Page 43 of The Devils in the Details

I reached up. My fingers found the scar on his cheekbone, traced the line of it—pale against his skin, raised slightly under my touch—and Ari’s eyes opened.

Black. Warm. Looking at me with an expression I had no category for, because Aristoteles Romano did not do expressions the way normal people did expressions, and what was happening on his face right now was several standard deviations outside the operational parameters I had established for him.

He kissed me. Once. Soft.

Then his arm tightened around my ribs, and he settled against me like he was planning to stay exactly where he was for the foreseeable future, and my brain, which had opinions about everything, had no opinion about this whatsoever, which was either concerning or perfect and I was too tired to decide which.

I closed my eyes. The gold stripes moved across the bed as the sun climbed, and somewhere in the palazzo, the day was starting, and somewhere in this bed, something had started that had no reverse gear and no off-ramp and I was, against all available evidence, completely fine with that.

* * * *

My brain came back online at approximately sixty percent capacity, which was enough to notice that Ari was looking at me. Not the way he usually looked at me. Not the operational watchfulness, the cold assessment, the focus of a man who was categorizing threats and assets and calculating the distance between them.

This was something else. Direct. Warm. The kind of look that would have been alarming on anyone else’s face and was, on his, exactly what I wanted pointed at me, which was its own kind of problem.

The palazzo was quiet. Early sounds of the city filtering through the shutters—distant church bells, the rumble of a delivery cart on cobblestone, and the hum of Florence waking up.

Ari’s arm was still across my ribs. His hand resting on my side, warm through the thin sheet that had somehow ended up covering approximately thirty percent of my body, which was thirty percent more than it had been covering five minutes ago.

“I moved your things,” Ari said. Flat. Operational. The same tone he used for security briefings and contract disputes and statements of fact that were not subject to discussion.

I blinked. “What?”

“Leon picked them up last night. Paid off your lease. Everything’s here. Room down the hall.”

I stared at him. The words arranged themselves into a sentence, the sentence arranged itself into a concept, and the concept landed in my frontal lobe with the approximate force of a freight train hitting a kindergarten.

“You moved me in.” Not a question. Couldn’t be a question, because questions implied the possibility of a negative response, and what Ari had just described was several exits past a negative responses.

“Yes,” he said.

I frowned at him. “That’s insane.”

“I agree.”

He said it without any indication that he found this a problem. No apology. No qualification. Just the flat certainty of a man who had made a decision, implemented it while I was asleep, and was now waiting for my reaction.

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at the ceiling. Looked back at Ari.

Six-foot-three of scarred, unreasonable man. Black eyes watching me with the absolute stillness of someone who had already decided that I belonged here and was now waiting for me to catch up to the conclusion he had reached.

I had arguments. Excellent arguments. Professionally constructed, airtight arguments, the kind of case I could build in under three minutes because building cases was what I did for a living and I was very good at it.

I thought about my apartment.

The mildew smell in the bathroom that no amount of cleaning had ever fully defeated. The neighbor’s cooking—something with garlic, always garlic, at hours when garlic had no business being active. The way the walls had started to feel like they were getting closer, millimeter by millimeter, the longer I stayed there.

Nothing good. Nothing warm. Nothing that had ever made me feel like the space I occupied was something someone had designed with me in mind.

I thought about this bed. This room. This man whose arm was across my ribs and whose hand was warm against my side and whose expression, right now, was doing something to my chest that my professional vocabulary did not have a category for.

“You’re adding a relocation fee to my invoice,” I finally said.

“Fine.”

“It will be substantial.”

“I assumed.”