“Especially when it’s not right,” Lucina snapped back at him.

Ivan told her, “First of all, I haven’t been with a lot of your girls. I stay away from them on purpose. But what do you want me to do, leave everybody alone?”

Lucina stared at him. She said, “You need to find someone who really means something to you.”

Ivan countered, “Well, what if I have, and she’s not interested?”

Lucina heard that and looked away from him.

She mumbled, “I’m sure she would not make up her mind by watching you sleep around.”

Ivan said, “Well, she needs to admit that she’s attracted, then. Can she at least do that?” He had no idea they would end up in this kind of discussion. All of a sudden he no longer cared about seeing Carolyn. Lucina Gallo was his number-one priority again.

“I mean, I don’t know how she does it, but a man’s gonna act like a man out here,” he told her. “And the last time I checked, I was still single.”

Lucina told him, “That doesn’t mean you have to be a whore, Ivan. That’s what I don’t like about America. You have no real romance here. And you don’t know what real love is.”

Ivan stared at her. Now she had reverted back to the cultural differences. He said, “Look, it’s too late at night for this. So you tell me how you feel about it in the morning. And I’m going to bed.”

“I’m gonna feel the same way I do now,” she told him as he moved toward his bedroom.

He stopped and said, “Then there’s nothing else to talk about. We’re still partners. We’re still making money together. We still care about each other. But I’m gonna do me, and I gotta let you do you. Case closed.”

He said, “And my thing for women is not bad for business. I’m a sex symbol now, right? That’s what happens to attractive men when they get money. You told me that yourself. You even set me up for it,” he reminded her, pointing to his diamond-studded earlobe. “But now you wanna sit there and complain about it.”

With that, he walked off toward his room and left Lucina speechless.

She sat there on the sofa with close to fifty thousand dollars in front of her on the floor and felt miserable.