AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Really.” My voice is flat. I’m not surprised. Tristan is the kind of man people like build fantasies about. The math and computer whiz from the lower East Side whose genius scored him the best education from an early age and helped him conquer Silicon Valley. His name is linked to almost every software innovation of the past decade. He’s a gifted intellect, passionate about his work, imaginative, highly intelligent, impossibly handsome…and extremely rich. “Did she say what they’re meeting about?”
“No, I didn’t ask, but I guess it has something to do with funding for the refurbishment?”
“Of course.” The Mercer Museum always needs the charity of donors and backers. People like Tristan.
“Maybe he’ll join the board,” Tana says hopefully.
God forbid, I reply silently, knowing he just might. Not because he cares about the Mercer particularly, but just to torture me.
“So, what’s he like?” Tana asks again. “God knows I’d kill for an introduction.”
I chuckle bitterly. “What’s he like?” I try to find words that can adequately describe my feelings about Tristan—the intensity, the pain, the emotional rollercoaster. “He’s perfect,” I say quietly. “At first, at least…”
“At first?” Tana frowns, then her eyes light up in realization. “You’ve met him before?” She stares at me, and her eyes widen when I nod.
“You know him?”
Pain stabs at me. “I did…once.”
“Did you date him?” There’s a teasing, skeptical, yet awestruck note in her voice.
Date.I almost laugh as I lower myself to my seat, ignoring Tana’s excited face. “I married him.”
PAST
FLORENCE, ITALY.
CHAPTER7
TRISTAN
“You’d better not have been anywhere near a computer screen since the last time we spoke.”
My gaze drifts around the cobblestone street before resting on the splashing fountain in the middle of the square. I’m in Florence, sentenced to a two-week vacation by my sister Maddie. Now she’s calling to check that I’m keeping to the terms of my enforced holiday—no writing code, no designing interfaces, no work whatsoever—I’m only allowed to relax and do tourist things until my mind slows down and my body starts to think of rest as normal again.
“Would I dare disobey you?” My tone is teasing and placating at the same time. The last thing I need is for Maddie to come down here to make sure I’m doing exactly as she instructed.
She sighs. “You’re far more obsessed with work than you are scared of me.” Her tone softens. “You need the rest, Tristan…and if I hadn’t insisted, you’d have just kept on working yourself to death by exertion and energy drinks.”
She’s right. I’m not wired to take breaks, and left to myself, I wouldn’t bother. This trip is the first vacation I’ve taken after years of, as Maddie puts it, working like a dog.
I enjoy my work. I get obsessed with the possibilities I see in my head, and I can’t stop pushing until I bring them to life in some tangible form. I’ve always been that way, and the all-nighters, the hours spent in front of computer screens, the obsessive learning and relearning…it’s not work to me. It’s life.
To stop working would be like saying no to the experience of life.
It’s not about the money. The speech-to-text software engine I created right after college sold for almost three hundred million dollars, earning me a small fortune, but I went right back to work on my new project, a cloud computing program.
I was still building the core software architecture when exhaustion landed me in the hospital.
Enter Maddie. As soon as the doctors cleared me to leave the hospital, she dragged me onto a flight to Milan, where I was forced to do nothing but sleep, swim and eat while she shopped fabrics for her new ready-to-wear collection.
“Still loving Florence?” Maddie asks. She wasn’t happy when I told her I was leaving her in Milan and going to Florence to spend the rest of the vacation on my own. My best friend Nick offered me his bungalow outside the city, but in deference to Maddie, he’s forbidden me from bringing a computer into his house.
“What’s not to love?” I reply. I’ve spent the past few days studying the city’s marvelous history and art. “Under the cobblestones, the earth is still dark with the blood of a thousand renaissance power struggles.”
Maddie snorts. “Your geekiness is not restricted to computers and it’s cute.”
I chuckle. “How’s Milan?”
