Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73233 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
“Florentine light.” His voice is quiet. “Before the river. The hour before sunset, the buildings go this color. Warm stone and warm air and everything turns gold.” A pause. His thumb moves against the back of my hand. “I haven’t been back in twenty-two years.”
Twenty-two years. Since he was fourteen. Since he ran. I think about the boy in the forest and the man in the museum and the distance between them, and I hold his hand tighter and I don’t say anything, because some things don’t need words. They need hands.
My hand finds his. Not a dramatic gesture. Not a reach or a grab. My fingers brush the back of his hand and settle there, and he goes still, and then his hand turns over, palm up, and my fingers lace through his, and we’re standing in a dark museum holding hands in front of a painting that looks like both our homes.
His thumb moves. Once. A circle on the inside of my wrist.
I nearly come apart. A circle. He drew a circle on my wrist. The thing I do, the thing he’s been watching me do since the third row, and he just did it back, on my skin, with his thumb, and the intimacy of it’s so targeted that my vision blurs.
“You noticed,” I whisper.
“I notice everything about you, Elsa.”
We stand there. His hand around mine. His thumb still on my wrist. The painting glowing in front of us and the museum empty around us, and I understand now why he brought me here. Not to impress me. Not to show me what his money can do. To show me a place where beautiful things are kept safe. Where they’re protected and lit and cared for, and the parallel is so clear it makes my ribs ache.
He turns to me. My hand still in his. We’re close now, closer than the painting, closer than the art, and his free hand comes up and touches my jaw the way it did in his office, light, just fingertips, tilting my face.
The kiss comes without warning.
And it’s different again. Every kiss has been different. The first was a man falling. The second was a man surrendering. This one is a man arriving. His mouth is warm and unhurried and his hand cradles my jaw and my back is against the gallery wall and I can feel the cool stone through my dress and his body is warm against the front of me and we’re kissing in the dark surrounded by centuries of beauty and I’m twenty years old and I’ve been kissed three times in my life and all three times were by this man and I don’t want anyone else, not ever, not once.
His mouth moves to my jaw. My neck. The place below my ear where my pulse is hammering. My head falls back against the wall and my fingers grip his shirt and the sound I make isn’t a word. It’s not anything with language in it. It’s pure body, pure reaction, and his hand tightens on my jaw.
“Luciano.”
His name. In my mouth. During this. I’ve said it before, in his office, during the thesis argument when he offered it. I’ve said it in my head a thousand times. But I’ve never said it like this, with his mouth on my throat and my hands in his shirt and my back against a wall and the word coming out broken and raw and so full of want that it doesn’t sound like my voice at all.
He goes still.
Completely still. His mouth stops on my neck. His hand stops on my jaw. His entire body, pressed against mine, goes rigid, and I can feel his heart through his shirt, hammering against my chest like it’s trying to get out.
“Say it again.” Against my skin. Barely audible.
“Luciano.”
His exhale is shaky. I feel it on my throat, warm and uneven, and his forehead drops to my shoulder and he stays there. Breathing. Holding me against the wall with his body and his hand and the weight of his name between us.
I say it once more. Quieter this time. Not a request. Not a plea. A gift.
“Luciano.”
His hand slides from my jaw into my hair. He lifts his head. Looks at me. In the gallery light, his eyes are dark and wet and I think, with a clarity that stuns me: this man hasn’t heard his own name said with tenderness in years. His mother named him. His father used it as a leash. His men call him boss or sir. The students call him Professor Salvatore. The whole world calls him Professor Salvatore, and no one, no one, says Luciano the way I just said it, like it’s the most important word in the room.
He kisses my forehead. Lips pressed to skin, lingering, the least sexual and most intimate thing he’s ever done. Then he steps back, takes my hand again, and we walk through three more galleries in silence, shoulder to shoulder, fingers laced, and I don’t need to draw circles because his thumb is doing it for me, tracing quiet loops on the inside of my wrist, and my hand is still in his.