Page 7 of Beautiful & Dirty

She bites her lip again, and her eyelashes flutter as she thinks. And then she shakes her head. “I smell wine. Red wine.”

I smile so hard my cheeks push my eyes into a squint. “A good nose,” I tell her.

She beams at me and the first joke I’ve told in a decade. Decades? A long fucking time.

“Now taste.” I mean this innuendo, and it takes her much less time to hear it.

She licks her lips. “What about you?”

I groan. If this is a trap from one of my enemies, it’s worth it.“What about me?” My voice is hoarse.

“Don’t you want to taste?” Apparently, I’m not the only one who can play this game.

I lift my glass slowly to my lips, and she mirrors me. We watch one another over the rims of our wine glasses as we take the smallest sips. I taste every note. She’s not wrong. It is earthy with hints of berry and an oaky finish, but I enjoy this glass of wine more than any other I’ve had because she’s tasting it at the same time, and I wonder what this sip would taste like on her tongue.

When we lower our glasses, her lips are parted, stained the tiniest bit purple from the wine. She has no idea how erotic she looks in this moment or the way she’s making me feel, the things I wish I could do. She can’t.

“What do you think?” she asks me.

There are so many things I want to say to her, but I shouldn’t. “I think it tastes divine.”

She licks her lips, and I think she hears my double meaning this time. I hope she does. And I also realize that this is the first time in my adult life I’ve ever avoided doing the hard thing.

* * *

“No, I can’t,” she says when I move to fill her glass of wine again. “I have a train to catch in—” She looks around for a clock, and I look at my watch.

“It is just past four o’clock,” I tell her.

She sucks her bottom lip into her mouth. “Three hours,” she says in a suddenly hoarse voice. The sound goes straight to my aching balls, suffusing my groin in an intense wave of need. Since the moment she walked into my restaurant, my body has been one throbbing, dull ache of desire and frustration.

“Three hours,” she whispers again, her eyes trailing away, and not for the first time since I joined her. I wonder what — or who — she’s thinking about, but I don’t ask. It’s not my place.

“What do you have planned for the next three hours?” I ask instead, sitting back in my chair, enjoying just watching her.

She shakes herself. Her eyes brighten when she looks at me again. “Well,” she says excitedly, and my stomach clenches. I can’t remember the last time I met someone so… pure. “I came to Naples with just three things to do.”

I smile. “And those three things were?”

She lifts her right hand and points her index finger at the ceiling. I take in her delicate wrists and fingers. I imagine myself kissing each fingertip as I make my way up her arm to her mouth. “I wanted to go to the archaeological museum, and I did that.”

I nod serenely.

She lifts another finger. “I wanted to have a glass of wine or two,” she says.

I smile wickedly at her, and her beautiful light brown skin flushes. I grab the bottle of wine, emptying it into her glass. “You are doing that.”

And then, she lifts yet another finger. “And I wanted pizza. All the pizza I could eat.”

There is a second of silence between us before I laugh so loudly that I see my bartender and waitress stop in their tracks and stare at me. I can’t blame them. I’m not prone to outbursts of any kind, not even violent ones. I’ve spent years becoming a man who doesn’t need to expend much effort getting my point across. If I’m angry, I can make that immediately clear with a slightly raised voice, and no one doubts that my threats are serious because I keep all of my promises. But I’m rarely happy, and I realize that that’s what Gino and Adriana have noted. When was the last time they heard me laugh? When was the last time I laughed? The answer to both might be so long ago that it doesn’t matter.

And yet, here I am, laughing so hard there are tears in my eyes.

“It’s not that funny,” she says. “Naples is the birthplace of pizza.”

I laugh harder.

Someone clears their throat. I turn and meet Adriana’s worried eyes. “Is everything alright, boss?” she asks in Italian, cutting her eyes at Shae.

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