Page 67 of My Dark Fairy Tale
It was one thing to indulge in this affair. To enjoy Guinevere while I had her. And quite another to dream of any future.
She was as bright and hopeful as a shooting star across my dark galaxy, and I had to remember that. Fleeting, but lovely to behold.
“The dress fit?” I asked Martina, even though I had asked her twice already.
That was the other reason I was pacing.
I could not wait to see Guinevere in that dress.
It was one she had seen in the window of a boutique we’d passed on our run to Piazzale Michelangelo the other night. Midstride, she had halted and turned to the window as if drawn by gravity. I had stopped immediately and then followed behind her silently as she crossed to the display and raised her fingers the way she had in the car our first day out in Florence. There was reverence in her face as she stared at the gown, and when she finally realized I was beside her, she startled as if awaking from a dream.
“Sorry,” she’d murmured, that gorgeous flush spilling from her cheeks to her chest. “I’ve never seen something like this before.”
“A dress?” I asked with an arched brow to tease her gently.
A little shoulder shrug any Italian would be proud of. “It looks like art.”
I sent a soldier out to buy it the next day.
“It fits,” a voice said, slicing my thoughts to ribbons. “And it’s gorgeous.”
I followed the sound up the grand staircase leading from the second floor to the marble-floored foyer.
And there she was.
Italian writers had coined the termsbigottimento, which referred to a phenomenon that had no direct English equivalent but meant the profound and arresting feeling of being confronted with the object of your desire. It was almost sickening in its extreme. I lost my breath to it, heart knocking too hard at my breastbone as if it was fighting to escape my chest and go to her.
Guinevere.
Gliding down the stairs toward me in a diaphanous dress of sheer layers hand painted with vague impressions of flowers in light pastels. It made her look like a nymph shrouded in fog, picking up petals as she walked through dew in some blooming spring pasture. All that thick dark hair had been loosely curled, some caught up at the back of her skull where I liked to cup my hand. I imagined the end of the night when I could take out the clip and watch the heavy fall of mink around her bare shoulders.
Proserpina, indeed.
Without my consent, my hand had found its way to my chest, where I was pressing it as if I could force my heart back inside the cage of my ribs.
Too fanciful for a capo. Too dangerous for a man in my position, and yet there I stood.
Struck byil colpo di fulmine.
A lightning bolt of passion so acute it felt like it could be love.
“You haven’t said a word,” Guinevere noted as she took the last step and floated toward me, made taller with her heels but still so much shorter than me I had to bend my head to maintain eye contact. “Don’t tell me you hate it?”
“I hate myself for agreeing to take you as my date,” I admitted caustically. “Because I will be the one having to fight off a room of admirers.”
Her laugh was delighted, the antidote to the angst burning like acid in my gut.
“We must stand as a united front, then, because you look absolutely ...” She drifted off as her gaze dipped to my polished dress shoes and rose up the length of my black Dolce & Gabbana suit. Her fingers ran lightly up the velvet lapels to the open throat of my black dress shirt. I swallowed against the press of her touch and watched the way her mouth fell open on a little sigh. “Stunning.”
I grasped her fingers and brought them to my mouth. “Thank you, but it does not hurt my pride to know that I pale in comparison to you. You are lucky—otherwise I would be angry we are late.”
“He has a thing about time,” Martina inserted helpfully from her seat on the antique velvet sofa. “You get used to it.”
I leveled her with a cool look that ordered her to be quiet.
She mocked zipping her lips and then throwing away the key like the insolentsoldatoshe was.
“I have a present for you,” I told Guinevere, reaching into my pocket for the gift I’d found in a small shop in Santa Croce the other day on my walk home from meeting with my man at the local bank.
