After Thanksgiving, the year passed in the blink of an eye. I’d like to say my first holiday season as an engaged woman was special or memorable, but it was more stressful than anything else.
The weeks between Black Friday and New Year’s Eve were packed with work, social obligations, and endless questions about my upcoming wedding. Dante and I stayed overnight at my parents’ house for Christmas, and it was just as awkward as I’d feared.
“If Mom fusses any more over him, people will think she’s the one marrying him,” my sister Agnes whispered as our mother plied Dante with another drink.
We only called her Mom to each other and never to her face.
“Imagine Father negotiating that arrangement,” I whispered back.
We burst into giggles.
We were in the living room after our Christmas Eve dinner—my mother and Dante by the fireplace; my sister and me on the couch, and my father and Gunnar, Agnes’s husband, on the other couch by the bar.
I didn’t see Agnes much now that she lived in Eldorra, but whenever we were together, we reverted to being teenagers again.
“Girls, want to share what’s so funny?” our father asked pointedly, looking up from his conversation with Gunnar.
Tall, blond, and blue-eyed, Gunnar was my sister’s polar opposite looks-wise, but they shared a similar sense of humor and easygoing manner.
He watched, his expression amused, as my sister and I sobered.
“Nothing’s funny,” we said in unison.
My father shook his head with an exasperated expression. “Vivian, put your jacket back on,” he said. “It’s freezing. You’ll get sick.”
“It’s not that cold,” I protested. “The fireplace is on.”
But I put the jacket on anyway.
Besides marriage, my parents were forever fussing at me about wearing enough layers and drinking enough soup. It was one of the few holdovers from our pre-wealth days.
When I looked over at Dante, I found him watching us with narrowed eyes. I raised an eyebrow, and he gave a small shake of his head.
I had no clue what that meant, but my curiosity over his reaction melted in the whirlwind of Christmas morning (where Gunnar announced he bought Agnes another pony for their country manor) and the Legacy Ball and wedding planning that dominated the weeks after New Year’s.
Before I knew it, it was mid-January, and my anxiety had peaked to an all-time high.
T-minus four months until the ball.
T-minus seven months until the wedding.
God help me.
“You need a spa retreat,” Isabella said. “Nothing restores the body like a weekend in the desert filled with deep-tissue massages and yoga.”
“You hate yoga, and you once left a retreat early because it was too
‘boring and woo woo.’”
“For me. Not for you.” Isabella lay stomach-down on my office couch, her feet kicked up in the air as she scribbled in her notebook. Occasionally, a.k.a. every two minutes, she’d stop to sip her soda or nibble on a piece of dark chocolate. It was lunchtime, but she said she wasn’t that hungry, and I hadn’t had a chance to order takeout. “You should take Dante with you. It’ll be a couples’ getaway.”
I looked up from the Legacy Ball seating chart. “Aren’t you supposed to be writing the next great thriller instead of providing unsolicited advice on my love life?”
Sometimes, Isabella used my office as her office because the silence in her apartment was “too loud,” which I was fine with as long as she didn’t distract me while I was working.
“I’m drawing inspiration from real life. Perhaps I can write about an arranged marriage gone terribly wrong. The wife murders her husband after having a kinky affair with her sexy doorman…or not,” she added hastily when I glared at her. “But you have to admit, sex and murder go hand in hand.”
“Only to you.” I moved the sticky notes with Dominic and Alessandra Davenport’s names to the table with Kai. Much better. The last setup had Dominic sitting next to his biggest rival. “Should I worry about your exes?”
“Only the ones that pissed me off.”
“That’s all of them.”
“Is it?” Isabella was the picture of innocence. “Oops.”
A smile pulled on my lips. Her dating history was a string of red flags encompassing race car drivers, photographers, models, and, in one truly spectacular lapse of judgment, an aspiring poet with a Shakespeare tattoo and a penchant for spouting lines from Romeo and Juliet during sex.
The past year had been her longest break from men since I met her. She deserved it.
Dealing with men was exhausting.
Case in point: my relationship with Dante. Trying to figure out where we stood was like trying to find my footing on a slab of particle board in the middle of the ocean.
Isabella and I lapsed into silence again, but my mind kept straying toward a certain dark-haired Italian.
We’d kissed, and Dante had given me not one but two mind-blowing orgasms, only to shut down immediately after.
Nothing beat the humiliation of asking him for sex only for him to leave me high and dry. At least I’d successfully (I hoped) played the entire night off as a mistake.
A knock interrupted my inner turmoil.
“Come in.”
Shannon entered holding an extravagant bouquet of red roses. There must’ve been at least two dozen of them slotted into a slim crystal vase, and their scent instantly blanketed the room with cloying sweetness.
Isabella sat up, her eyes gleaming like a Page Six reporter who’d stumbled on a juicy society secret.
“These just came for you,” Shannon said with a knowing smile. “Where do you want me to put them?”
My heart leapt in my throat. “My desk is fine. Thank you.”
“Oh my God.” Isabella beelined to my desk the second the door closed.
“These roses must’ve cost hundreds of dollars. What’s the occasion?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. Surprise and pleasure warred for dominance in my chest.
Dante had never sent me flowers before. Our relationship had smoothed into one of civil cohabitation and the occasional shared late-night snack since Bali, but we still weren’t a “normal” couple by any means.
I couldn’t imagine why he’d be sending me roses now. It wasn’t a holiday, anniversary, or anyone’s birthday.
“Just because flowers. The best kind.” Isabella skimmed her fingers over a velvety petal. “Who knew Dante Russo was such a romantic?”
The pleasure edged out the surprise.
I searched the extravagant blooms until I found a tiny card with my name written on the front. I flipped it over, and my stomach plummeted.
“It’s not from Dante.”
“Then who’s it… oh. ” Isabella’s eyes widened when I showed her the note.
Vivian,
Happy belated new year. I thought of you at midnight but didn’t have the guts to send you this until now. Hope you’re doing well.
Love, Heath.
P.S. I’m here if you ever change your mind.
A cocktail of disappointment, unease, and confusion brewed in my stomach. Save for a Merry Christmas text, I hadn’t talked to Heath since the flea market. His sending me flowers made even less sense than Dante sending them.
“Love, Heath.” Isabella wrinkled her nose. “First, he shows up in New York and coincidentally runs into you, now this. Man needs to move on.
You’ve been broken up for years, and you—”
“Who’s Heath?” The black velvet voice wrenched my gaze to the entrance.
Charcoal suit. Broad shoulders. Expression as dark as his voice.
My pulse skittered into overdrive.
Dante stood in the doorway, brown paper bag in hand, his eyes glinting like shards of volcanic glass against the soft roses.
His body held dangerously still, like the calm before a storm.
“Um…” I slid a panicked look at Isabella, who hopped off the desk and scooped her bag up from the floor.
“Well, this was fun, but I gotta go,” she chirped in an overly bright voice. “Monty gets cranky if I don’t feed him on time.”
Traitor, my glare screamed.
Sorry, she mouthed. Good luck.
I was never letting her work in my office again.
She brushed past Dante with an awkward pat on his arm, and I watched, stomach twisting, as he walked toward me and set the paper bag next to the bouquet.
He flipped the note and read it wordlessly, his jaw ticking in rhythm with each passing second.
“It’s a New Year’s gift,” I said when the silence became too oppressive to bear. “Like the champagne glasses my mom bought us.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
I hadn’t cheated on Dante or purposely sought out Heath myself. I had nothing to feel guilty about.
Still, my nerves rattled like wind chimes in a tornado.
“These aren’t champagne glasses, mia cara.” Dante dropped the note the way one would a diseased carcass. “Nor are they from your mother, which brings me back to my question. Who is Heath?”
I inhaled a soft breath for courage. “My ex-boyfriend.”
Dante’s eyes sparked. “Your ex-boyfriend.”
“Yes.” I didn’t want to lie, and Dante could probably find out who Heath was with the snap of a finger, anyway.
“Why is your ex-boyfriend sending you roses and love notes?” The velvety tone didn’t change, but the undercurrent of danger rippled closer to the surface.
“It’s not a love note.”
“It damn well looks like one to me.” If Dante ground his teeth any harder, they’d crumble into dust. “What does he mean by change your mind?”
“I told him about our engagement a few months ago.” If I was telling the truth, I might as well tell the whole truth. “He showed up in New York and implied he’d be open to giving our relationship another shot. I declined.
He left. The end.”
Dante’s eyes were near-black now. “Obviously not the end, given this lovely bouquet he sent you.”
“It’s just flowers.” I understood why he was upset, but he was making it into something bigger than it was. “They’re harmless.”
“Some fucker is sending you flowers, and you want to tell me it’s harmless?” He picked up the card again. “Thought of you at midnight. Hope you’re doing well. Love, Heath.” Sarcasm weighed heavy on the recitation.
“It doesn’t take a genius to know what he was doing while he was thinking of you at midnight.”
Frustration overrode my misplaced guilt. “I can’t control what other people do or say. I told him I wasn’t interested in getting back together, and I’ll tell him again if he persists. What do you want me to do? Get a restraining order against him?”
“Now that’s an excellent idea.”
“That’s a ridiculous idea.”
“Do you still love him?”
The question came from so out of left field I could only gape at him until I rustled up the only word I could find. “What?”
“Do you still love him?” The ticking jaw returned with vengeance.
“We broke up years ago.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
I shifted beneath Dante’s heavy stare.
Did I still love Heath? I cared for him, and I missed the easy rapport we had. Our breakup had devastated me.
But I wasn’t the same person I’d been when we were dating, and time had dulled my heartbreak into a distant echo of what it once was.
When I thought of Heath, I thought of the comfort of being loved. I didn’t necessarily think of him.
But if I didn’t have to marry Dante, and I could go back to Heath without alienating my parents, would I do it?
My head pounded with indecision.
“It doesn’t matter,” I finally said. “I’m engaged to you, and I’m not getting back together with Heath.”
My answer only stoked the fire in Dante’s eyes. “I won’t have my fiancée pining away after another man before, during, or after the wedding.”
“Why does it matter?” My frustration bubbled over into a rush of words.
“You’ll get your market access and business deal either way. Stop pretending like this is a normal engagement. It’s not. We may have kissed and…and gotten more intimate, but we are not a love match. You’ve told me that time and again. You have me. But you don’t get to dictate how I feel or who I think about. That is not part of the agreement.”
Silence reigned in the aftermath of my rant, so thick I tasted it in the back of my throat.
Dante and I stared at each other, the air crackling like a frayed electric wire between us.
One wrong move, and it’ll burn me alive.
I braced myself for an explosion or yelling or some kind of veiled threat.
Instead, after seconds that felt like hours, he turned and walked out without a word.
The door shut behind him, and I slumped against my desk, suddenly exhausted. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, my throat tight.
Every time we made progress, we took two steps back.
One minute, I thought Dante might be developing feelings for me. The next, he shut me out like an unwanted stepchild in the cold.
The caveman in Geico’s old commercials communicated better than him.
What had he been doing here anyway? Dante’s office was a few blocks from mine, but he’d never visited me at work before.
My eyes snagged on the paper bag he’d left behind.
After a moment’s hesitation, I opened it, and my stomach dipped in the strangest way.
Sitting at the bottom of the bag, nestled between paper-wrapped cutlery and a plethora of sauces, were two takeout boxes from my favorite sushi restaurant.
