Her mother pounced. ‘You’re thinking of Cesare, aren’t you?’
‘No!’ Fran’s refutation was instant. Instinctive. It had not been Cesare in her head. In her memory. It had been a quite different man.
/> No. The admonition to herself came swiftly. She had taken off with Nic because it had confirmed that Cesare was in the past and she was free to indulge herself. But the point about indulgence, she had to remind herself sternly, was that that was all it was. The easy companionship and casual camaraderie that had been between her and Nic from the off, and all that hot desire for his strong, tough body that had melted her in his searing embrace, had passed.
It’s been and gone. It was good, but it’s over.
It made sense to tell herself that, to remind herself of that when she was back in her department, working on her next paper, teaching her assigned batch of undergrads, looking out for new research posts. Made sense to tell herself that just as she had accepted that Cesare was no longer in her life, so she would accept the same of Nic—she had let Cesare go easily enough, so it would be the same with Nic.
Yes, it made sense. But it had caused a pang, all the same, to find her suitcase from the Falcone Nevada beside her desk, delivered as promised by Nic. Suddenly vivid in her head was that last farewell to him, in the hectic anxiety of her departure from the airport at Las Vegas. Even more vivid was the sensation of that last farewell kiss, so hurried and fleeting.
But maybe it was good that it had ended so abruptly. Road trips could not go on for ever. In time, the vivid memories would fade. She would move on with her life. She must.
Yet as she called up on her screen a complex set of graphs depicting the interactions of the data she was examining her mind went momentarily blank.
A stray, random thought drifted across it. We never did get to North Rim, did we?
Their road trip had stopped before that. And for a moment, before she bent her mind to focus on the graphs again, that seemed a cause for regret.
As if something remained unfinished...
* * *
Nic picked up the thirty-thousand-euro gold pen that lay on his fifty-thousand-euro eighteenth-century desk in his office and scrawled his strong, incisive signature—Falcone—onto the purchase contract in front of him.
The prime Manhattan site was his. It had cost him top dollar, as would the refurb and the launch, but he didn’t care. It would be worth it. For a few brief months last year he’d enjoyed rebranding the Viscari Manhattan, but that had been ripped from him. Now he had a flagship property of his own, and no one could take it from him.
Setting down the pen, he waited for a sense of satisfaction at such a signal acquisition to fill him.
Instead, memory flickered in his head, of how he’d signed that bar chit in the Falcone Nevada in the summer, keeping his name from the sight of the woman beside him.
Instantly the view before him, overlooking the ancient city of Rome which had spawned him in its slums and now housed him in a High Renaissance former papal palazzo, the headquarters of Falcone, vanished. In its place, as vivid as if he were there, was a wild landscape, rocky and bare, sun-scorched, parched and desolate, or darkly forested land, pine trees towering all around him, and he and Fran driving through it, day after day, the road ahead always stretching endlessly, taking them wherever they wanted, over the next horizon, and the next—as if their journey together would never end.
Except that it had—the road had forked, and they had gone their separate ways. She to study the arcane mysteries of the universe, he to soar ever higher with Falcone.
More memory pierced—of that feeling of having been punched in the guts, winded, as he’d watched Fran hurry through into Departures at McCarran. He felt it again now, and in his head he heard his own thoughts coming in its wake.
Should I get in touch? Arrange to see her again?
Because they had been good together.
The anodyne description flared like a struck match in his body’s memory, flaming into heat, instantly recalling all their days and their nights, making him shift restlessly. It would be easy to make contact again, to track her down at her university. All he had to do was pick up the phone.
But his hand stayed where it was. He made it stay.
Let it go—let her go. There is no purpose in making contact. What there was, was good—but it has gone. Its course has run. Move on.
He always moved on. All his affairs were transient. He would not risk anything else. In his head he heard his mother, scarred by what life had done to her, lamenting the infidelity of men. Of the man who had seduced her then left her pregnant and alone, a prey to other men.
‘You’ll be the same,’ she would say to him sorrowfully. ‘You look so like him...so handsome! But so faithless—’
His mouth thinned. Well, he would not be like his unknown father—because he would never let a woman expect anything of him.
And Fran—would she have expected anything more of me, more than what we had?
He did not know, but it was best not to ask the question. Best not to ask how she would be once she knew he was not Nic Rossi, who worked in security at the Falcone Nevada, but Nicolo Falcone. It would inevitably come out if he contacted her again. It would mean explanations, complications...
No, best to let their brief time together fade into the past, where it belonged. The best place for it to be. The best place for her to be.