Page 23 of Casanova LLC

“No, I’m sorry.” I said as smoothly as possible, regathering myself. “I thought I saw an invitation in your eyes?—”

“I’m sure you did. I just… I hadn’t considered kissing.” Her hands went to her flushed cheeks. “It’s so stupid, we talked about everything else, I mean everything else, but not—I didn’t even know you did that.”

“Kissing?”

“Yeah, isn’t that, like…a no-no? In your profession?”

She was adorable. “Pretty Woman fan?”

She gave me a shaky laugh.

“Claire? Do you not want to be kissed?”

She exhaled and her shoulders slumped. “No, I do. More than anything. I miss it so much.” My heart imperceptibly, but specifically, cracked. My hatred for Richard Craven spiked. “But it’s just…it’s so personal. So intimate.” She gestured between us. “Doesn’t it make this feel too real?”

“This is real.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do.”

She blew out a breath. “Kissing is relationship stuff. The one thing people who have been together a lifetime are still able to do. It’s sacred, somehow. ‘You may now kiss the bride.’ It’s how a lifetime together begins and how we hope it ends. You know?” She made the same gesture between us. “It’s not this.”

“This isn’t a relationship?”

“This is just three days.”

“And if your plane crashes on the way home?”

Her eyes bugged. “Okay, dark.”

“What if in three days there’s an earthquake and this palazzo crumbles into the canal? Would the centuries of love and care that you spoke of be rendered meaningless? Just because something ends doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.” I took her hand and looked at her wedding ring. I idled my thumb over it. “Relationships aren’t about longevity.” I looked back up into her eyes. “We can live a lifetime in three days.”

We stood there at the base of the staircase looking at each other. Her eyes were open. Shutters pulled back, curtains slid to the side.

For a fleeting moment, I felt haunted by the feeling I’d experienced the first time I saw her at the rehearsal dinner. The feeling that made me blow up the deal with Richard.

But I didn’t want to think about that right now.

The professional part of me acknowledged that a strong first step had been made with her. But the personal part of me admitted to myself: I had to be careful where I stepped next.

She lifted her chin. “Kiss me.”

I leaned down and hovered my lips above hers. Watched her eyes drift closed. Then, against her lips, I breathed one word: “No.” Her eyes popped open like a doll sat upright. I slung her backpack over my shoulder and carried her suitcase to the first stair and turned to look at her shocked face. Lifted a brow. “You coming?”

Suppressing a smile, she walked past me. I let my eyes rake over her as she did, relishing that pretty blush.

We passed the twelve-foot-high carved wood doors of the public rooms on the piano nobile and at the next landing, I went to the slightly shorter double doors of the guest residence and pushed them open. The hinges spoke with a five-hundred-year-old voice I loved hearing every time I opened them. I turned to Claire, but she had stopped on the top stair and was pointing upward. “What’s up there?”

“My private room is on the third floor. It’s the only part of the house that’s off-limits to you. If you need anything, just text or call me, any hour of the night, and I’ll come to you. The floor above that, though, is the roof deck, which you’re more than welcome to enjoy whenever you want.”

She sighed happily, wistfully, and, once again, I cataloged it. The things that made her sigh. I gestured her into the room and she went right to the bank of windows on the opposite side, looking out over the canal draped in impressionistic twilight. I continued past, dropped her bags off in the bedroom. When I came back, she pointed at the window seat. “I get it. I could easily spend three days right here.”

“Always an option, if it’s what you want.” I meant it. And I didn’t.

She pivoted to me with the grace of a ballerina. “Maybe some other time.”

Okay then.

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