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“I would love to see the New York you have described.”
Nick didn’t have to think about it. He reached for her hand, ran his thumb lightly over her fingers. “I want you to see it.”
She smiled. “I would like that, Nicolo.”
He would like it, too—and here they were, back at the same logistics problem he’d been thinking about a couple of hours ago. Okay. He’d have to work something out. Make plans, fairly long-range plans, to keep the relationship going…
Hell. Was that what it was? A relationship?
Well, no.
It was an affair. And yeah, there was a difference…
“…a big family.”
He blinked. “What?”
“This morning, you said two sisters. And now you talk of your brothers. A big family. That is nice.”
Amazing. He’d told her more personal stuff in a handful of hours than he’d ever told another woman no matter how long they’d been involved.
Nick swallowed hard. Involved?
“How many brothers do you have?”
“Three.” Her look of astonishment lightened the mood. He laughed, touched his index finger to the tip of her nose. “Hey, we’re Siciliano. What can I say?”
Her smile wavered. “Of course.”
Nick cocked his head. “Meaning?”
“Nothing.” She looked down at her glass, as if her interest had suddenly been captured by the wine. “It is only that—that I had almost forgotten who—who—”
“Who I am,” he said with cool belligerence. So much for personal stuff. “Right. Not just a Sicilian. A Sicilian named Orsini.”
Alessia shook her head. She raised her eyes to his and he saw that she was blinking back tears. So, what? All that had happened between them meant nothing when you got down to basics. It was the princess
and the peasant again, right where they’d started.
“No,” she said in an unsteady whisper. “Nicolo, you cannot be—you cannot possibly be—”
A crook. A thug. A member of la famiglia. Right. He was none of those things. Now was the time to tell her what a less pigheaded man would have told her from the beginning. That he was an investor. A financial analyst. That he was as legitimate as Mother Teresa—okay, maybe not quite as legitimate as that, but he could surely tell her he was an honest guy who’d worked hard for what he had, that he’d turned his back on his father and everything he represented before he’d been old enough to vote…
Instead, some terrible streak of Sicilian perversity drove him on.
“What if I can be?” he said tonelessly. “What if told you that I am exactly the man you think I am? What would you do then?”
Alessia stared at him for an endless moment. He waited and wondered why he should be waiting, and then the tears she’d tried to stem spilled down her cheeks.
“I would say, it does not matter,” she said brokenly. “I might go straight to hell for it, Nicolo, but I would say, ‘It does not matter what you are.’ You are mio amante, you are my lover, and I want you, I want you, I want—”
A heartbeat later, she was in Nick’s arms. And as he kissed her, he realized there was no way in the world he would fly back to New York tomorrow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
WHEN she was a little girl, Alessia had been taught by a seemingly endless procession of tutors and nannies.
At first, with a small child’s belief in the infallibility of adults, she’d believed that each of them knew everything there was to know about the world.
