Page 26 of Skin Deep

Chapter9

Gigi

There was a reason why I always got what I wanted. I refused to entertain the word “no” when my mind was set on something.

Some called me a bitch for refusing to budge. Others difficult for wanting what I wanted and not settling. My family mostly called me hardheaded.

Nonno always said that hardheaded people were the best to fall in love with. He reasoned that once their hearts and minds agreed, there was no budging them. Once they committed, they couldn’t be swayed, not even by outside, or inside, influences.

I had a feeling both Harrison and I were hardheaded. It was going to be interesting to see how this worked out. He wanted her. I wanted him. I took it as a challenge. I didn’t believe it was her he truly wanted. Like so many had done to me, it was the idea of her he seemed taken with. A childish idea that got stuck in his head at a vulnerable time in his life.

I’d never met a man quite like him before. Even though all my nerves felt exposed when I was next to him, at the same time, there was something so comfortable about being near him.

He didn’t look at me like most men did, like something to conquer. He didn’t treat me as most men did, like I was only a prize to be won.

Our conversations were truly conversations, and when he was not looking for Mariposa, he was looking at me in a way that made me feel like he didn’t only want to get me in his bed for a couple of nights.

I wasn’t even sure whether he found me attractive, much less beautiful.

If anything, I was fantasizing about him. I loved his hands. How masculine they were. I imagined them exploring every inch of my skin. I loved his forearms. How sculpted they were. I imagined my hands sliding up and down them.

My mouth all over him.

He made me feel…starved. For the loyalty he had for the girl, Mariposa. Like a famished person would do when the situation became life or death, I was willing to lie, cheat, and steal for the time he spent wanting her.

He looked up and candlelight danced in his eyes. “You’re being quiet,” he said.

We’d danced for an hour or two, maybe even longer, and since the moment I touched him on the dance floor, he kept touching me. He even insisted that I eat before he walked me to my casa. He made me a plate of food, along with something cool to drink, and we talked while I ate and he shared off my plate.

Even though he said he felt dead, his laughter was still alive.

I wanted it to be true as much as I wanted him to want me. To look at me with the same passion in his eyes as when he looked at her. When he even spoke about her.

He was looking at me from across the table in my small casa, a cold beer next to him, a candle between us, along with cards, and even though he hadn’t said as much, I knew he automatically assumed that I was shallow because of the way I looked.

Mariposa had his attention because she was deep. She knew what it meant to suffer and to have to overcome. He knew barely anything about me, since most of the night he spoke about her when we were not speaking of his family, but because of the way I looked, he assumed my life was easy.

Money did not always buy happiness. Beauty did not always equal peace.

I shrugged. “I am concentrating. I want to keep beating you.”

He took a drink of his beer, and when he set it down, his cologne drifted past my nose. It was a bit citrusy, maybe tangerine, mixed with something aquatic, like sea water. It was clean and relaxed. It reminded me of cool swims in the Mediterranean Sea.

It was a familiar scent. I was the woman in the ad with the model who was the face of the cologne. It was an Italian brand and famous around the world. He didn’t seem to have a clue. Even though I’d done some work in America, I was mostly famous in Italy and in Europe—especially for my list of high-profile lovers.

He looked down at his chest, which was only covered in an undershirt, then at his boxers and socks. “A few more rounds and I’ll be sitting at your table naked.”

We were playing strip poker. I knew the only reason he’d agreed was because he was close to drunk. He seemed to be one of those people who mostly lived inside a box, and to get him out, he had to be enticed. If I was reading him correctly, it would take something dire with his family, or desperation, to do the enticing. Which was why he had traveled so far for a girl who never loved him in the same way he had convinced himself he loved her.

I also knew he was letting me win on purpose. I had only lost my heels.

“That is the name of the game, ah?”

He grinned and took another drink of his beer. I wanted his tongue to touch mine as it did the rim.

He cleared his throat. “You think this is really going to work?”

“What?”

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