“All right.”
The drive back was quieter than dinner, but not awkward. Softer, maybe. The city blurred past outside the window while something low and old played through the speakers, and every now and then I caught him glancing at me.
When he pulled up outside my building, neither of us moved.
“Well,” I said, because I had reverted to the conversational skills of a nervous Victorian.
“Well,” he echoed, with a faint smile.
He got out before I could reach for the handle and came around to my side, opening the door with that same unhurried attentiveness he seemed incapable of turning off. I stepped out, and together we walked to the front of the building, the silence between us full of things neither of us quite seemed ready to say.
At the door, I turned back to him.
The streetlight caught the silver of his cane, the dark line of his coat, the sharp planes of his face softened now by something warmer than the intensity he wore so easily.
He looked unfairly beautiful.
“I’m not very good at pretending indifference,” he said after a moment. “So I’m not going to play games and wait three days to text you.”
A smile tugged at my mouth before I could stop it.
His gaze held mine. “I would like to see you again, Emily.”
There was nothing casual in the way he said it. Just simple, deliberate certainty.
And that felt more dangerous than all his sharp looks and dark suits put together.
“I’d like that too,” I said softly.
Neither of us moved.
Then, before I could overthink it, I leaned in and pressed a quick kiss to his cheek.
When I stepped back, he had gone very still.
Completely still.
His fingers lifted slowly, almost absently, and brushed the place I had kissed as if he could still feel it there.
I smiled then, because for the first time all evening, Pietro Benetti looked a little undone.
“Goodnight,” I said.
And before he could recover enough to stop me, I slipped inside and left him standing there beneath the light, one hand still near his cheek.
CHAPTER 6
PIETRO
Iwas beginning to understand what the men in my family had been trying to tell me.
Not that I would admit that out loud yet. Possibly not ever, given that Matteo Genovese would enjoy it far too much and my uncle would find a way to make it a training lesson. But the understanding was there, settling into me with a relentless certainty that I recognized from other moments of irreversible knowledge. The moment I understood my father's fear was love in disguise. The moment I understood that the island had been protection, not exile. The moment I first held a blade and felt it fit my grip like something I was always meant to carry.
Some things, once understood, could not be unfelt.
Emily Hart was one of them.
Which meant, among other humiliations, that I owed several men in my life a long-overdue apology.
