“Have you ever driven a Ferrari?”
I blinked at Raffa as we emerged from the side entrance of the palazzo into the courtyard, where a gleaming vintage red Ferrari convertible was waiting for us.
Behind me, Martina was laughing, and Carmine was muttering about never being allowed to drive Raffa’s cars because he’d crashed one when he was fourteen.
“Are you serious?” I asked. My mouth dropped open at the prospect.
My dad loved cars in the kind of obsessive way only an Italian immigrant to the United States would love cars. His garage was his haven, filled with paraphernalia from all the top Italian car companies and even a select few American ones. We weren’t wealthy like Raffa—I wasn’t sure many people were—but John Stone was proud of his collection.
But he would have sold his soul to clap his eyes on the Ferrari NART Spyder Raffa was offering to let me drive.
Only ten of them were ever made, and the last one had sold for something like $30 million.
“Just how rich are you?” I asked him, fisting my hands on my hips. “Because I have to tell you, this is getting a little absurd.”
Even Ludo laughed at that, and Renzo bumped my shoulder companionably as they moved past me to the more sensible SUV waiting at the gates.
“Do you want to drive it or not?” Raffa asked with that haughty raised brow, arms crossed so all those muscles bulged in his white linen shirt.
I knew now how he kept so fit: a gym in the basement of the palace that included an actual fighting ring.
“Yes, please.” I practically skipped to his side by the car and opened my palm for the keys. “Speed limits in Italy are just suggestions, right?”
He gripped my wrist and used it to pull me forward so I fell into his chest. “Watch yourself, cerbiatta. You would not want to hurt another one of my cars.”
“Well, you have to admit, the first time kind of worked out for me.” I flashed him a cheeky grin and rose to my tiptoes to kiss the corner of his jaw.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket to produce a silk Dolce & Gabbana scarf. “This will save your hair from becoming Medusa’s snakes.”
I laughed but turned obediently and lifted my hair off my shoulders so he could tie the scarf around my head.
“Do I look like Sophia Loren?” I flirted, batting my lashes dramatically.
“No,” he said, too quiet for a joke. “You look like you, which I much prefer.”
“A hundred euros she crashes,” Carmine said just loudly enough for me to hear from where he was glaring at me beside the other car. “No way a little thing like her can handle a car like that.”
I stiffened a bit, always self-conscious about my slightness because my lack of musculature and height were a consequence of my medical condition. When I was growing up, some of the kids in my class had called me Sticks until Gemma gave one of them a black eye.
“One thousand euros says we not only make it there in one piece,” Raffa drawled, and I knew he was defending me in his own way. When I looked sharply up at him, he winked, handing me the keys and then patting my ass as he crossed to the passenger seat. “But we also beat you to Livorno.”
“You’re on,” Martina declared, grabbing the keys from Renzo and pushing him out of the way before running to the driver’s seat.
I looked at Raffa over the hood of the low-slung convertible and watched as he slid the designer sunglasses out of his hair onto his nose. My grin reflected back at me in the lenses.
“And a private bet,” he added. “If you get us there first, I promise to eat your sweet figa later until you forget every language but the sound of ‘Raffa’ in your mouth.”
I shivered. “Andiamo! I have a race to win.”
We won.
Raffa didn’t even seem surprised by the way I handled the car on the busy highway out of Florence toward the coast, and he only whistled through his teeth when I had fun taking the curving side roads on the way to the marina just outside Livorno.
When I told him my father had taught me how to drive in a Maserati, he just laughed at me, grabbed my hand, and kissed my palm.
“Of course he did. The only thing that surprises me about you now, Guinevere, is that I am still surprised when you reveal yourself to be the most remarkable woman I have ever known.”
I added it to the list of impossibly sweet things Raffa had said to me.
When Martina had pulled up at the marina, we were making out against the car. She’d honked in a way that felt like a swear word, Renzo had thrown an empty bottle of water at Raffa’s head, and Carmine was still pouting.
Only Ludo gave me a fist bump.
Now we were on a beautiful sailboat motoring out of the harbor into the Ligurian Sea. The water was aquamarine close to the shore but deepened into azure beneath the boat as it cut south along the coastline. The rooftops of the passing city were red and orange, the rocky cliffs yellowed to gold by the afternoon sunshine. Everything was so bright it felt like the imagery was seared into my corneas, but I wasn’t upset by the idea. I hoped it meant that for the rest of my life, when I closed my eyes, I would conjure up this image of Livorno’s cityscape giving way to green hills descending into white sugared beaches and outcrops of rocks fit for Ariel to sing atop of.
It was completely different from the pervasive cultural majesty of Florence, the sense that every cobblestone and doorway had seen millions of lives pass through before your own. This setting was wild and freeing, the briny slap of ocean spray across my face as I sat alone at the bow while Raffa put the others to work behind me, the tangle of foliage that tumbled down the cliffs, and the wet crash of waves into the coastline.
I closed my eyes, dragged a deep breath of sea air into my lungs, and cast my face to the sky.
This was, quite possibly, heaven.
It could have been minutes or hours later that shade over my face roused me from my meditation. Crying had left me exhausted, but I didn’t want to sleep when I could be enjoying the sound of the waves and the demanding cry of seabirds, so I had let my mind float like the boat did on the sea.
Now I cracked open an eye and peered at Raffa above me.
His shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the tanned expanse of his tightly muscled torso, and his hair was alive with filaments of bronze, copper, and obsidian under the glaring sun. He was grinning down at me, more carefree than I had ever seen.
“The sea suits you,” I told him. “You look like a modern-day pirate.”
He laughed a little too hard at my quip, but I figured it was just the brightness of the day and the fact that we got to spend it together after barely any quality time since the Pitti Palace gala.
I moved over a bit so he could sit beside me on the blue-cushioned daybed built into the bow of the boat beneath the swollen sails.
“So you have a boat.”
“I have a boat,” he agreed, leaning back on his palms to tip his face into the sun the way I had.
“A very large, lovely boat named Salacia,” I continued.
A minute Italianate shrug. “She was Neptune’s consort, goddess of the sea. Only fools name their vessels after him. Anyone who has ever spent any time on the ocean knows she is and could only be a woman.”
I laughed at his drollness. “This is my first time on the ocean, so I’ll take your word for it.”
“You seem very at ease for your first time,” he said and then rolled his eyes at my eyebrow wiggle and added, “First time at sea.”
“Lake life,” I explained. “My parents have a boat, nothing like this, just a ski boat we keep on Gun Lake during the summers. It’s beautiful there. In fact, before I came to Italy, it was my happy place.”
He hummed, eyes closed, and my breath caught at how beautiful he was, sitting on the gently rocking boat with his throat bared and his hair falling back from his tipped forehead in perfect waves. I gave in to temptation and drew the line of his Roman nose with my fingertip and then pressed it into the divot above his lips. He shocked me into laughter by snapping his teeth at me.
“My happy place was Villa Romano,” he said without opening his eyes, and I froze, afraid that if I moved I would scare him into stopping. He revealed so little about his life that every kernel felt like gold. “I grew up running barefoot through the acres of trees, and each orchard was its own oasis. We played nascondino, like tag, in the olive grove because it had the best hiding places, and gioco delle biglie in the barn beside the vineyard. In the summer we were constantly trying to keep up with the ripening fruit, visiting every day to fill baskets and bowls with plums, peaches, and apricots. Sometimes, we would lay under the trees and gorge ourselves until we were sick.” He made a face. “I did not eat apricots for two years after I turned twelve.”
My laugh was soft because I didn’t want him to stop talking.
“My mother was the ultimate host, and we always had people over for every meal. Sometimes, I was sure even she did not know where they came from. But it was fun as a boy to meet strangers from all over Italy and beyond.” He cracked a lid open. “Did I tell you that I speak German, Spanish, and Greek as well?”
“Show-off,” I muttered with faux bitterness.
His lids lowered, and he grinned again. When he lay down, he tugged me into his side, running his fingers idly through my hair.
“You speak about the villa like it isn’t your happy place anymore,” I noted, tracing the boxed muscles of his abs to watch the way his belly contracted at the ticklish sensation.
There was such a long pause, I thought he wouldn’t go on.
But then, “I did not have a father like you do who cared about my health and safety. If I was not his puppet, I could not be his son.”
I winced, both because the sentiment was horrible and because it underscored the fact that my dad, while controlling and specifically insensible about Italy, had only ever wanted me to be happy and healthy.
“What happened?” I asked, because there was more story there, buried in the bitter dregs of his tone.
Raffa sighed, eyes popping open to stare into the vast, cloudless sky above us. “I did much as you did with your father, only I did it a lot less politely.”
“You told him to fuck off,” I guessed.
His smile was broken at the ends. “Yes. I had a full ride to Oxford to study business. It was my dream to go there, and I could not give it up, even when I tried. I was cut off from the family, not allowed contact with my sisters or my mother, with no access to my inheritance.” He shrugged, but it was not something he could play off. “I moved to wet, dreary England and pursued what made me happy at the cost of everything I had ever known.”
There were parallels there to my own situation that astonished me but also made me feel petty. My parents had refused to pay for my trip, which had seemed unfair when they had paid for all of Gemma’s, but the privilege of growing up as I did with enough money and more than enough love was glaringly obvious.
I would take my dad’s hugs and pep talks before every surgery and medical appointment above any palazzo. My mother’s homemade pasties and summer cherry pies, eaten with forks straight from the plate on the back deck of our lake house, above any Ferrari or designer dress.
It made me ache for Raffa. I had the absurd thought that I wanted to fuse my heart with his so that he would know, even long after I left, that he would never be alone so long as my heart still beat.
“How long?” I asked instead.
“Until he died four years ago. I lived apart from my home for nine years.”
Nine years.
“Oh, Raffa,” I murmured, unable to stop myself from moving so I could lay my body flat against his, as if I could imprint myself on his skin. “I’m so sorry.”
He wouldn’t meet my eyes, but one hand continued to play through my hair, tangling in the wind-blown strands.
“Carlotta married her high school sweetheart and had three children. Stacci married a stranger I had never met and had two of her own. Delfina took over the vines I had loved to help my mother’s brother tend as a boy, and my best friend, Leo, took over the business from my father.”
The words lay unsaid in the air after he spoke: They all moved on without me.
“Why did you come back?”
“Why does anyone do anything? For love. I had missed them every day, and when I could return, I did.” Something in his tone said he was holding back, a lingering bitterness I couldn’t make sense of.
But he had shared a massive piece of his painful history with me, and I was not going to linger over the details. Not when I only had three weeks left to bring this man enough joy to last him for the rest of his life.
Not when I could spend the last of our time together loving him enough to fill the abyss that nine years without love must have left in his chest.
And there was no doubt then, the two of us pressed chest to chest under the wide Italian sky on the Ligurian Sea, that I loved Raffa.
The kind of all-consuming, life-ruining love that had plagued Dante and Petrarch and Botticelli. An undying love that would never be returned.
It didn’t matter, I told myself as I cupped Raffa’s face and dragged myself farther up his torso so I could kiss his mouth, soft, feathering brushes like a healing touch on a wound. It didn’t matter if he never wanted this gift I’d made of my heart. It would always be his.
What I had told my father was true. I felt called to Italy, and I had since I was a girl lying awake and terrified in the hospital, pretending not to hear my parents weep.
And now I knew what had been calling my name.
Him.
“I hate that you’ve suffered to get to the man you are today, but the man you are? He’s spectacular,” I said against his mouth. “And I hope you know that you have left an indelible mark on my life. It feels like everything I wanted to be was just below the surface of my skin, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shed my old skin to find it. You helped me do that. You make me feel like every version of myself is a gift, when before, I thought I would never be good enough. And I might not be good in the traditional sense I always thought was so important, but maybe I am my own version of perfect. Your version. Flaws and all.”
“There is no maybe about it,” he told me, finally shifting his gaze to mine, eyes fierce with conviction and a yearning that made my teeth ache. “I know you believe you are unlucky. Sei nata sotto una stella sfortunata. Born under the wrong star. But to me, sei la stella cadente che illumina la mia vita.”
But to me, you are the shooting star that lights up my life.
He cupped my face then, so we were a closed circuit, something I was too scared to call love ebbing and flowing between us. Then he kissed me, a warm, open-mouthed kiss that made my toes curl.
And I wondered clearly for the first time if this moment and this man were enough to make me give up everything I had ever known.
We spent the day anchored off the shore of a public beach with no land access, a tiny strip of U-shaped sand surrounded by craggy rocks on either side of the cove so that the water within was as clear and steady as lake water without wind.
I had a diving competition with Martina and, of all people, Renzo, who actually ended up being voted the winner by the others through their sheer incredulity that he could make his enormous body slip beneath the water with hardly a splash.
Carmine produced a packet of Italian playing cards that went to forty instead of fifty-two and taught me the rules of tresette, which was a surprisingly complicated game played in partners. Luckily Raffa was mine, and he was a shark, because I definitely needed more practice.
I got the start of a sunburn across my nose, and Raffa insisted on lathering me in sun cream even though I’d already reapplied.
We had lunch together at the back of the boat, and Raffa handed me a liter jug of filtered water instead of a glass of wine, which oddly made me want to cry.
Because he was taking care of me in a way that did not seem overbearing or make me feel like a child. Just giving me silent, observant care, like bringing my meds to me from my bag in the cabin after the meal.
Yes, I loved him.
It pulsed in my chest like a lighthouse beacon.
By the time the sun set over the cerulean waters, we were all pleasantly sun drunk and sleepy. Martina was napping with her head in Renzo’s lap while he read a German spy thriller, and Ludo and Carmine were bickering softly over another card game.
“Take a swim with me,” Raffa murmured into my ear.
I was lying between his legs at the bow, listening to his sweetly accented English as he read from Dante’s Inferno. We were almost at the end, and I hoped we would finish Purgatorio before I had to leave.
I was sleepy, muscles lax from hours in the salt waters, but I was not in a mood to resist anything Raffa wanted, so I stood up and took his hand when he offered it. We stood at the side of the boat, and he grinned.
“Insieme?”
Together?
I nodded, and in tandem, we arched over the lines and plunged into the cold sea. When I broke the surface, Raffa was already cutting through the water with clean, powerful strokes, aimed toward a smooth configuration of rocks on the outer ridge of the cove.
I swam in his wake, thinking I would follow him, like Eurydice, blindfolded and trusting through the underworld.
He was standing on the rocks, dripping water out of his hair, when I arrived, and he offered his hand to me. I laughed when he tugged me too hard, pulling me tight against his chest.
“From this angle, they can’t see us,” he whispered in my ear before nipping it.
I tilted my head and found he was right. Though I could see the boat slowly turning with the tide on its anchor chain, a huge outcropping of white-gold rock meant if we lowered ourselves to the sun-warmed rock below, we would not be seen.
“Why, Raffa, what are you thinking?” I teased, linking my arms around his neck.
“I am thinking I cannot wait until tonight.”
He kissed me as soon as the words were out of his mouth, lifting me into his arms with his hands on my ass, pressing me to his groin, where I could already feel the hardening line of his dick. I groaned into his mouth and slid my hands into the wet strands of his hair, holding on as he kneeled on the rock and laid me gently against it.
“You taste like salt and sunshine,” he muttered against my mouth between succulent kisses. “Divino.”
I moaned when those talented lips trailed down my neck, pausing to kiss my cornicello before nipping each peak of my breasts through my wet bikini.
“You look like something from another time or another realm,” he said as he nosed the fabric aside and sucked my nipple into his hot mouth, shocking after the temperature of the sea. “A woodland nymph, a Renaissance princess, one of Salacia’s Oceanids. Sometimes, I cannot believe you are real until I touch you like this.”
The scrape of his stubble against my delicate skin lit fires in each breast that merged and raced toward my groin. I was wetter than the ocean had left me when he moved farther down my body and undid the tie of my bottoms with his teeth. The fabric gaped, revealing my bare mound to his gaze and the orange-pink sky.
“Una fragola così bella,” he praised, placing an open-mouthed kiss on my clit and then licking me off his lips. “E altrettanto dolce.”
Such a beautiful pussy, and just as sweet as a strawberry.
I moaned, lifting my hips to give him better access. He took control by cupping my ass and canting my pussy to his mouth as if he wanted to drink straight from the well.
He feasted just as he had promised he would if I won the race to the coast. Long, wet swipes of his tongue from the top of my clit to the furl of my ass, again and again, until I was thrashing against the rock, shamelessly begging for more.
He obliged, twisting a finger into my aching pussy while he sucked at my clit.
My orgasm crashed over me like an errant superwave, drenching Raffa’s tongue and hand, dragging me under so that I could not see or hear the scenery, only feel the sensation of him taking me apart at the seams.
The next time, he pinned my hips to the rock with one hand, cheek resting on my inner thigh, and used his other hand to expose my clit from its hood completely, his thumb strumming back and forth gently but insistently over the bundle of nerves. My entire body jittered as if I was being slowly electrocuted by pleasure, the pressure growing into something so sharp and bright, I was almost scared of it.
“Please, Raffa,” I cried out, unsure if I wanted him to continue until the end of time or stop immediately before my heart gave out.
“Hush, piccola. You can come for me like this. Lasciati andare e inzuppa la mia mano in quella dolce crema.”
Let go and drench my hand in that sweet cream.
The sound of his filthy words in the round vowels of his accented English and purring Italian cranked the dial so high, I screamed as bolts of pleasure shot through my pussy, curling my fingers and toes until they cramped.
I was as limp and pliant as kneaded dough for the next orgasm, the one I wasn’t sure I could take but Raffa insisted I needed.
“I want you to feel every inch of me as I push into your cunt for the first time,” he told me, ruthlessly pressing two fingers into the front of my pussy and rubbing at a spot that made me see stars across the pretwilight sky. “I want you to shiver and shudder with every press. I want you shaking and ready to come the moment I am seated to the root inside you.”
“God, Raffa, yes,” I moaned, my mind lost to the currents of lust, embarrassment left behind on the banks somewhere like my discarded clothes. “I need to feel you stretch me open. I’ve been dreaming of it for days. Please, please, please.”
“La mia dolce cerbiatta,” he murmured before he lightly flicked his tongue over my highly sensitized clit with just enough pleasure to take me gently over the edge, pulling this orgasm out of me in sweet, pulsing strokes.
He bit and sucked a mark into each inner thigh to count off each orgasm.
I was still gasping from the aftershocks when he covered me with his sun-hot body, his cock a searing brand as it smeared through the wetness between my thighs.
“So swollen and wet,” he murmured, peering between us as he fisted his cock and stroked it through my folds. “It will be hard to take me, but I want you to have every inch.”
“Yes,” I agreed, clutching at him, then raking my nails down his back in an effort to bring him even closer, though his lightly furred chest was already tight to my breasts. “I want to be impaled on you.”
He groaned, dropped his head, and said through gritted teeth, “I want to be rough with you.”
“Yes,” I hissed.
“I want to fuck you so hard and so often you will feel me every day for the rest of the time we have together. The echo of me inside you when we are apart, aching to be filled up again.”
“Fuck, yes,” I cried as he slotted the head of his wide cock at my entrance and thrust, one smooth, hard glide.
I was too swollen, still too untried, to take all of him in one, but I loved the sensation of him working me open, pulling back and then pulsing forward inch by inch until I could feel his balls pressed to my wet pussy.
“There,” he said, triumph rich in his voice, arms wrapped around my torso so I felt utterly consumed by him. “Il mio posto felice.”
My happy place.
His words tied all the pleasure oversaturating my body into bows around my heart, the one I wanted so desperately to carve out of my chest and hand to him.
Before I could say anything, though, he was lifting me, sitting back on his heels so that I was balanced entirely in his lap, one of his hands braced at the curve of my spine to keep me upright and the other twisting my wet hair into a rope to use as reins.
“Hold on,” he warned me before he started thrusting up into me as he simultaneously brought me down using his hold on my back and hair.
Stars exploded behind my eyes, the edge of painful newness eclipsed by the white-bright orgasm already sparking low in my gut. He fucked me on his cock like I was a doll, and I could not believe I had ever objected to the idea because it was the hottest moment of my life. His olive-tanned skin was sheened with sweat and corded with muscle like that of an old warrior from ancient Rome, his legs and arms flexing with tension as he brought me up and down over his dick. The riot of his drying waves had flopped over his forehead into his pale-brown eyes, which were locked on mine without wavering.
“Cerbiatta mia,” he grunted as I ground down on his upstroke, using the roughness of his pubic hair to rub against my clit. “La mia donna. La mia stella cadente.”
My little fawn. My woman. My shooting star.
I cried out his name over and over, lost to the vast ocean of his sensation, anchored only by his thick cock inside me and his name carved like an ancient secret into the roof of my mouth.
“Raffa,” I sang as I came again, arching in his hold so he had to fight to keep me pinned, grunting as he chased his own orgasm inside me and then cursing in Italian as he came seconds later.
I could feel the heat of him and the kick of his cock as it wrung every last ounce of feeling from my body until I lay limp and utterly used in his arms, head to his shoulder, regaining my breath my only focus.
“Meus Rex Infernus,” I murmured against his salty shoulder as he stroked my hair and settled back on his ass to stretch out his legs and hold me close.
It felt right to call him that.
My king below.
Below my skin and muscle and bones through to whatever made up the human soul.
“Thank you,” he said in a raw voice after a long moment. “For the best gift I have ever had.”
My laugh was breathless. “I think it’s me who should be thanking you. I gave you one, you gave me five.”
“You gave me you,” he corrected, pulling my face from his shoulder so he could kiss my sunburned nose. “When you have not given yourself to anyone else. Not just in this way but . . .” He shrugged eloquently. “I may not deserve the light you bring, but I will enjoy the hell out of it while I can.”
“Well, the pleasure is still mine,” I joked, hoping he didn’t hear the break in my voice.
He hummed a noncommittal reply and held me until the last of the jewel-toned hues faded from the sky and cool blues started to set in.
“We should go,” he said at last, lifting me in his arms with a little groan as his knees cracked. “I have something to show you.”
He touched me constantly as we righted our bathing suits and then matched me stroke for stroke as we swam back to the boat, as if he couldn’t bear to be apart.
Everyone was already ready to go when we climbed aboard, the anchor reeled in and the sails lifted. Raffa let Renzo take the helm so he could sit with me in silence on one of the benches across from Ludo, Carmine, and Martina.
I was surprised when they cut the engine as we stopped near an island close to the coastline, by a small collection of other luxury boats moored off the shore for the night, but I was silent as everyone got up as one and stood on the starboard side. Martina handed out binoculars, and we each lifted them toward a jutting cliffside. There was just enough light left to make out three speedboats as they slinked one by one from somewhere amid the rock.
“What—” I whispered.
“Hush,” Raffa returned.
I watched as the boats spread out in a V-shaped formation, heading toward Livorno on the other side of the strait, and wondered why this was tonight’s entertainment.
Until I heard the whomp whomp whomp of a helicopter.
Seconds later, a spotlight snapped on over the water, highlighting the speedboats for a moment before they splintered from each other, trying to flee.
A muffled Italian voice ordered something I couldn’t make out over the speakers, and then more lights filled the darkening ocean from the bows of four police speedboats coming from Livorno.
“Oh my gosh,” I gasped, pressing my eyes harder to the binoculars as if that would help me make out the details of the high-speed police chase I was watching.
The police split off to follow each of the three boats, and the helicopter followed the one traveling farther out to sea. The six of us watched until the lights were pinpricks on the inky horizon and we could no longer hear the sound of the helicopter.
I turned to Raffa, hardly able to make out his features in the dark.
“What the hell?”
He laughed, a long string of notes from the belly. Someone snapped on an overhead light and another at the bow of the boat and started the engines again, moving us out from the boats moored for the night and back toward Livorno.
Raffa’s face was creased with smug mischief like that of a teenage boy who had pulled off a wonderful prank.
“I thought you would want to see what your help meant to us.” He gestured to the place the boats had disappeared. “The company that screwed us over with dishonesty was smuggling into the port of Livorno through those shell companies you found. We turned them in to the authorities and . . . presto.”
“Oh my gosh,” I laughed as Raffa picked me up and spun me in a tight circle. “That was insane. I felt like I was in a spy film. Feel my heart!” I pressed his hand to my chest when he put me down so he could feel it racing. “Wow. How exhilarating.”
Renzo clamped a heavy hand over my shoulder and gave me a little shake. “If you ever need a job, Vera?”
Raffa shot him an unamused look, but I was too busy grinning at Renzo to note it. “Oh for sure, buddy. I mean, I knew you guys had to be more than just stuffy investment bankers. Look at you.”
“I think this calls for prosecco,” Martina announced, ducking into the galley to grab it.
“Servio packed sparkling cider for you,” Raffa told me, pulling me into his front and then kissing my temple.
Ludo reached over and offered me his fist to bump.
And not for the first time in Italy, but for the first time with Raffa’s chosen family, I felt at home.
