Page 78 of A Wife's Duty

Lucia sat back and thought about it. Whatever he had done, it had involved her family—her father, one of her brothers, maybe her sister. Could she handle anything happening to them, and also her mother? She shouldn’t forget her mother. Maybe it made her cruel, verging on heartless, but she didn’t care about them. They were not really her family.

Some people were born into amazing families and their loyalty was expected, even deserved. Then there were others that quite simply were not. She didn’t love her family. Getting away from them had been the best thing she ever did.

“Yes, I want to know,” she said.

“Leandro is dead,” Boone said. “He attempted to plant a bomb in one of my apartments, only I was expecting it and made arrangements to keep him trapped there. Since we came to my safe house, he’d been trapped with no way of escape. I went and took care of it.”

“What happened?”

“Exactly what he did to the nanny all those years ago.”

Lucia gasped and then sat in her chair.

Leandro was gone. She thought about her brother and his cruel ways. The staff hated him, where their father liked his cruelty. Leandro was a different breed of man. It was one of many reasons she was glad her father had been allergic to pets. She had a horrible feeling Leandro would have hurt them. And she wouldn’t have been able to stand that.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, he wasn’t a very nice person, and I remember hearing once that karma has a nice or nasty way of paying you back for the way you have lived. I guess his past caught up with him.”

She glanced over toward Boone, who simply gave a nod of his head. What more was there to say? There was no point in arguing for Leandro, or any of them. They were all poison.

Was she poison?

She didn’t know if she was on his list, and she was too afraid to find out.

****

Betty had curled up at his feet. Boone looked toward his woman, as Cameron got to work on the roses down her arm. It was going to take multiple trips to get the design she wanted. She handled it well. There were only a few gasps and he saw some tears in her eyes, but she didn’t want Cameron to stop.

Over the next few days, Cameron was more than happy to slot Lucia in, so he got the first part of the ink done on the upper arm, which included the main rose itself. A piece of art takes time. This was the only person he trusted with Lucia. Once that part was done, Cameron wrapped it and gave them the necessary care instructions, along with some ointment. Cameron refused payment until the whole tattoo was done.

“Isn’t that ... wrong?” Lucia asked once they were back in the car.

“What?”

“Not taking payment. Aren’t you a little suspicious?”

“If it was anyone other than Cameron, I would be. As it happens, he knows me, and knows I’ll pay. In the early days, he would always take a deposit. Now, he doesn’t have to. He trusts me.”

Lucia shifted back into her seat.

“How does it feel?”

“Good, I think. Tight? I don’t know. It did hurt in places.”

“Ink will do that.”

He glanced over at her and caught her looking at him. The moment their eyes met, she quickly glanced away, and he couldn’t help but laugh. “What?”

“Did any of yours hurt?”

“All of them. Trust me, there were a couple that made me cry like a baby, and Cameron even called me one.”

She turned to look at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yep. Like I said, I cried and Cameron likes to keep it real.”

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