“Sì, ce l’abbiamo,” she replied before instructing me to leave them inside the door.
Thank Christ.
The landlady smiled and stepped back to let us into the inner courtyard at the center of the U-shaped building common to this part of the city. I heaved the trunks to the place where she pointed and checked us in while Nina wandered around the courtyard, looking around with an expression somewhere between familiarity and awe.
The building had a gray baroque facade made of stone, but its inner peristyle and the colonnades surrounding the lower level indicated that, like so much of Roman architecture, it had probably been erected over a much older foundation stemming from ancient times. The joke in Rome, I’d heard, was that no one could build anywhere because every time you dug for the foundation, you’d find something else that needed to be preserved. It was true, too. In a single city block, it wasn’t uncommon to spot a two-thousand-year-old ruin, a medieval church, a Renaissance-era villa, and a jumble of baroque and neoclassical apartments.
Nina weaved her way around the columned floor, sometimes fingering the leafy vegetation and what looked like a few dormant grape vines for good measure. A fountain sang in the center, surrounded by a few bistro tables and an in-house bar at the far end. Balconies ringed the courtyard four stories up, at the top of which I could just see the remains of a much larger balustrade around the penthouse suite. Our suite. Containing two rooms. For us to sleep in. Separately.
I was frowning by the time I looked down again.
“It’s very lovely,” Nina admitted when she returned to where I stood.
“Just something I happened to find.”
I didn’t mention that Jane and Eric had actually put me up in the very hotel Nina booked—some five-star swank fest where even the bellhops wore tuxedos. I decided to cancel the reservation before I even made it to the front desk to check in. Nina had enough sterile glamour. This was a trip for family. For rediscovery. She needed intimacy and warmth. Places that felt a little like home.
And so, over the last two days, I’d been scouring every corner of Rome looking for something that would produce that exact expression of shy pleasure. Worth every damn minute.
“Signore.”
I turned as the landlady approached and gestured toward the balconies.
“Do you want to take dinner in your room later?” she asked in Italian. “We serve directly to the penthouse. It’s very beautiful to watch the sunset with aperitivos and then to eat.”
Beside me, Nina stifled a yawn. I glanced at my watch. It was closing in on five—laughably early for dinner by Italian standards, but pretty damn late for Nina, who looked like she was about to fall over from jet lag.
“If the kitchen’s open, we’ll take dinner in thirty minutes,” I replied with a glance at the menu drawn on a chalkboard by the bar. “Two of the daily specials, every course. And a bottle of your best white wine.”
The landlady’s brow rose with that curious look people get when they smell money. “The best?”
I nodded. “The very best.”
Two hours later, Nina and I were lounging on the rooftop deck, bellies full of pasta and wine just as the sun was finishing its sojourn below the horizon. Nina’s long legs were splayed out in front of her while she stared up at the sky, looking for stars. I hated to tell her that we probably wouldn’t see any more here than we would in New York. But I supposed she could always hope.
“Ten years,” she groaned sleepily. “It has been more than ten years since I had a meal that good.” She stretched both arms overhead, then forced herself to sit back up. “Thank you for finding this place. It really is so much better than overpriced room service.”
“Anything for you, doll,” I said just as lazily as I swirled the last of the white Montepulciano around in my glass.
I’d gotten over my jet lag yesterday, but right now, under the haze of wine and food, I was feeling it a little more. I wanted to collapse into a bed. Preferably with Nina. But since there was no way she would let me, I was content to not stargaze a little longer.
I tossed back the rest of the wine, allowed it to sit on my tongue for a moment. Then, without thinking, I pulled a pack of cigarettes and a lighter out of my jacket pocket and flipped one into my mouth.
“What is that?”
I froze at the sudden sharpness in Nina’s voice. “What’s what?”
“That.” She pointed a slender finger at my mouth.
I took the cigarette out and looked at it as if I hadn’t realized it was there. “Oh. This.”
Nina was sitting up straight now. “When did you start smoking? I’ve never seen you do that before.”
For a second, I wanted to retort that there were a lot of things she’d never seen me do. Things she’d never let me do because we were too busy sniping at each other or trying to keep me a dirty secret. Things like kiss her or hold her hand in public. Things like sleep with her more than one night in a row or keep her from running the fuck away when I pissed her off.
But instead, I looked down at the cigarette. “I…I guess I hadn’t for a long time when we met. Not since I was on tour.”
“You smoked in Iraq?”
And just like that, the rest of the evening’s levity disappeared, replaced by the black cloud of anyone mentioning that hellhole.
I put the cigarette back between my lips and lit it, then took a deep pull and exhaled away from the table.
“You’d be surprised what men do to cope with being over there,” I said. “A smoke here and there was the lesser of a lot of evils, believe me.”
Nina watched me a bit longer, her full mouth twisted