‘I think she’d have liked that just fine,’ Saul said.
‘You didn’t even know her name this morning, it’s not as if I upset your great love.’
‘Maybe, we’ll never know now, will we?’ he asked then yawned, but it disappeared from his face when Dax walked in and made eye contact with her.
‘Time to go,’ Dax said.
‘Already?’ Ivy asked, leaping up off the couch and throwing Saul’s hand back to his lap. ‘How do you know that—‘
‘Trystan called, he wants to meet.’
‘You were right,’ Ivy sighed.
‘Right about what?’ Carina asked.
Dax didn’t acknowledge her, he wandered off in the direction of the kitchen, so Ivy answered. ‘Dax said that Trystan would want to show off, that he would want to invite us to the suite just to try and rile us.’
‘Brad is such a pleasant man,’ Carina said. ‘I can’t understand how Trystan turned out to be so obnoxious.’
‘He’s had a lot of practise,’ Ivy said, and Dax came back to the group.
‘Come on.’
‘What shall we do with Carina?’ Ivy asked, causing him to halt in the doorway.
‘She can stay here,’ Dax said as though Carina wasn’t in the room.
‘But if we’re taking Rosie home, we’re not going to come back here, are we?’
‘Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you brought her here where she doesn’t belong,’ Dax said.
‘It wasn’t like I had a lot of time to consider my options. I had to move fast.’
‘She’s taken care of herself for years, she’ll figure out how to get home.’
He disappeared from the room and the front door closed, signalling that he’d left the building.
‘What a sweetheart, no wonder you fell in love with him,’ Saul said, but Ivy ignored him.
‘Carina, you stay here. I’ll talk to Dax and—‘
‘He won’t let me in, will he?’ Carina asked.
‘Now isn’t the time to talk about this,’ Ivy said. ‘I need… time.’
She didn’t like to be rude to anyone, but this wasn’t the time to worry about Dax and Carina’s relationship. If she was honest with herself, Ivy still hadn’t figured out how she felt about Carina. She wasn’t yet sure if she wanted to use her influence over Dax to encourage him into a relationship that he didn’t want when Carina might be bad news.
Sure, she came across as quite sweet and innocent, but the woman had walked away from her child when he was still an infant in need of a mother. Carina hadn’t come back or followed up to see how Dax was. Anything could have happened to her son and what did happen to him wasn’t at all pleasant.
Realising that she hadn’t yet forgiven Carina for what she had done to Dax, Ivy left Saul’s house alone. Going into the thick heat of the desert, she crossed the drive to reach the car she’d driven here.
Dax was in a different vehicle parked behind hers. Though he was wearing his shades, he still managed to glower at her, and she glowered right back. Opening the trunk of her car, she unzipped the suitcase and pulled some bills from the wad of cash still nestled in her clothes. Ivy was heading back into the house when she heard Dax exit his car.
‘Give me the keys,’ he said, and she turned to toss him the car keys though she didn’t know why he needed them.
Pushing open the front door, she took the cash into the living room where she had left Saul and Carina. She gave each of them a thousand dollars.
‘You, for your trouble,’ Ivy said to Saul, then turned to Carina. ‘That should get you home, to wherever that is.’
‘It’s over?’ Carina asked. ‘But I didn’t get a chance to—‘
‘The truth is there’s too much going on for Dax to deal with this right now,’ Ivy said. ‘If you want to give me a phone number, I can talk to Dax, and if he decides he wants to get in touch, then I’ll tell him to call you.’
‘A phone call,’ Carina said.
Ivy shrugged. ‘It’s the best I can offer right now.’
With the bounty and Mauri’s illness, this wasn’t the time for an emotional reunion between mother and son. If Carina pushed Dax right now, then she wouldn’t get the response that she was hoping for. Dax would be abrupt, and he could be cold. His only reaction to Carina so far had been to ignore her, and that didn’t bode well.
Saul got them pen and paper so Carina could write down her phone number and after taking it, Ivy said her goodbyes. She went outside to see Dax back in his car enjoying the air conditioning until he buzzed the window down a couple of inches.
‘Get in.’
Trusting that Dax had switched her things into his car, she did as he asked and got in the passenger seat. ‘Is Trystan going to be a nightmare?’
‘Yes,’ Dax answered. ‘Your sister knows how to pick ‘em.’
He backed out of the driveway and began to head toward The Strip. ‘Ironically,’ she said, fishing in the backseat for her purse, which Dax had flung in there. ‘She always went for the bad boys, and I always tried to avoid them.’
‘Why is that ironic?’
Peeking up from her purse, she smiled at his profile. ‘No reason, my baby-faced angel.’
His scowl made her laugh, and she pulled her sunglasses from her purse. ‘Ok. So, I’m no innocent, but I’m better than Trystan.’
‘Hands down,’ she said. ‘Rosie just likes the attention and a guy like Trystan, with money, he could take care of her. If he was decent that is. I didn’t know that they were flirting until she vanished with him last night. Carina said that they met at Mauri’s party.’
‘Why did you bring her? Why would you—‘
‘Carina came of her own accord. I packed up our things at the beach house and by the time I got downstairs, she was waiting for me. I didn’t have the time to argue.’
‘I don’t want you to make friends with her.’
‘I haven’t. I spent most of the time avoiding her. But we did… we got the chance to talk before Rosie took off. I think you should listen to what she has to say.’
‘So now you know more about where I come from than I do?’ Dax grumbled.
‘If you’d taken the time to listen to her then you would know too,’ Ivy said. ‘Some of what she said was… I was shocked, but… it made sense too.’
‘I don’t want to hear it.’
Unsure if he was putting up the barriers just to be bull-headed, or because he was affected by his past, Ivy started gently. ‘When she was pregnant, she left to protect you,’ she said, deliberately avoiding Bruno’s name. Though riling Dax now would mean that his patience with Trystan would be non-existent, which was a good thing as far as Ivy was concerned. Dax had shown Trystan plenty of patience over the years, too much in fact.
‘Protect me from what? Getting involved in Mauri’s world?’ Dax asked. ‘That worked out well, didn’t it?’
‘She didn’t know that Mauri had tracked you down and taken you in until years after the fact. She figured that you wouldn’t want to see her. Carina knows Mauri well, knows the people in his world, and if they had closed ranks around you—‘
‘She didn’t try, did she?’ Dax asked.
‘Did you want her to? Can you see yourself welcoming her? Look at how you’re acting towards her now, if she had shown up when you were fifteen or sixteen, would you have fought against Mauri to keep her in your life? Be honest.’
His jaw moved, and Ivy knew he was peeved by the direction of the conversation, but she put her purse back on the backseat and waited for him to respond.
‘Mauri told me that… that he tried to stop me fighting.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘Me neither. When he did, I got aggressive, and that’s why he pulled me from school. He let me go back to fighting, and that changed things, calmed me down, least that’s what he said.’
So Dax had been learning things about where he came from. Knowing that sort of made this whole journey worth it. They could have stayed away and refused to return with Brad despite Mauri’s illness. But if they had done that then Dax would never have any answers to his questions.