you about us breaking up, I left a lot out. Only because nothing had happened between you and me yet, and I was trying to spare you the details. He really was pushing to move the engagement along by getting a ring, and he had begun to threaten with ultimatums, but I knew he’d never follow through. He’d gotten excessively controlling, so I left him one morning when he wasn’t home and moved back in with my sister.”
“You lived with this guy?”
She started to wince but recovered quickly. “Yes.” She nodded, looking strangely defeated. “But not for too long. He wasn’t so bad in the beginning, but he got progressively worse as the time passed. It only took a few months for me to realize just how controlling he was, and I left him.”
“And he just let you?”
She took the baby, who was reaching out for her. As soon as he was in her arms, her nose scrunched. Grabbing a diaper and wipes out of the bag next to the crib, she put him down and began to change him as Orlando waited impatiently for her to answer his question.
“Believe it or not, it wasn’t as drawn-out a breakup as you might think given how persistent he could be. It’s actually been surprising that he’s respected my wishes to stay away and stop calling me, but he did show up at my sister’s to try to get me to come back home with him that first day. Only I refused and he left.”
Orlando wondered now how much else she’d left out about their breakup. “And he didn’t come back again?”
“Nope,” she said very matter-of-factly, but Orlando wasn’t buying it.
“Why am I finding that hard to believe, Dani? The guy’s begging you back first time he sees you, but he stayed away all this time?”
She finished with the diaper change and handed Orlando the balled up dirty one. He tossed it in the trash can then turned back to her. She was now holding the baby again, who cooed happily in her arms, cuddling up into her chest. As much as he usually enjoyed watching Little Man’s response to her, Orlando couldn’t take his eyes off her. She closed her eyes for a second before going on. “My sister pulled a gun on him that day. I’m sure that had a lot to do with his staying away. That and my threat to go to the press about him being so controlling and even abusive.”
“Abusive?” The blood thrummed in Orlando’s ears at the very thought. She’d left a whole lot of shit out about this guy. “He abused you?”
“Not really,” she said quickly as if backpedaling after hearing Orlando raise his voice a bit. “He never physically abused me while we were together, but he was furious the morning he got home and saw I’d packed and left without notice. He showed up at my sister’s on fire, accusing me of seeing someone else, and it’s why I’d really left him.” She closed her eyes as she kissed the baby’s head as if the memory was still a tough one. “He just grabbed my arm when I wouldn’t get in the car with him and tried to force me to. It’s why my sister pulled out her gun.”
The visual alone had Orlando feeling ready to kill. “Just grabbed your arm?”
“I mean—”
“Dani, this fucker put his hands on you and attempted to abduct you.”
“Well, when you put it that way”—Dani gasped wide-eyed—“it sounds terrible, but he’d never done anything like that before. I think it was just the shock that I’d actually up and moved out without giving him so much as a warning.”
Orlando took a few steps closer to her, leaning in when he remembered the few females he’d known in his life who’d suffered at the hands of an abusive man. Calming a little, he kissed her softly. “Baby, don’t make excuses for his ass. It is terrible. I’ve been around enough scum in my lifetime to know this. There are two types of men in the world when it comes to this shit. The kind that slap women around and the kind that don’t—no matter what. The kind that don’t wouldn’t have it in them to even be grabbing a woman roughly and trying to force her to do something against her will. If he had it in him to do that, trust me when I say that you got out of his clutches just in time. You said