“I will marry you, Donatti. I will get my tubes tied, and I will come to this place just like we talked about. And when you see that I’m fully committed to you, you’ll probably dump me because I won’t be challenging anymore. I know men. You’re only in it for the hunt. Besides, you can’t keep up this sexual pace. You’ll die. I’ll die.”

He raised his eyebrows. “It’s called a little blue pill.”

I wagged my finger. “You shouldn’t take that unless you need it. And obviously you don’t need it.”

He grew serious. “I’ll never tire of you. Never! I’ve always loved you, Terry. But now, with you here with me, I’ve fallen back in love with you. Those intense feelings that I had when we first got together. Only better, because you’re the only person in this world that I trust.”

“You just said that you didn’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust your commitment to me, but I do trust you with my life. And by that I mean that every night when I go to sleep, I leave my gun on my nightstand. In the beginning, every time you moved, I woke up. Now … I wake up and you’ve been up for hours. Don’t hear you get up, don’t hear a thing. And I’m naked in the wind. You could take me out and I wouldn’t even know what was coming.”

“No, I’m not going to shoot you,” I said. “That’s a pretty low bar for trust, Donatti.”

“You’d be surprised. You get pretty mad at me.”

“Stop it.”

“Also,” he continued, “and this is truly, truly remarkable … you’ve never asked me for money.”

“You always gave me money.”

“You never asked for anything more than I gave you.” He shook his head. “Your woman gene must be defective.”

“Stop it.”

“Even when we divorced, my lawyer had to beg you to retain a lawyer so we could get the process going. You know, at that time, you owned my entire ass. It took a while to transfer it to Gabe. Everything I had was in your name. You never skimmed a penny from me.”

“I know.”

“Did Devek know what was going on?”

“He knew you had money. He even told me that if we didn’t marry, I could get alimony. I told him where to go with that idea.”

“Not a bad idea.”

“It was a terrible idea,” I said. “I wanted Juleen to have married parents. And the last thing I needed was to antagonize you. I was scared of you, Chris. I knew what you were capable of doing. I told him that my divorce was my business. That I’d handle it. And I did.”