Pizza My Heart
A Billionaire Romance, Part 2 of 3
Glenna Sinclair
Chapter 1
The gray ash faded gently into the tawny sand, and when the wave lapped the shore, I couldn’t tell one from the other, the water darkening them both, making them one.
“Would you like to say something?” Devon asked me, but I couldn’t turn to him, couldn’t look at him. I was mesmerized by the dust blending into the sand.
“It’s all right,” he said after I didn’t answer him. “We don’t really need words, do we? The waves say whatever we need.”
My eyes fluttered closed as the last of the gray became lost in the wet shoreline, and I listened to what Devon was hearing. Every time a wave came ashore and then was sucked back into the ocean, it was like a long sigh. I tried to breathe in time with the movement, tried to let the waves do my breathing for me, say the words I should’ve been able to say, but it was so hard.
Everything was hard.
It had been hard to find Nana on this very beach, dead, smiling at the very wave that moved now.
It had been hard to make a decision about arrangements, much easier to sit back and nod wordlessly as Devon made gentle suggestions.
It had been hard to come back here, at his suggestion, and harder still to open the cap of the urn and let Nana’s ashes vanish into the surf.
“I think she would’ve thought this was right,” Devon said gently, taking the urn from me, recapping it, and slipping his hand into mine. “Nana loved this place.”
I shook my head. This was too hard.
“I can’t do this,” I whispered, my words quieter than the waves that soaked our feet. He heard me anyway.
“That’s fine,” he said. “You don’t have to. Let’s go back to the cottage.”
But the cottage was just as unbearable. I remembered Nana on her last morning here, being sassy and drinking an alcoholic smoothie to help curb her hangover from the night before. I’d been shocked at her behavior, then. It had been completely out of character for her.
Now, though, it was starting to make sense. Maybe Nana just wanted one last hurrah.
“June.” Devon was at my elbow, waiting. Watchful.
“Can we just go somewhere else?” I asked him, still unable to meet his eyes.
“Of course,” he said easily. “Get in the truck.”
He drove and I lost myself in emotions. Losing Nana was like losing my parents and my grandparents all at once. She was all I had. There wasn’t anyone else in the world looking after me, now—even if I’d been the one looking after Nana recently. She had raised me, and I treasured her enough to come to Hawaii with Devon for her—not because I had wanted to.
Then she’d sent us out on errands. The sexual tension that had been building between Devon and me came to a head while we were out, walking around, alone with each other. We’d stolen away from prying eyes and handed ourselves over to blind passion—in an alleyway, of all places.
I felt guilty—and I thought it was reasonable to assume that I’d feel guilty for the rest of my life—that we’d been gone so long. We hadn’t gotten back to the cottage until the afternoon. I wondered whether we would’ve been able to catch Nana before she left the cottage, if only we’d been a little bit earlier in arriving.
She’d sent us away from the cottage just so she could slip off and die.
“June, we’re here.”
I looked over at Devon, who was staring at me expectantly, and I wondered how long the truck had been stopped. I’d had no memory of the directions we’d taken, no knowledge of where we were in this moment.
He got out of the car, purposeful, and I followed, dutiful. That’s all I felt that I could do right now—try to mime the words and actions of a person who wasn’t hurting as badly as I was. I felt as if a limb had been torn from my body. That’s how deeply I felt Nana’s loss.
I followed Devon around the truck and paused for a moment, my breath catching in my throat. He was leading us into a dense forest unlike anything I’d ever seen growing up in Dallas. It was a little daunting to be so small compared to the trees that towered around us, to be willing to toss ourselves into the small path hacked through the encroaching flora.
“What is this place?” I asked, feeling tentative, wondering if maybe I should just force myself to go back to the cottage, ghosts and guilt be damned.
“I came here a couple of times when I was shooting that movie Nana liked so well,” Devon explained. I flinched when he said “Nana.” I wasn’t ready to hear her spoken out loud. “It’s nice and quiet. A good place to get away from things. To clear your mind.”