notch. Challenging him was a mistake. It was an exercise in bashing herself against bulletproof glass with no hope of reaching whatever was inside. She knew that from the few times she had been desperate enough to try getting in touch, to plead her case, only to be shut out.
At least she was in a better place these days, even though it was still a precarious one. Her brother was looking after himself now, if barely scraping by under student loans. Her being jobless and homeless didn’t mean he would be without food and shelter, as well. She actually had a place to go to now that her own life had imploded again.
That meant she didn’t have anything left to lose in standing up to Dante. She dropped her arms and lifted her chin.
“Are you accusing me of somehow causing your grandmother’s asthma so I could call for treatment?”
“No. But I think you recognized her and took advantage of an opportunity.”
“To do what? Be kind? Yes. Guilty!”
“To get on my good side.”
“You have one?”
He didn’t move, but his granite stillness was its own threat, one that made a dangerous heat coil through her middle and sent her pulse racing.
“You haven’t seen my bad one. Yet.” Then, in a surprisingly devastating move, he added, “Cami.”
She felt hammered to the floor then, all of her reverberating with the impact of his saying her name. A flash in his eyes told her he knew exactly how she was reacting, which made it all the more humiliating.
Sharma chose that moment to knock, forcing her to collect her bearings. Cami had to brush by him, which caused him to move farther into her apartment. Her whole body tingled with awareness, mind distracted by thoughts of his gaze touching her few things, casting aspersions over them. Why did she even care how little he thought of her?
“Hi,” Sharma said with a big smile.
Cami had actually forgotten between one moment and the next who she was expecting. Her own baffled, “Hi,” reflected how out of sorts she was, making Sharma give her a look of amused curiosity.
“Everything okay? Oh, you have company.” Intrigue lit her gaze, and she waved at Dante. “Hi. Are you our new neighbor?”
Cami caught back a choke. The Dante Gallos of the world didn’t live in places like this. He’d probably wipe his feet on the way out.
“He’s just visiting.” Flustered, she set a brown bag of cookies on a small box of dishes she wasn’t keeping, but that Sharma’s young family might find useful, and returned Sharma’s keys at the same time. “Thanks for the car today.”
“It was bad enough you were moving out of the building. You can’t leave town,” Sharma said, making a sad face as she accepted the box. “What happened with the job?”
“I’ll explain later.” Cami waved a hand to gloss past the question, not willing to get into it with the demigod of wrath looming behind her, skewering her so hard with his bronze laser vision she felt it like a pin in her back. She was a butterfly, squirming under his concentrated study, caught and dying for nothing because her plain brown wings wouldn’t even hold his attention for long.
Sharma’s gaze slid over to him and back as if she knew Dante had something to do with it. “Okay, well, nice to meet you.” She waved at Dante, then said to Cami, “Gotta run to get Milly, but say goodbye before you leave.”
“I will.”
As she closed the door, Cami ran through all the should-have-saids she’d conjured last night, as she had replayed her interchange with Dante in his office. Through it all, she had wished she could go back and change a decade’s worth of history, all to no avail.
No matter what threats he was making, however, she knew this was a chance to salvage something. To appeal to whatever reasonable side he might possess. Maybe. Or not. Perhaps talking to him would make matters worse.
Still, she had to make him see she was trying to make amends and hopefully ease this grudge he had. It was killing her on every level; it really was.
* * *
As Dante waited out Cami Fagan’s chat with her neighbor, his brain was still clattering with all the train cars that had derailed and piled up, one after another, starting with the news her father was dead—which had been strangely jarring.
Initially, before their association had gone so very wrong, he’d looked on Stephen Fagan as a sort of mentor. Dante’s grandfather had been a devoted surrogate after Dante’s father died, and an excellent businessman willing to bet on his grandson, but he hadn’t had the passion for electronics that Dante possessed.
He’d found that in Stephen, which was why he had trusted him so implicitly and felt so betrayed by his crime. Maybe he’d even believed, in the back of his mind, that one day he would have an explanation from the man he’d thought of as a friend. Damaging as the financial loss had been, the real cost had been his faith in his own judgment. How had he been so blind? Something in him had always longed for a chance to hear Stephen’s side of it, to understand why he would do something so cold when Dante had thought they were friends.
Hearing Stephen was dead had been... Well, it hadn’t been good, despite his claim otherwise. It had been painful, stirring up the other more devastating loss he’d suffered back then. All the losses that had come at once.
As he’d been processing that he would never get answers from Stephen, someone had knocked insistently, informing him his grandmother was unwell. Rushing outside, what had he found?
Cami.
In the confusion, she’d slipped away, but she’d stayed on his mind all the while his grandmother was treated. The moment she had recovered, his grandmother became adamant that she thank the young woman who had helped her.
Back when she’d been grieving the loss of her husband, Dante hadn’t dared make things worse by revealing how he’d put the family’s security in jeopardy. It was one of the reasons he hadn’t pressed charges against Stephen—to keep his grandmother and the rest of the family from knowing the extent of their financial woes. He hadn’t wanted anyone worrying more than they already were.
Instead, with the help of his cousin, he’d worked like a slave to bring them back from the brink.
That silence meant Noni didn’t understand why he was so skeptical of Cami’s altruism. He didn’t want to tell her he would rather wring Cami’s neck than buy her a meal, but he wasn’t about to let his grandmother go hunting all over town for her good Samaritan, possibly collapsing again. He also sure as hell wasn’t going to give Cami a chance to be alone with his grandmother again. Who knew what damage would be done this time?
So, after a restless night and a day of putting it off, he’d looked up her address from her CV and had come here. He’d walked up the stairs in this very dated building, wondering what sort of debts her father had paid off since he clearly hadn’t left much for his daughter, and knocked.
Then Smash! She had opened the door, plunging him into a blur of pale pink top that scooped low enough to reveal the upper swells of her breasts and thin enough her nipples pressed enticingly against it. Her red shorts were outright criminal, emphasizing her firm thighs and painting over her mound in a way that made his palm itch to cup there. The bright color stopped mere inches below that, covering the top end of a thin white scar that scored down past her knee.
He’d barely processed the old injury when she whirled away in response to a buzzer. The fabric of her shorts held a tight grip on her ass as she turned and bent to retrieve something from the oven, making his mouth water and his libido rush to readiness.
He had spent the night mentally flagellating himself for being attracted to her at all, let alone so intensely. Cami was beyond off-limits. She was a hard No. Whatever he thought he might have seen in the first seconds of their meeting had been calculated on her part. Had to have been.
She