Breaking Him (Love is War #1)(56)

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.





CHAPTER





TWENTY-EIGHT





“Love is the whole and more than all.”

~E.E. Cummings





PAST


We were in my grandma’s trailer, on the sofa getting hot and heavy again, and every farther bit we went only led to more. It was a one-way street, the progression of it. Once the top was off, it came off every time, once the bra was off, it came off whenever we were alone.

I was straddling Dante and rocking against him as he felt me up, kneading at my flesh, and soon that was not enough either.

I pulled my mouth away.

He let me, but I could tell that he really, really didn’t want to.