Chapter Five Guinevere
Chapter Five
Guinevere
Eight days after the incident, I finally woke up feeling good again.
In fact, I woke up and still felt as if I was dreaming.
Light filtered through the sheer curtains and pooled on the white linen bedcovers like liquid gold.
Raffa had left the doors open slightly so the faint sounds of city life streamed in, the staccato of Italian conversations and the toy car honk of a Vespa.
It was so idyllic I had to pinch myself to make sure I was truly awake.
Stretching the vestiges of sleep from my body, I noted I was still sore and stiff, but not nearly as crippled by the accident as I had been even two days ago. My throat was tender like a healing wound, but I didn’t feel pain when swallowing anymore, and my thoughts were unmuddied.
It was time to get organized and out of Raffa’s space.
There was accepting kindness from a stranger and then exploiting that kindness, and I felt dangerously on the verge of the latter.
Raffa had fed me and given me shelter, but he’d also carried me to the bathroom when I was too sick and in pain to walk, read to me from Dante’s Inferno because I couldn’t entertain myself with a concussion, and even braided my hair.
God.
The feeling of his big hands moving gently over my scalp and hair had been the single most romantic and erotic experience in my life.
Which was depressing, really, but it was one of the many reasons I was on this adventure. To learn about myself in every way, including my sexuality. It embarrassed me a little to be a twenty-three-year-old virgin, but I’d never had time for boys. I was either too sick or working too hard.
Now I was free to fall for anyone I wanted, but of course I had to set my sights on the gorgeous Italian man eleven years my senior and wildly out of my league.
I sighed as I slipped out of bed and wiggled my toes in the plush Aubusson carpet.
A full-length ornate gold mirror in the corner of the room showed my skinny legs beneath the tails of Raffa’s borrowed linen shirt.
I raised the cuff to my nose to inhale the delicious scent of air-dried laundry and wondered what the material might smell like after a day spent pressed to his skin.
“Concentrate,” I scolded myself as I headed to the bathroom to take care of my morning business.
When I was finished, I tiptoed down the hall to the staircase spiraling up and down to other floors, straining to hear if anyone was awake and inside. A faint clatter of dishware from the first floor had me moving down the stairs, taking in the interior of the palace properly for the first time.
It was magnificent. Like something from a Disney movie.
There was even an intricate fresco painted on the ceiling of the main floor that extended from a formal living room through a huge dining room and music room.
Artwork I recognized from history books and museums lined the walls, along with some marble statues that had to be authentic antiques.
Finally, I found the kitchen and, through two sets of open doors, a huge terrace where Raffa sat at a ceramic-inlaid table, drinking an espresso while he read the local paper.
I took a moment to study him in the rich morning sunlight because it was my first opportunity to really look my fill. And look I did because he was simply too lovely not to admire.
Even though I’d mostly seen him in dismantled businessman finery, he was obviously fit, with the kind of quilted muscles that left seams in his skin I wanted to trail with my fingertips.
The sun turned his dark-brown hair to bronze and caught the pale maple of his eyes so they glowed like a predator’s, narrow and intent on something written in the newsprint.
Those same big, tanned hands that had braided my hair made my throat dry as I watched them flex, the tendons in his forearms popping as he folded the paper impatiently and dropped it to the table with a dark glare.
For one insane moment, I thought getting chased through a wheat field and hit by a car was worth it to see such a man sitting there, as beautiful as any piece of art I’d ever admired before him.
“Something unpleasant in the news?” I asked as I moved forward into the doorframe. “How shocking.”
He looked up at me without surprise, as if he’d known I was there the entire time. The expression on his face was too bland to be called a smile, but there was amusement there.
“This is universal, I think,” he agreed, gesturing for me to sit across from him. “Help yourself to fruit and bread, but do not eat too much. We have things to do today.”
“Yeah, I was going to have a bite to eat and then go to the bank. I researched, and there is one in this neighborhood.” It was only a fifteen-minute walk, which I could manage easily even with a stiff hip.
“I just have to call my parents to ask them to transfer me some money. Then I guess I’ll go to the police and file a report.
It seems like I’d have to do that in order to get an appointment at the consulate for a new passport. ”
Raffa crossed one ankle over the opposite knee, and I noticed he was wearing leather loafers without socks.
The sight of his olive-brown ankles shouldn’t have been shocking or sexy, yet it made my pulse pound.
I wanted to reach out and touch the knob of bone and the plum-thin skin to see if he’d shiver.
“No.”
I blinked away the fantasy, heat rushing to my cheeks as I stared up into his implacable gaze. “Sorry, what?”
“No,” he repeated clearly. “I have a better idea. You will finish your breakfast, and then we will go get you some clothes. As tempting as you are in my shirt, I do not think it is appropriate attire for a police station or the consulate.”
I winced because somehow I’d forgotten that little detail.
“Maybe I can borrow a belt?” I suggested.
Raffa’s full mouth twitched. “That will do until we get to the stores, maybe. Do not worry about money, Guinevere. You may have noticed I am not exactly worried about it myself.”
I sat back in the wrought iron chair with a slice of melon in my hand and sighed. “I just feel like I’ve taken a lot from you.”
“Is it taken if I have given it freely?” he asked imperiously.
He should have been condescending, speaking like that, looking like that, but there was an unmissable warmth I couldn’t pinpoint to any one mannerism. It was obvious he liked helping me. That maybe he even liked me.
“I’ll pay you back,” I insisted. “My father raised me to believe it’s vital not to be in debt to anyone.”
“Smart man.”
“He is,” I agreed. “And I still need to call him ... I sent a text saying I was under the weather, and they’ve been checking in on me. I didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily.”
They would have been on the first flight out if I’d told them what had happened to me, especially if I’d been forced to admit I was in Italy, and not France as I’d told them.
It would have meant the end of my trip before it even had a chance to begin, and after everything—my illness, the years of anticipation, the loss of Gemma—I found it was the final straw I couldn’t allow myself to lose.
“You are their child. It is their right to worry.”
“Hmm, well I guess you have a point there.” Only, I’d never thought of it quite like that. I’d always been vaguely annoyed by, though always accepting of, my parents’ concerns and hovering.
They’d almost lost me twice to brutal kidney infections when I was a child and then had to watch as I underwent major surgery for a kidney transplant at sixteen. Then we’d lost Gemma, and whatever gains they’d made in giving me some autonomy had diminished like smoke in the wind.
“I’ll call them,” I told him, feeling properly chastised.
He shrugged a shoulder. “Do what you want. I was merely telling the truth from my experience. I do not have children, but you cannot grow up with an Italian mother without hearing how difficult it is to raise and love your children, then let them go off into the world on their own. She is always happier when we are all under one roof, and all of us are grown.”
I plucked a clementine from the fruit bowl and picked at the peel anxiously. “They’re going to flip out.”
His expressive, slashing brows rose. “Well, their daughter was almost raped and then hit by a car. Can you blame them?”
“No. But they’ll want me to go home immediately.”
Another flippant shrug as if he didn’t see the problem.
“So? You are a grown woman, are you not?”
“Of course!”
“Then, you can do as you wish.” He sighed at my flat look and leaned closer so that the sunlight caught both of his eyes and turned them to burnished gold.
“There is a difference between respect and blind obedience, capisci ? You can respect them by telling them the truth about what has happened to you, but you do not owe them submission to their desires. I do not know why you are in Italy, but does one not usually spend time abroad to discover oneself?” When I nodded somewhat woodenly, a little cowed by his wisdom, he leaned back in his chair and opened his palms. “Then, do what you want and only what you want. This time and this place are for you. It is rare we get so much freedom. Do not squander it before your adventure has even begun.”
I blinked at him as I chewed a piece of bright citrus.
It was both eerie and wonderful that his thoughts so closely aligned with my own.
Maybe it shouldn’t have surprised me, given that he was almost a perfect stranger, yet I felt more comfortable sitting there that morning with him on a terrace in Florence than I’d felt in most other places with most other people in my life so far.
“Are all Italian men so wise?” I teased finally.
Raffa’s slow, curling grin was wicked. “You have not seen anything yet.”
“Okay, Yoda,” I quipped, then hesitated. “Sorry, do you know Star Wars ?”
“I am Italian, not an alien,” he drawled. “Of course I understand the reference, young Padawan.”