Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven
E rin looked out from the upper deck of Enzo’s yacht at the Italian coastline, dawn barely a thought at this early hour, frustrated to find her fingers pressed against her lips, again .
Dangerous. It had been dangerous to mess with Enzo Rossetti. Ever since she’d woken—far too early—she’d walked around in a daze, thinking only that she hadn’t known a kiss could be like that. A kiss that she had initiated.
Of all the kisses they had so far shared, this—unique in its innocence—had been all the more powerful.
And what had driven her to that kiss? Him. His kindness. And her curiosity. Her desire. Her want.
You think you can resist the charms of the Playboy of Amalfi?
Gio’s taunt came back to haunt her.
She had been so na?ve. Last night, she had dreamed about it, fantasised about it, thoughts of it had consumed her whole, leaving her hot and breathless, flushed and deeply, deeply unsatisfied.
Surely it wasn’t good for her to be walking around in this state of.
..dissatisfaction. But in a way, wasn’t it a rather apt punishment?
Because Erin was beginning to suspect that she was making a big mistake.
Yes, she wanted Charterhouse. That hadn’t changed.
Not one bit. And every time she thought about it, thought about having it, running it, making something of it, it left an ache in her heart so sore and so yearning that it was hard to speak of it.
But Enzo’s kindness last night, staying with her until she’d calmed, the words he’d offered her, had shifted something ever so slightly in a very old wound.
It had touched her, deeply. She’d seen the shadows haunting his gaze, knew of the press that had dogged his steps since childhood, collateral damage in the chaos of his parents’ divorce.
That there was a link, a connection, between them. ..
But was that connection enough to stop her from reaching for her goal?
No. Not that alone. But could she really cling to the belief that he was just a bored, lazy, careless playboy?
That he was like her father, uncaring who got hurt by his whims?
Because despite Enzo’s sometimes dramatic flamboyance, his constant charm and his impressive arrogance, there was something else to him that she had glimpsed last night.
A depth. A layer beneath this playboy persona he seemed to revel in.
Erin might be ready to do just about anything to get her hands on Charterhouse, but that didn’t mean she could willingly hurt another person to get what she wanted.
The only reason she’d come this far was because she’d been near convinced that Enzo Rossetti didn’t have a heart.
And last night, she thought she’d seen a little of that heart.
That was why she’d kissed him. She’d... liked what she’d seen.
Enzo appeared on the deck, her heartbeat jumping a little at the sight of him, tall, good-looking, his white shirt glowing in the pre-dawn. His surprise at her being there was quickly masked and she regretted it, desperate to know what he was thinking and feeling after last night.
‘You are out here early, cara ,’ he observed as he came to stand beside her.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ she admitted.
His response was a nod, the dark smudges beneath his eyes enough confirmation that he had suffered the same. For a while they stood there together in silence as the gentlest touches of dawn began to lighten the sky overhead.
‘Do we...’ She hesitated. ‘Do we have to go off to France today?’
She wasn’t ready, she realised. France was where they would get married and suddenly Erin found herself wanting to delay.
To wait. She wanted time to make sure that she was doing the right thing.
To make sure that she wouldn’t cause damage with a scheme that was getting uncomfortably close to something that her father might have done.
‘Is there somewhere else you’d like to go?’ he asked.
‘Not if it would cause a problem,’ she prevaricated.
‘There’s no rush. The yacht can make the crossing in a day if needed,’ he assured her. ‘So, tell me. Where is it you’d like to be?’
Florence.
It had fallen from her lips before she could stop it and a part of her hoped that maybe he would say that unfortunately it wasn’t possible. But he hadn’t.
And just over two hours later, she was standing at the end of the Via dei Calzaiuoli looking between the Baptistry and the Cathedral, as long soft fingers of light crept slowly into a denim blue sky.
‘I get the destination, amore mio , but did it really have to be so early?’ Enzo complained grumpily, as if he’d been hoping to go back to bed. The man, she had discovered, was not a morning person.
‘Yes,’ she laughingly replied, ignoring Enzo’s near unholy beauty and turning back to one of the most magnificent sights she’d ever seen. ‘It’s so early that we have beaten the tourists and we have the place nearly all to ourselves.’
Oh, her mother would have loved this . If her father hadn’t frittered everything away, they would have come here.
As a family. They might have even stood right here, staring up at the ornate detail of the white-and-green marble, the terracotta tiles of the dome atop the cathedral, that was much more beautiful than she had ever imagined.
‘Did you know,’ she asked him, ‘that work started on this in the early twelve hundreds and didn’t finish until the fourteen hundreds?’
‘Really?’ Enzo asked as if it were the least interesting thing he’d ever heard, and she smiled, because she’d seen, despite the grim mask of ‘grumpy morning man’, how his eyes had feasted on the stunning sight. ‘Does that have any bearing on the need to be here at seven thirty in the morning?’
She folded her lips together to stop herself from laughing at him again.
Laughter that disappeared when she turned to find him standing in a single beam of sunlight, filtered by the Italian rooftops and Cathedral tower.
It lovingly caressed the planes of his face, dancing in a healthy glow across bronzed skin, sharp angles, and deliciously dark hair.
And for a moment they seemed content to study each other as if they were more important than the centuries-old architecture that they were surrounded by.
He took her breath away. She’d never met anyone who’d been able to do that.
He shook his head slightly, as if trying to dislodge them from the moment. ‘Is there something wrong, cara ?’
‘Why do you keep calling me cara ?’ she asked instead of answering his question.
He frowned. ‘Well, if I’m honest, Rin doesn’t seem to suit you, and I presume you use it because you don’t like Erin, so...’ He shrugged and closed the distance between them.
Unaware of the seismic shock that threatened Erin’s foundations, Enzo led them to a small café within sight of the Duomo.
A waiter bustled over to greet them, ushering them into a table.
His frantic enthusiasm was amusing, but went utterly unnoticed by Erin who was distracted by the Cathedral over his shoulder.
When he’d asked her if she could go anywhere, he’d expected.
..something else. Maybe shopping in Paris, or a night at an ice hotel in Jukkasj?rvi, or well, he didn’t know.
But something expensive. Something not so.
..easy to accomplish. And by the time they had their coffees and pastries, and Enzo—with a little caffeine in his system—was feeling more human and less bear, he finally asked the question.
‘Why Florence?’
Something crept into her gaze and he wondered whether he had strayed too far into the personal. And whether that was, in fact, what he’d intended all along. A little crease appeared between her brows that he wanted to smooth away with the pad of his thumb.
‘We were supposed to come here. As a family, when I was younger,’ she haltingly explained. ‘Before...before everything changed.’
He waited, sensing that she would fill the silence.
‘Mum really wanted to go. She has a thing about Giotto—the painter and architect.’
‘As you do,’ Enzo interjected, familiar with the English penchant for Italian art.
‘As you do,’ Erin repeated with a small smile.
‘And when we lost everything, when the business went, the house, her friends, my school, she kept saying, but what about Florence? What about Giotto? Erin must see it. She simply must .’
Enzo could see it. The blind shock of someone so confused, that they clung to a minor detail.
‘I don’t know whether it was important to her for me to see it because it meant so much to her, or because she wanted one thing, just one, that my father had promised to come true.’
She was telling the truth, he realised. A few days ago he would have dismissed this as a sob story—something engineered to manipulate him.
But the reverberation of truth in her tone, the steadfast clarity in her gaze.
..the lack of her tell . This was the real Erin Carter.
Whose life had changed dramatically as a teenager, when comfort had been replaced by loss, all ending in a move that had seen her bullied and isolated.
‘Why come here? This seems like a painful memory?’ He couldn’t wrap his head around why she would do that to herself.
‘I want to tell her that I’ve seen Giotto’s campanile, his bell-tower. I want her to know that I’ve seen it.’
The sparkle in her eye wasn’t delight. It wasn’t happiness. It was earnest, it was sincere. It was heartfelt and he didn’t want to see it.
‘Do you not have somewhere like that?’ she asked. ‘Somewhere bittersweet?’