The ancient, narrow streets. The magnificent fountains. The green parks. The centuries worth of paintings and frescoes and sculptures. The passageways beneath the Coliseum, where she could almost hear the cries, smell the fear of the men and the animals about to die in the arena.
And he wanted to buy her things. A carnival mask from Venice. A tiny bejeweled heart from Bulgari. Each time, she offered a polite “Thank you, but no.”
He tried to overrule that no in a tiny, elegant shop on the Via Condotti, where he’d taken her after she said she really, really needed to buy some clothes, emphasis on the really, really in a way that told him what he already suspected—that his Anna wasn’t accustomed to spending much on herself.
Except for shoes. “My weakness,” she’d admitted one night, and he told her he was glad that it was, because the sight of her long, lovely legs in those killer heels, the rest of her clad only in a thong and matching bra, was fast becoming his.
But when she said she needed to get something to wear, that she couldn’t live in her lady lawyer suits, one pair of jeans and that T-shirt that made him laugh each time he saw it, Draco took her to the only place he could think of. The Via Condotti, its endless designer shops …
A mistake.
Any of the women who’d passed through his life would have been thrilled.
Anna was horrified.
“Ohmygod, look at the prices!” she’d hissed—at least she’d hissed it when there were prices to see. There were no tags on the things in some shops; when Anna asked, the clerk would ignore her and give the answer to him.
That they would assume he’d pay for her purchases made Anna even more indignant.
“Anna,” he’d said softly, “bellissima, be reasonable. This is how things are done.”
“Not by me.”
“But I want to buy these things for you. That dress. This skirt.” He picked up a tiny gold-and-Murano-glass replica of the Trevi Fountain. “And this. Imagine how it would look on your fireplace mantel. Or the desk in your office.”
Imagine how it would remind you of this week we spent together, he’d meant, but it was pointless.
“That little figure,” she’d said, “costs a king’s ransom. Besides, I don’t have a fireplace or a mantel in my walk-up, and if I put it anywhere in the hole-in-the-wall I call an office, one of my scruffy clients would try and steal it.”
A walk-up flat. A miserable office. Clients who probably spent more time making excuses for their failures than doing something about them. She deserved better than that, but he’d known that telling her so was pointless.
Almost as pointless as their shopping expedition until a clerk had taken pity on her, or maybe on him, and whispered the name of a place blocks away that dealt, she said, in things far less expensive. Anna had dragged him there and left him outside to cool his heels.
When she’d emerged a quarter of an hour later, carrying a huge, plain shopping bag, he’d been surprised.
“So fast?” he’d said.
“I don’t need to waste time. I know what I want when I see it.”
Yes. So did he. And what he wanted was Anna.
He wanted her all the time, and she wanted him with the same hot desire. And yet the more they made love, the more he felt that heat changing to something else. Something deeper and stronger, something powerful …
And frightening.
It was on his mind all the time.
That he felt something he couldn’t comprehend, and that their time together was coming to a close. Only another two days, he found himself thinking one night as they were finishing dinner on the terrace of a small, very quiet, well—off-the-tourist-route restaurant in Trastevere.
Anna was talking. Animatedly.
Draco was listening. More or less. Mostly he was filling his eyes with her.
“… haven’t listened to a word,” she said sud
denly, and he blinked and said, “What?”
She made a face. “See? And here I was telling you all my secrets.”