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Chapter 11
Since Megan was the one giving up her privacy for him, Alessandro had to be the most grateful for any moment she spent with him. She couldn’t possibly feel the kind of warmth he felt when he looked at her across the table of a quiet restaurant in the North End. They were getting looks from other patrons, but a burly man in a black suit, hired by Yasmin, sat at the next table and discouraged anyone who might have had ideas of approaching them.
Alessandro saw the surreptitious flashes of camera phones, but he didn’t care. Well, he almost didn’t. Megan looked incredible tonight. His mouth had gone dry when she’d removed her thick fleece coat and revealed a figure-hugging black-and-white geometric-designed dress. A thin gold necklace highlighted the pulse in her throat, and her dangling gold earrings made him want to move them out of the way and kiss the spot below her ear that had made her shiver the other night.
“The students are so excited,” Megan said after the waiter had delivered her lemon drop cocktail and Alessandro’s Milano-Torino. “I can’t wait for them to get pampered.”
“I had to stop some of them from skipping school to get ready,” he said.
“Very hard to do. Do you think they will anyway?”
He shrugged. “We can only give them a good night and hope they have learned the rest.Salute.”
Had she chosen that drink because the yellow contrasted with her dress so perfectly? Her gold jewelry glowed brighter in the dim light of the restaurant. And the spark in her eyes when she talked about the students from the Studio really undid him. She’d adopted them as easily as if they were part of her family, and when they’d arrived together at the community center the other night—after a photograph outside her building and another at the entrance to the Studio—the kids had treated her with the same lack of admiration they treated Alessandro. Megan seemed to be happy with this. Then one of them asked her what they should wear, and he lost her to a chattering group in the corner for half an hour. By the next morning, Megan had contacts at three local department stores ready to dress them all. Yasmin’s team got approvals from the kids’ caregivers, and they were going to run a red carpet at The Rosette.
Megan had made that happen. She’d made more people happy, without even blinking.
So Alessandro wanted this dinner to be for her. And that meant giving her something back.
“When did you move to America?” she asked.
“When I turned twenty.” He glanced behind them and lowered his voice. “This is just for us. Not for the plan.”
Megan’s eyes widened and she leaned in. “You’re scaring me.”
“It is not a big deal,” he said. “The older I get, the less it matters. But when I started out, I did not want to be associated with my life in Italy. I thought it was hard enough to be taken seriously, so I hid it.”
“Okay, so I’m not scared anymore, but you’re killing me with the hints.”
He smiled, and she smiled back. And if the cameras caught him reaching up to stroke her jaw for a second, then that was what they caught. “When my parents and I first… agreed I needed to leave, I had very little training in acting. Only what I could get around my school. But I did have something else that I could…monetizzare. What is that? Make money with.”
“Monetize, I guess.”
“Oh.” He laughed and shook his head. “Sometimes I say an Italian word and people think I’m speaking English. Some days I do not know which language I’m speaking.”
“Do you dub your own movies into Italian?”
“And French. I learned when I was modeling.”
He looked at her very hard, but her expression only showed comprehension. “That’s what you did?” He nodded. “Well, of course that’s what you did! Alessandro, I’m still getting over the fact that your parents threw you out when you were still a teenager! They’re lucky you didn’t get a way worse job than modeling!”
“They didn’t see it that way. We were still talking then.” He leaned back and took a sip of his drink. The bitterness matched his memories. “I can say it was my only choice, but it was not. I knew it would piss them off, and I loved that.”
“You were so young. You fought back the only way you knew how. Who did you model for?”
He gave her a few names. “I was afraid you’d recognize me when you first came into the coffee shop. I could tell you knew your designers.” He nodded respectfully to her dress.
She brushed a nonexistent speck from her dress. “My one vice.”
“That is not much of a vice,cara.”
“You say that because you lived in that world. My sister Sam wears cargo shorts to every event.”
He laughed because she did, but he heard the pain in her voice. Now he didn’t want to meet her family, because he was really beginning to dislike them for putting doubt in her mind about her worth.
“So you modeled and saved enough money and came to America?” she asked.
