She’s playing a role, but hearing her call mebabymakes my stomach drop. So pathetic. “Much better. Thank you.”
We order coffees and two waters, my leg jiggling under the table. Remembering Allegra’s earlier dig about my diet, I order a basket of fries to share, too.
“How decadent,” she says once the waitress is gone, tracing a scratch in the table with a polished nail. “It truly is a Christmas miracle.”
With the diner secured and the De Rossi mansion hours behind us, I look at Allegra properly for the first time tonight. She looks tired, and thinner than last month. Swamped by her midnight blue sweatshirt, her shoulders sag with defeat.
Fuck, I hate this. I hate seeing Allegra’s light dimmed by even a few watts, and I hate knowing that she’d be happier if Diego were here and not me. They’d be chatting and ordering burgers, telling each other awful jokes and savage stories. Is her low mood because Santo sent her away? Or because I have this effect on her?
For the record: I didn’t always make her droop. Once upon a time, Allegra lit up when I walked into a room.
That was a long time ago. Now, the young woman across from me looks ready to take a hundred year nap.
“You can stretch out in the back seat after this,” I tell her, shrugging out of my coat and folding it on the red vinyl booth seat beside me. “If you sleep the rest of the way, you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“You have no idea how I’ll feel,” she says, tone bored.
“Iama doctor.”
“But not a mind reader.” Her smile is cool. “Anyway, you’ll be the one trying to digest fat for the first time in a decade. Worry about yourself, Dr Ossani.”
“I eat fat—”
The waitress interrupts our bickering, thank god. Steam curls above both coffee mugs, and the water comes in a glass pitcher stuffed with ice and lime. The fries smell surprisingly good—hot, golden and salty.
“Enjoy!”
As the waitress strolls away, Allegra falls on the basket of fries like a hungry wolf. She stuffs three into her mouth at a time, leaning over the table, and ignores me completely.
I press my lips together, fighting a smile.
My own stomach growls with hunger, but I watch Allegra eat every single fry without coming up for air, sipping my own coffee and stretching one arm across the back of the seat. She vacuums up the tiny crispy bits too, pressing her thumb into the golden shards on the waxy paper.
“Told you.”
I watch her lick the salt from her fingers, my whole body tensed with longing. Not for any damn fries—forher.For the lash of that little pink tongue.
“You talk a big game, Dr Ossani, but when the carbs come out, you sit there like a lemon.”
A lemon?
“I’m not hungry,” I lie. The truth is, I was hungrier for the opportunity to watch Allegra freely. To make her happy for a change, and to see her sit back with more color in her cheeks. “Drink your coffee.”
Allegra scoffs, snatching up her mug. “Don’t tell me what to do.”
But her mouth twitches when she says it.
* * *
All of Santo’s safe houses are nondescript from the outside. That’s the point, obviously, but the mob boss couldn’t resist adding more of his signature touches inside.
This house, for example, looks to passersby like a standard detached family home in suburbia, complete with white picket fence and a kids’ basketball hoop above the driveway. But when you step inside…
Allegra yawns loudly, not bothering to cover her mouth. “Oh, look. Priceless paintings kept in the ass crack of nowhere. Classic Santo.”
“There is a twisted logic to it, I suppose.” I follow Allegra inside, shrugging off my coat and hanging it on the door hook. “Even if someone broke in here, they’d never suspect those paintings were real. The ultimate camouflage.”
“And the sign of a man with an auction addiction.” Allegra glances over at my chuckle, but she’s not smiling. “Standard safe house procedures?”