CHAPTER
TEN
“Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience.”
~Laurence J. Peter
“Oh God,” Dante breathed out as I closed the door behind him. “You’ve been baking? It’s like you knew I was coming.” He made a beeline for the kitchen.
“Oh yeah,” I drawled to his back, trailing him slowly. “I made all those cupcakes just for you, you narcissistic ass.”
“Are those German chocolate?” he asked. “Like you used to make?”
“Not quite the same recipe. I tweaked it a bit. Spoiler alert: The secret ingredient now is hate.”
He laughed, shooting me a sideways look out of his devastating eyes that made my traitorous knees go weak. “So you did make them for me.”
I gritted my teeth as he helped himself, but the truth was, though I hadn’t been expecting him, and emphatically did not want him here, I did want him to eat one. He had a surprisingly sweet tooth for a man with a rock hard body, and he’d always loved it when I’d baked for him. He and his sweet tooth was actually the whole reason I’d ever learned to bake.
I wanted him to taste and be reminded of one of the many things he’d thrown away when he’d ruined things with me.
Demi was hovering near the hallway that led to her and Leona’s rooms, looking back and forth between the two of us like she didn’t know what to do.
Dante waved at her, mouth full of food.
She glared at him. Or tried to. It was a baby lamb glare. She looked like she meant it, but it came across like a Disney princess trying to make a mean face for the very first time.
It was adorable and ridiculous. She was a soft-hearted girl, and she had my back, would muster up every meager ounce of hostility inside of her for the sake of me and protecting my notoriously hard heart, and I loved her for it.
“I’m good,” I told her. “I can handle him.”
“I know you can,” she reassured me, still aiming her princess glare Dante’s way. “I’ll give you privacy, but you holler if you need anything, Scarlett dear.”
I bit my lip to keep from outright smiling, because who wouldn’t smile at a twenty-two-year-old who called them dear? God, I liked her. I’d tried to fight it, but Demi was an irresistible sweetheart, damn her. “Thanks, hun,” I told her.
She left with one last adorable sneer at Dante.
“She seems nice. I like her,” Dante said when we were alone.
“She hates you,” I assured him.
His cupcake eating face was not one ounce offended by that. “I’d imagine she does. It boggles the mind, the things she must’ve heard about me. I assume everyone living in this apartment hates my guts?”
“Everyone,” I agreed blandly and unpleasantly.
He finished his first cupcake, grabbed a glass from the cupboard, rummaging around in my kitchen without a qualm, and downed a large cup of water with a few big swallows. “God, that was amazing. You haven’t lost your touch. And by the way, I’m glad to hear I must still be on your mind if your roommates know that much about me.”
I cursed him—a long, fluid tirade.
He didn’t so much as blink. “That was a lot of vowels,” he stated serenely when I’d finally finished.
His calm made my hellish temper boil up at an excessive and alarming rate. I looked away from him and tried to tamp it down. As I’ve said, I have a very healthy fear of my own temper. It has made me do some terrible things.
In my peripheral, Dante continued to watch me as he took a long swig from the bottle of scotch I’d been working on, grimaced briefly (his rich, entitled ass hates cheap scotch), and reached for another cupcake.
“What do you want?” I asked him, yet again.
He took his time answering, finishing off another cupcake, taking another long drink of my subpar scotch before saying, “Just give me a minute to enjoy this, will you? Do you know how long it’s been since I had one of your cupcakes?”
I did, of course. I opened my mouth to answer him when I saw him shrug his shoulders slightly and wince.
He was at an angle to me, and involuntarily, my eyes shot to his back, covered in a suit now, but I still knew what was under there.
He craned his head trying to follow my gaze.
I gave him an insouciant smile. “How’s your back?”
“Scratched me up good, didn’t you?
I shrugged, still smiling.
“I’m flattered you still have that urge.”
My smile died a short, violent death.
“What urge?” I asked through my teeth, mood plummeting to dark with a few careless words from him.
“I think you know the answer to that. You marked me up rather impressively, considering that I didn’t even feel it at the time. Your claws are as sharp as ever.”
I shrugged again. “Oopsies. It was an accident,” I told him, knowing he’d never believe it even if it was the truth.
His mouth twisted into a self-deprecating smile that I despised. “I didn’t mind. To tell you the truth, it was enlightening. I didn’t think you still saw me as your territory to mark.”
Point for Dante.
“Enough with the useless banter,” I gritted out. “Tell me what you came here to say and then leave.”
His smile died its own short, slightly less violent death, his whole face going somber again. “We should sit down for this,” he told me solemnly. “And go somewhere more private. Your room, I guess.”
I stared at him incredulously. Even now, knowing him as I did, the sheer nerve of him threw me off balance. So much so, I found myself leading him to my room, letting the devil even deeper into my sanctuary without much of a fight.
He made himself right at home, perching on the edge of my bed without asking, his eyes solemn and probing on my face in a way I couldn’t stand.
“What do you want? Just spit it out.” I shut the door behind me as I spoke, hovering in front of it, in case I needed a quick escape.
There was always such familiarity, such an unspeakable intimacy between us when we were alone. Distance and time had never dulled it. Even my outright hostility could not kill it, and I had tried my best.
“It’s not that simple,” he said in a bracing way that did indeed make me want to brace. “I don’t know how to tell you this. I don’t want to have to tell you this.”
“Enough with the fucking dramatic suspense. Just spit it out,” I repeated, less and less certain by the second that he was just messing with me because every note in his voice, every line in his body was telling me to worry. Something was very wrong. My rage at him, my enduring spite had let me overlook it since my first sighting of him yesterday, but it’d been there all along. He’d not been acting like himself because something was wrong.
“What is it?” I asked, voice softer now, tentative with a dread I could no longer deny.
He couldn’t look at me, and I took a step back involuntarily as I saw the light hit his eye and noticed a sheen there.
He was crying?
Oh God. Something was wrong. My hand went to my chest, gripped my shirt over my pounding heart as my mind flew to the only thing we both still shared.
The only person.
Oh no. Not that. Not—
“Gram is dead.”
Denial was my first reaction. “That’s not possible. Bullshit. I call bullshit.”
“You think I’d lie—“
“Yes. Yes, I think you’re a lying bastard.” I did believe that. I needed to believe it. It was a firm part of the very foundation that kept me going.
His damp eyes glared at me. “You think I’d lie about that?”
I didn’t. Dante’s gram was Switzerland. She was neutral territory. Sacred ground. Even with us.
“I just spoke to her a few days ago,” I explained to him, as though it would make him change his mind. “She sounded fine.”
“It was very sudden. A fatal stroke. No one expected it.”
It all made sense suddenly. He hadn’t been himself for this little fucked up reunion. Not by a long shot. He was usually more of a bastard. When I took a swipe at him, he took two back, but this time he’d been reticent, talking about truces, letting volatile subjects drop.
No. Not Gram. Any loss but her I’d have taken with a stoic face and a hard heart.
But I had no hardness in me, no protection on my heart, superficial or otherwise, when it came to Gram. In my less than happy childhood, Dante’s grandmother had been the stuff of fairy tales. I’d always felt, and still felt, that she’d saved me in a lot of ways.
She’d been the only thing connected to Dante that I couldn’t let go of as an adult. She was too essential to me.
And she was gone.
I staggered where I stood, and Dante, predictably, wretchedly, was there to catch me.
I tried to shove him away, but he wouldn’t let me, pulling me to him, my face to his warm, familiar chest, where I gasped in and out, in and out, trying to fight back hated tears.
Breaking down in front of my worst enemy was not something I would ever give in to easily. It went against every ingredient that made up the sum of who I was.
Which just goes to show how weakened I felt at that moment, because I found myself clutching at his shirt, digging my cheekbone hard into the firm, plump pad of his pectoral.
Melting against him, I let myself cry.