Page 4 of In Italy for Love

The haunting harmonies of the song reached a crescendo and the dog stopped moving to mournfully join in, his snout in the air as he whined and barked.

It seemed Arco was singing.

‘Ar-ar-arooo.’

Jules snorted in disbelief as she crouched next to him, her hand on his harness. He wasn’t in tune, but she’d never heard sounds like those from him before – almost musical. Now he’d come sufficiently close to the noise, he calmed down, his nasal howling just as sombre as the melody the accordionist played.

She tried not to laugh but didn’t quite succeed. Titters behind her revealed she wasn’t the only one amused by Arco’s intrusion. Possibly, he was even improving the sound of the whining instrument? At least there was one adoring fan for this wizened old busker.

Glancing up to meet the gaze of the accordion player, she opened her mouth to apologise and…

She hadn’t been expecting that. It wasn’t a wizened old man. The busker was young – around her age – and he was… Her brain supplied a few unhelpful adjectives, before she pulled herself together and decided to end that sentence with ‘very attractive’.

He was smiling at her – well, he was smiling at Arco – a wide, amused grin that was… there went those unhelpful adjectives again.

Ouch, first the view made her cry and now the busker was hot? He had a short moustache and a little goatee. Those were not supposed to be sexy. And since when did she describe men as‘sexy’? That department had never been a particular priority for her and it hadn’t been a chore to go without over the past year of platonic cohabitation with Luca.

But suddenly, she was losing her mind over a pair of blue eyes – and a pair of shoulders. They were very nice too – broad and sturdy.

Playing the last few notes with a melancholy vibration of the bellows, he finished to muted applause sounding behind Jules, earning the small group of gathered strangers that smile that she’d stupidly thought was for her a moment ago.

Clipping the instrument closed and shrugging it off those wide shoulders, he set it carefully on the ground and approached, tilting his head, to study Arco. Dropping into a squat, he roughed up the dog with a strong hand.

‘Ciao, piccolo. Come sei bello,’ he crooned in a deep, smooth voice that scrambled Jules’s thoughts again. He met her gaze and asked something, but she had little hope of understanding English at that point, let alone Italian. ‘Are you… English?’

She finally managed to react to his statement, if only with a choppy gesture that wasn’t quite a shake of her head. ‘Not really.’

‘Eh?’

She scrambled to her feet. ‘I’m Australian,’ she explained. ‘And I’m so sorry for my dog. He’s never done anything like that before.’

His eyes crinkled and a pair of deep, narrow dimples stretched. She also noted hollows under his eyes – deep enough to create shadows, but even that piqued her interest.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘I knew a dog who used to play the piano when her owner was out.’ He spoke English with barely an accent – another surprise.

‘Wow, it’s a town of virtuoso canines?’

‘Where homo sapiens just plays the simple accordion.’

‘Just imagine everything dogs could do if they had fingers,’ she quipped, before he could turn away.

‘Don’t you know aboutWolf-gang Amadeus Mozart?’ His straight face was decidedly wobbly.

‘No, but I have heard of Johann SebastianBark.’

He grinned up at her. Biting her lip as her mind insisted he was flirting with her, her skin blossoming accordingly, she scrambled to arrange her thoughts into something that made sense.

She hadn’t thought about being attracted to anyone in a year and suddenlythis, whatever it was.

A small flirtation with a handsome busker was all it was, she reminded herself.

He stood and she noticed that, on top of the eyes and the smile and the shoulders, he was also tall enough that her eyeline was level with his top lip. Jules was used to looking men in the eye – and the accompanying wariness they seemed to feel in the company of a very tall woman. But the busker had his own oversized proportions and a straightforwardness in his eyes that made her suspect he wouldn’t take particular note of her height anyway.

‘Do you think your dog will let me keep playing or am I finished for today?’

She glanced guiltily to where the accordion sat. The case was closed and there wasn’t even a battered hat to receive donations.

‘I think Arco loves the music, but I don’t know about the rest of your audience.’

---