Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Amanda
The first thing I register is his heartbeat under my ear, steady and warm, and the second is that I don't want to move for the rest of my life.
I'm sprawled across Valentino's chest, one leg tangled with his, his arm draped across my back. Morning light slips through the gap in the curtains and lands on the ink spread across his pectorals, all those dark geometric lines rising and falling with his breath.
I've woken up next to men before. Plenty of them, if we're being honest, which I guess we are now. But usually there's a process. Hair check. Breath check. Figure out whether I look like a human being before he opens his eyes.
I haven't moved a muscle because this is the best feeling I've ever had.
I'd put it up against every campaign, every launch party, every champagne toast in every glittering room I've ever worked. It's not close.
"You're awake," he says.
His voice is rough with sleep, lower than usual.
I tilt my chin up. He's already looking at me, and he gives me an actual smile. Small. Unguarded. The kind I suspect very few people ever see.
"Did you sleep well?" he asks.
I nod against his chest.
"Did you?"
"Yes."
He says it easily, but I'd bet my entire next spring campaign budget that he spent half the night staring at the ceiling.
"I'll make coffee," he says, sliding out from under me. "Something to eat. Okay?"
"Okay."
He pulls on a pair of pants and disappears into the other room.
I stay where I am for a moment, staring at the dent his head left in the pillow. The sheets smell like him. Cedar, apparently, is an acceptable cologne note now. My standards have evolved. Or devolved. Jury's still out.
Eventually the cold air reminds me I'm wearing exactly nothing.
I find one of Valentino's shirts folded on top of a small dresser and pull it on. It hangs to the middle of my thighs. I roll the sleeves three times and they still swallow my hands.
The kitchen is small enough that Valentino seems to take up most of it.
He's got the moka pot on the burner and a loaf of bread on the counter.
I stop in the doorway and watch him work.
"You're staring," he says without turning around.
"You're interesting," I tell him. "It's a small apartment. The entertainment options are limited."
He huffs a laugh and slides a cup of espresso across the counter.
"Sit."
"Bossy."
"Sit, please."
I blink.
"Wow. Growth."
I climb onto a stool and wrap both hands around the cup. The coffee is dark, bitter, and perfect. The smell of toasted bread and olive oil fills the apartment, and my stomach chooses that exact moment to announce itself.
Valentino glances over. "Cristo." He shakes his head and cracks two eggs into a pan with one hand, which should not be attractive and somehow is.
"You'll eat all of it."
"Or what? You'll threaten me?"
"Or I'll feed you myself, and you'll like that worse."
"Will I, though?"
The look he sends over his shoulder is dark and amused and full of promises.
I bury my smile in the espresso.
A few minutes later he slides a plate in front of me. Through the window behind him, Rome is doing its best impression of a postcard. Terracotta rooftops. Laundry lines. A church bell ringing somewhere in the distance.
And suddenly I realize I have absolutely no idea what any of it is.
"You know what's funny?" I ask.
"What?"
"I've never been to Rome."
The bread knife stops.
Valentino turns around slowly.
"That's impossible."
"It's actually very possible."
"You've been to Italy—" He sets the knife down. "How many times?"
"Fourteen, probably. Milan for Fashion Week. Florence for a shoot. Lake Como twice for a campaign and once for a wedding I wasn't technically invited to. Capri. Positano. Portofino."
"And never Rome."
"Never Rome."
Valentino stares at me for a second.
Then he shakes his head.
"That's insane.”
"There was never a campaign here. The luxury market skews north. Milan's the money, Rome's the—" I wave my espresso vaguely at the window. "Rome's the ruins."
The sound he makes is somewhere in his chest, low and genuinely pained, like I've insulted his mother and his mother's cooking in the same breath.
"The ruins," he repeats.
"I'm sure they're lovely ruins."
"You're sitting in the middle of the greatest city human beings have ever built, and you've spent fourteen trips drinking spritzes on a lake and fashion shows."
"The lake had wifi and George Clooney's house. What does Rome have?"
"Everything," he says, with such flat finality that I actually shut up for a second.
He turns back to the stove and slides the eggs onto two plates, but his shoulders carry the conversation with him.
"When this is settled," he says, with his back to me, and I hear the small hitch he puts before the word settled, the half-second pause that means he's chosen it carefully from a lineup of much worse words, "you will see Rome. Properly. Ten days, minimum."
"Ten days?"
"Ten days, on foot. You walk the entire city. No driver, no itinerary, no phone in your hand." He brings the plates over and sets mine in front of me. "You get lost. You eat where the menu is handwritten. You sit on the steps of a church for an hour and watch people do nothing. That's Rome."
"Ten days of walking. In what shoes, exactly?"
"Flat ones."
"I don't own flat ones."
"Then we'll buy you flat ones. Christ." He sits down across from me, and the chair complains under him the way furniture always does, like it knows what it's been asked to hold.
I cut into the eggs and watch him over my fork. There's color in his voice that wasn't there yesterday, a current running under the words. He talks about this city the way other men talk about teams they've loved since childhood.
"You know who you sound like right now?" I say.
"Don't start."
"There are these Italian guys I follow on Instagram whose entire content is judging non-Italians for committing crimes against Italy. Cappuccino after eleven a.m.? Crime. Cream in carbonara? War crime. Chicken on pasta? They do a whole funeral. Black clothes, fake casket, the works."
"They're correct."
"They rated American garlic bread a two out of ten and one of them crossed himself."
"A two is generous."
"You're proving my point, you understand that. You're doing the bit right now."
"It's not a bit." He points his fork at me. "It's the truth. Your country puts pineapple on pizza and calls espresso a 'shot.' Someone has to hold the line."
"And that someone is you. A man who kills people for a living."
"Among other services."
I laugh, and it comes out of me easy and unplanned. His eyes drop to my mouth and stay there a beat too long. The room shifts. It does that around him, the temperature changing without anyone touching a thermostat.
"Eat," he says.
I eat. The eggs are stupidly good, which is its own kind of insulting, that this man can break a person's orbital bone and also knows the exact moment to pull eggs off heat. I make a sound around the fork that I don't fully authorize.
"Good?" he asks.
"Fine. Adequate."
"You moaned."
"I did not moan. That was appreciation. Culturally appropriate appreciation."
"No." He leans back, arms crossing over all that ink, and one corner of his mouth lifts in a way that turns my spine into warm liquid. "I know that sound now. I learned it last night. Twice in the shower, once on the washing machine."
The fork stops halfway to my mouth. Heat climbs my throat and settles in my cheeks, which is ridiculous, because I have done significantly more embarrassing things in front of this man.
"That's different," I manage.
"It's the exact same sound." His voice drops lower, rough around the edges. "Same pitch. Same little catch at the end. If my cooking gets that reaction out of you, bella, I'm insulted on behalf of everything else I did for you yesterday."
"Oh my God."
"Finish your breakfast," he says, perfectly calm, cutting into his eggs like he hasn't completely derailed my morning. "Then we can revisit the discussion."
I press my thighs together beneath the counter and immediately regret it, because of course he notices. The man probably notices structural weaknesses in buildings from three blocks away.
"You're a menace."
"You're wearing my shirt and eating my food. Who's the menace?"
"Still you. By a wide margin."
He huffs through his nose and goes back to his plate.
For a minute, we just eat. The last chime fades into the morning.
A month ago, I would've filled the silence. Pulled out a story. Asked a question. Performed conversational CPR until the room started breathing again.
Now I drink my espresso and watch this dangerous, infuriating man eat eggs in the morning light. The silence doesn't feel awkward. It feels comfortable.
"Ten days," I say eventually. "Walking. You'd really do that? Tourist stuff?"
"With you?" He doesn't even look up from his plate. "I'd walk the whole goddamn city."
Something warm settles low in my chest. Not excitement. Not hope. Something quieter.
I let myself picture it for a second. His hand around mine. A narrow street. No one looking for us. No one needing anything from us.
Just walking.
"That's a very romantic answer for someone who pretends not to be romantic."
That finally gets his attention. He looks up.
"I don't pretend."
And somehow that's worse.
Valentino
The question I keep circling is obscene in its simplicity. Do I tell her before or after I take her again?
There's no easy version. I know that. I've cleared rooms with less hesitation than this.
She catches me staring and points her fork at me.
"You're doing the thing again."
"What thing."
"The looming. The brooding thing. You just stand there sweeping the room with your eyes." She takes another bite and grins around it. "It's very atmospheric. Hard to digest under, though."
"Eat your eggs."
"I am eating my eggs. You're watching me eat my eggs like it's a hostage situation."
"If it were a hostage situation, you'd be quieter."
She laughs, and I cross the kitchen before I think about it. Her chair scrapes half an inch when I stop in front of it.
She tips her head back to look up at me. The line of her throat in the morning light is the kind of thing that ends careful men.
"Hi," she says.
"Finish your breakfast."
Her hands come up and land flat on my chest, over the shirt, and she drags them down slowly, then back up again.
"You know what I figured out?" she says, fingers walking back down. "You make this face when you want something. Your jaw twitches. Right here." She taps the hinge of my jaw with one finger, bold as a debt collector. "It's been twitching since I sat down."
Her hands settle low on my stomach, fingertips hooking just over my waistband, and she looks up at me through her lashes with an expression that has zero innocence in it. She knows exactly what she's doing.
I slide my hand along her jaw, tilt her face up.
"Still hungry?" I ask her.
Her eyes go dark, and her lips part.
"Yes," she says. "Starving."
Madonna. The last of my restraint goes to its knees.
I gather her hair in my fist, giving her every chance to pull back. She leans into the grip. When I take my cock out, her exhale washes hot over the head of it, and my whole spine tightens.
"Open that pretty mouth," I tell her, and my voice comes out lower than I planned, like gravel dragging over my vocal cords.
She opens.
The first slide of her tongue pulls a sound out of me I don't usually make. She takes me in slowly, wet heat closing around me inch by inch, her eyes on mine the entire time because she doesn't do anything without watching what it does to me. Her cheeks hollow.
The chair creaks under her as she shifts forward to take more, and the small wet sounds she makes fill the kitchen.
"That's it," I murmur, cradling her skull, guiding her rhythm without forcing it. "Just like that, bella. Christ. Your mouth."
She moans around me and the vibration nearly buckles my knees. Her hand wraps the base and I watch her knowing no one has ever looked at me like that. Like I'm something she needs.
She pulls off long enough to drag her tongue up the underside, root to tip, and smiles at me with wet lips.
"You're doing the jaw thing again," she says, breathless.
"Smart mouth."
"You love my smart mouth."
"Right now I love it for other reasons. Put it back."
She laughs and then takes me deep enough that the laugh dies in her throat.
My fist tightens in her hair. The pleasure climbs my spine in long pulls, building, and I let my head drop back and just feel her mouth, her hands, her low hungry sounds, all of it stacking into something I have no defense against.
I look down at her and I understand, with terrible clarity, that I've already made my choice about when to tell her.
After. God forgive me, after.
She moans again, and I stop thinking at all.