Page 45 of Promised to the Don of Naples
The last woman to tell me no was my mother, when I was eleven and wanted to leave the house in the small hours with Matteo to see the volcano.
More than thirty years, more than thirty years without anyone saying the word no to me.
And that girl of twenty-three, raised in a convent, daughter of a man I'm going to kill before the year is out—that girl had told me no in the corner of my own arbor, with her hand on the strap of my own watch, and had lowered my hand from her face like someone putting out a flame.
And I couldn't get angry.
I put my hand to the corner of my mouth, the thumb that had almost touched her. I felt her warmth still there—maybe it was my imagination, maybe it was the light through the arbor, maybe it was the whiskey from the night before making my blood rise the wrong way.
I didn't take my hand away. I stayed another five minutes with my hand to my mouth, feeling something I hadn't felt in so many years that I no longer had a word for it.
CHAPTER 14
"A woman who gives up a man's secret loves out of self-interest—or hates out of experience."
VALENTINA ROSSI
I didn't sleep.
I lay on my back, eyes open in the dark, the jasmine on my wrist giving me back the arbor on every hour the clock struck.
Two. Three. Four.
His thumb at the corner of my mouth, the weight of his knee against mine, his hand falling back without a fight when I drew it away.
Thirty years without anyone telling me no,he'd probably thought. I'd thought it too. I thought a lot of things about Luca Moretti now—I felt things for him that seemed like his thoughts, thoughts that had entered me by osmosis, through the smell, through the air of the house.
I got up at six.
I took a cold shower and put on black pants, a white blouse, pinning my hair into a bun.
A uniform. Today was a workday—not a dress, not an arbor, not a thumb at the corner of my mouth.
Today was Bianca's day.
I went down at eight and found Luca in the hallway between the stairs and the breakfast room.
He'd just come down from his room—sleeves already rolled, white shirt, no jacket, hair still damp from the shower.
He hadn't expected me there, and I hadn't expected him either. We stopped in the middle of the hallway, a couple of yards apart, in the yellow light of the stairway candelabra.
"Bella."
"Luca."
He looked at me up and down. He took his time.
"I prefer the navy-blue dress."
I smiled, almost without meaning to.
"You'll have to wait until the next arbor."
"When?"
"When I ask the right question."
He laughed and walked toward me. He didn't come to where I was—he passed me in the hallway, his shoulder brushing lightly against mine, the way a big man's shoulder brushes a woman's when he passes on purpose down a hallway that had room enough not to.
