Page 100 of The Savage

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Giada

‘More sex or the best gelato this side of Florence?’

A low voice rumbles against my ear, followed by warm hands smoothing my sex-tangled hair away from my face. I blink my eyes open, the afternoon light slanting across the bedroom like a lazy blessing – or a warning.

Renzo is leaning over me, smug and satisfied and sinfully beautiful, the type of man who shouldn’t look real this close. Not after what we just did. Not after the things I let myself do. Not after the way I came undone under him… twice.

My body aches in new, wondrous ways. My mind aches more.

I rebelled.

Truly rebelled.

Not just in small, internal ways the way I have for years, with quiet doubts, fleeting questions, the occasional uncharitable thought I repented for immediately. No. This time I acted. This time I said no. Pushed and grabbed and demanded things.

Things no novice on the brink of final vows should even think, let alone do.

But instead of feeling consumed by guilt, what blooms in me is something terrifyingly close to relief.

It feels like shrugging into an old, comfortable coat – one I didn’t know I’d lost. A version of myself that existed long before the fire. Before the memory fracture. Before Santa Maria delle Nevi and its cold stone cells and quiet hymns and the endless, suffocating sameness.

A spark of the girl I used to be lived in that rebellion.

And I’m frightened of how much I liked it.

I swallow. ‘Gelato, please.’

Renzo’s grin is wicked. ‘Good choice.’

It’s not. Not really. Gelato isn’t what I need – clarity is. Perspective. Fresh air. Distance from the warmth of his skin and the heat of his mouth and the rough tenderness that destroyed me so completely I can still feel the echo.

We dress in companionable silence.

He struggles into a dark T-shirt stretched tight over his cast and bruises and a sling he refuses to wear correctly. I slip into a soft pale-blue summer dress he bought me – a compromise between my resistance and his stubborn insistence that I ‘look like myself again’.

Renzo watches me tie my hair.

Or rather, he watches me try to hide it.

‘You know,’ he says, grabbing his keys, ‘I’m beginning to think you put your hair up like a strict schoolmistress just so you can wonder why I walk around half-hard.’

‘Renzo!’

He laughs, full-bodied and unrepentant. ‘You’d look beautiful bald, angel. But that knot is a sin.’

I glare at him, but my lips betray me with a small smile.

‘Let’s go,’ he says, his hand brushing my lower back as he escorts me towards the door. ‘We don’t get many peaceful afternoons, so we’re stealing this one.’

The words settle between us, all soft and strange and heavy. I don’t know what he means by ‘don’t get many’. I don’t want to ask.

Not now. Not when I’m jumbled up inside and still shivering to the sound of his voice rumbling brat.

We step outside into the sun.

And the ache in my chest, the confusing, frightening, exhilarating ache, flares anew.