One Reckless Decision

She did not—would not—think of his wicked mouth on hers, his hands smoothing fire and need into her skin until she’d shaken with it. She could not think of his devastating quiet on that darkened street, the way he had held her captive with only that dark, too-perceptive gaze. His cutting mockery, that beguiling almost-smile…She wanted none of those images in her mind. She had to remember why she was here—why she was doing this.

She let her head fall forward until it touched the cool glass of the great window, and sighed. It seemed to take over her whole body.

She would do what she must, but that did not mean she had to sit here like this apartment, empty and discarded until Nikos condescended to return and begin their little dance anew. A whole city waited just outside, brimming with art and history in the summer rain, the perfect balm for the heart she told herself did not ache within her chest, the tears she would not allow herself to cry; for the life she suddenly feared would never fit her again as well as it used to, as well as it should.

Chapter Seven

HE WAS waiting for her when she rounded the corner.

At first she thought he was some kind of hallucination—the same one she had been having to some degree or another all afternoon, to her great irritation. She’d seen the side of his head in the crowded rooms of the Uffizi Gallery, startling her as she gazed at Botticelli’s famous painting of Venus rising from the water, all lush curves and flowing hair. But it had only been a dark-haired father bending to whisper to his two wriggling children, not Nikos at all. She’d glimpsed his unmistakable saunter from a distance on the Ponte Vecchio, the ancient bridge crowded full of shops and arches and tourists that stretched across the Arno—but then she had blinked and seen the figure approaching her was nothing so special after all, just a local man crossing a bridge.

So Tristanne did not immediately react when she saw him this time, expecting the figure lounging in the archway that led into Nikos’s old building to turn to vapor, fade into shadow, or step forward and reveal himself to be an ordinary resident of the city, simply going about his business in the wet summer evening.

But as she drew closer, her footsteps echoing off the ancient cobblestones, the image before her only intensified. The jet-black hair. The dark, tea-steeped eyes, swimming with gold and fire. The dragon in him infused his very skin, making him seem almost to glow with all the power he held carefully leashed in that lean, muscled torso, so wide through the shoulders and narrow at his hips. He leaned against the stone wall, protected from the rain, his long arms crossed and his gaze intent upon her as she approached.

“Where have you been?”

The question seemed to echo even louder than her shoes against the stones, and her heart beat like a drum in her chest. Tristanne told herself that it was simply a trick of the fading light and the effect of the rain, as the old city settled into evening all around her. This section, hidden in a series of twisted age-old streets that seemed to double back and forth on top of each other, was so very quiet in comparison to the high traffic areas she’d walked earlier. He only sounded dangerous and on edge because there were not seas of tourists to dull the sound of his voice.

And even if he was on edge, for some no doubt inscrutable reason he would not bother to share with her, why should she act as if that cowed her? She did not understand why this man made her forget herself so easily, but she could not let it continue. It did not matter how she felt, she reminded herself—a key point she had returned to again and again as she wandered through centuries of art all afternoon—it only mattered how she acted.

“My apologies,” she said, curving her mouth into an approximation of meek smile. “I had so hoped to beat you here, so that I might arrange myself on your sofa like a still-life painting. Prettily, of course. As directed.”

He only watched her as she closed the distance between them and stepped under the archway with him. She knew she was soaked through, but she could not bring herself to care as she no doubt should. The rain was warm, and had seemed to her like some kind of necessary cleansing as she’d walked through Florence’s famous piazzas. As if she had needed to bathe in all the sights and centuries arrayed before her, and if the price of that was her bedraggled appearance now, well, so be it.

“You look half-drowned,” he said after a long moment. His eyes were too hot on hers, too unsettling. “What could possibly be so important that it lured you out in this weather without so much as an umbrella?”

“I cannot imagine,” she said dryly, pushing her damp hair back from her face. “Surely there is nothing in the whole of the city of Florence that could possibly interest an artist.”