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A couple of hours from now she’d have seen whatever earthshaking thing he wanted her to see, and then Rome and Sicily and Prince Draco Valenti would be history.
Wrong. W-r-o-n-g. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The flight took just a little over an hour. Draco had arranged for a rental car to be waiting at Catania for the drive to Taormina. It was some kind of sturdy-looking SUV, and once they were under way, Anna understood why he’d chosen it.
Put simply, the roads.
Taormina was a tourist destination. She’d had, at least, enough time to determine that before setting off for Rome. And from what she saw of it as they drove through, it was charming. Cobbled streets, winding alleyways, the incredible blue of the Ionian Sea and, of course, the breathtakingly beautiful Mount Etna, the heat of its volcanic breath rising against a cloudless sky.
Then they left the town behind.
The road grew narrower and rougher. It twisted around mountains, clung to rocky slopes, climbed and climbed and climbed.
“I thought the Orsini land was in Taormina,” Anna said as she tried to keep from clinging to the edges of her seat.
Draco looked at her.
“My land, you mean.”
Anna rolled her eyes.
“Could you just answer the question? Is it in Taormina or isn’t it?”
“Sure. More or less. Definitions of what is and isn’t a boundary line are a little less stringent here than in Rome. Or Manhattan.”
“Shouldn’t we have stopped at the town
hall? Or wherever it is they keep real estate records?”
“They keep records, all right. Some go back a couple of thousand years.”
Anna raised an eyebrow. “Well, then—”
“My lawyers sent copies of all that stuff to your father weeks and weeks ago. Didn’t you read it?”
“I did,” she said, lying through her teeth. “And nothing I read changed my mind. I only meant it might be helpful to have the deed, whatever, with us right now.”
Draco nodded.
“I sent your old man photos, too. Did he pass those along to you?”
Photos. Photos? Anna did a quick mental review of the material she’d seen.
“What kind of photos?”
Draco took his hand off the gearshift and held it out to her. “What do you see?”
What, indeed?
A strong, very masculine hand. Tanned skin. Long fingers. Without warning, she thought of how those fingers had felt, learning the curves of her body.
“What do you see?” he demanded.
Anna looked away.
“A hand. Am I supposed to congratulate you for having one instead of a tentacle?”
He laughed. “Nice.”
