“Because I’m brilliant?” I teased, feeling light as air, so light I could float away if Dante wasn’t holding me in his big arms.
“Si, splendido,” he agreed solemnly.
I kissed him.
My hands held him still while I bent to take his mouth, the first taste of him making my head reel even more than the victory. He’d been eating freshly made taralli, salt and yeast still on his tongue. I tangled it with my own, moaning as his hands flexed on my ass.
“Wow.”
The voice was familiar, but I was too mired in everything Dante to recognize it at first.
I angled my head steeply so I could kiss him more deeply.
“I’ve never in my entire life seen my sister make out with anyone,” that same voice, laughing now, mock-whispered close by.
That voice.
Speaking English with that lilt of Italian she’d never rid herself of, a hiccough of British muddling the mix. In a few years, she might even sound exactly like Dante.
I pulled away with a gasp, immediately turning toward the voice.
And there she stood.
My Cosima.
The hot Italian sun burnished her olive toned skin, still caramel even though she was suffering through a cold British winter, and her long, thick hair hung in inky waves to her waist. She was in one of those beautiful dresses she’d always loved, a floral-patterned thing that hugged her curvy form and let her exposed skin do the talking.
She looked beautiful.
But more, she looked incandescently happy.
The reason for that stood slightly in front and to one side of her, as if we were threats he had to shield from his beloved wife. Alexander Davenport was the scariest man I’d ever known despite his gorgeousness. He had the coiled stillness of a predator always ready to pounce, an alertness to his gaze that never wavered even when he was supposedly relaxed on the couch with Cosima. It was as if he was ready for an attack at any moment and I had no doubt any enemy of his would suffer and die a quick, but horrifically brutal death.
Dante had the same capacity for savagery, but his was buried beneath layers of charm.
Alexander let it be seen in his silver eyes, sharp as weapons. Even though he had a slightly bemused look on his face as he stared at us, he still looked every inch the Duke of Greythorn in his custom St. Aubyn suit.
I could see it now, though, the resemblance that was hard to find between the brothers at first. Dante and Alexander were night and day, light and dark, utterly contrasted in their coloring and then reserved again in their personalities. But they were both massive men, tall and broad shouldered, though Dante was packed with more muscle. Their features were carved out of marble, strong bones under fine golden skin, and the shape of their eyes when they smiled was similar, I thought, though I couldn’t remember Alexander smiling often.
Loving Dante was so new and my life so utterly different than anything it had ever been before that quite honestly, I hadn’t thought about what my siblings might think about our relationship.
The reality doused me with cold water. I could feel my bones seize up as my thoughts went arctic, how I sat differently in Dante’s hold, like he was keeping me captive instead of holding me up. Sensing the change, Dante left me down slowly, inch by inch against his body until I was on my feet but flush against him. He kept me there with a hand anchored over my low back, his hand reaching all the way around my waists, his fingers curled over the opposite hip.
“This is Napoli, trespassing could get you killed,” Dante said in an oddly mechanical voice, all tone and no subtext. “We have a sharp shooter here that could take your earlobes clean off.”
Cosima’s eyes danced as she moved closer, rounding Alexander without admonishing him for being stupidly protective. “I am rather attached to my earlobes. Still, I have it on good authority, I’m welcome at Villa Rosa.”
Dante arched an eyebrow and regarded her coolly. It took me a moment to realize he was channeling his brother, who was affecting the exact same posture behind Cosima. I laughed a little then coughed to cover it up.
“What makes you think that?” Dante asked.
“Well, for one, the house happens to be named after my mother,” she said with a light laugh, her eyes fixed on Dante so she didn’t catch my frown. “And for another, my best friend and sister happen to be here. Obviously…here together.”
“I’m not asking you for permission if that’s what you’re insinuating,” he countered drily.
I realized I was holding my breath, that the reason for my tension was the possibility of Cosima’s disapproval and censure. I’d had both before, when I hadn’t handled Daniel and Giselle’s affair as gracefully as I should have, and the memory of her criticism still plagued me.
“I suppose I didn’t ask you for permission to date Xan,” she agreed easily. “But a phone call announcing the relationship might have been nice. Especially because I had to read in the newspaper that you’d fled the country, D.”
We both winced a little. Dante looked down at me then, smiling this little smile that was only for me, more of a secret tucked between his curled lips than an actual expression.
“We’ve been busy,” he admitted, his voice soft, intimate as he looked down at me and pushed a lock of errant red hair behind my ear.
I got caught in those obsidian eyes, drowning in the words he’d written in black ink on black paper so only I could read them as close to him as I was.
He wasn’t going to give Cosima a chance to judge us. He was telling her in his own way that we were together. That he loved her, but there was a boundary between them now there hadn’t been before, a line drawn in the sand with my name on it.
It was possessive and bullying and bold; all things Dante could be so it didn’t surprise me because it wasn’t out of character.
But it did surprise me, how much that meant to me.
That he didn’t care what his best friend thought because he loved me too much to change his mind now.
That she was somehow trespassing on an intimate moment between us instead of me being the third wheel in a relationship that had begun years ago and been through so much.
That he implied we were busy, meaning whatever he was doing, I was doing it with him. We were a team and he was broadcasting that so loudly to Alexander and Cosima it seemed blared from a loudspeaker.
“Io sono con te,” he said so softly, lips barely moving, that for a second, I wondered if I imagined it.
But no.
I am with you, he’d said.
A reminder. An affirmation that even with his brother and best friend, he still wanted me to come first.
Tears burned the backs of my eyes, hot as the blowtorch Dante had used on Umberto Arno. I didn’t let them fall, but I couldn’t evaporate them either. So I stared at Dante with glazed eyes and swallowed down a sob.
“Ion sono con te,” I repeated quietly.
The fingers on my hip gave a squeeze.
When I looked back at Cosima, she seemed a little thunderstruck by our connection, but she wasn’t angry. When she caught my gaze, those yellow eyes melted like butter in a hot skillet.
“Lena, my love,” she said, extending her hand. “I’ve missed you so much.”
Those tears I’d been fighting so valiantly to keep at bay surged over my lower lids and fell down my cheeks in two scalding trails.