Chapter Eighteen Guinevere
Chapter Eighteen
Guinevere
Living with Raffa was both incredible and frustrating.
Incredible, because his palazzo was a work of art and history that his cook, Servio, and housekeeper, Annella, had countless stories to tell me about.
It had originally been constructed in the sixteenth century by Gherardo Silvani for one of the wealthiest merchants in the city and later sold to a local eccentric art lover, who had commissioned Il Garofalo to paint on the ceiling in the living room a mural depicting a woodland setting besieged with wild animals and a naked nymph hiding in the greenery, the goddess Diana painted beside a huge buck in the foreground.
It made me wonder if Raffa had drawn inspiration for my nickname from the otherworldly imagery.
So living in a breathing testament to Florentine history was amazing daily, as was getting to know the motley crew Raffa seemed to have at his beck and call.
Despite my negative first impression of him, Carmine proved to be almost ridiculously charming and an incredible storyteller.
He regaled me with stories about his youth trailing after Raffa; his older brother, Renzo; and Leo in the Tuscan countryside.
The games they would play and the trouble they got into—apparently Leo almost got them all suspended for a rude prank he pulled on one of the nuns at their primary school.
He was just as chatty as I could be, and I found myself seeking him out whenever the villa was too quiet and Raffa was busy with work.
I already knew and liked Martina, though her ruthless teasing never failed to make me blush. She was incredibly smart and had taken to furthering my Italian-language education by giving me actual homework and quizzing me over mealtimes.
“If you want to be with a Romano, you must speak Italian,” she had explained seriously.
“I leave in three weeks,” I’d reminded her, but she had only sniffed and continued with our lessons.
I was grateful.
It made it easier to speak to Ludo, who did not speak English as well as the others but whom I liked the best. He was quiet and unassuming, not particularly handsome but with a set of the sweetest brown eyes I’d ever seen.
When Raffa was too busy to go on my runs with me, Ludo would come.
They were often silent journeys, but I enjoyed his peaceful energy and occasional keen observations.
He was also happy to aid me in my search for Italian relatives.
I figured if anyone could find information on my family tree in Tuscany, it was the man who ran investigations for Raffa’s investment firm.
We didn’t have much more to go on than the fact that my father had immigrated to the United States twenty-six years ago and was born somewhere in the countryside close to Florence.
He had changed his name when he immigrated, but I knew he was born with the first names Mariano Giovanni.
Italian recordkeeping was notoriously unorganized and not digitized, most of the information kept on handwritten papers in local record offices, but Ludo promised to do his best with such solemnity that it made me believe he’d make more progress than I ever had.
I only spent time with Renzo when Raffa was around because the two were constantly locked in the study together, working on whatever they’d been dealing with at the firm. But it meant a lot to me when he thanked me for my help because I thought he wasn’t the kind of man to give praise easily.
I did not miss my lonely apartment across the river. It had seemed like a symbol of my independence, but it took even more strength of character to live in a house of foreign strangers than it did to live on my own in a little bubble.
But it was frustrating, too, because for the last five days, Raffa had been run off his feet with work.
In fact, he’d left Florence entirely for two nights on a work trip to Switzerland and returned home in the middle of the night on the third.
I tried to stay awake for him, but Martina and I had gone to Volterra to see the Etruscan ruins that day, and I was exhausted from the walking, fresh air, and early start.
Which meant I had been living with Raffa for five days and I was still, technically or not, a virgin.
And it was driving me crazy.
Fortunately, I had my period during that hectic stretch. It was over now, and I would be spending the entire day with Raffa.
So I decided to start it off on the right foot by joining him in the shower.
The tiles were cold and hard beneath my knees, but the feeling of his heavy shaft stretching my lips more than made up for it.
When he came, he fisted one hand in my hair and jerked himself off on my face before hoisting me to my feet and getting me off with his fingers.
“Tonight,” he promised before sucking a bruise into my throat. “I will finally teach you how to take every inch of my cock in this snug little pussy.”
With a smug grin, he left me panting against the wall of the shower to finish dressing for our day in the ocean.
I was just stepping out of the shower myself when my phone rang. My mind was still trying to reanimate after my orgasm, so I answered it without thinking, assuming it was one of my friends from language school.
“Guinevere.” My dad’s voice crackled through the microphone like a lightning bolt. “I called six times.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was sleeping and then in the shower.” I put the phone on speaker so I could wrap myself in a huge terry cloth robe I’d found in one of the guest bathrooms and then started to moisturize my face. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” he said darkly. “Everything is not okay because it appears my daughter has been lying to me about where she is.”
My pot of moisturizer fell into the sink with a clatter, my hand hanging numbly in the air.
“Guinevere?” he snapped.
“What are you talking about?” I asked, trying to salvage the situation, but my scrambling brain could find no lie to cover my first one.
“Are you in France?” he demanded point blank.
I chewed my lip. Raffa appeared in the reflection of the mirror, standing at the entrance to his palatial bathroom with a frown fixed to his brow.
Something about the sight of him, that expression of concern and the fact that he had obviously come in a silent show of solidarity, gave me the courage I needed to be honest.
“No,” I said, but my voice quavered. “I am not.”
I’d never known before that a silence could be deadly, but this felt like a religious shunning or a banishment. This felt like the end of a relationship I’d never thought could end.
“Where are you?” he asked quietly, his own words trembling with the brutal force of his anger.
“Florence,” I whispered back, my eyes pinned to Raffa as he strode forward with purpose and then gently, so gently, pulled me back against his front, wrapping his arms around my belly. “I’m in Florence, Italy.”
A beat of silence like the deepening quiet before you know a storm is about to hit.
“What the hell are you doing there?” he roared, the words echoing through the stone-walled bathroom.
“You promised me you would not go. What the fuck were you thinking? Did the promise you made to me mean so little? Did you think I was asking you to stay away out of sport? This was fucking important to me, Guinevere.”
His anger wrapped a hand around my throat and squeezed until my eyes burned and my head throbbed. The only thing keeping me from crumbling under the weight of his censure was Raffa, stalwart and strong at my back.
“Of course it was important. You and Mom are the most important people in my life.”
Dad scoffed. “You clearly have no respect or love for us if you could lie to us for weeks about your life. What the hell are you doing there? Why would you disobey us like this, Guinevere? I would expect it from Gemma, but you ...” He trailed off as he realized how he had spoken of my sister, as if she was still here, as if it was okay to speak ill of the dead.
“I lied because I needed to come here,” I tried to explain, voice plaintive, nails digging unconsciously into Raffa’s forearms at my belly.
“It was hardly even a lie because I’ve been honest my whole life about loving this country.
I felt ... I felt called to come here, Dad, and if you want to bring Gemma into this, she’s the one who encouraged me to come even though you told me not to. ”
“Do not speak about your sister. This is about you and your dishonesty. How are we ever going to trust you again? I thought we raised you to be a good, honest person.”
A whimper lodged in my throat, and I choked on it as I struggled not to cry. Raffa pushed me into the cabinets at my hips, and it was oddly comforting, being pressed between immovable objects. I could trick my body into thinking it was safe while my mind and heart remained under siege.
“I am a good person.” The words were more breath than voice.
It eviscerated me to hear him suspect my basic human decency because it was the foundation Dad and Mom had always laid thickly for us.
Be good, do good, and good things will come.
I didn’t believe in the ethos as much as I had when I was a girl.
I had been good all my life, but unlucky in the extreme.
Gemma had been a good person, despite her lies and manipulations, and she was dead.
I wasn’t sure being good got you anything.
“But this was something I needed to do for me . Not for you and Mom.”
“You’ve never even been to Italy before. What could have been calling you? What reason could be good enough to explain betraying your parents like this?”
“You never explained to me why you hate it here so much,” I countered, voice rising as my temper did.
“I asked you all the time, and you always shut me down. I’m a grown woman, and I’m just supposed to trust your opinion about an entire country?
About a place that is in my blood through you whether you like it or not? ”