Page 57 of Our Chaotic Love Affair

You’ll get them. Go back to bed. Or puke. Whatever the baby wants.

Love you.

Love you too. I put my phone down and picked up my fork again.

Cash was watching me. “Everything okay?” he asked.

“She was worried. I told her I’m fine.”

“And?”

“And she wants details when I get back.” I took another bite of my breakfast. “Which I will give her.”

I reached for my water glass, took a long sip, and used the act of drinking it to collect the thoughts that had scattered when I’d looked up and found him watching me with those gray eyes across a very small café table in Rome.

Rome. I’m in freaking Rome!

To really add the cherry on top is the fact I’m with Cash. Lurch. The guy I really didn’t like up until a week ago.

And dammit, Cash Bancroft was genuinely, objectively, almost offensively attractive. He was impossible to resist.

I’d obviously always known he was handsome. He was a fucking Bancroft. They didn’t do ugly.

But Rome was doing something to the context. The looser shirt, the slightly less controlled version of him that had emerged over breakfast. The way he’d watched me come out in dress after dress with an expression he’d mostly managed to keep neutral but not entirely.

I had definitely noticed the specific places where his eyes had gone when I stepped onto that platform in the black dress. The slight pause before he’d found his professional composure. I had made out with him and knew his excited face. When he tried to say no to the dress, I almost would have listened to his opinion if his face wasn’t telling me something different.

He liked the dress. He liked me in the dress.

To be looked at like that by a man like him, who was selective and controlled and not given to impulsive reactions, was doing things to my equilibrium that I found mildly annoying. I would have loved to blame it on the jet lag, but he had my insides twisted up in the best way.

I was a badass woman who didn’t need a man’s attention to feel complete. I knew my worth independently of anyone’s gaze. And yet. Here I was in Rome, slightly warm at the back of my neck and in other lower regions because being looked at like that was so good.

Irking, I decided. Not good. It was irking me. I filed that under things to deal with later.

We paid and left the café, wandering through the streets around the hotel without any particular destination. This part of the city was for people who lived here rather than visited. There were small shops without English signage. A flower vendor whose entire sidewalk display was color coordinated in a way that made me stop and take pictures. It was just too pretty to not document.

Cash waited, unhurried.

“Sorry,” I said.

“You keep apologizing for things you don’t need to apologize for.”

“Force of habit.”

“Break the habit.”

I took a picture of him instead. Just like that. Click. Done. No lighting. No staging. Just him in his usual way.

He looked startled, like I had just poked him in the forehead. “What was that for?”

“Documentary purposes.” I checked the shot. It was good. Candid and real and capturing something in his face I hadn’t been able to name yet. “You look like a person in this one.”

“As opposed to what?”

“As opposed to a corporate entity wearing a person.”

He gave me a look like he was deciding whether to be amused or offended. I was learning to read that particular expression, which felt like a small victory.