“Hey, doll.”
I slipped a stealthy hand around her waist and delivered a quick kiss to her cheek, getting a brief whiff of roses as I did. God, she smelled good. It had been nearly a month since the party—a solid month of unanswered calls and terse text replies.
I’m not ready, she kept saying every time I tried to contact her. I need time.
Well, time was up. I had a job to do in more ways than one.
She looked a bit more like herself, though. Gone was the dark eye makeup and the body-baring dress. The hair had grown out close to an inch, and Nina was back in shades of white and gray—a lacy sweater on top of tailored gray pants, over which she wore her favorite heather gray cashmere coat.
Her lips, though. Those were bright red again.
She sucked in a breath as I released her. Maybe I shouldn’t have—she was wobbly for a moment, even in flats.
“What are you doing here?” she asked again.
“Would you believe me if I said it was fate?”
Nina only tipped her head, not even bothering with a reply.
“Jane and Eric didn’t like the idea of you going alone. Come on, do you really blame them?” I asked when Nina opened her mouth to protest.
She closed it, then opened it again. “I…well, I suppose not. But—”
“I know you didn’t think we were done talking after the party, duchess.”
She blinked. “Well, you never came back, did you?”
“I called. I texted. Accepted your one-word answers. And then the holidays, you know. I do have a family of my own. Anyway, I figured this was a pretty good way to show you.”
Her brows wrinkled, revealing that cute little furrow between them that I wanted to kiss. “A good way to show me what?”
“That you mean the fucking world to me.” I reached up a hand and gestured toward the porters clearly looking at Nina as their target. “Plus, I’m pretty sure if Jane suggested it that night, you would have said no. We agreed a surprise was a better tactic.”
“Matthew, this really isn’t necess—”
“Per favore, porta i suoi bagagli alla Ferrari nera fuori,” I interrupted her to give the porters instructions about where to take her bags and handed one of them twenty euros.
They nodded, one of them with an impressed whistle at the mention of my car, and ducked around us. Nina was still watching me with a little irritation and a lot more shock.
“You were saying?” I said.
She just folded her arms and snorted adorably.
“All right, duchess,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll go if you can tell me what I just said.”
She opened her mouth, then closed it, opened it again, closed it again until that furrow had appeared once more. Picture-perfect frustration. Her lips, however, were twitching at the corner.
“Fine,” she said. “It was a little fast for me. But it will come back, you know. I just need to practice.”
I grinned. “Well, I think we can both agree that you need an interpreter until then. Lucky for you, I’m available.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then you can start by telling me where you just sent all my things.”
The little black coupe dipped and dived around the traffic on the congested Via Giovanni Giolitti with ease. I didn’t mind driving in Italy as much as I remembered. For all their reputations as crazy drivers, Italians weren’t any worse than the average New York cabbie. I was used to this kind of frenetic pace.
“Do you even know where I’m going?” Nina called over the roar of the road and the traffic. It was hard not to watch her enjoying the sun. It was an unseasonably warm day for January in Rome with temperature topping seventy, so we drove with the windows down, listening to the cacophony of the city. Thank you, global warming.
Nina, however, was dressed for it, having shucked her coat and sweater to make herself more comfortable in the thin cotton tank top that showed off a distracting amount of her neck and collarbone. With a silk scarf wrapped around her head and a pair of white, cat-eyed frames guarding her eyes, she looked more like a silver screen film starlet than ever.
“Jane sent me your itinerary,” I called back as I swerved around a delivery truck that made a sudden stop. “I changed it for a better one. I hope you don’t mind.”
Nina pulled off her glasses to stare at me. “You didn’t.”
“It might have been five stars, but that hotel was full of tourists and stiffs,” I said. “I thought you wanted to work on your Italian, baby.”
When she worked her face into a tight little scowl, I had to laugh again.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I found a great pensione, owned by the same family for five generations. Right in the middle of Trastevere, with house-made cacio e pepe to die for. I promise, you’ll love the beds too.”
“Matthew!”
I almost held my hands up in surrender, but reminded myself to keep both on the wheel.
“In separate rooms, of course,” I amended.
Was it my imagination, or did she look a little disappointed when I said that? I just laughed and shifted gears. The Ferrari shot forward, and the streets of Rome flew by.
I parked the car in a small garage a few blocks from the pensione, but only after depositing Nina and her monogrammed Louis Vuitton trunks near the entrance to wait for me.
“Did you bring your entire wardrobe with you, doll?” I asked when I returned to find her still standing outside the closed front door.
She snorted. “Hardly. But I had to pack heavy. I don’t know how long I’m staying.”
“You do know they have laundry services in Italy, don’t you?”
She ignored me as the door opened after I knocked, and a kindly-looking landlady greeted us.
“Salve, signora.” I tipped my hat toward her, then asked about our reservation and whether or not they had a bellhop. I prayed to God they did. Otherwise I’d be
