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She’s a manipulative bitch, I told myself. She hides it better, but she’s just like his mother. She’s either lying or exaggerating.
“Did you spend a lot of time here when you were a teenager?” I asked, trying for a bland tone, having no idea if I succeeded.
I knew she’d spent some, I’d been there for most of it, back in the early days of my hatred of her. But the way she said it was the way I thought it, like it had meant more to her than the simple short trips when she’d come to visit.
She eyed me and, seeing something, changed the subject.
Either she couldn’t back up what she’d said or she wanted me to think that she was sparing my feelings.
It wasn’t hard for me to pick one, and I felt instantly better when I did.
“Did you see that Whitney Holloway is here?”
Well, she was certainly a good subject changer. That got my attention. “I did not,” I said succinctly, taking a long drink.
Whitney was another privileged trust fund baby. She was rich from birth, but for fun she modeled in her spare time. Barf. She also happened to be the woman Dante had started seeing immediately after he and Tiffany had called off their engagement.
Her tinkling laugh rang out hollowly. “We should start a Dante’s ex club. There are certainly enough of us floating around, right?”
That passive aggressive jab was meant to bring home the fact that we’d both had a relationship with him, and that mine was no more significant than any of his others.
“Oh look, speak of the devil,” she said with a smile.
I turned to watch as Dante approached us, looking ill at ease.
Tiffany met him halfway, throwing her arms around his neck as she rose up to say something in his ear.
Images of her wrapped around him assaulted me. Of them, together, naked and writhing. They were graphic, and I’d never get them out of my head.
Seeing him with her gave me that feeling again. My skin humming, bile rising in my throat.
But then—he recoiled from her, moving around her without so much as a hello.
Well, whatever he was doing with her for this twisted little trip, he was not playing the same games as he was with me. If I had thrown myself at him like that, I’d have been over his shoulder and carried to the nearest bed in about three seconds flat.
It was something, some sad sop to my ego. I made a vengeful note to use that against Tiffany the first chance I got.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
PAST
Tiffany was only a despised name in my head for years before I actually met the girl.
When her parents started sending her to stay at Dante’s house for a few weeks every summer, I was already solidly turned against her.
It is a fact that I never gave her a chance.
Blind hatred will do that.
Dante was kinder than I was, or at least that’s what I told myself back then. He tried not to hold their mothers’ crazy ideas against her.
When I first got wind of it, we were alone in Gram’s parlor right before dinner. We were sitting side by side, waiting for her to finish a phone call.
He had a hold of my hand when he told me the news.
I wrenched it away.
