Page 42 of Ache for You (Slow Burn 3)
There’s a bitter taste in my mouth. Must be all the tears I’m swallowing. “I know. I mean, from all the photographs I’ve seen, we’re like twins. As I got older, sometimes I’d catch Papa staring at me with this haunted look, like he was seeing a ghost.”
Matteo moves closer. Slowly, as if drawn by a force he’s fighting against. “Do you think that’s why the only pictures of you in the house are from when you were a child?”
Whoa. The man notices everything. I look at the floor, hiding my eyes, and nod. I think of the Polaroid of me laughing tacked to the corkboard in the back of the shop and wonder how often Papa looked at it and saw someone else in the shape of my face. How often he put it away, only to take it out and tack it up again.
How much pain it must have caused him.
“Hair as black as night. Skin as white as snow. Lips as red as blood.”
When I look up, startled, Matteo says, “That’s how your father described you. Like Snow White, he said, only too smart to take a poison apple from a witch.”
How can someone smell so good? How can someone be so beautiful? Look at him. He’s like a walking piece of art.
Then it’s like a switch gets thrown. Remembering how I let Brad’s good looks and pedigree blind me to reality, my voice hardens. “If there’s one thing fairy tales have taught me, it’s that the most tempting, perfect-looking apples are always the ones that are rotten to the core.”
He stops. We’re feet apart. His tone, so soft only moments ago, turns cutting.
“Question: How much of your dislike of me is actually about me, and how much of it is about your ex-fiancé?”
I feel as if he can see through me, like every thought I have is floating in a bubble over my head and there’s a gauge stuck on my nose that’s broadcasting my temperature. Hot
, cold, boiling, freezing, want you, hate you, about to cry. He sees it all, and it drives me crazy.
“My ex has nothing to do with anything.”
“Really?” His eyes do their laser beam thing again. “Because I’m starting to think you decided to hate me before we ever spoke a word to each other. I’m starting to think that look of disgust you gave me at the airport lounge when you first saw me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with you getting dumped at the altar.”
An atomic detonation of fury blasts through me. If I were Wolverine, this is the part where my long steel claws would unsheathe from my knuckles with a violent clang. “I never said I was dumped at the altar.”
Here comes that condescending eyebrow arch. I’d like to slap a blob of wax on that thing and rip it clean off.
“You didn’t have to. There are plenty of stories about it on the internet.”
My mouth drops open. I stare at Matteo in horror. “You googled me?”
His lips curve into his signature ruthless smile. “I like to know all there is to know about my business rivals. ‘The Lovelorn Seamstress’? ‘The Cast-Away Couturier’? So many clever headlines. Maybe you can use one of them for the name of your new shop.”
I’m so embarrassed I can’t talk. I stand there staring at him, my cheeks blazing with heat. I’m living that awful moment all over again. I can’t escape it, even thousands of miles away. In another country halfway around the world, I’m still the girl who wasn’t good enough.
I think I’m going to be sick.
“Maybe I did decide to hate you before we spoke a word to each other, and maybe I had good reasons. The way you walk around like the world should throw itself at your feet. The way you smirk at everyone, so superior. The way you look at women—”
“You,” he interrupts, his voice gruff. “The way I look at you, you mean.”
“You’re splitting hairs again. I’m sure I’m just one of millions of women you’ve given that look to.”
“Which look?”
He steps closer. Now we’re inches apart. Breathing each other’s air. Feeling each other’s body heat.
This guy has serious space issues.
I moisten my lips. His eyes follow the motion of my tongue. The smug smile is gone. All that’s left on his face is blistering intensity.
“You know which look. And step back. You’re crowding me.”
“No. I want to talk about this look you’re so upset by. I want you to tell me what you think it means.”
