Chapter 12 Naomi #2
“Vecchio,” Vasso says finally, his voice the smooth line between admiration and calculation, “that exchange program would dovetail with our environmental promise and guest retention metrics. It also gives your portfolio new oxygen in the U.S. press.”
“Oxygen,” the old man grunts. “Too much oxygen, the fire dies. But a little—” He twirls his fingers. “Pff. Flames.” He leans back and grins, suddenly boyish. “We continue talking and maybe I’ll give you two weeks to show me something that makes me regret not marrying you myself.”
“Enzo,” Lulu protests, smacking his arm with affectionate scandal.
He pats her knee, then looks back at me with the cool shrewdness that made him rich. “You have a degree, si?”
I nod. “Hospitality and service design. Europe.”
His gaze flicks to Vasso. “Did you know, ragazzo, or did you only want your ring on her pretty finger and the chance to call her yours?”
“I wanted the second part, very much, but I knew,” Vasso says, and his voice does something I can’t name—pride or possession or simply memory rearranged. He glances at me. “She spent two years in Copenhagen. Another year doing post-grad in Spain.”
My head jerks toward him. “How—”
He smiles like a man who doesn’t apologize for surveillance if he calls it care. “I keep tabs on what matters. And you’ve never stopped mattering to me, sweetheart.”
A furious, ridiculous little thrill darts through me, even as I remind myself I mattered for a whole different reason.
As the source of igniting his retribution on my family for the wrongs done to his.
I smother both emotions with a snarky look.
“Well, just so you know, I didn’t waste all my time pining for you. ”
“Maybe not all of the time,” he returns, unruffled. “But I liked the part where you did.”
Vecchio barks a laugh. “Basta, enough flirting with the old man present. We drink to your arrival, and we dine tonight. But right now, I am tired.” He finishes his wine and rises in a creak of joints and a ripple of expensive linen.
“Lulu, after they are settled, you take them. Show them the vines. Try not to cause trouble, hmm? The wife looks like she is clever with knives.”
“Si, amore,” she sings.
We’re whisked through cool stone corridors that smell faintly of patchouli oil and old books, then up a shallow flight of travertine steps to our suite.
It’s less a room and more a small kingdom with a vaulted ceiling painted with faded vines and swallows and French doors opening onto a private loggia where wisteria knots itself around iron; a sitting room layered in Persian rugs and linen sofas.
Through inner doors is a bedroom anchored by a carved four-poster dressed in crisp, lavender-scented sheets. There’s a bowl of apricots on a marble pedestal, a silver tray with almond biscotti, and a vase of pale peonies that look like clouds that decided to vacation in Tuscany.
The bathroom could seduce a monk—Calacatta marble everywhere, a rainfall shower the size of a dressing room and a standalone tub posed beneath a window framing cypress, a tray of amber-glass bottles labeled in looping Italian: fig, rosemary, wild honey.
Vasso’s phone buzzes as the butler and staff head out and when he excuses himself to take the call, I undress and head to the bathroom.
I let the cool water drum over me until the last of Rhode Island shakes off, and when I step out, steam ghosts the mirrors and my skin smells like a garden at noon.
For a moment I stare at myself, noting the faint traces of Vasso’s possession and hoarding them like little treasures. My fingers find and trace a few on my neck…my arms and thighs.
“Dammit, you showered without me,” he drawls behind me and my head jerks up to meet his heated but amused eyes. “That’ll teach me to place business over pleasure, huh?”
“Hmm,” I say noncommittally because I can’t drag my overactive brain from imagining us in the shower, reenacting every last one of the lurid thoughts reeling through said brain.
Through the mirror, I watch his fingers reach for his buttons, slowly undoing each one in a slow, wicked tease that has my breath shortening. “Sure I can’t tempt you back in? I’ll make it good, I promise.”
I know he will. And therein lies the problem. Each episode with Vasso gets better and better. And what is that if not the slippery slope to Vasso Dillinger Addiction?
“Nope,” I force out, making the ‘p’ pop.
He remains in the door when I attempt to leave, forcing me to squeeze past him…and noting his very aroused, very hard evidence of what I’m missing.
I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed when he finally steps away and enters the bathroom.
I try not to imagine his hot, towering body with water cascading over rippling muscles but I’m all fingers and toes when he emerges, towel slung low over his waist.
For another wild moment I stare at the delicious outline of the muscles lovingly framing his pelvis, leading to where he’s most virile and—
Stop staring like a hormonal teenager!
We dress at an unhurried pace that’s somehow not unhurried at all. I slip into a cream silk slip and a soft linen sundress the color of sea glass, fastening the thinnest gold chain at my throat before sliding on stylish but comfortable wedge sandals.
When I look up, Vasso’s leaning in the bedroom doorway, shamelessly watching. And there’s nothing polite about the look in his eyes. He’s appreciative but blatantly, heated and hungry, as if my act of dressing is a show produced for his private viewing.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I say, reaching for my earrings and dropping one twice because my hands have chosen today to be treasonous.
“And deprive myself of watching these sexy little rituals that put you together so impressively?” His mouth curves, eyes dark and amused. “No, sweetheart.” Under his breath, almost to himself, “I think I’ve missed enough.”
I still, earring poised. The words slide under my ribs and find a place to live.
When I glance at him, not a single molecule has changed.
He’s still just standing there in suave, casual armor of sun-washed chinos, a pale blue linen shirt open at the throat, sleeves rolled to forearms that do unspeakable things to my composure; a leather belt, a thin steel watch, loafers that whisper money in Italian.
Handsome is the wrong word. He looks inevitable and unstoppable.
But the air is suddenly charged, weighted with past, present, and future.
A knock rattles the door and I jump like I’ve been caught stealing fruit. Dammit, I hate being tardy.
“Un momento!” I call, fumbling the second earring into place, smoothing my dress like that fixes the noise in my bloodstream.
“Easy, baby. No need to stress,” he rasps with a devilish smirk, then he crosses the room with the leisurely confidence of a man who owns the hallway, drops a kiss on my cheek that is entirely unnecessary and devastatingly effective, before striding out to open the door.
Lulu’s voice floats in, bright and effervescent, like a flute of prosecco poured too fast. “Ciao! Are you ready? Enzo is napping so I get you all to myself.”
I hate myself for the go claim your man urgency that bolts through my veins. It’s ridiculous. It’s pathetically human. I swipe a hand over my hair, grab my light shawl, and follow the sound of her into the suite’s private sitting room.
I enter just in time to see her slipping her arm through Vasso’s, the cute peach tattoo on her bare shoulder bared by the cherry-red crochet mini that’s more loophole than dress, braless beneath a whisper of lace and balanced on espadrille wedges that weaponize her legs.
“Come, come. There is a lookout where you can see the sea if you stand on your toes and dance.”
She pulls at Vasso. My husband.
And he allows it a step, two, then glances back at me with an expression that admits the absurdity and asks for patience. I give him neither. I fall into step on his other side, smile neat and lethal.
Lulu narrates as we walk.
This slope is Sangiovese; that one, Cabernet because Enzo likes to make the French jealous.
The truffle dogs that accompany us, barking excitedly, are called Biscotto and Regina; the cellar ceiling has one star painted for every wife, which is either romantic or a cry for help.
Every third sentence, she squeezes Vasso’s arm, stands too close, or leans to point with unnecessary contact, as if he’s a museum piece with a button to press for audio.
“Here,” she coos at a break in the vines, pressing against him to peer down a path only she can see. “Look. So pretty.”
“So are boundaries,” I say pleasantly, and when she blinks, uncomprehending, I add with sharpened sweetness, “They’re like hedges, Lulu. You can lean on them, but if you climb over, you get scratched.”
“Oh!” She beams. “I love gardening.”
Vasso makes a strangled noise that might be a cough and might be a laugh trying to behave.
I step closer to his other side until his body heat registers through linen, my breast making an impression on his arm.
He stares down at me, nostrils flaring briefly, then the casual-looking adjustment of his hand to the small of my back turns firmer, more definite.
He pulls me closer and something settles in my chest.
Lulu bends to pet Biscotti while displaying several eyefuls of her cleavage.
“For the love of God,” I bite out under my breath.
“Play nice,” Vasso murmurs without moving his lips.
“I am nice,” I murmur back. “You should see me mean.”
“I have,” he says, low and warm but with tight edge I don’t miss. “It’s beautiful and deadly. Belladonna at its finest.”
The tour winds between vines heavy with promise and under olive trees that toss their silver leaves like confetti.
The air smells of rosemary, sun, and the iron tang of stone.
Lulu’s commentary chirps on: This is the pergola where the private dinner will be “Fairy lights! Like stars, but closer”, this is the Vespa shed “I look so cute in a scarf. Maybe I will come with you”, this is the barrel room where lovers write their initials in chalk on staves for luck “Mine is on seven of them!”
By the time we loop back toward the house, my jaw aches from smiling. Lulu reaches again for Vasso’s arm with the innocent entitlement of a toddler claiming a toy.
“Lulu,” I say, still honeying my tone. “If you hang on any tighter to my husband, you’ll end up a bracelet.”
“Oh!” She looks delighted. “I love bracelets.” She jangles her wrists as if we’re blind to the evidence.
“Of course you do,” I say, and Vasso’s composure slides, the corner of his mouth betraying him into a flash of grin he kills too late. “But sadly, his favorite color is not red.”
He sees my face a second later and the grin dies properly. I’m not amused. I’m… something else that tastes less like the champagne we drank at ten thousand feet and more of the olive pit we spat out two hours ago.
“Maybe we cut this short,” he tells Lulu with the smoothness of a man who rescues both damsels and situations. “My wife and I have jet lag to fight and a call with the island trust.”
“Jet lag,” Lulu repeats, pouting a little. “Boring.”
“Sleep is the new scandal,” Vasso says dryly. “Very fashionable.”
She peels off with a wave and a promise to bring me the best lipstick color for Italian sun, flitting toward the house like a sparrow with too much jewelry. We’re left in the dappled shade of a fig tree, the villa golden beyond, the vineyard stretching away like a green sea.
I turn to him, hands on my hips. He lifts his hands as if to show they’re empty, guilty of nothing but being a man with arms people like to hold.
“Don’t,” I say, because he’s about to be charming about it and I’m about to hate how well it works.
He shuts his mouth. Smart man.
We stand there, a breath apart, the hill breathing under us and the smell of figs and sun making everything feel worse in that way beauty sometimes does when you’re raw.
He watches me with the patience he claims to own, the hunger he doesn’t bother to hide, the handful of lines at the corners of his eyes that appeared sometime between nineteen and now, each one a ledger entry I wasn’t here to witness.
“The tour,” I say, crisp. “Was illuminating.”
“Molto,” he agrees.
“And very long.”
“Endless.”
“And very… hands-on.”
His mouth tips. “Her hands were on. Mine were not.”
“They would have been if I wasn’t there.”
“They are on you now,” he says, and places his palm over mine on my hips, this time with fierce intent, with claim, with the possessiveness he should not voice but I’m suddenly grateful to feel. “Come on, Mrs. Dillinger.”
“Where?”
He leans in closer, his sinful lips a whisper from mine. “To discuss jealousy,” he says, voice gone silk and sin, “and the appropriate primal, sexy, husbandly remedies for it.”
The heat that streaks through me answers before I can form a rebuttal. The pergola arches ahead, strung with lights that will glow like captured fireflies when dusk comes.
The old man’s laughter carries from the far terrace, Lulu’s trill chiming after it.
We step off the path and into shadow, the kind that promises privacy and trouble in equal measure. The tour is over.
The heady turbulence, I suspect, is just beginning.