"I"m good at reading people. Don"t you believe me yet?" he said, the ice over his eyes cracking at the same time he smiled. It was a one-two punch, first the lecture delivered so clearly, then the smile to smooth everything over.
He definitely got his way in the boardroom. And everywhere else, I bet. I hoped his boss knew what they had in Liam. Whatever meeting he was in Rome for was in the bag, as far as I was concerned.
"I believe that you have a really high opinion of yourself," I said, unable to keep my own lips from curving up into a matching smile. I could lose myself in those eyes of his. Escape my sliding grades, escape the memories from St. Louis. All of it.
"A well-justified opinion of myself."
I slipped my shoe off and then ran my toes up his calf, loving the warmth coming off him, the smoothness of his khakis against me. Liam"s smile twitched. Reaching down, he ran his fingers up my calf, stopping right behind the knee.
He squeezed that spot. It was like he"d lit a pilot light inside of me. A furnace roared to life low in my stomach. It wouldn"t have surprised me if my panties burnt to ash with the heat of it.
"A very well deserved opinion," I said while teasing electric fingers ran up and down my back. If only we hadn"t been in such a public place.
I wondered if I could be brave enough to ask him to take me back to that lovely hotel room with its equally lovely, large bed.
His hand slipped away, leaving the back of my knee cool and aching for his touch again. Liam crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, regarding me with that philosopher"s gaze again.
"Tell me something about you I don"t know. Something good."
"Like what?" I said. I"d be his open book if only to feel his eyes discover me.
"Anything. Ten seconds. Something I don"t know." He then jerked his watch out from beneath his cuff, actually counting off the seconds.
I opened my mouth, smiling hard enough that my cheeks hurt. But nothing came out. It was crazy. We hardly knew anything about each other. There was an entire ocean of life behind me I could tap, but I didn"t know when or where.
"Five..."
"Liam!" I said, laughing around his name. It was a nice name. Lyrical.
"Four..."
"I don"t know!"
"Three..." He couldn"t keep his own smile off his face, amused at the way he"d put me on the spot.
Desperate, I picked something. "Before I came to Rome I"d never been on a plane before."
He frowned. "Something interesting."
"Once, in third grade, I made a boy I had a crush on eat a worm."
The frown disappeared, replaced by that winning smile. "Remind me never to play in the dirt with you."
"So you think I have a crush on you?" I said, leaning across the table.
He smiled again, but didn"t answer. Probably because the answer was obvious. I definitely had a crush on him. Third-grade me would have tried to force-feed him a whole handfuls of wriggly worms.
Of course, now that that memory had surfaced, I recalled that the boy in question ran away from me every time I approached him on the playground after that.
"Your turn," I said.
"You wouldn"t believe me if I told you," he replied.
He started saying something else, but his cell began beeping furiously in his pocket. He pulled it out, frowning at the screen. He sighed, and I knew instantly that he had to go.
I wanted to beg him to stay, to hang out with me some more, to tell me about himself. But instead I let him go.
"I have to attend to some matters," he said, his voice and eyes switching back to that confident businessman mode I"d gotten a glimpse of earlier. "But first you"re going to tell me where you"re staying."
I scribbled the address of my little flat onto a napkin and pushed it across the table to him. He picked it up, folded it neatly, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his jacket. He also took out a few bills and tucked them under the antipasto plate.
When he stood, I did, too.
"I want to see you again," he said.
"I want that, too."
Then he pulled me close, his hands clasped at the small of my back. His lips found mine. He tasted of olive oil and desire. It was the sweetest kiss I"d ever had, and I didn"t want it to end.
The way his hands squeezed against me, I didn"t think he wanted it to end, either. But it had to.
"Until next time," he said, his cheeks flushed and his dark pupils dilated. He was breathless.
I hated to see him go, but I loved to watch him leave.
Chapter 5.
I missed Liam. I missed the feel of his skin against my fingertips. I missed the way my heart fluttered in my chest when he smiled.
I missed him so badly that I"d started writing a sentence about the Renaissance painted Giulio Romano about fifteen minutes earlier and gotten no farther than typing his name out. It was supposed to be a paper exploring Romano"s tutelage under Raphael. Similarities and differences between the styles of student and teacher.
Yet, I couldn"t bring myself to type another word. I"d rather write something about the perfect symmetry of Liam"s face. I"d focus on his eyes first, I thought. That light, baby blue shade that deepened the more you looked into them. As though you could fall into their fathomless depths.
It was kind of funny, actually. I"d been putting this paper off again and again, giving myself a new excuse every time I looked at the a.s.signment sheet and the ever-approaching due date.
I"ll get to it tomorrow. There"s still a month left. There"s still two weeks left. There"s still a whole business week left. You know that sort of thing.
And the closer that deadline crept, the heavier the rock in the pit of my stomach became. And since the only way to relieve the pressure of that weight was to give into temptation to put writing the paper off again, I did it more and more easily each time.
Since I"d wanted to leave Rome and the program anyway, that made it even easier. Except now I didn"t want to leave.
Now, I wanted to stay. Ever since I"d met Liam, I wanted to stay. And staying meant writing that d.a.m.ned paper.
Somehow, deciding I needed to write it resulted in my sitting to write it and instead commencing to daydream.
That had to stop.
Leaning my elbows against my desk, I cupped my chin with my hands and put myself through a little artist"s meditation I"d learned back in a soph.o.m.ore art cla.s.s in high school.
Art, paintings, sculptures, frescoes, and the like, my teacher, Mr. Drayton had told us, weren"t just visual. An artist needed to be in touch with all their senses if they truly wished to tap into their creative spirit.
This, of course, was back in my more idealistic days when I thought I could be an artist myself, rather than a studier of artists. But I"d always found the exercise helpful.
So I closed my eyes. Immediately, I saw Liam projected onto my mind"s eye. I concentrated harder.
Follow your senses, all of them, not just sight, I heard Mr. Drayton"s voice as I dredged it from my memory, let them pull you into the present. Life happens in the present. There is no past. No future. Only here and now. Art happens in the here and now. Be there.
So I opened my other senses to the world. The rich smell of the small bakery I lived above wafted through the air, the smell of the dough so pungent now that I paid attention to it that I could almost taste it.
There was something so very comforting in the smell of baking bread.
That made me smile. An old lady called Mrs. Rosselini owned and operated it. It had been handed down father to son for the last 150 years. But Mrs. Rosselini"s father had only the one daughter, and she did her best to keep the family business going.
She also offered me a fresh roll every morning, banging on the door and greeting me with a smile each time.
I always tried to be polite, thanking her as she clicked her tongue at me, fussing and telling me I was too thin.
I always ate the roll, but now that I thought about it, I never really tasted it. That, I resolved to change.
What next? Touch. I let my hands fall to my keyboard, slid them down the smooth plastic keys, feeling the little humps over the F and J. Soon they touched the desk. It was an old wooden thing that creaked alarmingly if you dared lean against it. The varnish was rough and worn. But the wood itself was warm, alive.
One of the drawers was missing the little bra.s.s k.n.o.b so that I couldn"t pull it out. And someone had long ago shoved an old Italian coin beneath one of the feet to keep the whole thing from rattling.
It took no effort at all to remember the warmth of Liam"s bare skin against mine. The heat of it.
A shiver running up my back made me suck a sharp breath in through my teeth.
Next, I concentrated on what I could hear. There were the normal city noises, of course. The rush of traffic outside. Shrieking car horns. The buzz of engines. Children laughed somewhere.
I thought of Liam"s smooth voice. It was the type of voice that resonated in your chest when you heard it. I remembered the first time I"d heard him say my name in that voice. I wished I could hear that voice right at that moment.
Finally, I opened my eyes and let them play across my small flat. Back home, folks would probably call it a studio apartment (or a bachelor pad, if I"d been a man).
A Euro-style kitchen with the washing machine to the right of the sink, a tiny stove and an equally small fridge.
My desk sat beside my bed, which was a creaky affair. With no air conditioning to speak of, I always kept the single window open.
I"d always thought of it as cramped and spare. But now it seemed homely and warm and the thought of leaving it all behind gave me pause.
Mr. Drayton"s exercise worked, it seemed. When I looked back at my laptop, I started tapping away feeling focused and confident.
I"d gotten two-thirds of a page done when the knock came from the door. The sudden, sharp noise jolted me.
"Coming!" I said in Italian, expecting to see Mrs. Rosselini on the other side.
Instead, when I pulled the door open I found Liam waiting on the other side. The door to my little flat was at the top of a set of steep and narrow stairs that always left me uneasy. Yet Liam had his hands in the pockets of his khakis while he leaned easily against the wall like there wasn"t a neck-breaking fall just a few inches beyond the heels of his shoes.
My throat tightened and my heart lurched, leaving me standing dumbfounded there in front of him for I didn"t know how long. Too long, anyway.
"Hey," he said.
"...Hi," I replied, my shocked brain finally remembering that I"d given him my address. However, I also remembered scrawling my cell number there.
"Not expecting to see me?"
The shock of his appearance on my doorstep wearing off, I rallied, "Well, I was sort of expecting a call first. A text, even."
He smiled, glancing around me into my small, one-room flat. He could have fit it into the kitchen of his suite back at the hotel with room to spare, and I felt myself get defensive about it, getting ready to rebuke anything he cared to say.
Except I didn"t see disdain in his eyes, or amus.e.m.e.nt.
"Aren"t you going to invite me in?"
"You need an invitation? Are you a vampire?"
Amus.e.m.e.nt did sparkle in his eyes, then. "I hope not. I enjoy sunshine and garlic far too much."
He wore a polo shirt a few shades lighter than his eyes, the b.u.t.tons undone to give a tantalizing tease of the body the rest of the shirt hid. I leaned against the doorframe coyly, my hands pressed against the small of my back. Right then, those hands started clenching with the desire to touch him again.
"So why did you come?"
"Maybe I just wanted to see you."
"Just to see?" I said, all thoughts of Italian Renaissance artists and school papers forgotten.
"Should I leave and give you a call? Set this straight?"
He turned and grabbed the handrail a though about to start back down the stairs.
"No!" I said, reaching out and grabbing his hand, sudden panic setting in. I knew somewhere that he was just teasing, but part of me couldn"t bear the thought of such a fleeting visit with him. Not after I"d just spent all morning thinking of nothing but him.
Liam turned back to me, pulling me close, our hips touching. "Good, because I don"t think I could stand the wait."
Then he kissed me. Lightly, so that I could feel the soft smoothness of his lips and the warmth of his mouth. He tasted sweet.
A tingle ran down my chest and stomach, bursting into incredible heat when it reached its final destination.
Just when it began getting really good, just as my knees began turning to jelly, he pulled back from me.
"Hnh?" I said, unable to put a real word to my confusion. Part of me hated the effect he had on me. That complete disarming of all my defenses.