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“No, I just think you probably usually only meet women from a certain background.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve dated women from many walks of life.”
She made a noise that sounded dangerously close to a snort.
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t know why you’d lie,” she said, after a beat. “But I just can’t imagine you hobnobbing with, oh, I don’t know…a waitress.”
“I’ve dated waitresses.”
She arched a brow.
“Okay, one waitress, and it was a long time ago. Why do I feel like you’re going to hold it against me?”
She didn’t answer that. “What about the woman you were with the night we met?”
He looked confused, as though he’d genuinely forgotten who he’d been with.
Maddie put a hand on her hip, not making it easier for him.
“What do you want to know about her?” he asked after a beat.
“It’s not about her, it’s just—because she’s the most recent woman, before me. What was she like?”
Exasperation tinged his words. “You’re making it sound like I have big, consuming relationships. I don’t. Jessica and I had been on a few dates. The night I met you, I had actually been planning to end it with her anyway.”
“Why?”
“Why are you so full of questions this evening?”
She frowned. It was a fair thing to wonder. “I don’t know,” she said after a pause. “I guess…the longer we know each other, the more I wonder…but also, I guess it’s just being here.” She gestured to his home. “And at the villa. Meeting your family. Imagining you as part of the family. In America, you were just…the guy who was trying to ruin my life,” she said, trying to infuse the words with a hint of humor, when inside, she was still in knots over the real estate portion of their relationship. “And then the guy I was sleeping with. Both of which made it easy to keep you as an almost two-dimensional character, if I’m honest. But here…”
“Here?” he prompted.
“You’re real.” Damn it, her voice sounded husky. Emotional. Rich, and raw, laced with feelings that had no business in this conversation.
“I am real.” He moved closer, pressing his hand to her hers, looking into her eyes.
She tried to focus. She tried to ignore the tide that was suddenly rushing towards her, threatening to swallow her into the depths of an ocean from which she might never escape.
“But this isn’t,” she said, slowly, calmly, even when her insides were tightening into a knot that made it hard to breathe. “We’re not.”
His features showed confusion, not rejection.
“Rocco, after the wedding, when we’re back in America, we have to go our separate ways.”
He didn’t respond, and she was glad. She didn’t want him to argue with her, but at the same time, she desperately wanted that. It was peeling off the sticky tape she’d plastered over her heart, opening wounds she wanted to keep firmly sealed.
“We agreed to that.”
“I know.”
“But you think I might have changed my mind.”
She bit into her lip.
“Are you not having fun, anymore, Maddison?”
