Living with Raffa was both incredible and frustrating.
Incredible, because his palazzo was a work of art and history that his cook, Servio, and housekeeper, Annella, had countless stories to tell me about. It had originally been constructed in the sixteenth century by Gherardo Silvani for one of the wealthiest merchants in the city and later sold to a local eccentric art lover, who had commissioned Il Garofalo to paint on the ceiling in the living room a mural depicting a woodland setting besieged with wild animals and a naked nymph hiding in the greenery, the goddess Diana painted beside a huge buck in the foreground.
It made me wonder if Raffa had drawn inspiration for my nickname from the otherworldly imagery.
So living in a breathing testament to Florentine history was amazing daily, as was getting to know the motley crew Raffa seemed to have at his beck and call. Despite my negative first impression of him, Carmine proved to be almost ridiculously charming and an incredible storyteller. He regaled me with stories about his youth trailing after Raffa; his older brother, Renzo; and Leo in the Tuscan countryside. The games they would play and the trouble they got into—apparently Leo almost got them all suspended for a rude prank he pulled on one of the nuns at their primary school. He was just as chatty as I could be, and I found myself seeking him out whenever the villa was too quiet and Raffa was busy with work.
I already knew and liked Martina, though her ruthless teasing never failed to make me blush. She was incredibly smart and had taken to furthering my Italian-language education by giving me actual homework and quizzing me over mealtimes.
“If you want to be with a Romano, you must speak Italian,” she had explained seriously.
“I leave in three weeks,” I’d reminded her, but she had only sniffed and continued with our lessons.
I was grateful.
It made it easier to speak to Ludo, who did not speak English as well as the others but whom I liked the best. He was quiet and unassuming, not particularly handsome but with a set of the sweetest brown eyes I’d ever seen. When Raffa was too busy to go on my runs with me, Ludo would come. They were often silent journeys, but I enjoyed his peaceful energy and occasional keen observations.
He was also happy to aid me in my search for Italian relatives. I figured if anyone could find information on my family tree in Tuscany, it was the man who ran investigations for Raffa’s investment firm. We didn’t have much more to go on than the fact that my father had immigrated to the United States twenty-six years ago and was born somewhere in the countryside close to Florence. He had changed his name when he immigrated, but I knew he was born with the first names Mariano Giovanni.
Italian recordkeeping was notoriously unorganized and not digitized, most of the information kept on handwritten papers in local record offices, but Ludo promised to do his best with such solemnity that it made me believe he’d make more progress than I ever had.
I only spent time with Renzo when Raffa was around because the two were constantly locked in the study together, working on whatever they’d been dealing with at the firm. But it meant a lot to me when he thanked me for my help because I thought he wasn’t the kind of man to give praise easily.
I did not miss my lonely apartment across the river. It had seemed like a symbol of my independence, but it took even more strength of character to live in a house of foreign strangers than it did to live on my own in a little bubble.
But it was frustrating, too, because for the last five days, Raffa had been run off his feet with work.
In fact, he’d left Florence entirely for two nights on a work trip to Switzerland and returned home in the middle of the night on the third. I tried to stay awake for him, but Martina and I had gone to Volterra to see the Etruscan ruins that day, and I was exhausted from the walking, fresh air, and early start.
Which meant I had been living with Raffa for five days and I was still, technically or not, a virgin.
And it was driving me crazy.
Fortunately, I had my period during that hectic stretch. It was over now, and I would be spending the entire day with Raffa.
So I decided to start it off on the right foot by joining him in the shower. The tiles were cold and hard beneath my knees, but the feeling of his heavy shaft stretching my lips more than made up for it. When he came, he fisted one hand in my hair and jerked himself off on my face before hoisting me to my feet and getting me off with his fingers.
“Tonight,” he promised before sucking a bruise into my throat. “I will finally teach you how to take every inch of my cock in this snug little pussy.”
With a smug grin, he left me panting against the wall of the shower to finish dressing for our day in the ocean.
I was just stepping out of the shower myself when my phone rang. My mind was still trying to reanimate after my orgasm, so I answered it without thinking, assuming it was one of my friends from language school.
“Guinevere.” My dad’s voice crackled through the microphone like a lightning bolt. “I called six times.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was sleeping and then in the shower.” I put the phone on speaker so I could wrap myself in a huge terry cloth robe I’d found in one of the guest bathrooms and then started to moisturize my face. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” he said darkly. “Everything is not okay because it appears my daughter has been lying to me about where she is.”
My pot of moisturizer fell into the sink with a clatter, my hand hanging numbly in the air.
“Guinevere?” he snapped.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to salvage the situation, but my scrambling brain could find no lie to cover my first one.
“Are you in France?” he demanded point blank.
I chewed my lip. Raffa appeared in the reflection of the mirror, standing at the entrance to his palatial bathroom with a frown fixed to his brow.
Something about the sight of him, that expression of concern and the fact that he had obviously come in a silent show of solidarity, gave me the courage I needed to be honest.
“No,” I said, but my voice quavered. “I am not.”
I’d never known before that a silence could be deadly, but this felt like a religious shunning or a banishment. This felt like the end of a relationship I’d never thought could end.
“Where are you?” he asked quietly, his own words trembling with the brutal force of his anger.
“Florence,” I whispered back, my eyes pinned to Raffa as he strode forward with purpose and then gently, so gently, pulled me back against his front, wrapping his arms around my belly. “I’m in Florence, Italy.”
A beat of silence like the deepening quiet before you know a storm is about to hit.
“What the hell are you doing there?” he roared, the words echoing through the stone-walled bathroom. “You promised me you would not go. What the fuck were you thinking? Did the promise you made to me mean so little? Did you think I was asking you to stay away out of sport? This was fucking important to me, Guinevere.”
His anger wrapped a hand around my throat and squeezed until my eyes burned and my head throbbed. The only thing keeping me from crumbling under the weight of his censure was Raffa, stalwart and strong at my back.
“Of course it was important. You and Mom are the most important people in my life.”
Dad scoffed. “You clearly have no respect or love for us if you could lie to us for weeks about your life. What the hell are you doing there? Why would you disobey us like this, Guinevere? I would expect it from Gemma, but you . . .” He trailed off as he realized how he had spoken of my sister, as if she was still here, as if it was okay to speak ill of the dead.
“I lied because I needed to come here,” I tried to explain, voice plaintive, nails digging unconsciously into Raffa’s forearms at my belly. “It was hardly even a lie because I’ve been honest my whole life about loving this country. I felt . . . I felt called to come here, Dad, and if you want to bring Gemma into this, she’s the one who encouraged me to come even though you told me not to.”
“Do not speak about your sister. This is about you and your dishonesty. How are we ever going to trust you again? I thought we raised you to be a good, honest person.”
A whimper lodged in my throat, and I choked on it as I struggled not to cry. Raffa pushed me into the cabinets at my hips, and it was oddly comforting, being pressed between immovable objects. I could trick my body into thinking it was safe while my mind and heart remained under siege.
“I am a good person.” The words were more breath than voice. It eviscerated me to hear him suspect my basic human decency because it was the foundation Dad and Mom had always laid thickly for us. Be good, do good, and good things will come. I didn’t believe in the ethos as much as I had when I was a girl. I had been good all my life, but unlucky in the extreme. Gemma had been a good person, despite her lies and manipulations, and she was dead.
I wasn’t sure being good got you anything.
“But this was something I needed to do for me. Not for you and Mom.”
“You’ve never even been to Italy before. What could have been calling you? What reason could be good enough to explain betraying your parents like this?”
“You never explained to me why you hate it here so much,” I countered, voice rising as my temper did. “I asked you all the time, and you always shut me down. I’m a grown woman, and I’m just supposed to trust your opinion about an entire country? About a place that is in my blood through you whether you like it or not?”
“Trusting me should be enough,” he retorted, his tone matching mine. “If you care at all about us, you’ll come home right now. Enough is enough. We can talk about the consequences of your irresponsible actions when you get back.”
Behind me Raffa’s body shifted just slightly, a tensing in every muscle he tried to curb so I wouldn’t detect the way those words affected him.
He didn’t want me to go.
And neither did I.
Staring into my own face as if I were staring down my father, I declared, “I am not coming home. I have three weeks left here, and I’m going to enjoy them.”
“Guinevere, honey, please come home.” The sudden shift from fury to pleading derailed me. “After everything we’ve been through when you were young and now with . . . with losing Gemma. Your mother and I can’t handle this.”
“Does she know?” I asked, thinking about how devastated my mom would be with me for lying, but especially for lying about this. Even though it was Dad’s hang-up about his homeland, Mom had always supported his aversion completely, and she hated to see him upset.
The sigh that unspooled over the phone was so weary, it made my heart ache. “No. When a friend sent me a photo of you with some man on a red carpet outside Pitti Palace, I thought it might have been a very good resemblance. Even when I called . . . I honestly never thought you would defy me. I-I was hoping I could convince you to come home, and she never needed to know. You must, Jinxy. It’s not safe in that godforsaken country.”
I winced, realizing how stupid it had been to be photographed together, even though I never could have assumed a random society page article would get back to my dad. I didn’t even know he had friends in Florence to keep in touch with.
Raffa had turned into something carved from marble, a cage around me instead of a comfort. I looked at him in the reflection, but his gaze was pinned somewhere I couldn’t follow.
“Can you explain why you think that is?” I asked Dad softly, because I wanted to understand. I always had. I just needed more to go off than “because I said so.”
The silence was telling, filled with anger and fruitless frustration on both ends.
“I’ll see you in three weeks,” I said, silk over steel because I hated that he was hurting, that I had been the one to make him hurt, but I was not giving up on this dream because it would have been giving up on myself. “I’m still coming home, Dad, and you’ll still see me every day at work in the fall. I just . . . I can’t give up on this. Not yet. Not now.”
Maybe not ever, a cruel voice at the back of my mind whispered. How will you ever get over this place and this man?
As if privy to my thoughts, Raffa softened, dipping his head to press a kiss to the mark he’d made sucking into one side of my neck.
“Guinevere, if you stay, there won’t be a job waiting for you when you come home because we will not have a relationship,” he threatened.
My heart, so full of new experiences and new people, withered in my chest.
“Fine,” I whispered as tears finally fell down my cheeks. “If that’s the way it has to be, I’ll live with the consequences of my actions. What I can’t live with is giving up on what I want just to keep you happy.”
Silence met me on the other end because he’d hung up.
I squeezed my eyes shut at the burn of hot tears springing from the backs of my eyes and let the waves of sorrow take me under, somewhere dark and deep and lonely.
Distantly, I was aware of Raffa gently pulling the phone out of my grip and lifting me into his arms as he took us from the bathroom into the bedroom and sat carefully on the bed, arranging me in his lap with his back against the headboard. I was crying hard, but silently, soaking Raffa’s bare chest and the hem of the fresh pair of shorts he’d put on.
He didn’t seem to care.
He held me in his arms as I cried until there was no water or salt left for my body to produce and my head throbbed like an open wound. One of his hands was in my hair, stroking it back from my wet face, and the other was rubbing soothing circles into my thigh.
“I am sorry it came to this,” he said finally, when my sniffles had subsided and I lay there in recovery. “It is the worst kind of grief when we cut the final strings of filial responsibility to our parents in order to carve out our autonomy. Our own futures separate from their vision.”
There was silence, but I could almost hear the words unspoken in his mouth.
“I am very proud of you for standing up for yourself,” he admitted into the top of my hair. “And I do not mean that to be condescending. You are one of the bravest people I have ever known.” He chuckled softly. “You throw yourself into life and adventure with such a pure enthusiasm and confidence, it inspires me to seek the pleasure in life as well.”
I tipped my chin up to peer at his face, my fingers trailing the furred line of his jaw because they could. “And what brings a man like you pleasure?”
“You,” he said simply. “In all your iterations. A goddess on my arm at a party, charming everyone we meet; a genius perched in my lap at my desk, finding something my men, Martina, and I could not find for hours; a little fawn stranded on the side of the road, looking at me with much too trusting eyes. I like them all.”
“You make me sound so much better than I am.” I rubbed my salt-crusted cheek against his chest hair and listened to the steady thud of his heart.
He snorted. “Oh, I like the girl who curls up on my chest in her sleep and leaves a little puddle of drool and the girl who leaves her clothes on the floor and the one who teases me when I have never enjoyed being teased very much. You must remember my definition of perfect, Vera.”
I did remember. It wasn’t something I was likely to forget, because I wanted to make it my definition too.
“It means something so captivating that you can’t help but find it beautiful, flaws and all.”
“Molto bene,” he praised. “Exactly.”
“And you feel that way about me?” I asked just to clarify. “Even knowing I lied to my parents about where I was. That I can be that selfish and reckless and stubborn as a mule.”
“Especially knowing all that. How boring you would be without those wicked little habits and flaws.”
I had never considered it like that before, but he did have a point. “I did always find heroes a little dull.”
Raffa laughed from his belly, the sound vibrating through his skin into mine. “And who are your favorite villains?”
“I think I would call them antiheroes over villains. They occupy that murky zone between good and bad that most of us battle to stay out of at all costs. Achilles with his unforgiving pride and rage that ultimately led to his avoidable death. He is flawed and wrong more often than he’s right, but we still talk about him as a hero. Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind is one of the most obviously manipulative women in literature, and I cry every time Rhett leaves her without a moment’s hesitation.”
“‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.’” Raffa surprised me by quoting those cruel parting words. When I laughed, he shrugged a shoulder. “My sisters love any movie, in any language, that will make them cry.”
“I think it’s easier to empathize with people who aren’t all good,” I realized. “It’s even easier to love them. We can’t relate to perfect heroes because none of us are as good as we want to be.”
“Ben detto,” he agreed, but there was a knot in his brow I had to reach up to erase with my thumb.
“I wish I was a better person,” I confessed with a sigh as I snuggled closer against his chest. “But I also want to be happy, and those two things always seem to be at odds.”
Raffa didn’t smile at my joke. Instead he seemed almost upset about it. His voice, when he spoke, was dry with self-mockery. “Ah, that is the difference between you and me, Guinevere. Sometimes I feel like I should wish the same, but at the end of the day, I know I am not capable of being better, and I am happy with where I am.”
It was my turn to frown. “Are you? Because even though you keep implying you’re a bad guy, you’ve played the hero very well for me.”
“I am a very good actor,” he said, deadpan, and I laughed as I was sure he meant me to.
Even after a brutal fight with my dad, this man could make me smile.
