she hadn’t told him about the dress shop. Or about college. His hand on her arm was insistent but not controlling, like Dante himself
“I’m not sure this is a great idea,” she said.
He stopped, turning her to face him. “Right now, I’m not sure you would know a great idea if it ran over you.”
Camille bit her lip and slid into his car when he opened the door for her. She would just have to ride out the storm. She was an expert at that by now. Heaven knew she’d had enough practice over the years. What couldn’t be cured had to be endured. She’d heard someone say that once, and it had become her personal mantra. But she wasn’t sure that advice had ever been intended to cover a situation like this.
“When were you going to tell me?”
Dante kept his eyes on the road as he drove away from the town square, and so did she. She couldn’t afford to look at him now, not if she wanted to keep her composure.
She also couldn’t answer him. The silence stretched out between them.
“You weren’t going to tell me.”
She shrugged. “You would have found out.”
“From who? Tallulah, the next time I had lunch at the café? Esther Jackson, when I went in the shop looking for you?”
“Yes.”
He took his foot off the accelerator, and Camille’s heartbeat sped up even as the car slowed. When he hit the brake, she clutched her purse in her lap and felt her pulse pounding in her neck. Dante swung the car onto the shoulder of the road and stopped.
Camille felt the tears pressing against the backs of her eyelids, but she refused to let them fall. He had a right to be angry. She was a coward.
Dante turned the key, shutting off the engine. Then he turned toward her.
“Do you know what I thought freshman year, the first time I saw you?” he asked.
That was the last thing she expected to hear. She’d thought he would yell at her with the same deafening roar he used on his football players, but Dante was as cool and calm as if they were discussing the weather.
“Freshman year?”
“My family had just moved here from Nashville. As far as I knew, my life was over, stuck out here in the middle of nowhere. But there was football. And there was you. When I saw you, I knew why God had brought me to Sweetgum.”
Camille stared at him, dumbfounded. “But—”
“That’s not something you say to a fourteen-year-old girl. I kept it to myself. But I knew.”
“Dante—”
“I still know.”
“Don’t bring God into this. That’s not fair.”
“Then tell me you don’t love me, and I’ll shut up.”
“That’s even less fair.”
“You think life is supposed to be fair? After all you’ve been through, you still haven’t let go of that?”
“I have to leave, Dante. I’ll suffocate if I stay here. As it is, I’ve been on life support for the last six years.”
His hands clenched around the steering wheel. “We’d be worth it, Cammie. We’d be worth your staying here.”
“It’s too high a price.” She wished she could wrap her own hands around something, anything to hang on to. “If I don’t go now, Dante, I never will. And I’ll always regret it. Always.”
She knew that with bone-deep certainty. And as the silence lengthened between them, anger, fierce and low, kindled in her midsection. Why couldn’t she get just one break? One time when things went her way?
Dante took his hands from the steering wheel and retrieved something from the front pocket of his pants. A box. Small, black, and velvet.
“Don’t.”
Her command didn’t stop him. He opened the box.
The ring was breathtaking, a square-cut diamond in an old-fashioned platinum setting. “It was my grandmother’s,” he said. “She left it to me.”
Camille couldn’t stop the tears. “Put it away.” Instead, he took it out of the box and reached for her hand. She jerked away. “Dante, put it away.”
“Just let me see it on your finger. Just once, Cammie. You can at least do that much.”
With her right hand, she wiped away tears while he took her left and slid the ring onto her finger. It fit perfectly. The weight of it terrified her.
“That’s where it belongs,” he said. He reached over and cupped her chin, turning her face toward his. She didn’t want to look in his eyes, but she made herself. The love she saw there frightened her even more than the feel of the ring on her finger.
“No. It doesn’t belong