Divorcing Her Mafia Family
Chapter 35

They finished lunch and when Dimitra insisted, she pay for her own lunch, oddly Miklos didn’t fight with her. He was well and truly acting as they had just met. She collected her bags under the table and let him follow her out of the restaurant.

“You have a date tonight, Elektra?” he asked as they began walking back through the marketplace in the direction of the enclave.

“I do.” She didn’t elaborate.

“You mentioned a husband earlier. How do you think he would feel you were dating? Does your new friend know you’re married?” He posed the question in an innocent tone. He paused to examine one of the stalls of fresh fruit and selected a mango and a banana. “I’ll need snacks later.”

She nodded as she waited for him, “to answer your second question, I did tell my date I was separated from my husband so yes, he knows I am still legally married. To answer your first question, he would not like it because like my father, he believes women are property and since we were together, I belong to him now.”

“Your husband sounds like a d**k,” Miklos said with a frown. “No woman is property.”

His words caught her off guard and she froze and looked at him curiously as he accepted his change from the vendor and continued on.

“What’s your story, Draco? You mentioned messing around with the boss’ daughter.” This she should be good she considered as she wondered how he would spin their past.

“I made her cry,” he shook his head with regret. “I made her cry because I left her to face enemies alone. Her father insisted I fix it but if the truth be told I don’t think I can. She needed me and asked me for help, and I turned my back on her. Apologizing to her every day for the rest of our lives will never be enough. Not ever.” He exhaled slowly as he stopped at another vendor and began looking through a rack of locally made dresses.

He held one up to her and shook his head, “wrong color. You need something with more reds than blues. You’re fire not ice.”

She was staring at him unable to speak as he continued his story, “anyway, I realized the best thing I could do was push her to run. I knew if I accused her of selling her family out, she would get pissed off enough to run and go into hiding. It gets her a bit of time away from everyone including her parents who are pushing hard for her to do things she doesn’t want and from her friends.”

“You wanted her away from her friends?”

“Yes.” He didn’t lie. “She has the best friends anyone could ask for. She could tell them she was blowing up the White House and they would help her pack the bombs without question and then pay her bail after. The problem with friends like this is oftentimes they forget to tell you when you’ve gone too far or pull you back before making decisions which would affect you negatively for the rest of your life.”

“Supportive friends are not a bad thing,” she slapped at him as he held up another dress in front of her.

“No. They aren’t. I also have a very best friend who would support me in almost anything, but he will tell me when I’ve been a complete f**k-wad. For example, when I told him about leaving her to face our enemies alone, he called me right out and said I was a f*****g i***t who didn’t deserve to have the best thing to ever happen to me. He told me if I had a brain cell, I’d be on my knees groveling. I don’t think her friends have ever argued with a decision she’s made ever. Loyal to a fault.”

She couldn’t argue his words. Magda and Darya were ride or die kind of friends. If she killed someone and needed to bury them, Darya would replace the spot and Magda would bring the shovel while Sienna provided an alibi. They were also as crazy as she is. She looked at him as he paid for the dress he’d just been holding up.

“What are you doing?”

“You have a date tonight. You can’t go dressed like this,” he waved at her jean shorts and t-shirt. “I would argue you packed in a rush and didn’t pack anything pretty to wear. In a couple of hours, you will be standing in front of your wardrobe questioning what the hell you’re going to wear to dinner. I’m just being a friend.”

She c****d her head to one side and considered he was losing his marbles. “Excuse me?”

“This has the right colors for you, don’t you agree?” he pushed the bag into her hands. He motioned to her hair, “you should wear it down. The ponytail is cute, but your hair does this natural wavy thing when it’s loose. I was looking at it this morning when you stomped down to the beach in your flipflops.” He paused and looked around at the other vendors, “you need better sandals than flip flops for a date. If he takes you dancing, you can’t dance in flip flops.”

“Mi-, Draco,” she corrected herself looking around to see if anyone was listening, “What the f**k are you doing?”

“I’m being your friend,” he gave her a quizzical glance. “You’re here without yours so I’m stepping in.”

“This is the weirdest s**t you’ve ever done,” she mumbled under her breath.

“How would you know? You only met me a little over an hour ago.” He looked over his shoulder at her and then beelined for a stall with shoes. “Your feet are what, an eight?”

“How did you guess?” she rolled her eyes at his back.

“You’re about the same size as my girl back home.” He shrugged, “she wears an eight.”

“You know her shoe size?”

“I know everything about her,” he paused, “well now I do. I admit I was a shitty partner for a long time and didn’t pay attention at all but now I know my mistakes.”

“What makes you think you can be a better partner to her now than you were before?” Dimitra asked him curiously while he discussed the price of various sandals. She hadn’t even looked to see what he was picking out.

“She makes me want to be better,” he said simply as he tucked the shoes into the same bag as the dress and started walking. “She recently swept back into my life like a tornado and in the chaos and c*****e she left behind, it reminded me of all the good times I had with her when we were younger but more than this, it made me realize she is and always has been the better part of me. She’s the yin to my yang or the north to my south, the sun to my moon. When I’m wound too tight, she makes me laugh. When I’m too focused on one thing, she reminds me there are a thousand other things to look at it. She challenges me in a way I’ve never been challenged, and it’s always only been her to do it. I’ve also discovered, I am intensely sexually attracted to her.” He gave her a sideways glance and looked her up and down as if she were naked right in front of him, “is that too much to share with a new friend? Perhaps. I don’t know. I don’t make a lot of new friends but something about you is compelling me to overshare. Anyway, her eyes have always captured me but now she has this mouth on her and I replace myself wanting to k**s it constantly. Oh, and her a*s,” he threw his hands up as if he were gripping something round in front of him. “It’s perfection. I just want to bite it.”

Dimitra was blushing furiously at his words and looking everywhere but at him. “You are definitely oversharing.”

“Oh, sorry,” he gave a grin which told her he wasn’t sorry in the least. “What about you? Aside from your husband who you despise and are running from, anyone special?”

“I,” she paused at her words, “I don’t despise my husband,” she admitted quietly adjusting her bags in her hands, grimacing when he reached out and took all her shopping from her.

“You don’t despise him?”

“No. He hurt me, bad. We were put into a bad situation, and he handled it poorly. It left me feeling for a long time I wasn’t worthy to be loved. I thought,” she swallowed against the bile in her throat as she exposed her feelings, “because I was overweight, he found me repulsive. He was my closest, if not my only friend for a long time and then when we got married, he couldn’t even look at me anymore and I knew it was because he was disgusted by me. We got married eight years ago next month. For seven years and eleven months, I believed he thought I was too fat to f**k.”

It was clear she had startled him with her revelation. “Your husband, I repeat, is a d**k for making you feel so horrible. I bet if he were standing here right now, he would tell you, not once, not ever in the entire time he has ever known you, has he ever considered you anything other than perfect. He may not have wanted to sleep with you, but I can promise he would tell you it had nothing to do with your body and everything to do with his choices being taken away from him.”

He was staring into her eyes with such sincerity Dimitra could barely breathe and then he was looking away and walking again as if he hadn’t just said what he’d said.

“Hey, look,” he pointed to a lizard on the side of a wall, “a lizard.”

“Yeah, it’s a lizard,” she furrowed her brows at his childlike behaviour.

“What are your plans for the afternoon?” he asked suddenly as she caught up to him, the units of their rentals now in sight.

“I didn’t really have any,” she shrugged. “I have work I need to do but realistically, it’s nothing urgent. It’s a side project I’m working on based on an idea from one of my girlfriends. We are early in the process, and I imagine it will be another two- or three-year project so putting it off a few days isn’t a big deal. I didn’t sleep well last night so I’m contemplating a long nap before I go out this evening.”

“How come you didn’t sleep?”

“Um,” she looked at him with a smirk, “you snore. Loudly. You could have been in the same room as me it was so loud.”

He had the grace to look embarrassed. “I’m sorry. I was so tired. I don’t think I’ve slept since Tuesday night into Wednesday. Wednesday night I was up all night because I realized the depths of the damage I’d done, and Thursday I was trying to figure out where I was going on Friday and very worried, I would make things worse by pushing her so hard. Arriving back to my room last night and knowing my girl is safe for the time being, I was able to finally sleep. I’m sorry it kept you up.”

“You pushed your bed right against the wall where mine is.” She ignored his ‘my girl’ comment.

“Trying to get as far away from the lovebirds on the other side of the unit. Even with the entire living room between my bedroom and their unit, I could still hear them. I tried whistling to let them know how paper thin the walls were, but they didn’t seem to hear, or maybe they simply didn’t care.” He gave a shudder. He held the gate open to the entrance to the private area after swiping his card against the lock. He leaned closer to her ear after she stepped past him and whispered, “that’s them by the pool. She doesn’t look the shrew I heard last night but she is cold. Brr,” he mocked.

She tried not to look at the couple and when she was unable to control her gaze away from the front of the man’s swim trunks, she felt Miklos pinch her arm. “Hey.”

“Stop looking at his d**k, or where it should be. He might be self conscious. It’s not his fault he was born with a tiny dong.” His voice was hot in her ear, and she couldn’t stop her giggling at his words. As they climbed the stairs to their side-by-side doors he passed her the bags. “Thank you for the lovely lunch. Enjoy your siesta this afternoon. I expect to hear all about your date tomorrow.”

“Right,” she stood there staring at him as he looked down at her with a tender smile. It all felt very weird and strange. He reached forward and for a moment she thought he was going to touch her cheek but instead he flicked his wrist at a fly.

“Hope you don’t have anything in those bags which needed refrigeration. It’s hot out here and we were at lunch a long time.” He pointed to her bag. “See you later.” He turned on his heel and walked into his unit.

She grabbed her bags and went into her own space, closing the door behind her and leaning against it in confusion. “This is so f*****g weird,” she told herself as she closed her eyes. She had just spent an hour and a half with Miklos pretending to be someone he wasn’t while she pretended to be someone, she wasn’t so they could work through their differences only so she could get her divorce in two weeks.

She put her market items away and sniffed the package of shrimp. It definitely wasn’t as fresh as when she’d bought it, but the birds would not mind. She wrinkled her nose. Could she still attract birds to his balcony even though she knew now it wasn’t just a weird guy on the other side of the wall? The memory of Theresa telling her he had complained about her language and now knowing full well he knew who it was on the other side of the wall made her nod her head. She could absolutely still f**k with him. Maybe her antics would make him leave sooner than the two weeks.

She left the living area yawning and decided she needed to sleep. She curled onto her bed and faced the wall, pulling her pillow tight to her chest. She reached her fingers out and stroked the wall wondering where he was in his rooms. Was he also laying down or was he in his kitchen or on the balcony? She listened to see if she could hear him whistling and then frowned. There was only silence in the other room, and she found herself curiously wondering what he was up to.

Why was she stupidly focused on him and his little game when she was here to escape him. She didn’t want to be with him. She didn’t want to be part of the Lykiaos curse. She didn’t want to have a child with a man who would expect their offspring to run the family business. Not to mention all the FBI crap she had going on right now. She needed none of it. She wanted none of it. Yet, for all the talk she was giving herself in this moment her mind kept replaying to their conversation on the way back to the units.

“Your husband is a d**k.” She couldn’t disagree. He had been a d**k. He was acknowledging he had f****d up in the worst of ways but what did it mean?

“Apologizing to her will never be enough.” She noted though he hadn’t apologized but maybe it was on his to-do list. Maybe he thought it was pointless. He had admitted he had zero confidence he could win their game.

“She’s the sun to my moon.” What on earth had he meant by this? Sun to his moon? Miklos as Draco was a sappy son of a b***h.

“I am intensely sexually attracted to her.” She squeezed her thighs together at the way he’d looked at her when he’d said it. He hadn’t touched. Hadn’t tried to k**s her. Didn’t hold her hand. Yet the look when he’d uttered those words had her feeling as nude as the flat sandals, he’d bought her.

She g*****d as she considered he’d bought her a dress and shoes to go out with another man. She wished she could call Darya and Magda, but Miklos had said her father didn’t know where they were and if he got wind Miklos was with her, there would likely be trouble. She didn’t want to be brought back kicking and screaming but she knew how ruthless her father could be.

Dimi kicked her feet in frustration as sleep eluded her and flopped onto her belly as she contemplated his other actions of the day. He’d bought her a dress to go on a date with another man and shoes to match. He hadn’t been wrong. She hadn’t packed anything even remotely date night worthy. Romance had been the last thing on her mind when she’d thrown a bunch of clothes into her luggage and hightailed it out of LA. Shouldn’t he be a raging jealous a*****e telling her she wasn’t allowed to date anyone else? At home he had made it clear he would be the last person she ever slept with and today he was buying her clothes for a date and asking she use protection and not get pregnant.

An hour later she was still laying in her bed, staring at the ceiling and walls, no sleep and in utter confusion over his actions.

Yet as she lifted the phone to check her messages, she found only a message from Miklos telling her to have fun and be safe and suggested she use a reputable taxi company and not let anyone who had been drinking drive her home. She sent him back a thumbs up emoji and wondered where this big brother thing was coming from.