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‘I don’t want you to feel daunted,’ Rafe said, and again he took her hand.
‘Which is why I don’t want to find out that you’re a film star, or a world champion skier...’
She floundered in her poor attempts to label him, for she was certain he was rather more than that. She knew it from the way he held himself, and the silent command of his presence. She knew that heads had turned as they entered the restaurant, and they had not, despite his kind words, turned for her.
She looked down at their entwined fingers. Oh, it was not just his hands that gave him away, but they had hinted at the truth from the start. Yes, there really were only two reasons that men had manicures: they chose to or they were born to.
She did not want to know.
‘So you think I could be a film star or a world champion skier?’ Rafe teased. ‘Absolutely not, to the former, and I wish, to the latter.’
And then it was Rafe who had a question, and he both frowned and smiled when he asked it.
‘Why wouldn’t you want me to be a champion skier?’
She blushed instead of answering.
‘Why?’ Rafe asked again.
‘I would like to see the dessert menu,’ Antonietta said, and sidestepped the question.
Rafe left it.
For now.
‘I can’t decide!’ Antonietta groaned as she read through the menu, because everything sounded sublime.
‘When there is Modica chocolate mousse on the menu,’ Rafe said, with barely a glance at the other offerings, ‘the choice is already made.’
He gave her a quizzical look as she started.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ Antonietta said, thinking of the purchase she had made that morning with Rafe in mind. It would be foolish to tell him, surely? But then she looked into the eyes of the man who had been so very kind to her today and it made it a little easier to reveal. ‘I bought some for you.’
‘Forme?’
Antonietta nodded. ‘For Christmas. Well, that was when I thought you were staying until Christmas Eve.’
In Silibri, gifts were often exchanged then. Though it wasn’t often that a chambermaid bought a gift for a guest, and they both knew it.
She opened her mouth to say that she had bought it because he had been kind when she cried. But of course that would be a lie, for she had bought it before that had happened.
‘It’s just a small thing,’ she settled for instead. ‘A tiny little thing.’
Yet it touched Rafe.
‘Coffee-flavoured,’ Antonietta said.
‘With a breakfast banquet at the side?’ he checked, taking them both back to the morning they had met.
‘No!’ Antonietta smiled.
‘You were the only good thing that happened that day.’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ she pointed out.
‘Antonietta, I find your silence golden.’
