Chapter 1: Vacation Planning

"So, you think we're gonna just drive off into the sunset…Dominic?" Dani said with a teasing smile.

"Who said anything about driving?"

"Whoa! As I recall, the last time you said that to me, I ended up on a helicopter going up and down the Jersey coast. No helicopters!"

Nico chuckled. "And I seem to recall that you never stopped complaining about that chopper the entire time we were on it. So, no, I don't think I'd like to repeat that experience. Besides, it wouldn't be too practical. I think that this time our mode of transportation needs to be a bit less noisy, and have a little more range.

"Thank God! But, wait, I've already got my ticket to Barcelona, so what?..."

"Don't worry. I'll turn it in, take care of all the arrangements and send a car for you.."

"Wait a minute! Don't I even get to know where we're going?" Her expression had been happy, teasing, but now the "Dani-squint" was beginning to make an appearance.

"Dani, do you trust me?" And while that soft, teasing smile was still on his face, the one that made her toes curl and her heart beat faster, his eyes told her that this was a serious question. One he wanted an answer to.

"I do, Nico, I trust you. It's just that it's hard to pack for a trip if you don't know where you're going."

Nico glanced at the two suitcases already packed and waiting by the door, and then at the one still on the floor. "About that, Dani. Three suitcases? Really? Just to visit Jeanette? Which one is full of your shoes?"

The squint was back as she swatted him on the arm. "Well, I was a little distracted while I was packing. I mean"… oh, God, why had she brought that up when everything seemed like maybe it was gonna be OK?

"I know what you mean," he said softly. He stepped a little closer and wrapped her up in his arms.

Dani sighed softly against his chest. "I think I can rearrange things a little. But I still need to know where we're going."

Nico thought for a moment. "If you packed for Barcelona, you should be OK. Maybe take a couple of sweaters. It is January, and we're not heading to the tropics."

Dani stayed in his arms a moment longer, but when she stepped back, looked up at him, and squared her shoulders with a little shake, Nico just knew that she still had something on her mind, something that she felt needed to be resolved before she allowed him one inch further into her life.

Now what? He'd been on pins and needles for the past several days, making arrangements and wrapping up the details of his life, determined that he could persuade her to take this trip with him, the one that she herself had suggested only a few days ago. He wanted, no he needed, some time alone with her to explore and strengthen that connection between them, that current of electricity that had flowed between them for so long, unacknowledged.

Nico hadn't known how to explain to Dani that he wanted to be completely open with her, so he'd simply begun spewing out random facts about himself. He was a methodical man, so he figured he'd start right from the beginning, with the name on his birth certificate. It had felt so unnatural to just give away information about himself, after all his years of hiding in plain sight. The concept of "need to know basis" had permeated every aspect of his life. But this was Dani, and he knew he was never going to be able to have her in his life unless he let her in all the way.

"I know that expression, Dani. What is it you want to know?" And now she'd balled her hands into fists and moved away from him completely. He could feel the warmth disappear, even though she was just a couple of feet away. "I thought you understood that you can ask me about anything, but we don't have much time right now, and we'll have plenty of time to talk later."

As always, his voice was calm and his expression unruffled, but inside he was suddenly terrified. He'd relaxed, let down his guard, and thought that she was going to finally give him a chance - give them a chance.

"Alex. I want to know about Alex."

He was puzzled, and it showed on his face. "We talked about my marriage to Alex, Dani, or at least I tried to explain to you how it was. What else is it you need to know that can't wait a little while?"

A mix of emotions showed on her face, but she was most of all resolute. "I need to know why she reappeared in your life now, Nico. And why your marriage of convenience didn't become inconvenient a long time ago," she said quietly.

Dani's voice was a little shaky. This, after all, was the elephant in the room, the reason that this "thing" between them had almost ended before it had begun. What am I doing, she thought? Why do I need to bring this up now? But she knew that despite how she felt about Nico – and hadn't she had trouble coming to terms with that! – she couldn't just ignore the..the fact of Alex. She'd met her, for God's sakes. Been introduced to her as his wife. Shaken hands with her, goddammit! Before she took one more step into this relationship, she needed to know if Alex (oh, God) was going to be a factor in her future.

Nico sighed. He didn't want to take the time to do this right now, but he knew he had to. Dani hated deception, but she also hated concealment, and she always wanted, make that needed, to know the entire truth. And he had all these compartments in his life that he'd kept separate and locked away for so many years, but he knew he was going to have to open that one door before he even left this room.

"Nico?"

"Sit down, Dani." And there he was, sitting on Dani's couch, trying to explain his fucked up life to her – again. At least it was a different couch.

"Do you remember the night I told you that I'd been married? You were having dinner with your doctor friend at my Tuesday night place."

Oh, Dani remembered THAT night very well. First Nico had interrupted her date with JD Aldridge, then he'd dropped the fact that he had an ex-wife during a very casual conversation with JD, a man he had just met! She'd been so pissed because she'd been working with Nico for months and she hadn't heard anything about a wife. And she remembered now with a sigh, she'd also been pissed because after he'd left, the rest of her date with JD had seemed a little dull and a little flat, like the life had gone out of the evening.

"Yeah, I remember that. I also distinctly remember you talking about an EX-wife."

"Because that's how I've thought of her for years. The marriage hadn't been a real one." He sighed, willing her to understand. "I explained to you that there had been a relationship at times, but it was never one that would have led to a marriage if it hadn't been absolutely necessary. Later, when my life changed, when I got out of my previous type of …employment…I just put it all behind me. It didn't matter, because in my mind I wasn't going to ever be in a position to care whether or not I was legally married. Alex had her own life. She knew where I was and if she had ever needed to end the marriage legally, I certainly wouldn't have stood in her way."

Nico looked Dani in the eye, trying to judge how to explain this next part. "A little over a year ago… about the time that Marshall Pittman died…I began to realize that I needed to somehow put my personal life in order. Hell, at that point did I even have a personal life? Work and sleep, that was pretty much it; everything else was purely incidental."

He took hold of one of Dani's hands, unfolded it from its ball, and began to slowly caress the back of it.

"But then it was brought to my attention very forcibly that I needed to cut some of the strings that I had to my past, even if I hadn't thought about them in years. That was the only way I would be able to …move on. One of the things I knew I had to do was to finally extricate myself from my marriage to Alex, to actually make her an ex-wife."

Dani pulled her hand away. "And this was around the time that Marshall died, Nico?" Her voice was a little faint, a little uncertain, so unlike her usual confident tone.

"Yes." His eyebrows quirked up in that patented Nico quizzical look, as he wondered what had caused the change in her manner. Once he'd mentioned the timeline, he'd been so sure that she'd make the obvious connection.

Dani was silent, trying to find a way to put her question so it didn't sound all jealous and needy. No way to do that, she finally realized.

"So, was it because of Gabrielle? Marshall was dead and you could be with Gabrielle? You wouldn't be betraying your best friend, and you'd been in love with her for all those years – how many? 20 something? – and now if only you were legally free to make her your wife.."

"STOP! Dani, what the hell! None of this has anything to do with Gabrielle! Or ever did have anything to do with her. And if you recall, the Pittmans were divorced by then, so if I'd wanted to have anything more to do with Gabrielle, I didn't need to wait for Marshall's death to…to… jump into her bed! So why would you even think that?!"

"Because you never said that you weren't still in love with her. That night in my car when you told me about your relationship with Gabrielle, I asked you if you were still in love with her, and you said nothing at all, but I knew what your silence meant. It meant that you were still in love with her but you didn't want to tell me, because maybe you were a little ashamed, maybe you thought I'd think less of you, maybe…"

"Jesus Christ, Dani, you'll be the death of me! I didn't know that your psychology training included mind reading." He pulled her into his embrace and began rubbing his hands up and down her back. Dani shivered, just like she always did when she got this close to Nico.

"I didn't answer when you asked me that partly because it's just a habit I have – one I know I'm going to have to break, at least with you, so that my silence doesn't send you running off with hare-brained interpretations of your own. But mostly, I just needed to process what we'd discussed, run it through my head, and understand what had been right in front of me for a long time.

"If you'd pressed me for answer that night" he gave a little chuckle, "if I'd allowed myself to be pressed, I probably would have told you that I didn't love Gabrielle, that I hadn't for years, and that I wondered if what I'd thought was love all those years wasn't some strange addiction brought on by the fact that I'd lost her to Marshall. When that had happened, I'd only dealt with the fact of it, and never considered what it revealed about Gabrielle's character. No, that part took me another 20 years," he said ruefully.

Nico moved back a little from Dani so that he could look her in the eye.

"Last year, when I decided to finally end my sham of a marriage to Alex, I never gave a thought to Gabrielle "

"Then why …then?"

It puzzled him how the normally perspicacious Dr. Santino could sometimes be so obtuse.

"Dani, we only ever talked about it in those damned four-word sentences, but I can't believe that you've forgotten what happened on your back porch the night they found Marshall's body. My God, we were…I was…" He shook his head, unable to even verbalize his astonishment at the intensity of the passion that had swept them both nearly to her bedroom, and had ended only with that phone call about Ray Jay's arrest.

Dani blushed, vividly remembering her almost wanton behavior that night with a man she had, up to that point, considered just a friend. And then the penny dropped, and a smile lit her face.

"It was because of that… because of me?"

Nico shook his head and smiled at her softly. "Of course it was, even though I didn't have any idea what to do about you… didn't know if there was any chance at all that I could persuade you to let me into your life. But I knew I had to disentangle my past if I was ever going to have any kind of future.

"So I decided to start the process of divorcing Alex. You have to understand, at that time I hadn't actually seen Alex in almost 10 years, and I hadn't heard from her in nearly 5. But it wasn't until I started looking for her that I realized there was going to be a problem. I needed her signature if I was going to be able to get a no-fault divorce, which would be the quickest way to end the marriage. But I couldn't find her. I just couldn't goddamn find her!"

Nico shook his head and ran his hands over his face, his normally calm manner deserting him as he remembered again the frustration he'd felt when after several weeks of searching, all his connections and all his resources had been unable to locate Alex Careles. By that point, his primary reason for wanting to end his marriage of convenience had become somewhat less compelling, but he'd still recognized the need to put that part of his life behind him.

He laughed ruefully. "I finally did manage to locate Alex, after I was working as a…uh…consultant for the FBI, but before you came to work at V3. By that time she had been picked up by ICE and was about to be deported.

"And here is the irony. While researching me so that they could use certain… irregularities…in my background to force me into working for them, the FBI discovered that I was trying to find Alex. While I have good resources, they don't compare with the U.S. government, so they were actually able to locate her.

"Turns out the reason she had been keeping such a low profile was that she was desperately trying to stay one step ahead of Immigration. When my search brought her to the feds' attention, it wasn't long before they picked her up. So basically, I led them right to her, Dani, a situation that I was not happy about.

"Agent Bennett was able to both delay her deportation and get me in to see her. I brought the divorce papers with me and asked her to sign them right then. She didn't have any objection, really, but she just wouldn't commit to signing them immediately. I know she saw me as her one chance of avoiding deportation, and I promised to try to help her with that. I gave her an envelope to mail the papers to me at V3 if she ever decided to sign them. She promised she would, if I could somehow get her a green card so that she could stay in this country.

"The day that I gave Agent Bennett the drugs from the V3 clinic, he told me that ICE had released Alex. I expected her to mail me the signed papers. It's one of the reasons I wanted to stay at V3 for a while. I was expecting those damned divorce paper – signed – and my interest in having them in hand had become, by that point, my highest priority."

Nico looked at her intently, and Dani didn't pretend to misunderstand.

"Never in a million years did I expect her to just show up at V3. Besides the pain that I know it caused you, there was every possibility that it would somehow blow my cover. No matter what went down with the investigation, I never wanted anyone to discover that the feds had planted me in that organization. It would not have enhanced my reputation. Since I passed on the Dallas job, I never did give V3 my notice. So…I don't know…I seem to be still employed, so maybe my cover is still intact."

"And the divorce papers?" Dani asked. Her priority was pretty clear.

"Alex gave them to me when I dropped her off at the airport. Having my attorney file them with the court was at the top of my priority list. He phoned me to confirm they were filed yesterday."

Dani sat there silently for a minute, while Nico waited.

"So you're divorced? No wife? No marriage, convenient or otherwise?

"I am a single man," Nico smiled at her.

"Hey, buddy, I don't think so," she squinted up at him.

Nico chuckled, and leaned over to kiss her softly. It was a simple kiss, just a brushing of his lips on hers, a need to maintain connection. In her relief, Dani instinctively tried to deepen and prolong the kiss, but Nico reluctantly pulled away with a sigh.

"No time right now, we're on a schedule." He moved back from her, dropping his hands from her shoulders. "To be continued."

"OK," she laughed. "I'm going to hold you to that!"

Nico looked down at their hands, and then up at her, and Dani knew that there was still something else that he wanted to say. She could see how difficult it was for him to just freely offer information. It was a moment she was familiar with; it happened all the time with her patients. A little bit of Dr. Dani kicked in as she sat and waited for him to decide how to continue.

"You know, Dani, I wanted to tell you about Alex, considered doing so on more than one occasion, but it just never seemed to be the right time. Things were always so …tentative…between us, even more so over the past 6 months. Lately…well, I hoped that there'd be a good reason that you'd need to know, but I was waiting for a certain comfort level in bringing up the subject." He laughed ruefully. "I didn't want to lie, but I also didn't want to admit that I was still legally married. So I thought if I just waited long enough, I could truthfully tell you about my ex-wife. I wanted to control the information, control the situation. You know me, Dani, it's what I do.

"And then everything happened so fast that night. I'd reached a level of frustration about…our situation, a point where I just needed to know." He paused and shook his head, still amazed. "Only in my wildest fantasies did I ever think that you would kiss me like that, that you would just be there so suddenly, after sitting on that fence for so damned long. But I guess I should have known, because the Dani Santino I know is either all in or all out."

His look became a little smug then, a ghost of a smile hovering around his mouth, "I don't recall that you were much interested in conversation after that."

Her face a study in embarrassment, Dani remembered her impetuous decision to stop fighting it and just let it happen already. She recalled reaching the top of the stairs and wondering if Nico had even followed her. It seemed funny now. She hadn't even made it to her bedroom door before he'd swept her into his arms in a scorching kiss.

Bliss.

They'd tried to talk to each other that night; it was what they were good at. But somehow other…activities…kept interrupting. They'd both been so damned happy that they couldn't keep the smiles off their faces. And every smile had led to a caress, every caress to a kiss - and then neither one of them had been inclined toward conversation.

"So are we good, Dani? About Alex, I mean?" His expression, as always, gave nothing away, but she knew him well enough to know that there was tension beneath that calm surface and behind that simple question.

Dani took her time, wanting to be sure before she answered. Nico had told her the whole story, and he deserved to know she wouldn't bring it up again.

"Yeah, Nico, we're good. In fact, we're very, very good." She grinned happily.