Chapter Nineteen Guinevere
Chapter Nineteen
Guinevere
“Have you ever driven a Ferrari?”
I blinked at Raffa as we emerged from the side entrance of the palazzo into the courtyard, where a gleaming vintage red Ferrari convertible was waiting for us.
Behind me, Martina was laughing, and Carmine was muttering about never being allowed to drive Raffa’s cars because he’d crashed one when he was fourteen.
“Are you serious?” I asked. My mouth dropped open at the prospect.
My dad loved cars in the kind of obsessive way only an Italian immigrant to the United States would love cars.
His garage was his haven, filled with paraphernalia from all the top Italian car companies and even a select few American ones.
We weren’t wealthy like Raffa—I wasn’t sure many people were —but John Stone was proud of his collection.
But he would have sold his soul to clap his eyes on the Ferrari NART Spyder Raffa was offering to let me drive.
Only ten of them were ever made, and the last one had sold for something like $30 million.
“Just how rich are you?” I asked him, fisting my hands on my hips. “Because I have to tell you, this is getting a little absurd.”
Even Ludo laughed at that, and Renzo bumped my shoulder companionably as they moved past me to the more sensible SUV waiting at the gates.
“Do you want to drive it or not?” Raffa asked with that haughty raised brow, arms crossed so all those muscles bulged in his white linen shirt.
I knew now how he kept so fit: a gym in the basement of the palace that included an actual fighting ring.
“Yes, please.” I practically skipped to his side by the car and opened my palm for the keys. “Speed limits in Italy are just suggestions, right?”
He gripped my wrist and used it to pull me forward so I fell into his chest. “Watch yourself, cerbiatta . You would not want to hurt another one of my cars.”
“Well, you have to admit, the first time kind of worked out for me.” I flashed him a cheeky grin and rose to my tiptoes to kiss the corner of his jaw.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his pocket to produce a silk Dolce & Gabbana scarf. “This will save your hair from becoming Medusa’s snakes.”
I laughed but turned obediently and lifted my hair off my shoulders so he could tie the scarf around my head.
“Do I look like Sophia Loren?” I flirted, batting my lashes dramatically.
“No,” he said, too quiet for a joke. “You look like you, which I much prefer.”
“A hundred euros she crashes,” Carmine said just loudly enough for me to hear from where he was glaring at me beside the other car. “No way a little thing like her can handle a car like that.”
I stiffened a bit, always self-conscious about my slightness because my lack of musculature and height were a consequence of my medical condition. When I was growing up, some of the kids in my class had called me Sticks until Gemma gave one of them a black eye.
“One thousand euros says we not only make it there in one piece,” Raffa drawled, and I knew he was defending me in his own way. When I looked sharply up at him, he winked, handing me the keys and then patting my ass as he crossed to the passenger seat. “But we also beat you to Livorno.”
“You’re on,” Martina declared, grabbing the keys from Renzo and pushing him out of the way before running to the driver’s seat.
I looked at Raffa over the hood of the low-slung convertible and watched as he slid the designer sunglasses out of his hair onto his nose. My grin reflected back at me in the lenses.
“And a private bet,” he added. “If you get us there first, I promise to eat your sweet figa later until you forget every language but the sound of ‘Raffa’ in your mouth.”
I shivered. “ Andiamo! I have a race to win.”
We won.
Raffa didn’t even seem surprised by the way I handled the car on the busy highway out of Florence toward the coast, and he only whistled through his teeth when I had fun taking the curving side roads on the way to the marina just outside Livorno.
When I told him my father had taught me how to drive in a Maserati, he just laughed at me, grabbed my hand, and kissed my palm.
“Of course he did. The only thing that surprises me about you now, Guinevere, is that I am still surprised when you reveal yourself to be the most remarkable woman I have ever known.”
I added it to the list of impossibly sweet things Raffa had said to me.
When Martina had pulled up at the marina, we were making out against the car. She’d honked in a way that felt like a swear word, Renzo had thrown an empty bottle of water at Raffa’s head, and Carmine was still pouting.
Only Ludo gave me a fist bump.
Now we were on a beautiful sailboat motoring out of the harbor into the Ligurian Sea.
The water was aquamarine close to the shore but deepened into azure beneath the boat as it cut south along the coastline.
The rooftops of the passing city were red and orange, the rocky cliffs yellowed to gold by the afternoon sunshine.
Everything was so bright it felt like the imagery was seared into my corneas, but I wasn’t upset by the idea.
I hoped it meant that for the rest of my life, when I closed my eyes, I would conjure up this image of Livorno’s cityscape giving way to green hills descending into white sugared beaches and outcrops of rocks fit for Ariel to sing atop of.
It was completely different from the pervasive cultural majesty of Florence, the sense that every cobblestone and doorway had seen millions of lives pass through before your own.
This setting was wild and freeing, the briny slap of ocean spray across my face as I sat alone at the bow while Raffa put the others to work behind me, the tangle of foliage that tumbled down the cliffs, and the wet crash of waves into the coastline.
I closed my eyes, dragged a deep breath of sea air into my lungs, and cast my face to the sky.
This was, quite possibly, heaven.
It could have been minutes or hours later that shade over my face roused me from my meditation. Crying had left me exhausted, but I didn’t want to sleep when I could be enjoying the sound of the waves and the demanding cry of seabirds, so I had let my mind float like the boat did on the sea.
Now I cracked open an eye and peered at Raffa above me.
His shirt was unbuttoned, revealing the tanned expanse of his tightly muscled torso, and his hair was alive with filaments of bronze, copper, and obsidian under the glaring sun. He was grinning down at me, more carefree than I had ever seen.
“The sea suits you,” I told him. “You look like a modern-day pirate.”
He laughed a little too hard at my quip, but I figured it was just the brightness of the day and the fact that we got to spend it together after barely any quality time since the Pitti Palace gala.
I moved over a bit so he could sit beside me on the blue-cushioned daybed built into the bow of the boat beneath the swollen sails.
“So you have a boat.”
“I have a boat,” he agreed, leaning back on his palms to tip his face into the sun the way I had.
“A very large, lovely boat named Salacia ,” I continued.
A minute Italianate shrug. “She was Neptune’s consort, goddess of the sea. Only fools name their vessels after him. Anyone who has ever spent any time on the ocean knows she is and could only be a woman.”
I laughed at his drollness. “This is my first time on the ocean, so I’ll take your word for it.”
“You seem very at ease for your first time,” he said and then rolled his eyes at my eyebrow wiggle and added, “First time at sea .”
“Lake life,” I explained. “My parents have a boat, nothing like this, just a ski boat we keep on Gun Lake during the summers. It’s beautiful there. In fact, before I came to Italy, it was my happy place.”
He hummed, eyes closed, and my breath caught at how beautiful he was, sitting on the gently rocking boat with his throat bared and his hair falling back from his tipped forehead in perfect waves.
I gave in to temptation and drew the line of his Roman nose with my fingertip and then pressed it into the divot above his lips.
He shocked me into laughter by snapping his teeth at me.
“My happy place was Villa Romano,” he said without opening his eyes, and I froze, afraid that if I moved I would scare him into stopping.
He revealed so little about his life that every kernel felt like gold.
“I grew up running barefoot through the acres of trees, and each orchard was its own oasis. We played nascondino , like tag, in the olive grove because it had the best hiding places, and gioco delle biglie in the barn beside the vineyard. In the summer we were constantly trying to keep up with the ripening fruit, visiting every day to fill baskets and bowls with plums, peaches, and apricots. Sometimes, we would lay under the trees and gorge ourselves until we were sick.” He made a face.
“I did not eat apricots for two years after I turned twelve.”
My laugh was soft because I didn’t want him to stop talking.
“My mother was the ultimate host, and we always had people over for every meal. Sometimes, I was sure even she did not know where they came from. But it was fun as a boy to meet strangers from all over Italy and beyond.” He cracked a lid open.
“Did I tell you that I speak German, Spanish, and Greek as well?”
“Show-off,” I muttered with faux bitterness.
His lids lowered, and he grinned again. When he lay down, he tugged me into his side, running his fingers idly through my hair.
“You speak about the villa like it isn’t your happy place anymore,” I noted, tracing the boxed muscles of his abs to watch the way his belly contracted at the ticklish sensation.
There was such a long pause, I thought he wouldn’t go on.
But then, “I did not have a father like you do who cared about my health and safety. If I was not his puppet, I could not be his son.”