Chapter 26
Chapter Twenty Six
Giovanni
I come down barefoot, still warm from her, and find the kitchen alive with scent and action. The timer blinks red. The room smells like lamb and lemon, sage and garlic, and something sweet from the beans that’s made the air enticing.
She’s at the oven in my shirt—only my shirt—bare legs lit by the last of the light reflecting through the window. The hem skims the top of her thighs when she reaches for the oven door. I take the handle over her hand.
“Careful,” I say.
“I am.” She tips me a look that tightens my gut. “Hot.”
“I know,” I say, my voice husky.
We open the door together. The lamb has gone bronze. Fat has rendered and basted the shoulder until every edge shines. She spoons the pan juices up and over, slow.
Steam climbs around her face; a curl sticks to her cheek. I want to press my mouth there. I settle for sliding the pan out, setting it on the board, and stepping behind her so she’s between my body and the heat.
“Rest?” I ask.
“Fifteen,” she says, already reaching for the beans. I lift the lid. Garlic and sage bloom. The beans are perfect—soft with a little integrity left. She tests a few on a spoon, salts with a steady hand, then tips half the lamb juices into the pot and stirs until they gloss.
I watch her move like she owns the room and everything in it. The shirt falls open one button too many. I don’t fix it. I’m the man in loose pants and nothing else, and I’m not thinking about food. I’m thinking about the new name she gave me upstairs, in the dark, in that voice. Gio.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard it, but the way she says it…
“Stop staring,” she says without looking up.
“No,” I answer.
She cuts me a sideways smile that makes the muscles in my stomach tighten. “Plate the puntarelle,” she says, pointedly to hide the smile. “Dress it now. Anchovy will soften it just enough while the lamb rests.”
“Yes, Chef.”
She gives me that warning look; I grin anyway.
I spin the chilled curls dry, drop them into the dressing, and toss until the green goes glossy, and the scent of garlic, fish, lemon, and black pepper wafts into the air.
She slides a sheet tray into the second oven: wedges of radicchio with a swipe of balsamic and a thin coat of oil, a pinch of salt. “Ten minutes,” she says.
“Copy.”
The bottle of Sangiovese already sits open on the counter, resting until it’s just perfect.
She’s trimming the twine off the lamb, and I take one more second to look: the strike of her legs, the way the shirt cuffs brush her wrists, the line at the corner of her mouth that isn’t tension anymore.
Satisfaction sits there now, and hunger.
Her eyes flick to my hands. “You can pour now.”
“I was going to,” I say, pour a splash into each glass, and set one near her hand. “Don’t taste yet.”
“You’re bossy,” she says, amused.
“Efficient,” I say back, and earn the small shake of her head that makes my chest feel too tight.
She pulls the lamb to the board and rests her palm on the crust for a second, like she’s thanking it. Then the knife goes in. The blade meets no resistance.
She slices thick. The interior is rosy where it should be, the edges lacquered with paste and fat.
When she reaches the bone, she turns the knife and liberates a ridge of meat that would tempt even the strongest will.
I take two slices to a warm platter and spoon beans in a wide crescent beside them so the juices can run down and meet the starch like an arrangement.
“Radicchio,” I say when the second timer pops. I bring the tray to the island. The leaves have fallen in on themselves, bitter-sweetened by heat, tips charred just enough. She hits them with a small spoon of the good balsamic and a breath of oil. Nothing more.
“Puntarelle,” she says, and I carry the bowl over. She scatters a few salted capers across the top. “For a little bite.”
We stand there for a second and look at the table we’ve made out of my island. It isn’t print-magazine perfect; it’s better. It’s hot and alive and smells like the life I should have been living all along. She catches me looking at her instead of the food.
“What?” she asks.
“You,” I say.
A blush rises under the open collar. She reaches for the wine like a shield. “Now?”
“Now.” I touch the stem and wait until she looks up. We lift our glasses and drink at the same time.
The wine shows up like it knows its part. Cherry, orange, that line of savory that made her close her eyes earlier. It doesn’t need help. It wants company.
She swallows and nods once, a small satisfied sound in her throat. “Hello, Primo Raggio,” she murmurs.
My mouth quirks. “I said I’d consider it.”
I won’t. I’d already made up my mind the moment she’d said it.
Her eyes sparkle as if she already knows.
I want to put her on the counter, spread her legs, and feast. I don't. She’s enjoying this meal too much.
I slide a slice of lamb onto her plate, a spoon of beans, a tangle of puntarelle, a wedge of radicchio. I add a little dish of the garlic confit and warm bread I pulled from the oven. She sits on the stool when I say, “Eat.”
She takes a bite of lamb, then closes her eyes. The fork hovers. A soft sound of pleasure leaves her chest, both familiar and new.
“Yes,” she says, and it’s for the food, but I feel it inside me. She follows with beans and a swipe of the confit over bread, and the combination pulls a low, delighted laugh out of her.
I lean against the island and eat standing, watching her chew, watching the way the shirt shifts when she breathes, leans forward, reaches for her wine.
Watching the little red mark I put on her skin bloom on the top of her breast, half-hidden by the shirt.
I like that I can see it. I like that she hasn’t checked a mirror and decided to hide it.
She sees me seeing it, and her mouth curves. She takes a sip of wine to hide that.
“Say it,” she challenges, voice light. “Say everything you’re thinking.”
“No,” I tell her, and lift my glass instead. “You first.”
She chews, swallows, points her knife at the platter.
“This is the right lamb for this wine,” she says.
“Anchovy keeps it bright. The beans are humble and exactly right. The radicchio adds a little bite to it. The wine…” She sips, eyes on me over the rim.
“The wine is the reason you invite anyone at all.”
My smile gets away from me. “Eat,” I say again, because if I tell her what I think—about her, about us—she’ll run, or I will.
We eat. We don’t rush. We steal bites from each other’s plates without asking.
She smears a clove of soft garlic on bread and holds it up.
I take it from her fingers, and when my mouth brushes the tip of one, she goes very still and then takes her hand back like touching me burned her, and she liked it.
“Bibi,” I say quietly.
Her eyes lift. The pupils are wide. She doesn’t blink. “Gio.”
Something in my spine loosens, and I don’t know why that’s the word that does it, but it is.
I set my glass down and come around the island. She pushes her stool back as if she might stand. I rest my hands on the arms and keep her there, not a trap, a frame. Her knees open just enough that the shirt pulls high. I look once, slowly, because she asked me to be honest, and I always am.
“Tell me to stop,” I say.
“Don’t ask if you don’t want to hear it,” she says back, but her voice isn’t warning.
It’s heat.
I take her mouth again, not like upstairs, not all the way gone, just a deep kiss that melts her into the stool.
She tastes like lamb and beans and the wine we picked together.
Her hands slide under my hair and close.
Her thighs press the sides of my hips. I squeeze the back of her neck once, and she sighs into my mouth in surrender.
It lights a thrill under my skin—triumph and power. Like a drug. She’s like a drug I can’t get enough of.
When I pull away, her eyes look wrecked in the best way. She drags the pad of her thumb across my lower lip. “Your dinner is getting cold,” she whispers.
“It’ll reheat well,” I say.
She laughs, a real one, and it changes the room.
She picks up her knife like we didn’t almost lose the plot and cuts the next slice of lamb.
I take a small step back and take the carving fork from her hand and do it for her, quieter now, laying meat on the plate like an apology for the parts of me that will never be gentle.
“Say it again,” I tell her when we’ve eaten enough to make the world feel safe.
“What,” she asks.
“My name.”
“Giovanni.”
I shake my head.
She tilts her head, studies me, then finally says, “Gio.” Her voice is low and breathless.
It does something to me I’m not prepared to talk about. “Brava,” I say, because praise is the only language I can trust right now.
She shakes her head like she can’t quite believe who we are in this kitchen, in this country, with everything waiting outside. “We should be careful,” she says, not moving away, not closing up.
“We will be,” I say, and mean it. “But not careful enough to pretend we don’t want this.”
Her eyes soften but don’t turn sentimental. “Eat,” she throws back, and I obey because I like her when she’s bossy. In the kitchen, anyway.
The lamb gives up under the knife. The beans take in more juice and give back depth. The radicchio isn’t sweet, and I like it for that. The puntarelle stay sharp because she made them that way. The wine does what wine should do: it carries the whole table.
“Tell me something true,” she says after a while, elbow on the wood, glass in her hand. “Not business. Not the posture. A true thing.”
“You’re dangerous,” I say without letting myself soften the word, “not because of your mouth, not because of your hands. Because you make me want to sit down. I don’t sit down.”
She considers that, considers me. “Your turn,” she says. “Ask me.”
“What did you think the first time you walked into my kitchen?”
“That you had your spices ordered wrong.” Her mouth curves. “And that you were trouble.”
I laugh into my glass. “The spices were wrong?”
“I fixed it,” she says and takes another bite of radicchio and then leaves her fork where it is. Her toes brush my calf under the island, once. Not a mistake.
“Dessert,” I say. “We don’t have any.”
She tips her head back on a laugh. “We do,” she says and stands to walk to the fridge. She pulls out a basket and walks back to the island with it. With delicate fingers, she picks up a deep red cherry and slides it toward me over the wood.
I pick it up, split it, pit it, and feed her half. She takes it from my fingers with her mouth, and I feel that everywhere, zinging straight to my cock.
She touches my wrist, a point of heat that makes me forget every promise I’ve ever made to myself.
“Gio,” she says again, voice low now.
“Mia,” I say before I can stop it.
Her eyes flare and then narrow.
She slides off the stool and meets me at the corner of the island. For a breath, we just stand there, close enough that the collar of the shirt grazes the skin of my chest. Then she lifts her chin a fraction, and I take what she’s offering.
The first kiss is unhurried, a build-up, longing.
The second turns greedy. Her fingers climb the back of my neck, into my hair.
I brace one hand at her waist, the other at the small of her back, and pull her in until the wood presses against her thighs and her body finds mine like a puzzle piece fitting just right.
“Gio,” she moans into my mouth.
“Bibi,” I answer, and feel her smile before I see it.
We break just enough to breathe. The kitchen smells like lamb and lemon and wine and her. She looks up at me through her lashes, cheeks warm, lips flushed, and I’m finished pretending this is anything but what it is.
“Upstairs,” I say.
She simply nods. I lace my fingers with hers and start for the hall. We leave the plates stacked, the bottle half-drunk, the lamp over the island still throwing a soft circle on the wood. At the doorway, she tugs me back for one more quick kiss, and then we go.
The house is quiet, old stone holding the day’s heat. Our steps on the stairs find an easy rhythm. Halfway up, she stops on a tread above me so we’re eye to eye. She frames my jaw with both hands and kisses me slowly, taking her time, taking me apart.
I lift her, hands firm at the backs of her thighs. She laughs, surprised and low, wraps her arms around my neck, and I carry her the rest of the way.
At the top, the hall is dark except for a wash of moonlight. I shoulder the door to my bedroom open. She looks at me like I’m the only thing she wants to think about for the rest of the night.
We step inside together, and I shut the world out.