Eight days after the incident, I finally woke up feeling good again.
In fact, I woke up and still felt as if I was dreaming.
Light filtered through the sheer curtains and pooled on the white linen bedcovers like liquid gold. Raffa had left the doors open slightly so the faint sounds of city life streamed in, the staccato of Italian conversations and the toy car honk of a Vespa. It was so idyllic I had to pinch myself to make sure I was truly awake.
Stretching the vestiges of sleep from my body, I noted I was still sore and stiff, but not nearly as crippled by the accident as I had been even two days ago. My throat was tender like a healing wound, but I didn’t feel pain when swallowing anymore, and my thoughts were unmuddied.
It was time to get organized and out of Raffa’s space.
There was accepting kindness from a stranger and then exploiting that kindness, and I felt dangerously on the verge of the latter. Raffa had fed me and given me shelter, but he’d also carried me to the bathroom when I was too sick and in pain to walk, read to me from Dante’s Inferno because I couldn’t entertain myself with a concussion, and even braided my hair.
God.
The feeling of his big hands moving gently over my scalp and hair had been the single most romantic and erotic experience in my life.
Which was depressing, really, but it was one of the many reasons I was on this adventure. To learn about myself in every way, including my sexuality. It embarrassed me a little to be a twenty-three-year-old virgin, but I’d never had time for boys. I was either too sick or working too hard.
Now I was free to fall for anyone I wanted, but of course I had to set my sights on the gorgeous Italian man eleven years my senior and wildly out of my league.
I sighed as I slipped out of bed and wiggled my toes in the plush Aubusson carpet. A full-length ornate gold mirror in the corner of the room showed my skinny legs beneath the tails of Raffa’s borrowed linen shirt. I raised the cuff to my nose to inhale the delicious scent of air-dried laundry and wondered what the material might smell like after a day spent pressed to his skin.
“Concentrate,” I scolded myself as I headed to the bathroom to take care of my morning business.
When I was finished, I tiptoed down the hall to the staircase spiraling up and down to other floors, straining to hear if anyone was awake and inside. A faint clatter of dishware from the first floor had me moving down the stairs, taking in the interior of the palace properly for the first time.
It was magnificent. Like something from a Disney movie. There was even an intricate fresco painted on the ceiling of the main floor that extended from a formal living room through a huge dining room and music room. Artwork I recognized from history books and museums lined the walls, along with some marble statues that had to be authentic antiques. Finally, I found the kitchen and, through two sets of open doors, a huge terrace where Raffa sat at a ceramic-inlaid table, drinking an espresso while he read the local paper.
I took a moment to study him in the rich morning sunlight because it was my first opportunity to really look my fill. And look I did because he was simply too lovely not to admire.
Even though I’d mostly seen him in dismantled businessman finery, he was obviously fit, with the kind of quilted muscles that left seams in his skin I wanted to trail with my fingertips. The sun turned his dark-brown hair to bronze and caught the pale maple of his eyes so they glowed like a predator’s, narrow and intent on something written in the newsprint. Those same big, tanned hands that had braided my hair made my throat dry as I watched them flex, the tendons in his forearms popping as he folded the paper impatiently and dropped it to the table with a dark glare.
For one insane moment, I thought getting chased through a wheat field and hit by a car was worth it to see such a man sitting there, as beautiful as any piece of art I’d ever admired before him.
“Something unpleasant in the news?” I asked as I moved forward into the doorframe. “How shocking.”
He looked up at me without surprise, as if he’d known I was there the entire time. The expression on his face was too bland to be called a smile, but there was amusement there.
“This is universal, I think,” he agreed, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “Help yourself to fruit and bread, but do not eat too much. We have things to do today.”
“Yeah, I was going to have a bite to eat and then go to the bank. I researched, and there is one in this neighborhood.” It was only a fifteen-minute walk, which I could manage easily even with a stiff hip. “I just have to call my parents to ask them to transfer me some money. Then I guess I’ll go to the police and file a report. It seems like I’d have to do that in order to get an appointment at the consulate for a new passport.”
Raffa crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and I noticed he was wearing leather loafers without socks. The sight of his olive-brown ankles shouldn’t have been shocking or sexy, yet it made my pulse pound. I wanted to reach out and touch the knob of bone and the plum-thin skin to see if he’d shiver.
“No.”
I blinked away the fantasy, heat rushing to my cheeks as I stared up into his implacable gaze. “Sorry, what?”
“No,” he repeated clearly. “I have a better idea. You will finish your breakfast, and then we will go get you some clothes. As tempting as you are in my shirt, I do not think it is appropriate attire for a police station or the consulate.”
I winced because somehow I’d forgotten that little detail.
“Maybe I can borrow a belt?” I suggested.
Raffa’s full mouth twitched. “That will do until we get to the stores, maybe. Do not worry about money, Guinevere. You may have noticed I am not exactly worried about it myself.”
I sat back in the wrought iron chair with a slice of melon in my hand and sighed. “I just feel like I’ve taken a lot from you.”
“Is it taken if I have given it freely?” he asked imperiously.
He should have been condescending, speaking like that, looking like that, but there was an unmissable warmth I couldn’t pinpoint to any one mannerism. It was obvious he liked helping me. That maybe he even liked me.
“I’ll pay you back,” I insisted. “My father raised me to believe it’s vital not to be in debt to anyone.”
“Smart man.”
“He is,” I agreed. “And I still need to call him . . . I sent a text saying I was under the weather, and they’ve been checking in on me. I didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily.”
They would have been on the first flight out if I’d told them what had happened to me, especially if I’d been forced to admit I was in Italy, and not France as I’d told them. It would have meant the end of my trip before it even had a chance to begin, and after everything—my illness, the years of anticipation, the loss of Gemma—I found it was the final straw I couldn’t allow myself to lose.
“You are their child. It is their right to worry.”
“Hmm, well I guess you have a point there.” Only, I’d never thought of it quite like that. I’d always been vaguely annoyed by, though always accepting of, my parents’ concerns and hovering.
They’d almost lost me twice to brutal kidney infections when I was a child and then had to watch as I underwent major surgery for a kidney transplant at sixteen. Then we’d lost Gemma, and whatever gains they’d made in giving me some autonomy had diminished like smoke in the wind.
“I’ll call them,” I told him, feeling properly chastised.
He shrugged a shoulder. “Do what you want. I was merely telling the truth from my experience. I do not have children, but you cannot grow up with an Italian mother without hearing how difficult it is to raise and love your children, then let them go off into the world on their own. She is always happier when we are all under one roof, and all of us are grown.”
I plucked a clementine from the fruit bowl and picked at the peel anxiously. “They’re going to flip out.”
His expressive, slashing brows rose. “Well, their daughter was almost raped and then hit by a car. Can you blame them?”
“No. But they’ll want me to go home immediately.”
Another flippant shrug as if he didn’t see the problem.
“So? You are a grown woman, are you not?”
“Of course!”
“Then, you can do as you wish.” He sighed at my flat look and leaned closer so that the sunlight caught both of his eyes and turned them to burnished gold. “There is a difference between respect and blind obedience, capisci? You can respect them by telling them the truth about what has happened to you, but you do not owe them submission to their desires. I do not know why you are in Italy, but does one not usually spend time abroad to discover oneself?” When I nodded somewhat woodenly, a little cowed by his wisdom, he leaned back in his chair and opened his palms. “Then, do what you want and only what you want. This time and this place are for you. It is rare we get so much freedom. Do not squander it before your adventure has even begun.”
I blinked at him as I chewed a piece of bright citrus. It was both eerie and wonderful that his thoughts so closely aligned with my own. Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was almost a perfect stranger, yet I felt more comfortable sitting there that morning with him on a terrace in Florence than I’d felt in most other places with most other people in my life so far.
“Are all Italian men so wise?” I teased finally.
Raffa’s slow, curling grin was wicked. “You have not seen anything yet.”
“Okay, Yoda,” I quipped, then hesitated. “Sorry, do you know Star Wars?”
“I am Italian, not an alien,” he drawled. “Of course I understand the reference, young Padawan.”
My grin was so wide it hurt my cheeks, dimples digging trenches into my face.
Raffa got up with a murmur about making me an espresso, and I tipped my face into the sun, closing my eyes to smell the jasmine blooming in the flower boxes along the terrace’s stone railing. I let myself wonder what it might be like to live this kind of life every day, waking up in a palace and having breakfast on the terrace in Florence’s most exclusive neighborhood. Instead of going to work at my father’s financial firm every day, I would bike through the streets to the Uffizi Gallery, where I could give tours to English tourists on the bevy of art and artifacts on display. I could come home every night to Raffa, tie discarded, buttons undone to his sternum to reveal the crisp black chest hair I’d pressed my nose into while I was too delirious with sickness to truly enjoy it. We’d cook dinner and listen to jazz and dance under the moonlight.
I snorted at my own silliness, shaking my head to clear it of those childish fantasies.
There was an Italian saying my father had told me, vivere nel mondo della luna, which kind of meant living with your head in the clouds.
My entire life, I’d been dreaming of traveling to other places and being a different kind of person. I wasn’t going to waste my opportunity now that it was here by fantasizing about something that would never happen.
Of course, that was easier said than done when Raffa drove us to Via de’ Tornabuoni, which I knew from researching Florence inside and out was the most exclusive shopping street in the city. I gawked out the window as we pulled up outside a large boutique and watched a uniformed valet move toward the car.
“When you said shopping, I was kind of expecting a Forever 21 or something,” I murmured as a gorgeous older woman strutted by in a pencil skirt and high heels that should have made it impossible for her to walk at all.
Raffa huffed something like a laugh but otherwise didn’t respond, getting out of the car to hand his keys to the eager driver. Before I could pull myself together to leave the car, he was at my door, opening it and then offering me his hand.
I blinked up at him dumbly because no one had ever opened the door for me, let alone helped me out of my car. My father didn’t even do it for my mother because she said it was antiquated and she knew damn well how to open the door of a car herself.
And sure, even recovering as I was, I could have levered myself out of the low Ferrari with minimal effort and much less grace.
This was just a much lovelier alternative.
I slipped my hand over his calloused palm and allowed his strength to pull me gently out of the car . . . and into his body. The hard length of his chest pressed against my small breasts, and the heat of him seared me through to the bone.
My mouth dropped open in an inaudible gasp as I tipped my head back to look up at him. He was staring down at me almost somberly, those copper eyes tracing my features. I was close enough to notice how square his chin was, the nick of an old scar white against the tanned skin at the corner of his jaw.
“Do not be embarrassed when we go in,” he ordered. “You are not the kind of woman who should wear cheap American cloth, and I am not the kind of man to buy it for you. We will go inside together, and you will let me buy for you what I want simply because I want to and it will bring me joy. You understand?”
I pursed my lips and narrowed my eyes at him. “You know, you’re really bossy, but it’s hard to take umbrage at it when you’re also being insanely generous.”
He gave me that one-shouldered shrug, like my concerns were beneath him and he knew he would get what he wanted in the end.
Why was that brand of arrogance so sexy?
Without another word, he shifted a hand to my lower back and pressed me forward to walk slightly in front of him toward the store.
“Signore,” a woman greeted him instantly when we walked in. She smiled beatifically as she moved toward us, hands open in greeting. “It has been too long.”
“Maria Lucia.” They exchanged brief kisses on both cheeks before Raffa presented me with a little push to the base of my spine. “This is my friend, Guinevere . . .”
“Stone,” I supplied, offering my hand to Maria Lucia. “Nice to meet you.”
She blinked at my outstretched hand and then dissolved into a warm smile, grasping me lightly by the shoulders to kiss the air beside both my cheeks.
When she spoke, her English was flawless. “Hello, Guinevere Stone. I see you need some clothing?”
Her gaze trailed over Raffa’s shirt, which was belted at my waist with a Gucci scarf and paired with my hastily repaired sandals.
A blush warmed my cheeks like a sunburn, but before I could open my mouth to explain, Raffa was taking my hand to lead me to the nearest display.
“Si, she needs a new wardrobe for summer. Is Maria Teresa working with you today?” When she nodded, he went on. “Good. When you have picked out some outfits, tell her I will pay her extra to go gather shoes and accessories for Guinevere while she wraps everything up here.”
“Raffa,” I started to complain when I lifted the tag on a linen dress and saw it was €1,500. “Please, I can’t afford—”
He lifted his buzzing cell phone from his pocket and raised a single finger to hush me. “I must take this. Maria Lucia, please ignore whatever protests Signorina Stone gives you, and if she is reluctant to shop, choose for her, capisci?”
Before either of us could respond, he turned on his heel and strode for the door, answering the phone with a short, sharp “Pronto.”
I blinked after him, then turned with a little wince to face Maria Lucia again.
She was grinning at me conspiratorially. “It is best, I’ve found, not to argue with Signore Romano.”
Romano. Well, at least I knew his last name now. Maybe I could google him from the changing room to find out who exactly my fabulously wealthy benefactor was.
“He’s a little overbearing,” I agreed with a sigh, trying to think about how much money I could afford to give Raffa for this designer wardrobe he was insisting on.
I had the ten grand saved for my trip, but some of that had already been spent on the apartment I’d rented and still hadn’t seen, and the few excursions I’d booked, including a day trip to Volterra to see the Etruscan ruins.
Now that Raffa had made an appointment this afternoon to expedite my replacement passport, I’d have access to my accounts again by next week, which was frankly a massive relief. Because it meant I didn’t have to divulge the details of my trouble to my parents.
I agreed with Raffa to a certain extent. They deserved to know I’d been really sick and maybe even hurt, but I wasn’t going to tell them enough to jeopardize my trip.
For the first time in twenty-three years I was doing something for me, and I wouldn’t give that up without a fight.
“Don’t stress,” Maria Lucia encouraged me with a gentle pat to my forearm. “Signore Romano is a very successful man. He can afford to spoil his ragazza.”
“Oh, I’m just a friend,” I corrected, awkwardly moving my hands as if I could erase the question from the air between us. “Not even a friend, really. He’s just helping me out.”
“Of course,” she soothed, but the creases beside her smiling eyes said otherwise. “Let’s get to work, either way. He is not a man who likes to be kept waiting. You are a size forty, I think? Yes. Do you have favorite colors?”
“Maybe just neutrals. I don’t usually wear bright colors.”
“Red.”
I jerked my head around to see Raffa coming back into the store, his phone still pressed to his ear, one hand covering the microphone.
“I don’t really . . .”
“Red,” he repeated. “It is my favorite color.”
Oh.
He turned away from us to speak into the phone again, pacing the front of the store.
I didn’t know what to think about him wanting to see me in his favorite color. It felt somehow inappropriate.
Intimate.
Like he’d imagined me in shades of red and found himself pleased with the image.
“Well then, we better find some lovely shades of red,” Maria Lucia said with a wink before gently leading me deeper into the store, chattering away about Gucci’s new summer line and Valentino’s to-die-for poppy patterns.
I let her compile an excessive number of outfits, all of them hanging together in the spacious changing room at the back of the store when she practically pushed me inside to try them all on. I wasn’t a fan of shopping on the best of days, but only because I’d never really gone shopping with friends or even my mother or sister growing up. Being ill so much had barred me from those little pleasures, and I hadn’t realized until now, trying on a slightly sheer black tank dress, how much I wished I’d had that time with Mom and Gemma.
Maria Lucia and Maria Teresa both cooed and exclaimed over me each time I emerged from the room to show them my outfits, fussing over me as they pinched the fabric at my waist and tried to prop my small breasts up more appealingly in low-cut tops. They’d pulled things for me I’d usually never wear in a million years: a citrus-yellow maxi skirt and white silk cropped shirt, a sunset-orange midi dress with a sweetheart neckline, and a long, form-fitting dress that made me look like I was dipped in liquid gold silk. Everything was too bold, too extravagant, utterly inappropriate for my simple life back home in Ann Arbor.
But even I had to admit, as I twirled in an almost backless white linen shift dress, that it was the perfect wardrobe for a summer in Italy.
Raffa appeared at one point, leaning against the wall across from my changing room with his arms crossed, a small scowl fixed to his face as if his features had been molded that way since birth. At first it made me self-conscious, but the Marias’ excitement was contagious, and when Maria Lucia took my hand and twirled me around in a red Oscar de la Renta, I laughed with her, spinning until I was dizzy.
When I stopped, wavering on my feet, breathless and smiling, it was Raffa who stood before me, the Marias silently disappearing back into the front of the store.
His hand was on my elbow, hot and firm, balancing me so suddenly I felt as if I’d slammed both feet on the ground.
“I knew it would look like this on you,” he said, and it was an intimate whisper, as if he didn’t want the shopgirls or other shoppers to know.
It was declarative. Bold as the shade of red cupping my breasts and brushing against my thighs.
“Like what?” I breathed, a little embarrassed that my nipples were pebbling just from his sure, platonic touch on my arm.
His mouth didn’t flex, but I noticed a softness around his eyes that was a microexpression of a smile. My mouth went dry as he moved his hand up my bare arm to the bow tied over one shoulder. There was a whisper as he tugged on one end of the fabric and it fell apart, the straps falling free, the bust of my dress dipping dangerously low over my left breast.
I wanted to say something, but I had no vocabulary for the shame and desire and protestations swirling inside my belly.
We were in public.
We were strangers.
This was not the way Guinevere Stone would act.
But wasn’t that exactly the point?
Hadn’t I yearned to feel the kind of fire I felt then, standing in a cool designer boutique in the heart of Florence with a man who looked like a real-life Adonis? Didn’t I secretly love the way that single brush of his fingers over my skin had razed my inhibitions to ash and resurrected a voracious hunger for him in its wake?
A deep, forbidden part of my subconscious longed to shrug the other strap off my shoulder and bare my breasts to his predatory gaze. To cup my flesh in offering, lifting each nipple so he could worship or torture it with his mouth, with the teeth that flashed strong and white when he flashed an infrequent, wicked grin.
Raffa’s hands slowly gathered the edges of the fabric and pulled tight, redoing the bow so it lay beautifully against my skin.
“Uneven,” he explained calmly, but his eyes were fixed intently on his tanned fingers tracing the edge of the red fabric against my pale skin.
“Thank you,” I said thickly. “But honestly, Raffa, I can’t accept even half of this. I just can’t pay you back for it.”
“You will not,” he said simply, dropping his hand as his brows dropped over his eyes. He stepped back, and I was both relieved and annoyed by the distance.
“You said yourself my father was a smart man for teaching me not to be in debt to someone,” I pointed out.
“Si, certo,” he agreed. “But I intended for you to pay me back, just not with something so silly as euros.”
I fisted my hands on my hips and leveled him with a cool glare. “I’m not a prostitute.”
A reluctant grin claimed his mouth, pink against the dark stubble all along the curve of his jaw. “Do not insult us both. I only meant I have a fundraiser at the Pitti Palace next Friday evening and no date. If you are willing to bear the tedium, you would be repaying me with your company.”
I snorted, forgetting my nerves and attraction in the silliness of his request. “Oh c’mon. You’re you. I’m sure you could have any girl in Tuscany with one snap of your fingers.”
Slowly, he raised his hand between us and snapped his fingers. “Oh look. It is the only girl I want in Tuscany.”
His deadpan delivery made me laugh, releasing some of the giddy bubbles floating through my belly.
“You know, your friend Martina confessed to me you’re never this kind to strangers,” I said, and told myself I wasn’t flirting, but I could practically feel the hearts in my eyes.
He leaned a shoulder against the wall beside us and crossed his arms again, muscles bulging beneath the blazer. A lock of wavy dark hair fell over his forehead, and my fingers itched to push it back.
“I am not,” he agreed easily.
I dragged my toe against the plush carpet and looked up at him through my lashes. “Why do I seem to be the exception, then?”
He actually considered the question, rubbing a hand over his lower lip as he studied me. Finally, he reached out and adjusted the bow he’d just retied over my shoulder, observing as my skin broke into goose bumps.
“Because the kindness does not stem from the good of my heart,” he admitted, voice rough and textured enough to abrade my skin. “The moment I saw you like a deer trapped in my headlights, I saw you with the eyes of a predator.”
I swallowed thickly. “Predators usually hunt their prey.”
“Si, but I do not intend to kill you, cerbiatta.” His finger traced the strap down to the sweetheart neckline and tracked daringly over the edge of my breast exposed above the fabric. I watched up close as his eyes went from amber to bronze, dark with hunger. “I only intend to eat you.”
I tried to swallow and almost choked at the dryness of my throat. “Are you hitting on me?” I asked, just to be sure, because this entire trip was dreamlike in a way I couldn’t shake, for good or ill.
A tiny smile cut into one edge of his mouth. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
“Allora si,” he said, curling his hand around my throat, using his thumb to tip my chin up. “Ci sto provando.”
Then yes, he said, I am.
Before I could truly process that, he was moving closer for a kiss. I pursed my lips slightly, eager to test the texture of his mouth against my own. But to my slight shame and disappointment, those lips only tipped into a grin and then pressed first to one cheek and then the other.
How could the simple brush of his mouth against my skin liquefy my spine?
When he stepped away with low-lidded eyes and a smug smile, I was as breathless as if he’d kissed the air right out of my lungs.
