Page 6

“About a year and eleven months.”

His jaw works. I watch the muscle jump, and I know, in the exact moment it does, that I am in trouble.

“Why.”

He doesn’t say it like a question. He says it like a statement I’m required to answer.

“Because you looked like you needed them.”

The green in his eyes darkens. He straightens off the counter. Closes the last half-step between us until I have to tilt my head all the way back to keep looking at him, because he is a foot taller than my five-foot-five and standing close enough now that the heat of him is a physical thing between our bodies.

“You don’t know a thing about what I need, tesoro.”

Low. Almost gentle. In a voice that has nothing gentle about it.

The word — whatever it means, and I don’t speak Italian, but the tone is unmistakable — lands in me like a match dropped in dry grass.

“Then you should probably tell me.”

I say it before my brain has any input.

A muscle jumps in his jaw. He looks at my mouth. Looks back at my eyes. Reaches past me, picks up a scone, and strides out of the kitchen without another word.

I stand there. In the flour and sunlight. In the after-image of a green stare I can still feel on my face.

The oven timer beeps. I don’t hear it for a solid three seconds.

Oh no.

Oh no no no.

I set both palms flat on the marble island and try to remember how breathing works. My whole body is buzzing. My cheeks are hot. Between my thighs there is a warm, insistent throb.

Rosalie Palmer, get a grip.

The timer beeps again. I lunge for the oven mitts, grab the tray, and set it on the cooling rack in one fluid movement that is nothing like the state I am in on the inside. Cinnamon-orange fills the kitchen. The tops of the scones are perfect. Gold, just cracking open the way I like them. Steam curling up in soft ribbons.

I stare at them and try to slow my heart.

Two years. I have spent two years hiding in this house. Two years of being invisible to the man who lives in it. Two years of leaving small careful things on his counter and in his hallway and on the windowsills, because it was true, what I just said.

The lack of photos, plants, anything personal in this massive, luxuriously furnished house, made him to me, seem like a man who needed the treats. I told myself I was doing it for him, that it was kindness. I told myself it was the closest thing to gratitude I could offer a stranger who was, without knowing it, keeping me safe. Because, even if Andrei Zidaru discovered my whereabouts, there was little chance he’d cross Vincenzo Greco by invading his property.

I am now going to have to admit, standing in his kitchen with my thighs faintly trembling, that at least a little of it was true.

At least a little of it was because leaving small warm things in Vincenzo Greco’s house felt like reaching, quietly, toward a man I have thought about far too many times in the dark.

He has been in the kitchen for less than ten minutes.

I have never, in my whole entire life, gone from humor to heat in a heartbeat like that.

I press my flour-dusted palm flat against my sternum, over the wild, treacherous, thoroughly unhelpful thing that is doing laps in my chest.

He is your boss. Clearly Italian mafia. You are hiding a very dangerous secret from him. You cannot, absolutely cannot, want him this much.

I clean the marble. Wipe the flour off the island. Move the scones to a plate on the counter beside the coffee machine, in case he wants another one before he goes back out. Rinse the rolling pin. Rinse the mixing bowls. Set them to dry.

Then I stand for a moment in the middle of the kitchen and let myself look at where he was. The place his shoulder leaned against the doorframe. The stretch of marble he stood beside.