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Then came a voice, somehow familiar, even all these years on. ‘Would you like me to pour?’
What the actual hell...?
He frowned at her...at the shadow she cast as she approached and turned off the bedside lamp. Slender olive-skinned fingers poured coffee into a cup, and he recalled slender olive-skinned fingers exploring him elsewhere. May God forgive him, he chose not to look up, lest he spoil the fantasy he intended to return to the moment the maid had gone.
Or rather the memory.
Of taking Alicia.
But then her voice came again. ‘Dante?’ She sounded bewildered. ‘It reallyisyou!’
He felt seedy, hungover, and he had a morning erection that was less than comfortable when he was lying on his front with a maid smiling down on him. But, good God, it really was...
‘Alicia?’ he croaked.
‘Yes!’ Her reply was too enthusiastic for this hour—but then that was Alicia. ‘I saw the name on the tray, but I told myself it couldn’t be. I mean...’
Of course she didn’t addgiven how poor you were, but even in his cognitively challenged state he felt the implication.
‘What are you doing here, Alicia?’ Mistrusting by nature, and even more so now compared to the Dante she’d known, he asked the question point-blank.
‘Earning a living,’ she responded, as if it was obvious. ‘Would you like me to pour?’
No, I mean what are you doing by my bed...in my suite?
He didn’t say that, of course. But he nearly did. He was so rarely caught off-guard like this.
Holding the sheet, he turned and sat up a little and pulled up a knee, then reached for one of the glasses of water and downed it in one before leaning back on the pillows. Dante was jaded and bitter enough with the world to be suspicious. He’d been shunned like a leper growing up, but in more recent years suddenly people wanted to know him.
Yet, because it was Alicia, he gave her the very rare benefit of the doubt.
‘Two sugars?’ she checked.
‘Si.’He nodded and ran a hand over his very heavy morning shadow, trying to work things out.Milan, Milan...But of course. Her so-called twin had moved here.
Dante wasnota morning person. And neither did he tend to think out loud. But the shock of seeing her almost moved him to speak before coffee, to enquire after her and her sister, or whatever Beatrice actually was...
His brief silence was her undoing, though.
‘It’ssucha surprise to see you again.’
Her voice was forced and it had Dante looking up to her oh-so-innocent smile, and the blink of her gorgeous velvet-brown eyes, and the benefit of the doubt he had so briefly given her faded. This was no chance meeting.
He had always known that Alicia Domenica was a liar. It had made him smile once. But it didn’t today. Instead it disappointed him. It was an emotion he was not used to feeling, for he anticipated the worst and was usually right—as was the case on this breaking day.
‘Such a coincidence,’ Alicia said, her smile too bright, her eyes too wide.
And he knew he would by far have preferred to keep his last memory of her, instead of replacing it with this very beautiful fake.
It was no coincidence.
And so, instead of responding, Dante yawned. And as he did so he watched her gorgeous full lips pinch in slight frustration at his refusal to engage in conversation.
Yes, he was being played.
Go for it, Alicia, he thought.
No one ever beat Dante.
