How to End a Love Story(80)

“Nothing, nothing,” he cackles, when she turns around quizzically.

Grant covers her pinkie on the counter with his own, and she looks up at him for just a second before they hear Owen fake a heart attack, put up a staying hand, and say as he walks away, “This is too much. I need to gather myself.”

Grant laughs and drops a kiss to Helen’s shoulder. Nicole lifts a brow.

“Well,” she says. “Hot.”

And she leaves too. Grant turns to Helen, and they both laugh.

“I think maybe people were invested,” she murmurs.

“Fucking TV writers,” Grant laughs. “They should know better.”

Tom and Eve arrive with a chocolate lava cake and Saskia brings bruschetta. No one says anything when Grant touches the small of Helen’s back, or when her fingers hold on to him until the last possible moment when he leaves her side to check the carrots.

When he returns, he rubs her shoulder and his hand travels up to brush the nape of her neck. Helen catches his hand automatically and brushes a kiss against it without thinking.

“Now, come on,” Tom says plaintively. “Someone else has to have seen that!”

The room bursts into laughter, and Helen feels herself laughing too as Grant loops his free arm around her and presses a kiss to the side of her head.

This is what it would feel like to love Grant Shepard, she thinks, and it aches.



After dinner, everyone leaves one by one, staggered, cheeks flushed with conversation, until only Tom and Eve are left.

“He’s going to gloat about this forever,” Eve says, and laughs, as they head to the hall. “He’s been telling me I don’t know what a ‘soft launch’ is for weeks.”

“Hey, you guys should come over for dinner,” Tom says, sounding slightly sloshed. “And if you get married, I should officiate—”

“Okay, let’s get you home, Tommy,” Eve says, and pushes him out the door as she mouths an apology at them. Grant shuts the door with a click behind them.

Leaving them alone together. Again.

Helen looks up at him, grinning. “Did you have a happy birthday?”

He laughs, and he can feel her laughing too when he kisses her.

“Helen,” he says softly, and he watches her expression go from hazy and dreamy to wary and alert.

“No,” she says. “Let’s not talk anymore.”

“I have something to tell you.” He nudges her gently with his nose.

“Unless it’s about—something else, I don’t want to hear it,” she says, and walks away.

He exhales and follows her into the kitchen. She’s cleaning up, putting dishes in the dishwasher, her hair in a messy, frustrated ponytail. He’s so in love with her it hurts.

“We can’t not talk about this forever,” he says.

“Sure,” she says, rinsing things. “We won’t be talking in a few weeks, anyway, so we can absolutely not talk about this . . . forever.”

“That’s crap and you know it,” he says, annoyed he sounds like a 1950s movie gangster. “March is right around the corner and neither of us is going to want to be done with each other in a few weeks.”

“You don’t know what could happen in a few weeks,” she says.

“It was a slow fall but a pretty permanent crash, Helen,” he says, and he can’t help the acid note in his voice. “I’m in love with you.”

“No, you’re not,” she says.

“Yes, I am,” he says softly. “It’s my birthday, and I say so.”

Helen shakes her head and walks to the opposite corner, out of grasp.

“You just think you are,” she says, studying her hands. “This isn’t . . . you care about me, but . . . some fucked-up thing in our past is what’s tying us together. We never would have started this otherwise, and you’re confusing the two things—”

“That’s not what this is,” he says. “This is about who you are and who I am, right now, in the present. Why won’t you let me just—”

She kisses him then, cutting him off from love you. It’s a hungry, angry kiss, and he returns it.

“Fine, then,” he says against her mouth, and he’s suddenly cold despite the kitchen heat. “It’s my birthday. Lie to me. Treat me like you love me back.”



His kiss slows and she pulls away from him. She’s staring up at him and there’s something crashing in her chest at his expression.

“Grant,” she says, and reaches out a hand to his face.

When she kisses him, it’s slow and deliberate. It broods into something bruising and searching in seconds.

“Is it so hard to pretend you love me, Helen?” he asks softly, kissing a trail up to her forehead.

“This is very,” she breathes, “melodramatic.”

“We’re artist types,” he answers. “Humor me. I’ll even take back what I said. I’m not in love with you at all, Helen. There, we’re even. Now we can both just . . . act like it.”

“Should I put on my best Katharine Hepburn?” she says, softly affecting a transatlantic accent.

“Yes, sweetheart,” he murmurs, returning it in his best Jimmy Stewart.