Page 46 of My Dark Fairy Tale
“And would you?”
His sigh sounded almost resigned as it feathered over my mouth. “Troverei un modo.”
I would find a way.
Fattoria Casa Luna was a stunning sprawl of golden stone buildings arranged around a pretty garden and patio that were elevated over a vista of hills lined with wine grapes. I squinted against the sunlight, raising a hand to cover my eyes as I tried to see where the vines ended three hills and valleys deep from where I stood.
“Incredible,” I breathed, tipping my head back and dropping my hand to soak up the sunlight on my face.
Raffa had shown me the bathroom at the entrance to the main building and then gone off to find Imelda with a promise to meet me on the patio. Washing my hands and staring at myself in the antique mirror without his presence to muffle my senses had been its own kind of enlightenment.
My cheeks were flushed, my hair tousled from his tight grip, and the skin around my swollen mouth was pinked from the roughness of his cheeks as he’d kissed me.
I looked slightly debauched and ridiculously proud of it.
My smile was close lipped and smug, a coy expression I’d seen before on Gemma’s face when she’d returned home from a date with her boyfriend, but never on my own.
God, she would have loved this for me.
Thinking about how she would have crowed in delight and teased me about the mysterious Italian stranger who had swept me off my feet stole my breath for a moment. I rested my hands against the counter and blinked the tears from my eyes.
Who would have known kissing could be so emotional?
But then, I could acknowledge it wasn’t just the kiss.
It was the entire adventure laid before me, not the one I’d so meticulously planned from the comfort of my home in Ann Arbor, but a new future entirely. One elevated by the presence of Raffaele Romano.
He would have appealed to any woman with a pulse, I was sure, with his beauty and wealth, but there was something intangible about him that had appealed to me almost from the start.
A mirror image of the tension I felt inside myself, maybe, between who we were and who we wanted to be.
I didn’t know why Raffa struggled with it or how it manifested itself, but the divide was subtly clear.
He was kind with me, thoughtful and tender, which seemed uncharacteristic given his gruff, exacting manner. Martina had saidhow he related to me was unusual, and Raffa himself had said I was the exception to every one of his rules.
Maybe that should have been a red flag, but I couldn’t deny it made me feel special. Secure, even. If he had never experienced the kind of chemistry we had together, I could rely on it to feel just as real to him as it did to me.
Still, the idea of embarking on a true holiday romance was so surreal, I giggled to myself in the bathroom. Guinevere Stone, American virgin, licking the taste of herself out of someone else’s mouth.
No one back home would believe it.
Then again, Gemma and my parents had always been my best friends, the ones who knew me best, and it wasn’t like I could have ever told them the secret, kinky fantasies I touched myself to at night. Talk about awkward.
And now I had the perfect opportunity to explore them without embarrassment. Because I didn’t know Raffa that well, not really, but I knew in my bones I could trust him to teach me about pleasure without any judgment or shame.
It wasn’t easy to realize that my parents and I had been so afraid of my death throughout most of my life that I’d let fear wrap me in chains and keep me anchored to the safe banks of banal mundanity.
Didn’t survivors deserve more than just what they could eke out moment to moment? Didn’t they deserve to thrive and rejoice in every single second? Suck the marrow from the bone, juices dripping down the chin, gluttony not a sin but a privilege after the barren, hungry times of survival?
I would always have to mind my health. It was as much a fact of life as taking my next breath, but it did not mean I couldn’t take chances and indulge when opportunities were worthy.
I’d first started to feel this when Gemma died. Healthy, robust Gemma who was beautiful and young and at the beginning of her whole life. How could she be gone between one minute and the nextwhen there was no indication she had ever been ill? The randomness of it had not just shaken my reality, it had cracked it, and from that crack had grown an abyss I was finally able to crawl out of.
And here I was free to live my life for myself as I hadn’t been able to do the last twenty-three years.
What was I going to do?
Before I could think about it too long, I ducked into a stall and pulled off my damp silk thong, one of many that the Marias had picked out for me at the boutique and that I never would have bought for myself. I rolled the material into a ball and put it in my purse, feeling the heat in my cheeks as I thought about slipping it into Raffa’s pocket at some point, the look on his face when he realized I was naked beneath the shift.
