Page 10 of Valentino

"Okay," she says, not believing me, but letting me have it anyway. "Call me tomorrow. And babe? Keep Elio close. Promise me."

"I promise to tolerate his enormous presence. That’s the best I’ve got."

"I’ll take it. Love you."

"Love you back."

I hang up and let the phone drop to the little marble table.

The café settles around me. Without Vittoria’s voice in my ear, there’s nothing to keep my mind from circling back to Nadia’s bruise. To Bruno asking her to look into something. To the way both of those things made Milan feel less like a city and more like a locked room.

I reach for my phone again, because that’s what I do when a room gets too quiet around me.

That’s when I feel it.

The prickle at the back of my neck.

The specific weight of being watched.

I lift my head.

A man sits two tables over, near the window, one ankle resting on the opposite knee.

He isn’t pretending not to look at me. He’s just looking.

Gray at the temples. A jaw sharp enough to cut glass. Eyes the color of a storm, fixed on me with an attention so flat and complete it pushes the air right out of my chest.

I know that face.

Oh, fuck.

CHAPTER FOUR

Amanda

Iknow him immediately.

That is the embarrassing part.

Valentino Conti is not a man people almost recognize. He is a man your brain identifies first and asks questions about later.

He’s looking right at me, and when our eyes meet across the café, he does something I’ve never actually seen him do in all the years our paths have crossed at Sartori functions.

He smiles.

Then he stands.

Oh, this is happening.

I have a full three seconds to look at him as he weaves between the tiny café tables, and my brain, traitor that it is, uses every one of them. He's tall in a way that makes the room feel rearranged around him. Broad through the shoulders in a three-piece suit.

His eyes are the worst part. Dark and so beautiful.

I stand up before I've actually decided to.

"Conti," I say, and my voice comes out strange in my ears. "What are you doing here?"

And then, because apparently being alone in a country where I don't speak the language has lowered my self-preservation instincts by about ninety percent, I throw my arms around him.