“Oh!” She laughed. “When did he end things with me?” she asked, raising her chin a bit.

“You want to know the last time he fucked me, no?”

I nodded.

“Was it after he fucked you? Does that bother you? Wondering if he left you, not satisfied, and had to seek me out?” Her gaze was calculating, assessing. She looked at me long enough that I reflexively began to wonder if I had something on my shirt. Finally, she smiled. My heart sank. “You ask him.”

I reeled back, the pavement seeming to move beneath my feet. The edges of the world went haywire and out of focus, as though the earth had tilted on its axis and I could fall off a great cliff, with nothing to hold on to.

She leaned close, murmuring, “You be sure to tell him you ran into me, no?”

Oh, I’d be sure.

* * *

WHEN I’D LEFT TO GO shopping, Marcello was at home engrossed in his work. Needing quiet, he opted to skip the office craziness to do some research for a new bid he’d been putting hours and hours of work into. The job was massive in scale and would be an enormous undertaking should his team’s proposal win.

When?

Oh, God.

It felt like my chest was being crushed, and I bent at the waist, trying to breathe deeply as another searing image of them together knocked the breath from my lungs.

When I finally straightened, my feet flew across the cobblestones toward his home, my disbelief becoming a chant that matched my footsteps. Click click, click click, how long, how long?

I needed to talk to him, to find out what really happened, and if Simone was lying. Was she a disgruntled woman who would say anything to hurt someone who left her? Or a hurt woman whose heart had been broken by the man who had given me his?

Finally reaching his apartment, I flew up the stairs, my feet pounding out my confusion and insistence that it wasn’t true, that it couldn’t be true.

I tried working out the timeline to see what fit. Maybe things fit if I were to believe her claims. That awful crawly feeling was back, making me doubt, making me wonder.

At his door I considered knocking, but he’d told me never to knock, just to enter. Because only strangers knock, he’d told me, then slipped a hand under my shirt to caress my belly while kissing me stupid.

Had Simone been granted the same privilege?

I opened the door, finding Marcello seated at his drafting desk, a pencil behind his ear and an enormous smile on his face when he saw me. Crossing to me with heavily lidded eyes and sinful lips he was already licking in anticipation of my kiss, he was so incredibly beautiful that only my clenched fists reminded me of what had happened earlier today.

“Tesoro, you’re back so late?” he murmured. “I was beginning to wonder what was keeping you.” He dipped his head to place a kiss along my jawline, his weekend stubble brushing my skin as I pulled away.

I looked up into those warm brown eyes. “Simone.”

His hands stilled on me, his entire body stiffened, his features carved in stone. He cleared his throat.

“Simone? What about her?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

His question lit something deep within me.

“She told me.”

“Told you what?” When his eyes changed, I knew everything she’d implied was true.

My breath hitched. “That you were with her,” I said, my voice sounding strange in my ears. High pitched, a little crazy.

“Yes, you knew that. You saw me with her at the dinner. She was someone I dated for a time. So?”

“So? She stopped me on the street today and told me how long you were together. For a time.”

“Yes, for a time, so?”

I went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Were you fucking us both?”

“It was never serious.” He kept talking, missing what I said. Purposefully missing what I said?

I felt my heart bottom out. “She told me you were fucking us both at the same time, Marcello. Explain to me how that couldn’t possibly be true, that she can’t possibly be right about this.”

“I dated Simone. Casually. Occasionally. I don’t know what she told you, if she was more serious about me than I was about her, but it was not like that for me.”

“It’s funny that you never mentioned her to me after we started . . . after we started.”

“What would I tell you? I didn’t know if you were staying, or for how long. Why would I say anything when we”—he waved between us—“were not together.”

“Were you with us both, Marcello?”

“What are you asking me?”

I laughed, hoarse and hollow. “It’s a simple question: Did you fuck her after you fucked me?”

He reared back as if I struck him. “Now wait a minute, wait just a minute,” he protested, digging his hands into my skin.

I pushed angrily at his hands, tugging free of his grasp.

He let me go, frustrated. “You and I, we weren’t even together,” he insisted. “And what was going on with Simone and me, it was not serious.”

“Well, she sure thought it was!” I pushed him, hard enough that he stumbled back. If I was shocked, he was stunned. “How long after we slept together did you go to her?” My voice was barely audible over my shuddery breathing. To think that he’d been with someone else while we’d started sleeping together . . . I felt sick.

“Tesoro,” he began, laying his hand on my shoulder.

I shook him off. “Don’t call me that! Did you call her that, too?”

I moved as far away from him as I could in the small room.