And I had still managed to fluster her.
I found that gratifying.
“I’m from the West Coast,” she said, tucking a curl behind her ear. “I wanted a change.”
A half-truth.
I knew it the moment she said it.
In my world, reading people was survival. Hesitation mattered. Tension mattered. The slight flick of her eyes, the stiffness in her shoulders, the too-careful casualness in her tone—none of it escaped me.
There was more to that story.
Not your problem, Pietro.
And yet.
“What are you working on?” I asked.
“Power dressed up as legitimacy,” she said absently, then seemed to hear herself and smiled. “Sorry. That was the pretentious version.”
The corner of my mouth lifted.
She noticed.
“The less pretentious version,” she said, pushing her glasses back up, “is political marriages and succession crises in late medieval Italy.”
I set my book down. “That sounds worse, actually.”
That time she laughed.
A real laugh. Warm, surprised, unguarded.
And for the first time in a very long time, I forgot everything else.
All I could hear was that sound.
And all I knew was that I wanted to hear it again.
I should have left it there.
CHAPTER 2
EMILY
Men.
Men were the one thing I had promised myself to avoid when my plane took off from Seattle and left my old life behind.
And for the most part, I had done pretty well.
Until the library.
Until Pietro.
I still didn’t know his last name, and maybe that was for the best. There had been something about him I couldn’t quite explain. Not just that he was attractive, though he absolutely was. It was the way he carried himself. Controlled. Watchful. A little dangerous. The cane should have made him seem less intimidating. It didn’t.
That was the problem.
