Chapter Eight Raffa #2
He was not wrong, unfortunately. And there was some merit to her aggression. As the daughter of a Camorra capo in Lombardy, she had been raised around men with blood inked into their skin. It was not fair to assume she would remain untainted by it. It was not right to want her to be either.
But her aggression seemed hollow, a thin armor over an abyss of insecurity that could be easily manipulated.
She did not interest me.
Across from me, Guinevere had lost her smile and was staring into her empty bowl of fruit as if searching for answers.
“I would like to go check into my apartment today,” she said abruptly. “I emailed Signora Verga that I was ill, but I’m better now, and it’s time I got things in order.”
“Order?” Carmine laughed. “Aren’t you on vacation?”
“Yes.”
“Well then, what does order have to do with it?” He spoke English well because his father was a Canadian who had moved to the region years ago after meeting his mother while she was studying abroad in Halifax.
Guinevere sniffed at him in such a haughty, catlike way, I could not help but smile.
“I want to be sure I get to everything I want to do. I’m only here for six weeks, and I wasted one of them being sick and in bed.”
“Ignore Carmine. It is what I do. What is on your list, then?” I asked, disregarding her original entreaty.
For whatever reason, I did not want her to leave the shelter of my roof. Even if I had convinced myself to resist her temptation, I was not immune to this strange, celestial connection between us. It felt like fortuna , like fate. The hand of some greater force playing us both like burattini .
I could not stop wondering if I was meant to know her.
There was this inarguable sense that I had known her before. Or, maybe, that I had been waiting for her all this time without knowing it.
Could a stranger feel so immediately like a friend?
“I want to visit a winery, climb the steps of the Duomo, watch the sunset from Piazzale Michelangelo, spend hours at the Uffizi, eat my weight in gelato, explore the Etruscan ruins at Volterra, visit Siena and San Gimignano and Montepulciano—”
“ Bene, bene, basta! ” Carmine said, laughing as he held up his hands in surrender. “You have a lot to see and do. I agree.”
“It’s a good thing you have Raffaele,” Martina announced as she joined us on the terrace in her workout kit, glistening with sweat from her morning exercise. Renzo followed closely behind, wet with perspiration too. “He is the best tour guide.”
Carmine snorted orange juice out his nose, and Ludo barked out a laugh.
“I hate to ferry out-of-towners around,” I admitted to Guinevere, who focused on smearing a gob of Nutella on top of a cream-filled Ringo cookie.
“Well, no pressure. I came here alone, and I am happy to travel alone. You don’t need to be forced into my company just because you hit me with your car.”
Renzo laughed into the back of his hand.
“ Di classe ,” Carmine drawled.
Smooth.
“It is the least I could do, I suppose, after hitting Bambi,” I teased with a flash of a smile that bared my teeth.
I’d noticed that whenever I did that, a flush spilled down her front like spilled wine. It was no different now, the white of her dress emphasizing her blush.
“I wouldn’t want to bother you,” she insisted between her teeth, her gumption fighting through her conservatism.
I felt as I had when I was a boy pulling a girl’s pigtails, giddy and mean.
“Well, I think we are past that, do you not?”
She glared at me.
I glared right back.
Until Martina laughed and clapped her hands. “ Perfetto . Today is a good day to show her the wines. You promised Imelda you would visit Fattoria Casa Luna today, anyway. Guinevere can visit while you do business.”
“Fine,” I agreed.
“Can we swing by my apartment first?” Guinevere asked, standing up and fruitlessly trying to brush the wrinkles from her dress.
No.
“Fine,” I repeated, colder than before.
She bit the bottom of her lip, gaze skirting mine before she made her way inside.
My soldati barely waited until she was through the kitchen before bursting into laughter. Even Ludo.
“She is stunning, boss, I’ll give you that,” Carmine said through his chuckles, wiping at his leaking eyes.
“Evil,” I told them in Italian. “Swine.”
“Genius,” Martina quipped, pointing to herself. “Matchmaker. Just promise me when you marry the girl I can be your best man.”
“I believe you all have business to get to? I want to know who the hell this San Marco is by the time I return tonight. And Ludo? Did you find any of Guinevere’s things at Galasso’s residence?”
He shook his head. “Only a photo of her family, I think. Parents and sister.”
I frowned, surprised that the bastardo had sold or thrown out everything that wasn’t of value from her car but kept a silly photo.
“Did you take his hard drive?”
Ludo only blinked dispassionately at me, because of course he had.
“Tell me what you find tonight,” I said as I stood from the table. “He mentioned Leo’s name. Someone call him and find out how well he knew the stronzo .”
“Aye, aye, boss,” Martina agreed. “Now, you have fun on your date!”
I rolled my eyes and went into the cool depths of the house to get ready for my outing, ignoring the way they started gossiping about me before I’d even left earshot.
“Where is the Ferrari?” Guinevere asked when I took her to the garage and led her toward my matte silver Bugatti Chiron.
She eyed the Maserati, the two Lamborghinis, and the Ducati motorcycle almost suspiciously and muttered under her breath, “You could feed a starving nation with the money from these cars.”
“Unfortunately, I do not have an altruistic bone in my body,” I said, unashamed of my excess.
It was not something Italians were made to feel guilty about like they seemed to be in puritanical-leaning America. I worked hard for my fortune and ill-gotten gains. Why should I feel embarrassed about it?
“You helped me,” she reminded me as we got into the leather-scented interior. In the deep bucket seat, her dress rode up to scandalous heights, revealing that while she was short, she had long legs for her proportions.
I wanted to suck bruises into the tender, pale skin of her inner thighs like stepping stones leading toward her sweet figa .
“Exception, not rule,” I said as the car rumbled to life and I pulled briskly out of the garage and through the open gate into gentle midmorning traffic. “As you seem to be for all my rules.”
“Is that a compliment or a complaint?”
“Both,” I decided, sliding a look at her to see the way she bit the edge of her smile.
“So the Ferrari. What happened to it?” she asked again, much to my annoyance.
“You, if you will remember that night last week when you hip checked it.”
She rolled her eyes so exaggeratedly I worried they would get stuck that way. “Har har. Was the damage really so bad? I mean, I did have a mild concussion, but I remember it looking fine, and we drove it yesterday.”
“Fine is not perfect.”
“And it’s perfect or nothing for Raffaele Romano?” she asked, pronouncing my name like a local.
It shouldn’t have been so attractive, the sound of my name in her mouth. But she rolled her r ’s as if tasting fine wine, savoring the taste of each syllable.
“You say that like it is a bad thing.”
She shrugged in my periphery as I followed the direction system to the address she’d given me across the Arno for her rented apartment.
“You must find yourself disappointed a lot,” she said, her gaze pressed to the side of my face the way her fingers were the other day to the glass separating her from Florence’s wonders. As if my secrets were just under the skin.
“My definition of perfect is different from yours, perhaps. To me, it does not mean ‘flawless.’ It means ‘enticing,’ so vibrant you cannot help but find it beautiful, flaws and all.”
“And what would you consider a flaw?”
I hummed over that for a moment because too many came to mind, but I did not think she would enjoy my flippancy.
“Stupidity. Willful ignorance. A lack of loyalty to family and friends.”
She flinched as if I had hit her, turning toward the window so I only caught a fleeting glimpse of the self-recrimination on her face.
Uncharacteristically, I did not know what to say. I had not been deliberately insulting as I sometimes meant to be when we bantered, and I was strangely ... unsettled that my words had hurt her.
The tension in the car mounted as I maneuvered us silently through traffic to the other side of the city.
“ Chi sta bene da solo, sta bene con tutti ,” I said finally, pushing the words out into the dense quiet between us. “Have you heard of this saying?”
“No,” she said softly without looking at me.
“It means something like ‘If you feel good about yourself, you will feel good about everyone, and they will feel the same way about you in return.’” When she didn’t fill my pause, I sighed.
“I did not intend to insult you, Guinevere, and I am sorry that I did nonetheless. I am sorrier, though, that you were so ready to believe I would. That I should even.”
“You were the one who called me an idiota ,” she pointed out with a sharp look from the corner of her eye.
I wanted to smile at her show of teeth but refrained.
“That was before I knew you. Now I do not think you are stupid or willfully ignorant or disloyal. Naive, certainly. New to Italian culture, clearly. But I cannot think poorly of you in any sense, cerbiatta , and I have only known you for a week. I shudder to think how grand my impression of you will become if I know you any longer.”
She bit her lip to downplay her grin, but there was a noticeable shift in her energy, like sunshine slicing through a dense cloud.
“That was probably, in a very roundabout sort of way, the sweetest thing anyone has ever said about me,” she confessed.
“You should find better company, then,” I said mildly as we waited for the crowds of tourists to cross the street a block away from our destination.