Page 46 of With a Vengeance

They walked in silence, their steps slow and their pace languid. At one point, Dante’s hand brushed Anna’s, and, much to his surprise, she clasped it. As they neared her house, Anna drew closer. The clasp became an embrace, which turned into a clinch. Pressed against her, Dante leaned in for a kiss.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Anna whispered, even as her mouth rose to meet his. “It will only end in heartbreak.”

Dante swore that she was wrong.

She wasn’t.

“Why did you pursue me?” she says now. “Back then? You could have had your pick of girls, yet you chose me.”

Dante opens the nearest cupboard, revealing shelves neatly stacked with bowls and plates. He moves to the drawer below it. Inside are rolls of tinfoil and plastic wrap. “Because none of the girls were as special as you.”

“I’m serious.”

“As am I,” Dante says. “Very early on, I realized how amazing you were. That’s why I pursued you. Even though I knew my father would be furious if he ever found out.”

“Your father’s a terrible person.”

“I see. So what does that make me?”

“A heartless cad,” Anna says, making sure to inject the words with extra sting. Because only heartless cads are capable of doing what Dante did to her. The flirting, the wooing, the charm. By the time they shared their first kiss, she’d already been head over heels, although she made a point of trying not to show it.

After that kiss—that glorious, head-spinning, shudder-inducing kiss—it became impossible to hide her feelings from him. She was sixteen, madly in love, and mistakenly thought Dante felt the same about her. That’s why she behaved so foolishly for months. Sneaking out in the middle of the night. Meeting Dante in secret. Kissing him so intensely that her lips grew raw and her body ached with yearning.

Looking back on it, Anna realizes it was her own damn fault for falling so hard. That having playacted Juliet on the stage, she wanted to experience her own forbidden romance. One that should have been over when Dante, then eighteen, enlisted in the Army but ended up at Princeton by way of a previously undetected heart murmur. Instead of stopping things, Anna prolonged them by writing to Dante almost every day. Florid letters in which she bared her soul—and her desires.

She finally succumbed to them when Dante returned home on fall break. She remembers everything about that night in shivery detail. Alone outside his house on an unseasonably warm October night. His impish suggestion that they go skinny-dipping in the pool. The way his expression turned lustful when she agreed. And then everything that followed.

The pleasure.

The guilt.

The utter heartbreak when she never heard from him again, not even in the weeks that followed, when tragedy upon tragedy befell her family. The boy she loved had abandoned her when she neededhim most, taking her innocence with him. By the time her mother was dead and buried, Anna assumed she’d never see Dante again. Nor did she want to. She knew she was better off without him. Now he’s back, bantering with her as if none of that had ever happened.

“I’ve never forgiven you, you know,” she says.

“I noticed.”

“You just vanished. If I was so special, why did you disappear like that?”

Dante leans against the counter and looks at her in a way he never did when they were younger. Back then, his gaze always held mischief, lust, or a combination of the two. Now, though, he stares at her with clear-eyed understanding and, Anna hopes, regret.

“The way I treated you was truly awful, and I’m sorry,” he says.

Anna stiffens in surprise. She never expected an apology. Not from Dante Wentworth. “I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t need to say anything. It’s me who needs to explain why I behaved so atrociously. When your brother was killed, I wanted to go to the funeral, but my father wouldn’t allow it. I told him that you and I had been meeting in secret. That I was falling in love with you. My father didn’t care. He forbade me from seeing you again. He told me I couldn’t have anything to do with you or your family. And when your father was arrested, I started to think that maybe he was right, no matter how much I wanted him to be wrong. Only now do I know the real reason he made me stay away.”

“Because your father is the guilty one,” Anna says.

“Apparently so,” Dante says. “I know you’ll never be able to forgive him, with good reason. But I hope you’ll eventually find some way to forgive me.”

Anna thought she’d hate Dante for a very long time. Likely forever. But now that he’s here looking and acting the way he didall those years ago, she barely recalls the hatred. All she can remember are the times when she thought she loved Dante. Whether it was really love or merely a teenage infatuation she eventually would have gotten past, well, Anna never got the chance to find out. Now her mind races withwhat ifs. What if Dante had said this a dozen years ago? Would that have changed things? Would it have made her life slightly more bearable? She’ll never know, which is why all she can manage to say is “Maybe. Someday.”

That seems to be enough for Dante, who nods and says, “Right. Good. Until then, help me find some mustard. No man, no matter how hungry, should be forced to consume a dry sandwich.”

“Find it yourself,” Anna says. “I came here to look for something else.”

They switch sides of the car, where Dante opens the door to the pantry and scans the shelves. The top one holds baking supplies. Flour, sugar, and baking soda, not to mention the food dye used in the Phoenix’s justly famous red velvet cake. The favorite dessert of Anna’s father, it’s still served in both the club car and the dining room. The shelf below it bears other tricks of the trade. Salt and spices, distilled vinegar and canola oil. And, yes, a jar of mustard.

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