Chapter Three Guinevere #2
Without hesitation, he started to lead me toward the door, but two steps in, a small cry left my lips because my side screamed in protest. Raffa made a displeased noise and very carefully bent to gather my legs over one arm and prop my back delicately against the other so as not to jostle my ribs.
I pressed my stuffed nose into the short hair on his hard chest and squeezed my eyes against the tears that sprang up behind them.
The simple kindness was too much to handle after the sheer terribleness of my first day in the country.
“Sorry,” I croaked.
“ Stai zitta. ”
That I knew well.
Shut up.
My father still muttered it under his breath sometimes when one of us was being particularly obstinate.
I obeyed, but only because I needed to save my energy for when he put me down in the bathroom.
The hallway outside my bedroom was narrow, dotted every couple meters with chandeliers that glittered dimly on a low setting.
When we reached the bathroom door, Raffa gently lowered me to my feet, hands on my forearms as I steadied myself.
I tried to look up at him, but the effort made my head ache sharply, and I could barely open my eyes to see him anyway.
“Call if you need me,” he demanded.
I shuffled around without saying anything because I’d be damned if I asked this gorgeous stranger to help me in the bathroom.
As it was, it took me way too long after closing the door on him to lower myself to the toilet and do my business.
I thought briefly about checking myself out in the mirror, but I knew turning on the light would only hurt my eyes.
By the time I reached the doorway again, I had to lean my entire body against the door for a moment of reprieve.
For one clear, brutal second, I wanted to cry.
I wanted teleportation to exist so I could wish myself back to Michigan with one click of ruby-red slippers.
My mom would coo over me and make sure I was fed, watered, and cuddled to within an inch of my life, while my dad would go all over town to get my favorite treats to brighten my day.
I was twenty-three years old, but I felt so young, so unprepared to be sick, alone, and without money or ID in a foreign country, at the mercy of a man who’d hit me with his freaking car.
Gemma had been the one to call me Jinx for the first time when I fell through a rotted board in a friend’s treehouse as a girl and broke my arm. My parents had joined in soon after when it became apparent that karma had a grudge against me.
I’d felt lucky recently, though, that I was not the one who’d died in my twenties like my sister.
Now I wasn’t sure if being lucky or unlucky really mattered.
The truth seemed to be this: As soon as you were comfortable, life found a way to kick you straight in the teeth.
“Guinevere?” Raffa’s voice filtered through the door. “Do you need help?”
I sucked in a breath and pushed off the door so I could open it. He stood to the side, arms crossed, naked torso framed by that black robe.
“I wish I felt better to admire you properly,” I admitted as I braced myself against the doorframe.
I was too out of it to control my impulses, so I wasn’t even embarrassed when Raffa surprised me by grinning slightly, a wolfish expression that should have been threatening.
“You will have the opportunity when you are better,” he quipped before stepping forward to pick me up again. As he adjusted me in his arms, he added, “You have a fever.”
“Mmm,” I agreed, pressing my nose shamelessly to the column of his throat in search of the warm scent. “Cold.”
He cursed softly but took me to my room and gently laid me back in bed.
I shivered as he tucked the bedsheets in around me, then watched through slitted eyes as he retrieved another blanket from the cabinet in one corner.
Before he left, he took up my phone, held it to my face to open the screen with the facial recognition, and then typed away at something.
“My number,” he told me, placing the phone by my hip on the bed so I wouldn’t have to strain to reach it. “Text if you need the bathroom or anything else, si ? Do not be an idiota and suffer needlessly.”
“Aye, aye,” I said, sucking in a wet breath before continuing, “Captain.”
He stared at me critically, then pressed the back of his hand to my forehead with a shake of his head. “If this does not come down by the morning, I will call the doctor back. And you must drink, if you can. A kidney condition is not something to fuck with.”
“’M fine.”
He ignored me, pushing a lock of hair off my brow when he’d finished taking my temperature. “ Sogni d’oro. ”
Sweet dreams.
“Not as sweet as I thought they’d be,” I confessed in a slur as sleep rushed up to meet me like a slap to the face.
“Not yet,” he agreed before I fell into slumber. “But they will be again soon. Prometto. ”
I promise.
That continued for the next four days. Raffa was around whenever I texted, at all hours, to help me to the bathroom, to bring me medication and cool cloths he pressed to my forehead.
He never lingered, but it was soothing to know he was so close, so watchful.
Between the horrific cold I’d probably caught on the plane, which led too quickly to dehydration, and the bruises from the accident, I’d never felt so ill in my body before, not even after my kidney transplant, when I’d been dosed up on painkillers.
It was enough to give me nightmares that meant I woke up with croaking screams, tears wet on my face, ribs so painful they burned like fire.
And Raffa was there by the side of my bed like a sentient shadow, with cool, soothing hands and quiet Italian words my muddled brain couldn’t process.
There were hazy memories of his big hand cupping the back of my head to support me while he tipped a cold glass of water to my lips and the salt of his fingers against my lips as he forced me to eat small morsels of bread and sweet slices of peach.
The doctor came back and hooked me up to an IV so I could get proper fluids, which was a godsend, because otherwise I would have had to go to the hospital and try to explain, while I was in agony, what had happened to my money and ID.
On the fifth day my fever finally broke and left me as hollow as a dried weed. I slept for nearly a full day after that, waking on the sixth day feeling marginally better than I had in what felt like years.
There was a tray beside me on the bed holding sweet Italian cornetti , toast, a pot of hazelnut-chocolate spread, and a few ripe Italian plums. I pushed myself into a seated lean with gritted teeth, even though the pain in my ribs and hip was duller than it had been.
On the tray there was a folded piece of notecard I picked up with shaky fingers.
Ragazza ,
Eat. You were too skinny before this sickness. Now you make a very pretty skeleton. I will be back in two hours. Call if you need me.
RR
“Bossy even in absentia,” I murmured, shocked by the rough texture of my voice.
Still, I was ravenous because I hadn’t eaten more than broth, focaccia, and peaches for days, so I slathered a triangle of toast in chocolate spread and shoved it into my mouth.
Which was when, of course, the door to the room opened and a stranger appeared.
She was a small woman but clearly athletic, muscles evident in her shoulders and arms through her tight black T-shirt and black cargo pants. Though she was pretty, her makeup-free face was severe, her outfit stark and almost military.
“ Bene , you’re up,” she declared, moving to the closed curtains to toss them open unceremoniously, yellow light piercing through the room and my eyes.
I shielded them in the crook of my arm so I could adjust, and when I opened them again, she was at the side of my bed, staring down at me.
“Now I understand,” she mused.
“Um, understand what?”
“Why Raffa picked up a girl on the side of the road,” she offered condescendingly, as if it was obvious.
I guessed it actually was.
“You look like shit,” she told me.
My hand flew to my hair, and I winced at the greasy, ratty mass of it.
“You smell too,” she informed me helpfully.
“Thanks,” I muttered. “I’ve been sick for days. What’s your excuse?”
She blinked at me, then threw her head back to laugh from her belly, deep and loud and long. When she recovered, dashing a tear from her eye with the back of her hand, she grinned at me. “ Si , I understand now. My name is Martina.”
“Guinevere,” I said.
“Raffa told me not to bother you,” she said, and I got the feeling she didn’t often follow orders. “But I had to meet you. Also, I thought you might want a shower.”
“I’d love one, but ...” I wasn’t sure I was up to it energetically, which was incredibly sad.
“We can leave the door open slightly, and I’ll wait in the hall. If you need help, I’ll be there in a second,” she proposed.
I bit my lower lip as I considered her offer.
It was just so ... strange to be relying on strangers when I felt so vulnerable and unwell.
But there was nothing for it, and I decided to be grateful instead of suspicious.
Most good midwesterners would have treated me the same in this situation, I was sure, so it shouldn’t be weird that Italians might too.
“Thank you. I do feel disgusting.”
Martina nodded emphatically to make it clear that I also looked disgusting.
“Finish your food while you tell me about yourself,” she suggested, but it was more like an order, and I had to wonder if she was in the military or something. She just had a commanding aura, like you’d rather die than disobey her, and if you still managed that somehow, she’d kill you herself.
So I grabbed the cornetto and tore off the sugar-sticky end to pop in my mouth. “What do you want to know?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-three.”
She seemed to find that amusing. “Oh yes.”
“Is twenty-three an exciting age for some reason?”
“Not really.” Her grin was sharp and wicked. “If you’re curious, Raffa is thirty-four.”
“Hmm,” I hummed noncommittally.
I hadn’t thought about his age or occupation or really any pertinent details about the man who’d become my reluctant rescuer. My injuries and illness had thrown me into a survival-state fugue that I was only now emerging from.
But I could admit to curiosity.
To thinking that an age gap that large was probably too large.
I was a naive girl in a foreign land freshly graduated with my MBA from U of M, and Raffa was a man with a job and a palace .
Yeah, talk about out of my league.
He was helping me out because he felt sorry for me, and even though he was gorgeous and gracious enough to be a walking, talking heartthrob, life had taught me better than to hope for the impossible.
“He’s been very nice to me,” I admitted. “Not everyone would have helped me the way he has.”
“Not even Raffa would have helped someone the way he has helped you.”
I frowned at her quip. “Are you implying he isn’t usually a nice person? Aren’t you friends?”
Martina laughed that barrel laugh again. “He’s my boss, I guess you could say. And he can be ... kind. He’s just not known for it outside his family and small circle of friends. You are the exception, it seems.”
I thought she meant it as a compliment, but it only planted a small seed of unease in my belly. If Raffa wasn’t usually this nice a guy, who was he really?