Chapter Five
SAM SLEPT FOR thirty-six hours straight.
Vague memories drifted through her head of opening the door to Mr. Ricci in the afternoon. The poor man had needed to fetch a change of clothes.
Cheeks heating, she remembered that—in a moment of homesickness—she’d worn her oldest, most threadbare T-shirt that barely covered her panties to bed.
This morning, she’d woken up near dawn, refreshed and her body clock reset to the new time zone, to find multiple texts from Matteo. Every single one raging at Alessandro.
Frustration made her movements jerky as she packed her knapsack for the day’s excursion. She was going to sneak out to an art museum in Milan. Following the list on her phone, she shoved in meds, protein bars and salted nuts, even as her mind whirled.
Why hadn’t Matteo apologized for two-timing her? How dare he question her about what she and his brother were up to?
Now that she’d met Alessandro, she went over everything that Matteo had ever told her about his brother.
Matteo hadn’t lied. The man was exacting, grumpy and crude but brutally honest. Ruthlessly realistic with not a hint of softness or vulnerability. But he had left out the steely core of integrity beneath.
What could dent the ironclad control of a man like that? she wondered with a feverish curiosity. What could disturb the infuriating untouchability he wore like an armor?
Sturdy sneakers in one hand, backpack in the other, she opened the door and came face-to-face with Mr. Ricci again. In a dark navy button down and black slacks, his jet-black hair slicked back, he looked austere. Even the shimmering sunlight couldn’t lighten the severity of his looks.
Her breath caught afresh, that wild heat slamming into her middle as he took him in.
Unlike Matteo, who spent hours in the gym and even more on his appearance, Mr. Ricci wasn’t stocky or overly muscular.
He was much taller than his brother and held a lean, wiry strength in his body that made her skin prickle.
A sliver of gray peeked out at one temple, but even that only added to the man’s appeal.
Sam stared, fingers itching to find her sketchbook, so that she could capture his aura on paper. To somehow constrain this ruthless, powerful man to two dimensions, to contain him for herself.
A soft gasp escaped her at the sheer folly of the thought.
His gray gaze, in turn, swept over her, taking in her loose braid over her shoulder and her collarbones exposed by the wide neckline of her jumpsuit. “Dare I hope that you’re leaving the country, Ms. Fischer?”
With an exaggerated sigh, she handed him her sneakers and made a show of adjusting her belt. His lips twitched as he took the sneakers, but he didn’t let the smile bloom. God, the man was a miser with facial expressions.
“In your dreams, Mr. Ricci.” Her fingers tingled at the slight contact with his hard chest as she reached for her shoes.
“You keep surprising me, Ms. Fischer,” he said, reaching for her heavy backpack. It was such a surprising—and traditional—gesture that Sam let go without thinking.
He turned, motioning for her to follow him along a long, airy corridor. “I thought I would have to wait a few hours before I could escort you to Brera. But it looks like you’ve been up for a while.”
Sam hurried to catch up to him so quickly that she smacked into his side and had the breath knocked out of her middle. His arm came around her waist with the firmness of a metal shackle, but even that couldn’t distract her. “Did you say Brera?” she said, butterflies twirling in her belly.
He nodded, his eyes doing that sweeping thing of her face. “If I can trust you to not respond to Matteo’s texts or calls just yet.”
“I already agreed,” Sam said, suddenly aware of the warm weight of his arm around her middle.
She stepped back and looked around. The contrasting quiet of the villa after the noise and crowd from the other night slowly sank in. As if everything else was secondary to her awareness of this man.
The corridor stretched long and cool beneath her flats, flanked by shuttered windows that spilled sunlight across inlaid marble floors.
Through the open arches on one side, she caught glimpses of Lake Como glittering between cypress trees, so startlingly blue it looked unreal.
Like everything else in this house that smelled faintly of lemon oil, old money and effortless beauty.
“And?” Mr. Ricci said, without missing the slightest cue.
She sighed, hating the feeling of betraying Matteo to this…stranger. “He texted me all day yesterday. Someone also knocked on my door the previous night, but I was in a carb coma after the early dinner and wasn’t fully awake.”
His jaw tightened at the mention of his brother. “The evening visitor must have been my aunt.”
“How do you know it wasn’t Matteo?”
“He and Angelina took off for one of those lakeside crawls—bars, boat lounges, something loud, I imagine.” His cool, even mildly detached, tone said exactly what he thought of such activities.
“Wait,” Sam sputtered, coming to a stop just as they emerged onto the expansive front lounge. “Why would your aunt visit me?”
Mr. Ricci, of course, didn’t stop.
Sam followed him down the wide stone steps of the villa, sunlight catching on the ivy-laced balustrade and the pale stucco walls that had likely witnessed centuries of extravagant splendor.
In the courtyard below, a black Mercedes waited—sleek, silent, and somehow more intimidating than flashy—and Sam tried not to gape like a tourist who’d accidentally stepped into a postcard.
“She wants to see what kind of a woman snared my interest,” he said, opening the passenger door for her.
Sam inched closer, then stilled. “Why?”
“Because she hasn’t seen me with any woman, in any capacity, in a long time.” His eyes held hers. This close, the warm bergamot scent of him filled her nostrils. “Apparently, you’re going to cause me a lot of trouble, Ms. Fischer.”
Sam poked his chest and instantly regretted the action. “You’re the one who declared to all and sundry that I was your…girlfriend—mistress, whatever your generation calls it.”
Mr. Ricci grabbed her hand, his own abrasive against her smooth flesh. A jolt went through her, pooling low in her belly. His brows twitched, as if irritated by her reaction. “I offered to put you on a first-class flight back home.”
“And I have already told you that this holiday is important to me.” And because the man got her back up so easily, she added, “If you’re worried that you’ll find me moping around the dark corners of your illustrious villa, don’t be.
I’ll find alternate accommodation soon. And I intend to have fun this holiday, with or without Matteo by my side. ”
He inched closer, and it was like being pulled into his gravity. “Right, I forgot how interchangeably your generation uses partners.”
Alessandro did not have experience with being proved wrong, especially when it came to his assessment of people.
His assumption that spending three days with Ms. Fischer would rid him of his juvenile fascination with her had been rendered fully and utterly false.
In three days he’d brought Ms. Fischer to three different museums. On all three occasions, they had run into acquaintances—Angelina’s cousins and even Vittorio one afternoon—and he had to play the part of a doting lover to avoid suspicion.
One morning, his aunt and father had waited on them in the courtyard, just to meet his mysterious captive girlfriend, as his aunt put it. It should have bothered him no end to play into the fake relationship he had created.
It didn’t. If anything, he had liked touching Ms. Fischer under the pretense of an attentive lover, seeing the flush rise in her cheeks, desire dance in her eyes. Her gaze holding his in challenge even as her body quivered at their fake intimacy.
It had taken him mere minutes in the art gallery that first day to realize that she knew art, that she viewed it and absorbed it with a perspective unlike any he’d ever known. She seemed…desperately hungry for life, for any and every experience she could get.
She wasn’t like any other twenty-three-year-old he’d ever met. At least not like the crowd that hung around Matteo. She was smart and witty and had no compunction about calling him out on his jaded presumptions.
He had expected a touristy American to treat Milan like a backdrop—snapping selfies in front of canvases, mispronouncing Caravaggio, scrolling social media endlessly.
Instead, Ms. Fischer moved through each museum like she was starving for stillness, pausing for so long in front of a single portrait it made even him restless.
And when he joined her, she didn’t try fill silence with inane chatter, even though the awareness between them thrummed into life.
And when she spoke about brushwork or composition, it was with the clarity of someone who wasn’t trying to impress him.
His need to understand why she drew him so morphed into an obsession.
How had this woman and Matteo crossed paths? They seemed to belong on different planets. She suited his tastes much more than those of his flashy brother and—
The thought stopped his stride, though not his gaze, as he arrived at the upscale café he’d asked the chauffeur to bring her to. Tourists and locals alike waited months for a reservation at the café, drawn by its elegant gilded ceilings that provided a perfect background for their pics.
Curled into a wrought-iron chair at the edge of the chic little spot tucked into a quiet courtyard, Ms. Fischer looked like one of the masterpieces she’d been obsessed with.
A painting in soft motion—sunlight catching the slope of her bare back as she leaned over a sketchbook. Her braid had loosened, sending flyaway tendrils to kiss the fragile line of her jaw. The low waist of her jeans dipped enough to reveal a strip of silky skin when she shifted.
The humming under his skin intensified as he watched her, as did a strange foreboding.