Page 15

Eleven

Eight cars away, Anna faces the only other person who remains in the first-class lounge, desperately wishing he’d also leave. More than that, she wishes Dante Wentworth had never boarded the train to begin with. It’s his father she wants here, trapped with the others in her meticulously woven web.

That Dante crashed the party shouldn’t surprise her. After all, it’s how they first met.

“I must admit, I’m impressed,” he says. “This is quite a plan you’ve cooked up, Annie.”

It takes all of Anna’s strength to not gasp. No one has called her that in a very long time. Hearing it again after such a long absence makes it feel like time has bent back on itself, shuttling her into the past.

“One you shouldn’t be a part of,” she says. “If you think taking your father’s place tonight will spare him, I can assure you it won’t. You’re only delaying the inevitable.”

Dante sits back down at the piano. “I’m not here to spare anyone. Least of all him.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I wanted to see you,” Dante says with such sincerity that it would have made sixteen-year-old Anna swoon. He always knew exactly what to say. He still does. But Anna has learned a few things herself over the years, including how to resist the charms of Dante Wentworth.

“What made you think I would be here?”

“The invitation,” Dante says. “When I found it on my father’s desk and read the message on the back, I knew you were behind it. You should have had someone else do that part, you know. I’d recognize your handwriting anywhere.”

Anna briefly closes her eyes, mad at Dante for noticing and mad at herself because he’s right. They’d written to each other so much back then. Letters filled with swooning declarations of love that will make Anna die of embarrassment if she gives them too much thought.

So she doesn’t give them any thought at all. That was a long time ago. In another life. And the lovestruck teenager who spent all those late-night letter-writing sessions searching her brain for words to describe how her heart felt is dead. In her place is a different Anna now.

Dante, on the other hand, seems exactly the same.

He’s older, of course, the hard living of his twenties giving him a touch of raggedness that somehow only makes him more handsome.

Especially when he starts playing the piano again, his face scrunched in concentration as his nimble fingers trip across the keys.

This time, Anna recognizes the tune. “You Made Me Love You.”

That had been her favorite song, back when she was in love with him. A time in which they were supposed to hate each other.

No one had explicitly told them that. Things didn’t work that way on Philadelphia’s Main Line.

People who lived where they lived and were as rich as they were didn’t have enemies.

There, everyone smiled and air-kissed in public while trying to tear each other to shreds behind closed doors.

But their fathers were business rivals, so it was silently decreed that the two of them should have nothing to do with each other.

Anna knew who Dante was, of course. They moved in social circles close enough for her to hear all about the charming rapscallion son of Kenneth Wentworth.

Enough for Anna to know that she’d probably hate him.

At sixteen, she was a hopeless romantic, raised on love sonnets and Shakespeare.

She had no time for the spoiled sons of local captains of industry.

It didn’t matter that she was the spoiled daughter of one.

Anna swooned over Laurence Olivier and harbored dreams of being an actress herself.

She’d even been cast as Juliet in her prep school’s upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet.

Then came her parents’ annual Christmas party, in which their house was flooded with strangers in formal attire, including a boy in a sharp navy suit and red silk tie.

Halfway through the party, he slid next to Anna and introduced himself only as Dante, either because he didn’t want to share his last name or because he knew he didn’t need to.

In Philadelphia, there was only one Dante worth knowing.

“I’m—” Anna started to say, but Dante cut her off.

“Oh, I know everything about you, Anna Matheson.”

Anna blushed, although she had no idea why.

Maybe it was the knowing way Dante said it, as if he had peered into her thoughts and seen her deepest, darkest secrets and yearnings.

More likely, it was because Dante was undeniably gorgeous.

Even though she’d been told he was handsome, Anna was still unprepared for the sight of the boy standing in front of her.

Those blue eyes. That swoop of dark hair that couldn’t quite be tamed.

The slightly crooked smile that alternated between awkward, devilish, and seductive.

Her beloved Olivier had nothing on Dante Wentworth.

Thankfully, Anna kept enough of her wits about her to say, “Surely not everything, Mr. Wentworth.”

“I know that we’re not supposed to mingle.”

“Our fathers definitely wouldn’t like that,” Anna said.

“Which makes the idea seem deliciously appealing.”

Dante took a step closer, and Anna’s world narrowed until it was just the two of them. It didn’t matter that they were in a crowded house filled with holiday revelers. All she could see was the beautiful boy standing before her.

As soon as she was fully under Dante’s spell, it was broken by the sound of Anna’s mother shouting across the room.

“You get away from him!”

A hush fell over the party as Anna’s mother stomped to a corner of the room where her brother, Tommy, was talking to a man she’d never seen before.

“I said get away from him!” her mother bellowed. “Don’t you dare talk to my son!”

Tommy, now the center of attention, tugged at his shirt collar as his cheeks turned crimson. “We’re just chatting, Mom.”

“I don’t care,” her mother snapped. “Go to your room.”

The focus of her mother’s wrath raised his hands in innocence. “I was just being friendly, Maggie.”

“That’s Mrs. Matheson to you. And nothing you do is friendly, Mr. Wentworth.”

Anna looked to Dante, noting the resemblance between him and the man being yelled at by her mother.

Both were roguishly handsome. They even shared the same crooked smile.

When Dante flashed his, Anna understood something she should have known all along.

The man was his father—and neither of them had been invited.

Dante gave a blithe shrug and said, “I suppose I should have mentioned that earlier.”

Anna said nothing in response. She was too upset by her mother’s reaction to Kenneth Wentworth’s presence.

Margaret Matheson never got angry. Ever.

Yet Dante’s father made her absolutely livid.

Anna searched the crowd for her father, finding him standing in the shadow of the staircase, watching the argument over the rim of a raised rocks glass.

“You need to go,” Anna told Dante. “Right now. Both of you.”

Dante bowed and said, “It was a pleasure, Miss Matheson. May our paths cross again soon.”

In the weeks that followed, Anna tried hard not to think about Dante.

But then in late January, during the first scene of her final performance as Juliet, Anna spotted Dante in the front row.

His presence threw her so much she momentarily forgot her entrance line and had to be prompted by the classmate playing the nurse.

In those first, fraught moments of her performance, Dante was an unwanted distraction, and not just because she knew he was watching.

It was the way he watched that Anna found disconcerting.

Completely still, his attention rapt, yet always sporting that crooked grin.

Like he was imagining Anna saying her lines directly to him.

And when she took her final bow, no one in the audience applauded louder than Dante.

After the show, he appeared backstage with a bouquet of roses. Presenting them to her, he said, “That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Despite all reservations, Anna was smitten.

Now she’s anything but as Dante continues to play the piano. “Are you going to do this all the way to Chicago?”

“Would you like me to, Annie?”

That nickname again. Her heart thrummed like a plucked piano string each time he said it.

“That’s Miss Matheson to you.”

“I remember when you used to call me Danny.”

“That was a long time ago,” Anna says, pausing to add a caustic “Mr. Wentworth.”

Dante beams, pleased by how easily they’ve fallen into that old familiar rhythm. While certainly not pleased, Anna isn’t surprised. He always managed to coax out her sharp wit, no matter how serious she tried to be.

“I assume that, despite Jack Lapsford’s blustering efforts, this train won’t be stopping until we reach Chicago,” Dante says.

Anna looks out the window, seeing that the train is running parallel to a river, hugging the curve of the shoreline.

Several houses sit on the other side of the water, their lit windows reflecting off the surface in golden shimmers.

They’re smack-dab in the middle of Pennsylvania now, Anna knows, moving steadily northwest until they reach the Ohio border.

From there the train will head due west, taking them across Ohio, through Indiana, into Illinois and, finally, Chicago.

“No,” she says. “It won’t.”

The wrong thing to say, because it allows Dante to continue playing. Anna sits, resigned, as he starts a new song. “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

“At first, I wondered why you were doing this,” Dante says. “It all seemed so complicated. The train. The journey. The—”

He pauses, searching for the right word, which prompts Anna to offer “Dramatics?”

“Exactly,” Dante says. “All the dramatics. When it would have been so much simpler to let the FBI do the work of tracking everyone down, rounding them up, and arresting them.”

“Like what will soon happen to your father? If it hasn’t happened already.”