There were so many questions I wanted to ask. In those nine years, who’d been alongside him on these great adventures? Was it one woman? Two women? Several? Many? Who had shared his bed and his life all these years, someone special or just someone? I wasn’t sure which I was more interested in.

And just how special was this Simone he’d been all over the other night?

I could have sat there for hours and just asked him questions with my eyeballs, but the pizza place was hopping and there were people circling our table like sharks.

Finished, I got up and tossed our wrappers into the recycle bin at the street corner. I felt his eyes follow me with each step.

My phone buzzed as I was walking back to the table. It was the lawyer emailing to tell me that Daniel’s attorneys (yes plural) had requested another meeting, and it wasn’t looking good.

“Ah shit,” I muttered, stabbing at my phone and shoving it back into my purse.

“Everything okay?” he asked, touching my elbow. I blinked up at him, the worry eating away at the happiness I was feeling from being with him again. “We can go?”

“No, everything is fine.”

He seemed satisfied with my answer until he saw me rereading the email again on the way to the Vespa. The crowded street had gotten even crazier with the line of people outside of the pizza shop tripling in size.

“If you are in need of a friend to talk to, you can talk to me,” he said, throwing one leg over the scooter and offering me his hand to help me on.

“Is that what we are? Friends?” I asked, taking his hand but making no move to get on behind him. Not yet.

He pondered, searching my eyes for something. Answers? Hesitation? Second thoughts? “I think I’d like to be.”

I saw something in his expression change then. Guarded, yes, they’d likely be for a while. But something was breaking down, changing, smoothing out where it concerned me. Tonight was proof of that. I could feel an enormous weight lift right off and float away into the air, hanging somewhere over the pizza place. “Okay.” I nodded. “Friends.”

And with that I climbed onto the Vespa without a second thought, happy to once again slip my hands around his waist and hang on so very tightly. I caught his eye in the side mirror, and he grinned, pleased that I was becoming more comfortable riding with him.

When we pulled up in front of Daisy’s I let him help me off, wanting to keep him close. Now that I’d been wrapped around him once more, my body was reluctant to let him go.

I did let him go, but as he walked me up the stairs and to Daisy’s door, I noticed that the distance between us was shrinking. In all ways. This made me happy. In all ways.

“The pizza, you liked it, Avery?”

God I loved the way he said my name. At the door, I turned back to him, dreamy eyed.

“I loved it. Thank you.” I held out my hand to him.

He looked down, then at me and grinned. “What am I to do with this?”

“Shake it? Hold it? Kiss it?” It might be too soon for inside, but I could good night flirt with the best of them.

Taking my hand, and in the most excruciatingly slow way, he raised it to his lips and pressed them to my knuckles. He kept his eyes on mine the entire time, burning through me with one light kiss, then another, and finally a third. Bringing the other hand up, he repeated it, kissing my knuckles with three sweet pecks. With my hands in his, he brought his lips back to them together and held them there.

I exhaled a shaky breath. When he murmured, “Buona sera, Avery,” his breath puffed out across my heated skin.

He tugged playfully on the end of my scarf, headed back downstairs, and sped off into the night, tossing a ciao back over his shoulder. I giggled a little at the sight of this powerfully sexy man riding a tiny scooter. I hated to admit it, but it was pretty fun tooling around town on the back of one of those things. Would it become a habit?

Maybe. Possibly. We could all use a little vroom-vroom in our day-to-day lives.

* * *

THE FOLLOWING NIGHT I was back out on the town with Daisy, our nightly passeggiata taking us to the Monti neighborhood. And after checking out the scene and making sure we were also la bella figura, or cutting a beautiful figure, we settled in for dinner at a lovely little bistro with outdoor tables set up to take in the scene, as well as view the Madonna dei Monti just as the nighttime lights were beginning to twinkle on.

I drank it all in, along with a perfectly chilled glass of prosecco.

“What’s with the sigh?”

“Hmm?” I asked Daisy, tearing my gaze away from the fountain.

“You just sighed into your sparkly. What’s up with that?”

“It was a happy sigh—don’t worry about it.”

“Girl, I finally stopped worrying about you the day you got off the plane from Boston.” She snorted, digging into her purse for her ringing phone. “And speaking of worrying . . . Ciao, Marcello, what’s going on?”

I smiled into my prosecco, shamelessly listening in on her conversation.

“What? No! No, they can’t do that! Who would use duct tape on a fourteenth-century wall covering? What? Oh man, okay, you tell them that for every inch of duct tape I have to scrape off, we’ll charge them another five hundred euros. That seems fair, right?”

She put her hand over the phone and whispered to me, “Who in the world would think it was okay to hang a Happy Birthday sign on a six-hundred-year-old tapestry?”

Then she returned to her phone. “Okay, let me know if I need to come down there. You know how much I love a good ass kicking. No, I’m in Monti—at that little place with the truffles and cheese? Yeah, she’s here. Mm-hmm, I will. Sure, sure, I’ll ask.”