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“You don’t what?” She’s still waiting for an answer.
“I don’t know.” I shrug. “I’ve never been in love, so I don’t have an opinion.”
She laughs. “That’s an excellent answer.”
After our meal, we leave the restaurant and walk together through the brightly lit streets. Cora tells me about her time in the city. Where she lives—an apartment close to the university that she shares with another American student, and the pastry shop below the apartment, owned by a family whose eight-year-old son, Enzo, has decided he’s in love with her.
As she talks about Enzo, fresh bread, and sweet cakes, I watch the light from the streetlamps play across her features. She’s almost too perfect, too enchanting. A cool breeze caresses her hair. She shivers. It’s almost imperceptible, but I notice. I hand her the jacket I’ve carried around all day, pleased when she accepts it and pulls it on. I want to see her again. I have to.
I wonder what it would feel like to kiss her.
To taste her.
To make her shiver, not with cold, but with pleasure.
She stops in front of a shop with swinging, wood-framed glass doors, with delicious looking pastries visible through the display windows. At the edge of the building, a wrought-iron gate opens from the sidewalk to a cobblestone path and a flight of stairs leading up to a door on the second floor.
“We’re here.” She inclines her head toward the gate.
I don’t take my eyes off her. “Nice place.”
“It is nice.” She smiles up at me. “I had a great time today.”
“Me too.”God, I want to kiss her.She makes me want things that will require a lot more time than I have left in Italy. I want to know everything about her.
If I say goodnight and walk away, I’ll never have to explain that whatever happens between us will end when I leave. I’ll leave her with a memory of one sunny day.
One perfect sunny day.
She starts to remove my jacket. “You’ll need this.”
I shake my head. “No. The cold might get you before you reach the top of the stairs. Keep it. You can give it to me tomorrow.”
“What cold?” Her lips quirk. “Tomorrow?”
“Yup.” I’m hypnotized by the light of amusement and pleasure dancing in her eyes. “I have to call you about when to come over and pick it up.” I shrug. “So, Cora…I’m going to need your number.”
She chuckles. Later, I’ll think about the consequences of drawing out our encounter. For now, I just know I want to see her again.
We exchange numbers. “Come by around noon,” she tells me.
“I’ll be here.”
There’s a husky note in her voice when she laughs, a secret light in her eyes that intrigues me and makes me almost too eager for tomorrow.
“A domani,Tristan Kane.”
I chuckle.“A domani.”
Lingering on the sidewalk, I watch as she unlocks the gate and takes the stairs up to the landing. She turns and waves before unlocking the door and letting herself into her apartment. Reluctantly, I walk down the street, dragging my body farther and farther away from her.
Cora.
I can’t stop thinking about her smile, the way her eyes light up when she talks about long dead artists like Sandro Botticelli and Andrea Del Verrocchio…and I know that contagious excitement will have me reading about renaissance art late into the night.
Cora.
She occupies my mind all the way to the parking lot at the edge of the historic city where I’d left my rented car, and on the drive to Nick’s house outside the city. In my memories, I see the breeze tease her hair, I see her curving lips and hear her atrocious Italian. I see the soft swell of her breasts under her pink blouse, and the dusting of freckles across her nose.
