Page 23 of Blood Orange Christmas
Night takes its time settling over Villa Rosso. It slips into the corridors, sets a shine on the stone, softens the edges of the vines. Inside, the last plates stack, the last glasses clink, the last guests drift toward cars with polite promises and quiet eyes. I tuck Marco into the big bed in our small room with a warm bottle of milk and a stack of old comics we found in the library—masked heroes, bright sound effects, pages that smell like dust and ink. He asks if the dog can sleep in his castle by the fountain. I tell him the dog has night patrol. He salutes, finishes the milk, and is asleep before I can fold the blanket twice.
I wash my hands at the little sink—saffron and lemon still ghost my skin—and step into the courtyard. The fountain mutters. The vines hold their breath. A breeze carries rosemary from somewhere I haven’t found yet. Far off, a guard’s radio whispers and clicks, then goes quiet. The sky is clear enough to show every stingy star.
I sit on one of the iron chairs and let the chill do its work. My shoulders and hands hum with the day, spoons, heat, the low murmur of a room that decided to like what I made. Underneaththat are the locked cellar door, the rag that wouldn’t come clean, the wrong man with the right questions. And underneath all of it are the four years I carried alone.
Footsteps cross the arch. Dante’s. He moves like Villa Rosso set itself to his stride the day it was built. He carries a heavy tumbler of amaro, the dark catching lamplight, the bitter orange and herbs reaching me a second before he does. Shadows seem to follow him willingly. The courtyard makes room.
He sets the glass on the low stone table between us and takes the other chair. We angle them, almost toward one another, almost toward the fountain. We don’t speak. The quiet is not empty. It’s a space you step into carefully, like a chapel when no one is watching.
He watches the water for a while, and I watch the set of his mouth. Someone else’s problem is still in his jaw. The phone call earlier hasn’t left his face. “I don’t care if it’s his wedding.” That voice still lives in the stone. I picture the man on the other end, and I am glad I have never had to learn Paolo’s calendar.
He nudges the amaro across the table with a fingertip. “It’ll warm you,” he says.
“It’ll argue with the lemon,” I say, but I take a sip anyway. Bitter slides into sweet, then settles low. The courtyard becomes a fraction softer.
He studies me, not like a threat but like a man measuring a cut he can’t unmake. I keep my eyes on the fountain. The water keeps doing what water does. The last two guests’ taillights smear across the gravel and disappear into the ridge.
“I loved you,” I say, because the night is honest and because there’s no one here to ask me to make it pretty. “You didn’t even need to be good. Just honest.”
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t flinch. He sets his hands on his knees, palms open, the way men do when they want to show they’re not holding anything that can hurt you. “I know,” he says. “I wasn’t.”
For a while, we listen to the small life of the courtyard—the slow drip from the fountain’s lip, the dry click of a gecko shifting on warm stone, the fabric sigh of the vines when the breeze changes direction. It’s enough to draw the day out of my shoulders. It’s enough to let memory in.
He reaches for my wrist without looking at me, like he already knows where it is. His thumb finds the inside where the skin is thin and the pulse is honest. He traces the small crescent scar I’ve been carrying since a pan of calamari spat too high and too fast in a kitchen that wasn’t mine. He’d seen it the week we first met. He’d kissed it once like he could press the heat out.
I flinch. Not from pain. The past rises so cleanly, it feels like the first time. The smell of seared squid. His laugh in the fancy kitchen that had more windows than cabinets. The fish I almost burned, and what followed after that. I thought it was a whole other world. He looks up then, and the courtyard shifts a degree closer. “Serena.”
“Don’t,” I start, because there is a part of me that has no margin for mistakes.
“Then tell me to stop,” he says.
I don’t. The amaro warms a path down that joins the lemon trail and finds the place my breath has been holding.
He leans in. His mouth finds mine like it has directions it wrote years ago and kept folded in a pocket. His kiss is not careful. It doesn’t court. It claims and asks at the same time, and I let it. The chair scrapes. The table gives a faint stone complaint. The fountain keeps counting seconds. His hand comes up to my jaw, his thumb under my ear, the way he always found the one pressure that makes noise in my head dissolve. I taste bitter herbs and the heat of him and something I have been pretending I forgot.
I pull back a fraction because I need air and because I want to see him when I say, “This changes nothing.”
“It changes what I do if someone walks into your kitchen again,” he says, too steady, and there is the man the rooms fear.
“I’m not asking for protection,” I say, though I already cashed it when I walked through his gate.
“You got it anyway,” he says.
The dog—Pippo—pads to the courtyard’s edge, looks at us like we’re failing our post, and curls under the bench with a sigh. Somewhere inside, a floorboard complains and falls quiet. The guards keep their respectful distance, shadows against darker shadow.
He kisses me again, and the part of me that lives on breath and heat stops fighting. He tastes like night and an argument he plans to win. My hand finds his shoulder and then the back of his neck, because that’s where I always held on when the world fell away. I feel the shift in him when my fingers slide into the short hair at his nape. The chair is wrong for how close we need to be.
He rises first, one hand at the small of my back, the other catching my wrist like he’s taking a pulse he plans to keep. Thestone table behind me is cool against my thighs when I bump it. He doesn’t ask this time. He lifts me onto the slab in one smooth motion, the breath leaving my body with a small, unguarded sound as his hands slide up my thighs.
11
DANTE
The stone is cold under her thighs when I set her on the table, but her skin burns hot enough that she doesn’t notice. The night is supposed to be quiet—guards on the ridge, Harrison doing his rounds, Camilla with her phones—but none of that matters right now. What matters is Serena’s breath catching when I slide my hands up her thighs and feel the heat waiting for me under denim.
She doesn’t tell me to stop. She doesn’t even look away. She holds my stare like she’s daring me to prove four years of silence haven’t made me forget her body.
I grip the backs of her knees and push them wider, settling myself between them. My mouth drags from her jaw down the line of her throat. She shivers, tilting her head back, and I take advantage—bite just hard enough to make her gasp, then soothe it with my tongue. My hand slides under her shirt, finding bare skin, tracing her ribs, thumb brushing the edge of her bra until her breath stutters.
