Chapter Twenty-Two Guinevere
Chapter Twenty-Two
Guinevere
I dreamed that I was sitting at a café in Florence, waiting for Raffa to pick me up.
When he pulled up in the red Ferrari Spyder, I hesitated, suddenly unsure about getting into the car with him even though I was desperate to join him.
He watched me from the open window of the car with a patient smile on his lips, fingers drumming against the metal.
Just as I stood up to finally join him, the car blew up. A car bomb or something that completely eradicated the vehicle and everything inside it. Including Raffa.
I woke up crying.
As I blinked up at the ceiling with tears leaking down my cheeks, I knew I could no longer deny the truth.
There was only one path my life had been directing me down all these years, and it led through hell all the way to the throne of the devil himself.
A man who would break through the crust of the earth to find me. A man who had sacrificed again and again just to see me happy. A man who deserved the world and who somehow saw his happily ever after in me.
I didn’t know where he was emotionally after last night in the barn, and I cursed myself for giving in to exhaustion instead of holding out to explain exactly how I felt, but I could still make amends this morning.
After a quick shower, where I was careful not to submerge my face beneath the spray because of the lingering nightmare of being waterboarded, and then the administration of my medicine, I went downstairs to grab something to eat.
Four days without my meds wouldn’t kill me, but I had to make up for the lack by drinking even more than my usual gallon of water a day and sticking strictly to my diet.
It was early enough that the kids were just gathering their bags to go off to school, so I paused to kiss them all on the head and give Zacheo a big hug.
“Are my parents still asleep?” I asked Angela.
“Yes. I expect they will sleep until lunch, so I am making something good.”
“And Raffa? Is he up yet?” I grabbed an apple from the bowl on the island.
“He is meeting with Renzo. That is not a good breakfast, though, Vera!” Raffa’s mother tutted at me in Italian. “Sit and let me make you something.”
“No, thank you,” I insisted, having caught sight of Ludo waiting for me outside as he had every morning before the Pietras took me. “I have a busy morning, but I promise to eat a big lunch.”
“You are too skinny!” she called, but I was already slipping past Carlotta out the front door and jogging over to the side of the house, where Ludo was doing push-ups one handed to take the strain off his still-healing side.
Without hesitation, I sat cross-legged on his back.
“You think this makes it more difficult?” he grunted as he lowered himself again.
“It should.” I chomped into my apple and took in the gorgeous fall morning over the Tuscan hills. “But it’s mostly to prove that you absolutely should not be doing push-ups two weeks after getting shot.”
“Sto bene,” he said. “It was just a graze.”
There were people in the vines, their voices carrying up the hill to the house, but after the first day of the harvest, the family didn’t participate every day. On the last day, we would have another feast, but only as a family, to celebrate another successful year of grapes.
I didn’t realize I had included myself in the family so easily until I was mid-swallow around a piece of apple, and I choked.
Ludo tossed me off his back to pound a hand between my shoulders until I coughed it out.
“Grazie mille,” I rasped, waving him away as I stood up. “Well, now that I’ve almost choked to death, are you ready for our run?”
He nodded, staring at me a little harder than usual, probably because I was skipping in place. “You were just tortured and kept captive for days. Perhaps you want to take a break?”
“Pfft. I’m too energized this morning to take a break,” I told him solemnly before shooting him a wide grin.
“You fucked Raffa in the barn yesterday,” he countered.
I gasped, smacking him in the chest, and then darted off on the trail down the hill, yelling over my shoulder, “A lady never kisses and tells.”
“You have a succhiotto on your neck. It goes without saying,” he muttered as he caught up with me swiftly and fell into easy step beside me.
My hand flew up to my neck instinctively. I hadn’t realized Raffa had left a hickey because I’d put my hair into a ponytail when I was in the kitchen and not in front of a mirror.
“So much for discretion,” I bemoaned, but Ludo only bumped me with his shoulder in solidarity.
“Be careful with him,” Ludo surprised me by saying. Unlike Martina or Carm, he was not usually one to speak about emotions. “Boss was in a bad way when you went back to America, but he nearly went mad when you were taken. He doesn’t need much in life, but I think it is obvious that he needs you.”
“I need him too,” I offered simply. “When he’s finished his meeting with Renzo, I intend to tell him just how much.”
Ludo grunted, but I could see the faint curl of a smile at the end of his thin mouth.
“Softy,” I teased him, which made him knock into me again and power forward even faster.
I laughed as I chased him.
After a moment, I heard voices through the cypress trees, and we rounded a corner to come up on Renzo and Raffa, who were both in their running gear, heading down the same trail.
They were already sweaty, Raffa’s tee tucked into the back of his black athletic shorts, his bare chest glistening in the new-day sun.
My mouth went impossibly dry, tongue adhered to the back of my teeth.
I deserved it, but Raffa’s reserved look when he saw me over his shoulder panged in my gut.
“Buongiorno,” I called over the crunch of gravel beneath our feet. “Isn’t it a beautiful morning?”
Renzo blinked placidly back at me, but Raffa cocked his head, studying me for a hidden motive.
“It is,” Ludo grunted, because he was a good friend and the silence was awkward.
“Your mother told me you and Zo were in a meeting,” I told Raffa.
He waved between himself and his right-hand man. “We are multitasking.”
“Do you mind if we join you?” I asked as we pulled abreast of the other two joggers. “Race to the bottom of the hill?”
“Will I have to carry you back up it?” Raffa finally said, and though his delivery was bland, there was a bend in his mouth that said he was teasing me.
Warmth blossomed in my chest. “If you want the extra workout, but I’m more than capable of running back up myself. Ludo and I do this circuit every morning.”
Raffa lifted a brow as he looked to Ludo, who only grunted back.
“He gets more eloquent after the first two or three miles,” I explained to Renzo and Raffa.
Even Renzo’s mouth twitched this time.
“So,” I drawled. “Pronti?”
Ready?
“Partenza,” Ludo offered.
Set.
Raffa and I locked eyes as I waited for him to say the word. Instead, he reached out to put a hand on my shoulder. A smile was already forming on my lips when he slid his foot in front of mine so I tripped, and, using the hand on my shoulder, he controlled my fall to the ground.
Only when I was down and he was separated from me did he call out, “Via!”
Go!
“Caspita,” I cursed in Italian as I heaved myself to my feet and took off after the men, who were still laughing as they sprinted down the winding road.
They were all taller than me and undoubtedly fitter than me, given that I had taken up serious exercise just in the last few months, but they only beat me by a handful of yards, which I took as its own accomplishment.
Then I remembered that Ludo had a healing gunshot wound and still finished before me, and I felt a little less vindicated.
I bent over, gasping for breath with a hand to the stitch in my side, when I reached them where they were waiting at the bottom of the hill.
“Bravissima, Guinevere,” Renzo praised me in that quiet way of his, stepping up beside me to squeeze my sweaty shoulder.
“Very impressive,” Raffa agreed, staring at me from his habitual pose, arms crossed, legs spread like those of a fighter braced for combat. His sweaty hair curled around his forehead and ears, and there was that small, half-moon grin on his face he’d told me was made just for me.
“You should see her fight,” Ludo added, stretching out his thickly muscled tree-trunk thighs. “She is weak, but very fast.”
I rolled my eyes at my friend and flexed my minimal biceps. “Who’re you calling weak?”
Raffa chuckled, reaching out to run rough fingertips over the thin-skinned underside of my arm. When I shivered, his smile turned predatory.
“You look stronger,” he admitted. “You are certainly faster than when we ran together in Florence.”
“I told you I took MMA classes and I started running a lot in Michigan.”
“Why?” he asked, head cocked, something working behind those eyes the color of sun-bleached pennies.
It was a good question, and until that moment, I hadn’t had a great answer for it. “I think,” I said slowly, “I wanted to be prepared to defend myself in case I ever came back.”
Raffa only leaned back a quarter of an inch, his expression hardly shifting, but I knew him well enough to know that he reeled away from my statement as if to protect himself. He stared at me, matte eyed and stern.
“Leave us,” he said softly.
Renzo and Ludo were already turning to head back up the hill.
He waited until they were gone to ask, “Are you fucking with me, Guinevere?”