“Did you offer to help?”
He gave her a wicked grin. “And spoil that picture? You have to be kidding.”
Blissfully unaware of the new, dangerous ground she was treading, Leigh laughed and rolled her eyes. “I should have known it wouldn’t be my face that you admired. You were very perverse in those days.”
“I wasn’t completely perverse. I finally walked around in front of you when you spilled the whole pile onto the floor.”
“How gallant.”
“I wasn’t being gallant. I wanted to see what you looked like from the front.”
“What did you see?”
“Hair.”
She choked, laughing. “Hair?”
He nodded. “You’d gotten down on your hands and knees to reach for some oranges that rolled under the shelf, and when you looked up at me, your hair had fallen forward, covering the side of your face. So all I saw was a curtain of shiny reddish brown hair—and two great big laughing eyes of Caribbean green.” He shook his head, and said as if to himself, “I had the damndest reaction to those laughing eyes.”
“What kind of reaction?”
“That would be a little difficult to explain,” Michael said with veiled amusement; then he glanced at his watch. “Let’s go next door.” She joined him and strolled with him to the end of the aisle; then she faltered and stopped cold, staring at the newspaper and magazine rack directly in front of them.
VALENTE IMPLICATED IN MANNING MURDER
Beneath the Daily News’s hideous headline were large pictures of Leigh and Michael shown in profile, as if they were looking at each other.
Mesmerized by the timing of the moment, Leigh glanced over her shoulder at the aisle where he’d first seen her picking up oranges. “Just think,” she said somberly, “fourteen years ago we were back there. And now”—she nodded at their pictures splashed across the News’s lurid front page—“and now we’re there.”
“Together at last,” he joked, sliding his arm around her shoulders.
His outrageous quip wrenched a shriek of laughter from Leigh, and she buried her face against his chest, her shoulders shaking with guilty mirth, her hands clinging to his lapels.
Michael tightened his arm around her and smiled at her bent head. He’d finally seen those dazzling blue-green eyes light up with laughter again, and he was having the same old reaction.
Chapter 46
* * *
The interior of Angelini’s restaurant was invitingly “hip,” with exposed brick and mortar on parts of the walls and beautiful frescoes depicting the Tuscan countryside on others. The tables were dressed with fine linen, beautiful Italian pottery, tapered candles, and lavish bowls of fresh flowers. Trellises with flowering vines had been placed at strategic intervals to bring a cozier, more intimate atmosphere to what was actually a very large restaurant.
Business was definitely booming, with customers waiting at the maître d’s desk and stacked three deep at a long, raised bar at the far left of the entrance. Michael handed their coats to an attendant; then he put his hand on the small of Leigh’s back, guiding her through the crowd.
Near the rear of the restaurant, there were three empty tables in a row beside a frescoed wall. “This is perfect,” Leigh told him as he sat down across from her at the table in the center of the three. As she reached for her napkin, she noticed the design on the colorful charger in front of her. “There’s a little village on a mountaintop in northern Italy where pottery like this is made,” she said, recalling being there with Logan. By then, after two weeks in Italy, Logan had already run out of patience with everything, even the architecture of the medieval church in the center of the square. He’d hated to travel anywhere outside the U.S. because he felt too far removed from his business interests. “I’ve been there,” she added.
“So have I.”
“Really. How long were you in Italy?”
“A month, the last time,” he said, pausing briefly while a young man filled their glasses with ice water. “I combined it with an extended business trip to France.”
It was easy for Leigh to imagine him now as a world traveler. Leaning back in his chair, with his forearm resting on the table and a thirty-thousand-dollar Patek Philippe wristwatch peeking from beneath the monogrammed cuff of his shirt, he was the personification of relaxed masculine elegance, power, and wealth.
She started to ask him about his travels, but her concentration was derailed by the excited voices of four people at a table across the aisle who’d just recognized them and were discussing the article in the News. Leigh’s spirits sank a little. “We’ve been spotted,” she said, even though she knew perfectly well Michael could hear them.
“It was inevitable,” he said, lifting his wide shoulders in a shrug that dismissed their audience as if they were mere specks of dust on the floor. His attitude amazed and dazzled her. She was an actress; she could pretend, but he wasn’t pretending indifference. He was indifferent. He was accountable to no one but himself—the self-appointed master of his own destiny.
Their waiter, a jovial, heavyset man in his sixties, bustled up to them with a bottle of red wine that he put down on the table while he shook Michael’s hand and was introduced to Leigh as Frank Morrissey.
“I’ll tell Marie you’re here,” Frank told Michael. “She’s in the kitchen arguing with the chef.” He
pressed the corkscrew to the bottle’s cork and began expertly twisting it while he proudly explained to Leigh, “I knew Hawk before he was old enough to use a fork. In fact, I was there when he decided to have his very first glass of wine.”
He glanced at Michael and chuckled as he drew out the cork. “Do you remember how old you were when I caught you and Billy with that bottle of wine?”
“No, not really.”
“How old were they?” Leigh asked eagerly, noting Michael’s pained look.
“I can’t tell you exactly how old they were,” Frank confided with a grin, “but they were too short to reach it without climbing on a stool.”
Leigh laughed, reveling in the almost-forgotten feeling of being lighthearted.
“Leigh,” Michael said with amused exasperation, “please don’t encourage this.”
Ignoring him, she looked hopefully at Frank and raised her brows. It was all the encouragement he needed. “I was also there when Hawk and Billy decided to take Billy’s uncle’s car out for a spin,” he said, pouring some wine into Michael’s glass for him to taste. “Billy snuck the keys outside, and Hawk got behind the steering wheel. He was only about five, so he had to stand up to see over it.”
“What happened?” Leigh asked, looking from him to Michael.
“I started the engine,” Michael said dryly, “and Billy turned on the siren.”
“You were trying to steal a squad car?” She laughed.
“We weren’t going to steal it; we were going to borrow it.”
“Yeah,” Frank interjected, “but a few years later—”
“—a few years later, we stole it,” Michael provided with a sigh of frustration.
Leigh covered her laughing face with her hands, looking at him through her fingers. “My God.”