She stopped, turning to me. “Do you know what you need to do when you are unhappy?”
I didn’t want to argue with her that I was not unhappy, so I raised a brow. “What?”
“Something exciting.”
“Like?”
“I don’t know. Maybe smoking cigarettes with handsome young men.”
Ugh. A smile pulled on my lips. Only she would think of Nicolas as a young man.
“Goodnight, tesoro.” Nonna winked.
The candle’s flame danced, a bleak reminder of false smiles in the orange, mesmerizing light. Sheer curtains blew in the light summer breeze, and a lamp cast a soft glow against the wall of shelved books. Frank Sinatra leaked under the library door so quietly it could be a distant memory of a similar night half a century ago.
I sat with my legs folded against my side in a seat by the fireplace, a book lying on the arm. I hadn’t read more than two pages until I’d given up and rested my head against the chair and stared at the candle filling the room with the smell of lavender. My heels lay forgotten on the floor, the white bows unraveled across the red oriental rug.
I’d escaped the kitchen as soon as I could, my mamma’s talk about the wedding an annoying noise that became louder and louder until I needed silence. It wasn’t even about Oscar Perez anymore. It was about words unsaid and a future uncertain.
Like the hard shell of a coconut, the Sweet Abelli shielded the real me from the world. It couldn’t be cracked without strong tools. Lowering that barrier bared a part of me not many had seen—a me that felt. A vulnerable me. I wasn’t sure why I let Nicolas Russo see that side. Maybe it was because his indifference made me believe he didn’t want to crack me.
My eyes shot up when the click of the library door hit my ears, and, as if my thoughts had conjured him, Nicolas stepped in.
When his gaze came up from the floor and he noticed me, he stopped short. For a second, I thought he was going to turn and leave without a word just because I was here. His stare was an indifferent, condescending one—like he’d come into his library to find a servant in his chair. The man really wanted nothing to do with me. Well, I didn’t like him either. Truthfully, it was mostly because he didn’t like me.
His gaze narrowed. “Why aren’t you at the party?”
“Why aren’t you?” I countered.
He ran a hand down his tie, watching me in a calculated way, like he was weighing the pros and cons of my presence. It didn’t look like there were many pros.
Making up his mind, he shut the door and headed to the minibar, never answering my question. He poured a drink, and I tried to pretend he wasn’t here, that his presence hadn’t filled the room, making my mind now useless. Nonetheless, I found myself watching him, every smooth move as he filled a glass tumbler with whiskey.
My skin lit like a live wire, the fabric of my dress felt heavy, and the breeze from the open window brushed my shoulders. As he walked past, I pretended to be engrossed in the little black sentences before me, but in reality, I didn’t take in one word of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. History, facts, they made me feel better in a time of doubt, because someday I would be nothing but a memory, just like them.
He sat in a gray armchair by the window and pulled out his phone. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. He’d unbuttoned his jacket, showing his black vest that hugged his flat stomach. His tie hung askew from pulling on it, and the visual suddenly made me wonder: What does he look like in the morning, all disheveled? I swallowed.
He might be able to pull off his suit like a gentleman, but once again the red, busted knuckles of the hand holding his phone told me his appearance was just a façade.
Light scruff covered his jaw, and his hair was as dark as his suit, the top thick and messy. He was intimidating, with a heavy presence and a glare that burned, but when he wore a soft, sober expression like now . . . he didn’t even have to look at me to make me burn.
He glanced over and caught my gaze. “You’ve got to work on that staring.”
My pulse fluttered in my throat, and warmth rushed to my face.
His eyes fell to my cheeks.
And then he did something I never expected. Maybe it was from disbelief, or maybe he thought I was ridiculous. I didn’t know, and I didn’t care. He laughed. Softly, darkly. The kind of laugh that has no good intentions. The kind of laugh the walls don’t forget.
Warmth curled low in my stomach, and I couldn’t help it, I stared even more. He had white teeth and sharp incisors, just like the villain he was. When he glanced at me sideways, with dark mirth in his gaze, a flame pulsed between my legs.
“Jesus,” he said under his breath, running a hand through his hair.
I leaned my head against the chair, my teeth tugging on my bottom lip. He glanced at me one more time as his laugh faded, his amusement disappearing into a tense atmosphere that sparked. A warm breath of air breezed through the window and I shivered.
I didn’t know how long we sat in the same room, in silence, not far apart. Time wasn’t a factor. The moment was recorded each time he shifted, looked up from his phone, took a drink, glanced my way when I’d flip a page or brush my hair off my shoulders.
I thought I was doing well, that I was turning pages at an equivalent of what someone would if they were reading them. But I was thrown off when his gaze pulled up from his phone and rested on my face. It settled there for a moment, before running down my bared neck and shoulders. My breathing stilled when it trailed over the curves of my breasts and down my stomach. And I flushed when it went lower to my thighs, tracing my legs until it reached my pink-painted toenails peeking out of my dress.