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This time, when his gaze landed on hers, it didn’t flit away and her stomach seemed to drop to the ancient travertine floor.
“Why were you walking all day?”
“To explore.”
“Explore what?”
“This,” she gestured to the windows beyond him. “I’ve never been to Italy before. I want to see everything I can while I’m here.”
His eyes concealed something. “You’re Australian?”
She nodded.
“From which part?”
“The northern most tip of Queensland. Where it’s very hot and sticky all year round, and incredibly beautiful. Have you ever been?”
He shook his head curtly. “To Australia yes, but not the tropics.”
“Oh, you have to go one day. It’s wonderful. Then again, so’s this.”
He looked around the villa, a contemplative expression on his face.
“How can you bear not to live here?”
His brows knit closer together. “I have a home.”
“Where?”
“Georgia—,” his voice held a warning.
She waited, breath held, for what he was about to say.
“Clearly we are stuck here together, at least until the road clears. But this is my bolt hole. A place I come to be alone. I would prefer not to be interrogated by a stranger.”
She dipped her head to hide the hurt his statement had inflicted on her. It wasn’t as though he was someone she cared about. Why should it bother her that was still so unreasonably rude?
“You started it,” she pointed out, spurred to be defensive. “You asked me where I’m from. Why can’t I do the same?”
He glared at her without answering, his jaw ticking with visible frustration.
Generally, Georgia’s disposition was unfailingly sunny. It always had been, and then, when her parents had died in quick succession, she had faced a choice, a fork in the road. She could allow the grief and desolation to devour her, the helplessness and anger at having to put aside her own dreams to care for her brothers, or she could lean into whatever good she could find from the relics of her hopes.
She missed her parents terribly. Every day. She would have done just about anything to be able to see them again, to look at them, smile at them, hear their voices, their laughter, to know their support. Instead, she focussed on channelling their wisdom into how she cared for the boys. She felt the burden of wanting to impart her parents’ wisdom to the twins, aware that she’d had the benefit of five years more of their parents than they had. And as for her dreams of becoming a surgeon, she figured there’d be time for that. And she’d be a better doctor for having lived a little, gained some real-world experience.
In short, she was a rarely optimistic person, who found she could draw out an answering thread of joy in most people she met.
But Dante was something else.
His manner was as cold as the night was dark. His determination to hold onto that coldness was a force to be reckoned with, and Georgia was too tired to reckon with anything.
And so, with a little more frustration than she would generally allow herself to feel, much less display, she placed her pasta bowl down on the side table.
“I think I’d like to go to sleep.”
A muscle throbbed in his jaw but he stood, reminding her of how large he was.
“I’ll take you to a guest room.”
