You Kept the Don’s Daughter Waiting and Now She’s Someone Else’s Chapter 07

You Kept the Don’s Daughter Waiting and Now She’s Someone Else’s Chapter 07

In the car, Hooked down at the bouquet in my arms.

The one Luca had just handed me.

The flowers were still fresh.

But suddenly it felt absurd.

I’d been holding it, waiting for him to walk toward me.

But he’d stood beside Coral instead, holding her makeup bag.

Damon reached over and took the bouquet from me.

I looked up.

He rolled down the window and handed it to a woman on the sidewalk who was holding a toddler.

“Ma’am, these are for you.”

The woman blinked, then broke into a smile. “Oh my-thank you! Wish you a happy wedding!”

Damon nodded with perfect seriousness. “We will be.”

The window rolled back up.

Damon reached beside his seat and pulled out another bouquet.

White roses and lilies of the valley, with pale pink freesias tucked into the center.

My favorite flowers.

Years ago, I’d said it once offhandedly.

“Lilies of the valley look like little bells. It’d be fantastic to hold them at a wedding.”

We were seventeen then.

Damon was leaning against the back wall of the school, a lollipop in his mouth, laughing at me.

“Nina, you’re way too young to be thinking about weddings.”

I glared at him. “I can’t even think about it?”

He shrugged lazily. “Sure. When you get married, I’ll buy you a whole truckload of lilies of the valley.”

I rolled my eyes. “Who asked you to?”

Now that bouquet sat in my hands.

I couldn’t quite find my voice.

The car pulled onto the main road.

Sunlight streamed through the window, falling across Damon’s shoulder.

I looked at him and finally spoke.

“I didn’t think you’d actually come.

Damon turned his head to look at me.

His eyes were dark, the corners slightly tilted up. Still that same mischievous look when we were kids.

But his gaze was serious.

“Why wouldn’t I? I’d already made up my mind to crash your wedding. Then it turned out I didn’t have to crash it.”

He smiled. “Even better.”

My fingers tightened around the bouquet.

The truth was, I’d known Damon long before I ever knew Luca.

Usually, we lived in the same apartment building downtown. I’d only come back to the estate for the

wedding today.

I was on the third floor, he was on the fourth.

When I was little and my mom was busy, she’d send me up to Damon’s for dinner.

His mother always set aside an extra plate of pasta for me.

Damon was a year older, and he’d been a little jerk from the start.

When I first learned to write, he tricked me into scribbling “Damon is the hottest guy in the world” on my

homework.

I cried and tattled.

His dad gave him a hiding, and the next day he stuffed a box of colorful erasers into my backpack.

In elementary school, some boy pulled my pigtails.

Damon cornered him behind the playground, and then no one messed with me.

But I never found out what he said back then.

4M

In middle school, I was terrible at math.

He’d knock on my door every night with his workbook and sit beside me.

Every time I got a problem wrong, he’d tap the table with his pen.

“Nina, is that brain of yours just for decoration?”

I’d kick him.

He’d dodge, then write out the correct solution in neat steps.

When I was stressing over the SATs, hiding in the stairwell crying, he sat down next to me and handed me a yogurt drink.

“Nina. Don’t be scared. No matter where you get in, I’ll find you.”

Later, I went to Harvard.

Junior year, Damon went abroad.

The night before he left, he called me downstairs.

He stood under the streetlamp, his shadow stretching long behind him.

He said, “Nina. I like you.

I was frozen for a long time.

Not because I didn’t know. I’d felt it, vaguely, all along.

But I’d just gotten together with Luca back then.