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“I am not close to my family,” he told her, unbidden, as the new day began to stir outside. She knew they were somewhere north of Milan as he drove her into the hills without consulting a map, moving swiftly along winding mountain roads he seemed to know the way he knew everything. As if the whole of the world was etched there on the back of his hand.
Even the valleys she glimpsed seemed a part of his singular magic—vineyards stretching toward the rising sun, medieval castles standing guard.
She was beginning to think she was a part of it, too.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” she said quietly. “Families can be complicated.”
“Perhaps that is so. But I have always felt that mine was more complicated than most—or perhaps less inclined to pretend otherwise. My parents divorced long ago. And both of them are entirely too proud to admit that they might have borne any fault in the split. Then again, as their only child, I have long been entirely too proud myself and more, unwilling to admit that anything they did with their personal lives bothered me in the slightest.”
She glanced over at him, then returned her gaze to the hills all around them, gleaming gold in the morning light. “You do know what they say about pride.”
“I do indeed. And it has precipitated many a fall in my family, I assure you. I tell you this because we have come here and it is entirely possible that my parents will take it upon themselves to turn up. And if they do so together, well.” He shrugged in that supremely Italian way of his that was mesmerizing enough in New York. Here, it seemed a part of the very landscape. “Anything might happen.”
The roads grew more twisting and steep. Annika held fast to the door handle beside her and let what he’d said sink in.
“I don’t suppose that your interest in proper behavior has anything to do with your parents, does it?” she asked quietly. “It doesn’t sound as if you find them appropriate, either.”
Ranieri let out a bark of laughter that seemed to surprise him as much as it did her. He took a sharp turn, the SUV seeming to hug the narrow road. “My grandmother was all that was graceful and refined. My mother and father, not so much. I think you already know where I fall.”
And he sounded the way he always did. Assured. Arrogant. Ranieri, through and through. And yet...
Annika didn’t know how she dared, but she reached across and put her hand on his leg. Then felt the heat of him, of all that rock-hard strength. It seemed to flood her palm, making her want to do something more, like lean down and explore him. Possibly with her mouth, though surely that would kill them both on a road like this—
Focus, she ordered herself.
“Don’t worry,” she told him, sounding throatier than was wise, surely. “I would happily embarrass you in front of the entirety of New York City. But I would never do such a thing in front of your parents.”
The sun was up now, so she could see with perfect clarity the faintly arrested expression on his face. He glanced over at her briefly, then dropped his gaze to where her hand rested on his leg.
She felt very nearly scalded as she went to pull her hand away.
But he stopped her easily enough by placing his hand over hers, trapping her there.
Annika told herself at once that she wasn’t to torture herself with questions about what this might mean. She told herself to simply enjoy the heat of his thigh below her palm and the hard press of his palm against the back of her hand, too.
And she could not have said how long it was that they drove like that. She was lost in the motion of the car, the Italian countryside all around. The fact she wastouchinghim. Eventually, he took a road that wound down into a charming valley. There was a river that cut through it, a lake at the center. And everywhere else there were fields turned golden, vineyards winding down into autumn, sturdy cypress trees like sentinels, and there, nestled in the middle of carpets of wildflowers, an old house.
It was built of ancient stone with a red roof and charming shutters. And it was not the sort of castle or fortress they’d seen along the way. It was prettier, as if someone had taken the old stones and determinedly made them over into a home. Yet it still had the feel of something suitably medieval as they drove closer, and Ranieri finally pulled to a stop in the pebbled courtyard in front.
“This is my grandmother’s cottage,” he told her, his voice gone rough. He turned to her, still holding her hand beneath his. “She left it to me when she passed.”
“It’s beautiful,” Annika whispered.
It was more than beautiful. It looked like a fairy tale. It made her wish she believed that fairy tales could be real. It made her wish—
But no. She stopped herself there. It wasn’t safe to lose herself in all thesewisheswhen there was only a year. Only one, solitary year.
“I have come here many times,” Ranieri told her in that same gruff way, as if he didn’t know how to say these things. As if they were torn from within him. “I cannot always be in cities, you understand. But what I need you to know, Annika, is that I have never brought another woman here. Ever. You’re the first.” Something seemed to swell between them, then. “The only.”
And she could feel that fluttery beat inside her. Her pulse. Her heart. Her relentless longing. All of her, lost somewhere between a shudder and a sob, no matter how dangerous it was.
She understood, very distinctly, that this was an offering. His wedding gift, perhaps. That he could not give her innocence. He could not erase her father’s demands that had brought them here. He could not give her anything other than what he was—all that he was.
But he could bring her here.
To this far-off valley that meant something to him. To this old, beloved house, nestled in fields of flowers and flanked by ancient columns of cypress. She could see that this made him vulnerable, though she knew better than to use that word. For men like him, it could only be taken as an insult. Even now, when he had done this deliberately.
Still, she knew. She could feel it in the heat of his hand, the hard stone of his thigh. She could see it in his gaze, gold and intense.
