Page 25 of The Devils in the Details

He closed his eyes. Just for a moment. The expression of a man asking the universe for a single unit of patience and receiving a return memo that read, in bureaucratic font, request denied.

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

It didn’t work.

The smile happened anyway, small and private, directed at the window where Florence was doing its evening thing—ochre walls catching the last light, shutters being closed, the hum of a city that had been beautiful for so long it had stopped trying to prove it.

The Range Rover took a corner. Centrifugal force is real, it turns out, and it has opinions about thigh contact. I slid another half-inch toward Ari before catching myself on the door handle, and the half-inch was enough to register the difference between “touching” and “definitely touching.”

My pulse, which had been behaving with the dignity of a mildly interested bystander, suddenly developed the enthusiasm of a golden retriever spotting a tennis ball.

I looked at the window. Not at Ari. At his reflection in the glass—the profile carved against the darkening city, the strong line of his jaw, the way it shifted when he swallowed, the set of his mouth that suggested he was holding something behind his teeth that he had not yet decided whether to release.

His hand was resting on his own knee. Flat. Palm down. The silver ring caught what little light made it through the tinted windows, the black onyx dark against his skin. He was keeping the hand there.

Deliberately.

I could tell because everything Ari did was deliberate, and the stillness of that hand spoke to a man who had placed it precisely where he wanted it and was now exercising the kind of control that made lesser men look like they were having seizures by comparison.

It was, and I say this with all the objectivity I can muster while my right thigh is broadcasting sensations my nervous system has categorized as “high priority,” extremely something.

Not charming.

I was not using that word.

Charming was for men who brought flowers and told jokes and did not look like they could break someone’s jaw with the hand currently resting on their own knee.

Charming was the wrong classification system entirely. I needed a different term, one that accounted for watching a dangerous man exercise restraint while sitting close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him through two layers of fabric.

The Range Rover slowed. We were approaching the palazzo district, the narrow streets closing in, stone walls on either side close enough that I could have reached out and traced the mortar if the windows had been down, which they weren’t, because Leon believed in climate control the way some people believe in religion.

Ari hadn’t moved, his thigh against mine, warm and solid. Four inches of pressed denim and cotton and the awareness of another human body that was doing its own version of not acknowledging the four inches, which was its own kind of communication.

“Next time,” Ari said, still not looking at me, “text at the first block.”

“Noted.” I didn’t promise. Promises were for people who planned to follow instructions, and I had a historically complicated relationship with instructions, especially when they came from men whose thighs were currently conducting a very persuasive argument against rational decision-making.

He turned his head. Finally. Those black eyes found mine in the dimness of the back seat, and the look in them was warm in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature in the Range Rover and everything to do with the thing we’d been not saying for the entire drive, which was that four inches was both too much and not enough, and we both knew it.

The Range Rover pulled up to the palazzo’s iron-studded door. Leon cut the engine. The sudden absence of vibration left the silence feeling louder, the thigh contact more definite, the cedar-and-coffee scent more present than it had any right to be.

Neither of us moved immediately. There was a moment—brief, charged, the kind of moment that lived in the space between one breath and the next.

Then Ari reached for the door handle, and the moment dissolved, and my thigh was suddenly, noticeably cold where his had been, and the loss registered with an immediacy that my brain filed under “concerning” and my body filed under “highly relevant, please address immediately.”

I got out of the car. Florence evening air hit warm and carried stone dust and the faint drift of espresso from somewhere down the street.

I stood on cobblestone that still radiated the day’s heat into my bare feet and waited for whatever came next, which, based on the look on Ari’s face as he rounded the hood of the Range Rover, was going to be either extremely professional or the opposite of professional, and I was, as I had been since the moment I met him, genuinely curious which one would win.

Ari dismissed Leon and the others with a gesture so minimal it barely qualified as movement—a slight tilt of his chin, the kind that communicated an entire paragraph to men who had been reading his silent language for years.

And then it was just the two of us standing at the iron-studded door with Florence evening pressing warm against our backs and whatever was happening between us pressing considerably warmer against everything else.

Leon went. The others went. They dispersed into the palazzo’s shadows like people who understood that their presence was no longer required and also, possibly, that the look on their boss’s face suggested that hanging around to witness whatever came next would be professionally unwise.

The door swung open under Ari’s hand. We stepped through into the courtyard, and the smell hit me—stone and green things and the faint herbal trace of the lemon tree in the corner, doing its lemon tree thing.

Ari’s hand found the small of my back. Not gripping. Not steering. Just there, palm flat against the thin cotton of my T-shirt, the heat of him bleeding through the fabric.