“Jesus, why would she want to?”
“She loves him.”
“She’s an idiot.”
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”
He laughed. So simple. So stupid. These books were grandma crack, addictive and probably not good for you. “Have you read this before?”
She moved her head, no.
He flicked through the pile of books and magazines on the dresser. “If you’ve guessed what’s going to happen, maybe I should read something else.”
“No, finish what you started.”
He grinned. That was such a Buster thing to say. Keep trying. Finish what you started. Don’t worry what anyone else thinks. Be your own person. The phrases he and Dillon had grown up with. “You want me to keep reading this?”
She nodded.
“You just want to make me squirm.”
She gave a breathy cough.
So he read on. Antonio dumped Lucinda as predicted. Lucinda cried a lot and quit her job, so now she was both heartbroken and unemployed. Antonio suffered, which meant he walked around in a bad mood shouting at his employees and tearing at his boofy hair.
“He loves her, Mason.”
He looked up and grinned at Buster’s use of his full name. “He’s a bad-tempered bastard. He doesn’t deserve her.”
“Not yet.”
He turned the page and discovered another year had passed. Antonio was still a crank until the day Lucinda walked back into his life. She was all grown up, sophisticated and independent. She’d inherited money from a rich relative she didn’t know she had, and didn’t need to work anymore. Lucky bitch.
“This is where you tell me you’ve got a secret Swiss bank account and I’m going to be able to buy a yacht and a vintage Norton motorbike, after I start a business with Dillon.”
Buster frowned. “No bike.” And no secret fortune either. She wiggled a finger so he read on.
The new Lucinda managed to reduce Antonio to a quivering wreck by refusing to look at him, though secretly heartbroken, every time they ran into each other—which seemed to Mace to be every second page for no apparent logical reason.
“These two are ridiculous.”
“It’s love, silly.”
“If you mean love is silly, yeah I’m with you.”
“You’ll learn.”
“Not from reading this I won’t.”
They both laughed and he went back to the book. Antonio finally grew a pair and confronted Lucinda. This part was full of sentences Mace could hardly spit out.
“‘I can’t live without you’,” he spluttered.
“‘I would give up my fortune, my business, my world if you’d agree simply to smile at me like you once did.’ Freaking heck!”
And finally, “‘I do not deserve you, my darling, but I will dedicate my life to becoming worthy’,” after which he put his fingers to his open mouth and coughed to indicate he could vomit. “This is a train wreck.”
“It’s a happy ending.” Buster made an impatient go on gesture.