Breaking Him (Love is War #1)(35)

It was so familiar, something he’d done hundreds of times at least, that at first I just stared, my sensory memory at war with my current perception.

It took me a minute, but finally I managed to get out a quiet but firm, “Stop touching me.”

“It calms me, you know that,” he returned, his deep voice still rough with the storm of his temper. “I need to get a handle on myself before we get to the funeral home, okay? Need to.”

Who could argue with that? Apparently not even me.

But a few minutes later I was glaring at him again. His hand just kept inching higher. Now it was at mid-thigh, my skirt going up with it, and I knew he was doing it deliberately.

“Knock it off,” I told him, tone as scathing as I could manage.

With a smile, he took his hand away. Apparently it’d worked. He was in a markedly better mood.

“Did you want to speak at the service?” he asked me. “I’ll be getting up to say a few words.”

“No, thank you,” I replied. I didn’t even have to think about it. I couldn’t do it, couldn’t speak about Gram to a roomful of hostile faces. Oftentimes I flourished under the heavy weight of that contempt, but this was so personal. I couldn’t speak about her and not share too much about myself and in the sharing, expose my too raw emotions. Also, this was just the sort of thing that brought my stutter back. I couldn’t bear the humiliation if that happened.

Gram wouldn’t have asked that of me. It would have been enough for her that I was there, that I’d come home for her.

Dante didn’t pursue it any further.

“Who else is speaking?” I asked him.

“My dad, me, Father Frederick. We’re keeping it brief. You know how she hated funerals.”

I was relieved to hear his mother wasn’t speaking. She’d hated Gram, her mother-in-law, but she rarely turned down an opportunity to be the center of attention.

“There’ll be a short viewing,” he continued, “then the service, followed by a reception at her house.”

I’d figured as much, with all of the prep going on at the estate.

A short, tense length of time passed and suddenly we were there, parking, Dante handing me out of the car, giving me his thick arm to hold, heading inside, passing by countless, faceless black clad people.

I didn’t look at any of them. I tried to look only at the ground, determined to get through this without breaking down.

She lived a good life, I told myself. A long life, full of joy and surrounded by people who loved her.

But I already missed her. I wasn’t ready to let her go.

The viewing was unpleasant, seeing her for the first time like that, her face so still in death.

I wanted to remember her smiling and animated, her eyes open, and filled with mischief or delight.

Still, it was like I felt her there. I spoke to her coffin as though she could hear me. “It won’t surprise you that I’m not too keen about being back here,” I told her quietly. “Only you could get me into a room with these people, Gram.”

Of course there was no response, and the loss of her hit me anew, because there was so much I wanted to tell her from just the last few days alone, the last hours, things I’d only ever vent about to her. She’d been my shoulder to cry on for so many years, held so many of the secrets that I couldn’t tell anyone else, not even my closest friends, and it struck me then that I would never again have anyone who I could talk to in just that way, as a child does to a parent. She was the only adult figure in my life that had ever given a damn, and now she was gone, and I felt more alone than I ever had.

In a moment of utter weakness, I closed my eyes and set my shaking hand on her casket. “What am I going to do, Gram?” I asked her quietly. “I feel so alone in this world without you.”

Dante, who’d been a silent presence at my back, spoke then, “You’re not alone,” he said, his voice emotional. Intense.

I acted as if I had not heard, as if he had not spoken. Those words meant nothing to me, particularly coming from him.

“You were wrong, Gram,” I said softly, tone emotionless because I was resigned to the awful, lonely truth of it. “Love doesn’t save our souls. It kills them.”

I could hear Dante literally grinding his teeth behind me.

For some strange reason, Dante sat me next to him in the front row for the service. I didn’t have the energy to fight him on it, so I took my seat, glancing surreptitiously around at all of the familiar faces and the significance of where they were sitting and whom they were sitting with.

Predictably, I clocked Tiffany’s location first, but she’d placed herself so close to us, directly behind Dante in fact, that it was hard not to.

I almost moved when she first sat down, almost got up and made a scene, but something kind of wonderful happened to stop me.

As she sat, mere moments after we had, she perched herself on the edge of her seat, putting both of her delicate hands on Dante’s shoulders.

I had my head craned around to stare daggers at her. She was opening her mouth to say something, I’ll never know what, because we were all distracted by what Dante did next.

Without looking at her, without so much as acknowledging her, he pulled his shoulders out of her hands, leaning far forward to avoid her touch completely.

As he did this he glanced at me, his hand cupping the spot on my leg that had so soothed him earlier.