She’d seen how he looked at her. When they were alone. When they were spending a simple day together. Or over dinner in the elegant restaurants where he was greeted like visiting royalty? The tiny bistros where the owners fussed over them?
“They hope we’re from the Guide Michelin,” she whispered to him that evening and Marco laughed and said she was probably right.
Or was she?
Watching her face that night, feeling the lightness in his heart, he suddenly wondered whether all the attention they were getting had less to do with the hope of being listed in a famous guidebook and more to do with a French passion for discovering a man and a woman in love.
The thought would not go away.
Late that night, when sleep would not come, Marco pressed a light kiss to Emily’s hair. Carefully, he took his arm from beneath her shoulders, pulled on his trousers, went out on the terrace and quietly closed the doors behind him.
Paris glittered with her own brilliant light, all but eclipsing the brightness of the moon and the stars.
He and Emily were lovers. But love?
The French were such romantics.
He was not.
He didn’t believe in the concept. He had, once, but he’d been young. He’d thought that the grandmother and grandfather who’d taken him in would love him and when that had turned out to be nothing but a bitter hope, he’d believed that love would come with the nuns who’d replaced them.
What came, instead, were beatings and constant reminders that he had been born to a girl who had sinned.
By the time he came to America, he should have been past such nonsense. He wasn’t. Fool that he was, he’d opted for one more attempt at love. His marriage. The woman who had claimed to love him, who had lied to him…
“Marco?”
That was what love was. Lies. Illusions. Delusions.
“Marco. Are you all right?”
He turned around.
Emily stood in the open doorway, his discarded white shirt hanging to her knees. Her hair was loose and wild, ivory radiance caught in among the long gold waves.
“I am—” He swallowed. “I am fine, cara. I didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I woke because you weren’t there.”
Something happened to his heart.
He held out his arms. She went into them. And as he gathered her close and buried his face in her hair, he knew that he was a liar, too.
Love was real.
It was true.
Once you found the right person… As he had done.
The unbelievable had happened.
He was deeply, completely in love.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The flight home went quickly.
Marco had a backlog of messages on his cell phone. He’d read through them in Paris and decided they could all be safely set aside, but by the time his plane was halfway over the Atlantic, he knew he had to get up to speed.