Page 47 of Casanova LLC

It was inviting.

I wanted to climb up onto the table.

But instead, my professional self continued the massage. I drew away, lifted her leg, and wrapped the sheet around her hip. Then I took her free leg and pressed her foot against my shoulder. Pushed my weight forward to stretch her hamstring. Her eyes remained closed as I skated my hands along her calf, up her thigh. At her hip, I began to—“I enjoyed watching you talk to your nephew today.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m wedged between your legs, and you’re thinking about the dead bee box?”

She giggled. “I told you, things just come into my head, I can’t help it.”

“Okay, well, I’m not going to take it personally.”

“Don’t! Please, just continue.”

“With pleasure.” I lowered her leg, repositioned the sheet, and moved up the right side of her body, keeping contact with my hand the whole way. She was free to be thinking about me and Lucca, but I was fully engaged elsewhere.

My eyes drifted over the covered hollow of her stomach, the swell of her breasts, her flushed neck, to her face, and found her eyes…open. Watching me. I slipped my fingers through hers and began working on one of her hands. Maybe I’d recaptured her desire. Maybe it was time for more. Maybe she was going to ask me to?—

“Alessandro?”

“Yes?” I purred.

“What’s your mother like?”

I calculated how to make a significant course correction.

She took my silence for censure. “Sorry. You don’t have to answer that.”

“No, it’s okay. It was just your use of the present tense that…” I cracked the knuckle of her ring finger. “She’s no longer with us.”

“Oh, God, I’m so sorry?—”

“It’s okay. I don’t mind,” I lied. No one had ever asked me about her. Ever. And during a massage? Never ever. “My mother was…” I continued to work her fingers with mine as I considered every terse, dismissive adjective I could say. Depressed. Frivolous. Vain. Erratic. But they all painted an incomplete picture. “You know how there are some people who peak at twenty-two and are shocked when they discover the world doesn’t actually revolve around them? And they spend the rest of their life trying to reclaim something they never had in the first place?”

“The high school quarterback type.”

“Precisely. My mother was practically royalty here in Venice, even if she didn’t have the money to back it up. But outside, to the rest of the world, she was just a pretty girl. Who attracted the wrong men.”

“Your father?”

“Among others.” I left her hands and worked my way up her arms, determined not to let the current conversation disintegrate the mood. “He lasted long enough to take her back to America and foist two kids on her. Then gone.”

“He was American?”

“First-generation. From a Lombardy family. Anyway, ancient hist?—”

“Is that why you wanted to do this? Take over after Jacopo? To be a better man for women than the ones your mother had?”

She was too perceptive. So I prevaricated. “I wanted to do it because it’s what we do.”

“Do you miss her?”

I stopped stroking entirely now. I stared at Claire’s hand. “I miss who she could have been.”

“I can understand that.”

I risked a glance at her face. Her eyes had closed again. A tear, two, slipped over her temples. I left her hand, squeezed her bicep. “I think we might want to change the subject.”

“Just one more question.” Her voice betrayed neither of those tears. It was low, calm, composed. That all-too familiar place of hers.

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