Chapter Eight Raffa #4
“I will,” Guinevere agreed, touching the windowsill gently, giving it a caress as if it were sentient. “Thank you for renting it to me. I’m so sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner.”
“No, you explain,” Signora Verga said, waving off the apology.
“Signora Verga,” I said in Italian, startling both women who turned to face me with hands over their hearts. “I assume you know about the boys who loiter outside your apartment selling drugs?”
The older woman’s finely lined face creased like a crumpled silk scarf. “They aren’t bad boys.”
“Oh?” I asked, crossing my arms as I leaned into the frame.
“Not like your kind,” she said, brave in the way of all older people, close enough to death to disregard danger.
“My kind? Hmmm.” I looked at Guinevere, who was frowning slightly as she struggled to keep up with the conversation. “My kind saved this girl from a worse kind of man and kept her safe this last week.”
“Then you know not all men who do bad things are rotten in their hearts,” she rebutted smugly, sniffing in triumph.
Amusement tickled the edge of my mouth, but I kept it firmly pressed shut.
“I like it here,” Guinevere told me, crossing her own arms to stand off with me. Given she was five foot nothing and light as a feather, it was laughable but oddly endearing. “I searched for ages until I found somewhere this cute that I could afford in the center of Florence.”
I leaned forward to inspect the lock on the door, lifting the latch and then dropping it to hear the squeal of the rusted hinge. Without saying a word, I looked back at her with a raised brow.
Her arms tightened protectively over her chest. “If Signora Verga is safe here, I’m sure I will be too.”
“Signora Verga isn’t an exquisitely beautiful young woman with more courage than sense,” I drawled.
“Raffa,” she gasped. “Don’t be rude.”
I almost laughed at her outrage when I had just given her one of the nicest compliments to ever leave my lips. She had all the indignation of a wet cat, and I found myself ridiculously attracted to that stubborn nobility.
“It’s true.” Signora Verga allowed with a dirty look my way that shifted to a sweet smile for Guinevere. “I am old now, not young and pretty like I once was.”
I turned my snort of disbelief into a short cough, but Guinevere saw through my ruse and leveled me with a glare.
“You’re lovely,” she declared. “And so is this apartment. I can’t wait to settle in.”
Something strange happened in my gut, hooks ripping up the lining of my stomach as if something was being forcibly dislodged.
“You are not staying here tonight.”
She pressed her lips into a flat line at my tone, which I could admit was the same one I used when ordering my soldati .
“Why not?” she asked in an excessively reasonable manner.
“I’m no longer sick, I have clothes, and you kindly lent me some cash that I’ll be able to pay you back for next week when I get my expedited replacement passport.
In fact, forget about taking me on your work trip to the winery.
I can go another day by myself to one of my own choosing.
You’ll be happy to be free of the American idiota . ”
Wasn’t that the million-euro question.
Why didn’t I want to be free of her?
I hadn’t been home to Villa Romano in two weeks, the longest stretch of time I’d spent away from my family since the death of my father.
The Pietra scum were peeking their ugly mugs out of the ground with their sights set on revenge and taking over my territory.
Mama and Stefania were convinced an arranged marriage between Stef’s family and my own would solidify my power base and provide long-awaited babies.
I was a capo with real-life fucking problems.
So why did I want to continue this farce of playing Prince Fucking Charming with this American girl?
“ Lasciaci ,” I told Signora Verga.
Leave us.
She sniffed at me again, shot a look at Guinevere like she was tossing her a lifeline, and then shuffled out of the apartment in her slippers.
I didn’t close the door behind me, but I didn’t need to.
Instead, I held Guinevere’s long-lashed brown eyes and stalked slowly toward her. She held her ground, tipping her chin up when I loomed over her so she could maintain eye contact.
She opened her mouth, no doubt to use her sharp little teeth to take a bite out of my bossy ass, but I silenced her by pressing my index finger to her mouth.
“I have gone to great lengths to take care of you, cerbiatta ,” I murmured, moving my hand from her closed mouth to trace the line of her cheekbone up into the loose hair over her ear.
She shivered slightly when I hooked a lock with my finger and pressed it behind the delicate shell.
“I find myself ... invested in your well-being now.”
“Financially,” she quipped, but the word was too breathless to be punchy.
“I have invested more money in many more things, and they could go bankrupt tomorrow without me giving a single fuck,” I admitted.
“A rich man.”
“Yes, and oftentimes, a bored man.”
“I’m not a toy, you know.” She rolled onto her tiptoes, but she was still so short she had no hope of intimidating me. “I’m not ... some bambolina you can just dress up and play with.”
I smirked a little because it was cute she was so excited to spit my words from last night on the dance floor back at me.
“No?” I murmured, sliding my entire palm under the heavy mane of hair against her neck, my thumb placed intimately over the thrum of her pulse.
“You would not like to be my doll, sometime? Dressed in red, all this hair spread out on my pillow, your thighs spread for the weight of me between them? You did not enjoy being pressed against me while I led you through a dance that made your nipples bead behind the fabric of that pretty dress?”
An almost violent shiver rattled her slim shoulders, but she set her teeth against the physical mark of her desire. “I told you, I’m not a prostitute.”
“Did I say you were?”
“You implied it by saying you’ve invested in me and now you want a return.”
“I do not know the kind of men you have in America, but in Italy, a man is honest about his attraction. I find you ... incantevole . Do you know what that means, Guinevere?”
“No,” she whispered as my thumb stroked gently back and forth over her thudding pulse point.
“It means beguiling . Enchanting. And for a man like me, that is dangerous. I cannot afford distractions, but here I am in this ugly apartment feeling ... unsettled because you are suggesting I will not see you again when all I want is more of you.”
“In the biblical sense?” she asked, a little lost and entirely aroused.
I didn’t leash the grin that spread warm and dark across my face.
“ Si, certo , one day. But until that day, I want to see you in a field of poppies as red as that dress. I want to take you to dinner at my favorite trattoria because I can imagine the face you will make when you try true bistecca alla Fiorentina . I want to finish reading Dante’s Inferno to you before we walk through his house together here in Firenze.
I want to witness you falling in love with my country because I think you could make this bored man fall in love with it again too. ”
“Oh,” she mouthed, searching my gaze for something I both wanted her to see and desperately wanted to hide.
See the me I used to be, I thought, the young college Raffa with charm and swagger and a zeal for life that entranced people into his orbit.
Don’t see Raffaele Romano, the cold, dark metal of a man made into a weapon.
“What are you asking me, exactly?” she asked, reaching up to gently grip my wrist below the hand framing her throat.
When she pressed her thumb to my pulse, it felt as if a loop closed between us. Our hearts, when I took a moment to observe, beat in perfect bass-note harmony.
“I want to know you,” I admitted, even though it felt like a confession and I had stopped going to church for those such a long time ago I could not remember. “Will you let me?”
“Will I get to know you too?” she asked, and if I had thought she was clever before, I knew it for certain then.
Because it was not a given this knowing would go both ways.
In fact, it absolutely would not .
But I’d avoided indulging in anything for so long, the temptation to do so now was physically overpowering. It burned in my gut and quaked in my bones. It echoed in the beat of my blood knocking against Guinevere’s thumb.
Do something for yourself. Take something for your own.
Know her and let someone, just one person, know you too.
“ Si ,” I whispered, as I pushed her hair behind her back, leaving her neck warm from my grip but bare for my lips as I sealed my promise with a kiss. “You will.”