tale forever. And she couldn’t ever imagine how that nightmare would turn into something darker than anyone could believe.”
“I shouldn’t have brought it up,” Sixx stated quickly when he paused in speaking.
“Why not?” Stellan asked. “We’re getting to know each other. This is part of my life. A part of my life that you’ll discover, and with something like that you should be prepared.”
“So maybe—” she tried.
But he kept going.
“She lives in a beautiful home outside Sedona. She meditates and wears clothes that appear to be crafted solely out of scarves. She has Tibetan prayer bells installed in her garden, and she drinks three bottles of wine a night and can lapse into rages about a marriage that ended thirty years ago like she just discovered her husband was unfaithful the moment before. She comes down too often and stays with me. When she does, she sits cross-legged by the pool on a Bud dhist rug to balance her chi. Later I’ll have to assist her to bed because if I don’t, I’m not certain she’ll make it to her room without injury. She’s delighted I have not married, or even become serious with a woman, because she’s convinced I’ll destroy their life, like my father did before me. And if you told her she thought that, she would be stunned and affronted. However, halfway into bottle of wine number two, she would not be able to stop running her mouth about that very thing.”
When he stopped speaking, without anything else to say, Sixx said, “I’m so sorry.”
“I am too,” he agreed. “I remember her as beautiful and full of life, in love with her husband, and she adored her children. Besotted with us. It was unfortunate the bitterness settled in with permanency quickly, so even Silie lived it. Obviously, I cannot know what was happening in my sister’s head when she made the decision she made. And obviously, I’ve thought of it often since she made it. But I think it was not simply due to the fact she’d been raped by what amounted to a member of our family. It was that after she was, with her mother that bitter, already twisted, completely self-involved and so far down the path to alcoholism there was no turning back, Silie had no one to turn to.”
“Except you,” Sixx whispered.
He nodded once. “Except me, and your sixteen-year-old brother is not the confidant needed to deal with something that hideously ugly. I did my best, but it was never going to be good enough.”
In that moment Sixx was unfairly and irrationally angry at Silie Lange.
Because she hated that Stellan ever thought he wouldn’t be good enough at anything.
“Really, I’m so, so sorry I made you speak of these things, baby,” she said gently.
And when she did, he pinned her with his blue stare and returned, “I speak openly of them, Simone. I do not bury it. I do not hide it. I do not ever attempt to convince myself that it did not affect me, alter me, and those for the worse. I miss my sister. I mourn the life she could have had. I miss the mother and father I knew when I was young because they’ve both died as sure as Silie is gone. It is a fact of my life. It is part of what’s made me. I don’t turn away from it. I face it. I do that even if there’s no lesson to learn from it. No desperate silver lining to try to wrench from it. Every human being on this earth experiences heinous things. Some less extreme. Some so extreme, they’re unimaginable. If there’s a meaning to this life, that’s it. You find a way to deal or you die, whether by making yourself stop breathing or living a life not worth living.”
Sixx looked to her glass before she took a healthy sip.
“That’s not an indictment, darling,” he said softly.
She turned her gaze to the pool.
“Some of us do the best we can do,” he continued.
She cut her eyes to him and looked him up and down, from lean waist to fabulous head of thick, beautiful hair in his stunning kitchen in his Phoenician mansion.
“And some of us do better,” she returned.
“I found my sister dead in a garage. That marked me. I have a weak father and an equally weak mother, and that marked me too. I did not watch my parents get murdered and do it miraculously surviving a bloodbath. After what you’ve endured, the fact that you’re not a junkie, or a prostitute, or a drug dealer, or anything but the magnificent creature you’ve formed yourself into being is frankly no less than a miracle.”
Okay, she hated she put him through that.
But now she really wished she hadn’t brought it up.
“Are you going to cook that tuna or—?” she began.
“You couldn’t have saved them,” he stated.
“I know that,” she snapped.
“I’m not talking about your parents.”
Sixx actually felt her face pale.
Oh God.
Oh no.
God.
He knew everything.
She threw back the rest of her drink.
“They made their choices,” Stellan kept after her.
She glared at him.
“You are not responsible for those choices,” he declared.
“They were my friends,” she clipped.
He raised his brows. “Did you inject them with your uncle’s heroin?”
“Now we need to stop talking about this,” she bit out.
“No we don’t,” he returned smoothly.
“I’m sorry I mentioned your mother. I’m sorry it brought up your father and your sister. But in this getting-to-know-you thing we have going on, I’m not ready for this.”
“Will you ever be?” he asked.
“Absolutely not,” she stated clearly.
“Then now’s as good a time as any,” he fired back.
“Right then, did Dillinger tell you their parents didn’t let me go to their funerals?” she queried.
“No. But I’m not surprised. They needed someone to blame. So they blamed a seventeen-year-old girl who had nothing to do with it.”