Page 84 of Ticket Out

“No. I like him, though. A lot. It’s possible one day I could love him.”

“You young things these days. It’s a world gone mad. You need to like people to marry them. Me,” he slapped his chest, “I married Maria because my father and her father decided it. And look how happy we are.”

Gabriella eyed Maria. She didn’t look particularly happy. “I can see that. You are lucky.”

He sighed as James stepped away from the counter. “Go, then. Go home with your big, strong policeman.”

She gave him a wink. “I will.”

“What was that about?” James asked as they stepped outside. He had found a parking very close by, and he opened the Wolseley’s door for her.

“He was trying to persuade me I needed an Italian man in my life.” She settled in and then waited for him to come round the front of the car and open his own door.

“An Italian?” He started the car, glanced over at her, and then pulled out into the traffic. “What’s he got against Welshmen?”

She gave a quick laugh. “Nothing, except they aren’t Italian. And he says you speak English with a funny accent.”

Now James laughed. “He’s got room to talk.”

“I know.” She looked over at him, felt a familiar annoyance rising up in her despite the lighthearted comments. “Gennaro—others like him, like my uncles—they leave the old country because they can’t thrive there; they come to a new land, with new opportunities, new ways, and what do they do? They want it to go back to the old ways they’re familiar with. The very ways that made it difficult to thrive in the first place.”

“You’ve heard the story about dating Italians before,” James guessed.

“Too many times to count. So I ended up countering it by saying I was half-English, too. So did they also want me to date Englishmen.” She shook her head. “They did not.”

“That lets me out as well. I’m no Englishman.”

“No.” She watched his hands clench on the wheel. “I like you the way you are.”

“Good to know.” He pulled up outside her house, flexed his hands and then turned to her. “Maybe when this is all over, you’d come out with me again? Not to Gennaro’s.”

“Not to Gennaro’s,” she agreed.

He kept a careful distance from her as he walked her in, even up the stairs to her door.

The very care he was taking not to touch made her feel jumpy, made her feel the tension in him.

“Make sure it’s locked tight,” he said, and his gaze, when it caught hers, was electric.

She gave a nod, closed the door behind her, then leaned against it as she listened to him taking the stairs back down.

She felt like she was going to come out of her skin.

She pushed away from the door and thought of what Liz would say about this.

“Ooh-la-la,” she murmured, and smiled as she headed for bed.

chapterthirty-six

Clubs and Vicewere an interesting lot.

James knocked lightly on Detective Inspector John Drummley’s door, having walked through an office full of men dressed in much sharper suits than he saw in New Scotland Yard. The station, situated in the West End, near Soho, was right in the thick of the clubs and night life of the city.

“Archer?” Drummley asked. “Detective Superintendent Halberd said you’d be over.”

James shook his hand and settled in to the chair opposite his desk. “It seems we have some overlapping interests.”

Drummley rubbed a hand over short salt-and-pepper hair. “So Halberd impressed upon me.” He let the jibe hang in the air for a moment, and then relaxed.

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