CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
“You can’t buy love, but you can pay heavily for it.”
~Henny Youngman
PRESENT
As much as it was torture to see Dante, it was always sort of inevitable. A fact of life. At some point we’d find each other, clash again, and run away, trailing blood in our wake.
But Nate was different. I hadn’t seen him in years, and in my mind I’d never thought I’d have to face him again.
Also, he’d never wronged me. There was nothing I could pin on him aside from my own guilt at how I’d treated him.
I didn’t know what to expect. But if I’d had to guess, him walking up and enfolding me in a big tight hug would have been far from the first thing I’d have come up with. And that’s exactly what he did.
I was returning to the theatre room after a trip to the restroom when I ran into him.
I didn’t know what to say to him. I didn’t know what to do.
“It’s been too long,” he murmured into my ear.
Still recovering from the shock of him, I was only just then returning his embrace.
“How are you?” I asked him softly.
“Not too bad,” he said in that almost delicate voice of his that hadn’t changed a bit. It was a voice made for reciting poetry, soothing and lyrical.
We pulled back and looked at each other. I smiled tremulously at him. It really was nice to see him, particularly nice since he didn’t seem to hate my guts like he probably should have.
He looked close to the same. His angular face was handsome, his features symmetrical. He’d always been a skinny kid and he’d grown into a slender but graceful man. He was tall but not towering at just under six feet.
His blond hair was longer. He wore it in a kind of artfully messy way where it fell into his face, but it looked like that was the design of it.
I brushed one silky strand behind his ear.
“I don’t even know how you do it, but somehow you’re more beautiful than ever,” he proclaimed with his sweet smile, touching my cheek. He had a way of saying things with such vulnerable sincerity that you couldn’t help but be moved.
How had I ever thought that this sweet soul should be relegated to the role of casualty? Why had I thought that was okay?
Because Dante.
Because war.
Still, I’d take it all back if I could, if I’d had any clue the extent of the damage I was doing.
Nate held both of my hands in his and just looked at me for a while. “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you,” he told me.
“Really?” I asked him.
“Really. Truly.”
I caught Dante watching us from across the room.
I tilted my head to the side. The man still managed to fascinate me. Right then he was losing it. His hands were in fists and he was trembling.
Nate followed my gaze. He jerked a bit when he saw who I was looking at. “He still won’t talk to me,” he informed me wanly. “Won’t come near me, and he says that if I try to go near him, I’ll be sorry. I believe him.”
“I’m sorry,” I stated simply.
“It’s not your fault. I made my choices. I’m accountable. I love him like a brother, but looking at it with a bit of perspective, I don’t think it could be any other way. There can be no peace between two men when they’re in love with the same woman.”
I flushed and looked away. “I’m sorry,” I repeated lamely, a wave of guilt washing over me.
“Don’t be. The past is the past, and I’m doing much better now, I promise.”
“Yeah?” I looked back at his face.
“Yes. I mean it. I’m doing well enough that I wouldn’t mind a phone call from you every now and then.”
I nodded slowly, still studying him. “All right. I can do that. I’d like that.”
His smile brightened, and he took out his phone. “Tell me your number. I’ll call and you can save mine.”
I spouted mine off, and a beat later, heard my phone vibrating in my little clutch that I had draped crossways over my torso.
“Sounds like I got it,” I told him. “I’ll be sure to save it.”
He held one of my hands in both of his. “We’ll leave it at that. I don’t want to agitate Dante any more than necessary. I hope to hear from you soon.”
“You will,” I promised.
We air-kissed cheeks, and he slowly moved away.
Dante avoided me like the plague after that.
I was fine with that. It was rare when I got to observe him from afar, so I took advantage.
He seemed particularly standoffish, and not just towards me. Or at least, the majority of it wasn’t. His family got the honors on this particular occasion.
The way he looked at his mother when she came near him was almost worth being here for. I got an absolutely diabolical kick out of it.
She was a level of bitch that I liked to refer to as fuck that.
As in, upon seeing her, your best option was to say ‘fuck that’ and flee in the opposite direction.
Even at a funeral. Especially at a funeral.
I wasn’t sure what she’d done lately, the sky was the limit with her, but she seemed to have permanently alienated her only child.
I wasn’t surprised. She seemed to me to be capable of anything.
I honestly didn’t think I’d have a hard time avoiding her. She hated to acknowledge that I even existed.
I didn’t factor in the one annoying little detail.
I had something that she wanted now, and of course she’d figured it out right away.
She strode right up to me so suddenly that I didn’t even have escape as an option.
Adelaide Durant was hell on wheels disguised as a delicate flower of a woman. She was pale and petite with masses of pitch black hair and eyes the same ocean blue as her son. She had an ageless beauty that seemed to take less blows from time than was fair. If the smooth lines of her face hand been made of karma, she’d look like a withered old hag by now.
Her hobbies were golfing at the country club, playing chess, and ruining lives.
She was a master manipulator. Like mother, like son.
“Give me back my ring.” She got right to the point, her tone sharp with impatience.
She thought she could still intimidate me.
Didn’t she know she had nothing left to damage me with? She couldn’t hurt me anymore with Dante. He wasn’t my soft spot to wound anymore.
I smiled. Over my dead body would she get that ring in her clutches. “It was never yours. It was Gram’s, and she gave it to Dante, who gave it to me.”
“Give it back to Dante. It’s not right for you to keep it. Even someone as low-born as yourself should know that.”
I shrugged and gave her a rueful smile. “Nope. I guess I’m too low-born even for that.”
“You’re a fool if you think I will let that stand. Don’t you know anything? I never lose, especially not to a piece of trash gold digger like you.”
I looked at Dante, who’d just walked up behind her. “It looks like your son wants a word with you. I’ll leave you to it.” I gave him a bright smile. “Excuse me. I apparently have some gold digging—things—to do.”
Without an ounce of remorse I escaped to the theatre room.
*****
The screen in the theatre room had started to show a documentary about Gram, one of the few docs about herself that she actually liked.
Currently some TV producer was being interviewed. He’d just been asked about when Gram met Grandpa.
I had that story memorized. It’d been one of her favorites.
She’d been a bratty starlet who was too jaded to believe in love. He’d been the heir and grandson of the man who had founded one of the most successful department store chains in the states.
He’d set eyes on her at an industry party and become instantly smitten.
Here’s where the producer being interviewed went into detail about how Gram lit up a room, how she drew people to her like bees to honey, especially men.
But Grandpa hadn’t been just any man. He was beautiful. He was larger than life. And, after hearing her tell one of her famous stories to a crowd at the party, he was determined to make her his.
According to Gram and the pictures I’d seen, he was the near spitting image of Dante, so it was easy for me at least to see why she hadn’t been able to resist him.
And his courtship of her had been famously tumultuous.
Gram herself was interviewed on the doc at that point, with a soundbite about Grandpa. “He was the most determined, stubborn, ruthless son of a bitch I ever met. I didn’t stand a chance from the moment he decided he was in love with me,” she told the interviewer, followed by her delightful laugh.
My eyes filled at the sound.
“And when did he decide he was in love with you?” the unseen interviewer asked.
She laughed again. She was at least sixty in the video but still vibrant, still beautiful, still absolutely gorgeous with vitality. “Well, the first time he set eyes on me of course. Have you seen me?”
Even the interviewer was laughing at that and I was smiling through my tears.
“How did he court you?” they asked her.
“You name it. I couldn’t even walk into my house because of the flowers for a good three months. Little gifts sent to me everywhere I traveled, little thoughtful things that let me know he had bothered to learn my tastes. And of course some not so little things,” she wiggled her brows, “well they were little, but they came in light blue boxes from Tiffany’s if you know what I mean. But the gifts were just a small part of it. They were thoughtful and cute, but it was the man himself that was impossible to resist. He gave me his time, and insisted I give him some of mine, which wasn’t easy to arrange at that time, but we did it. And then—the way he looked at me when I told a joke, the way he smiled, and laughed, and always had a comeback that surprised a giggle out of me.”
“How did he win you?”
“By making me fall for him. How else? There are not many men that love the way he did. I just don’t think many humans are capable of that kind of devotion, but once you get a taste of it, especially if you’re a vain thing like me, it’s completely addictive. I didn’t stand a chance. He made me less jaded, less insecure. He softened me in a way that I needed at that point in my life. The industry has been wonderful to me, don’t get me wrong, but just then the harsher aspects of it were turning me brittle. He brought me back.”
I quietly got up and left the room.