My mother’s words stole my breath a moment.
Were these the pieces she told me about? Did I want them to be?
Was I falling in love with my husband one small piece at a time?
For the first time, I wondered if maybe Nico was the man my mother told me about.
For the first time, the thought of Nico being my first—of being many firsts didn’t sound so bad.
Maybe this honeymoon would lock more in place.
Maybe he had the shards too, and we’d both create something by the end of all this.
Maybe I could be some of his firsts too.Twenty-SixNicoLorenzo must have been hurting financially longer than I thought because Vera’s wonder at every extravagance was better than the last.
Of course, the private plane was over the top even with the wealthiest of people, but when I asked if she flew first class, she let me know that she really didn’t travel at all. Her father went alone or not at all. She’d only been to Italy once when she was little before her mother passed.
For a family rooted so deeply in tradition, they didn’t do much together. The last time she’d seen her grandparents was a month after her mother’s funeral.
“This is where we’re staying?” she gasped, looking out the window of our hired car.
She looked like a kid outside of a candy shop, almost pressing her nose to the glass to get a closer look. She whipped her head around with wide-eyed wonder, her smile growing bigger by the second. She’d been doing it the entire drive, trying to take in every inch of history she could. But now that we’d stopped in front of the double doors of the hotel, she unbuckled and closed the gap between us, pressing every inch of her leg to mine.
The sun hadn’t even begun to rise yet, but the streetlights illuminated the Spanish Steps stretched down below. Her excitement blinded her to how tightly she pressed against me while she tried to look out my window. However, not even the pope with hundred-dollar bills raining from the sky could pull my attention away from her soft breasts pressed against my arm—the heat of her thigh warming mine. I ached to brush the hair back behind her ear to bare her smooth neck and rain kisses down until she became lost in the pleasure.
“Signora?” A member of the hotel staff held her door open.
She looked back at the open door and quickly flicked her eyes to me before scooting back.
“Sorry,” she muttered.
“Don’t be. Your excitement is quite endearing.”
She exhaled a soft laugh and smiled. Tucking the strand of hair I so desperately wanted to touch behind her ear, she scooted back, thanking the attendant as he helped her out.
By the time we checked in, the sun had just begun to crest the edges of Rome.
“I can’t believe this is our room,” she said, twirling to take it all in. She stopped and faced me, her lips stretching into a devious smirk. “I mean, it’s only the second to top floor, but I guess it will do.”
My lips twitched at her sarcasm. “Ha. Ha. We would have been at the top, but I think someone famous already nabbed it.”
Her eyes widened further. “I wonder who it is?”
“Probably no one special.” For a moment, I struggled to hold back the words rolling through my head. I forced myself to stop before I added no one as special as you. The warmth from our wedding came back, bigger than before, and I struggled to push it back like I had before, but I refused to focus on it, the truth of what it may be too much to handle at six in the morning.
“If Raelynn was here, she’d make us stake out the room to figure it out.”
“You mean, she’d stalk them.”
She scrunched her nose but then shrugged and laughed. “Yeah, I guess.”
Silence fell, filling the room. Opulence surrounded every inch around us, and we stood like two strangers who knew what the other was thinking, but neither would admit it.
At least, she thought she knew what I was thinking. She probably assumed I was looking for a way to seduce her, but instead, I grew frantic with a way to make this soft heat growing in my chest go away.
She looked stunning in black leggings, tennis shoes, and an oversized cardigan. Her hair flowed around her face, and her eyes shined with excitement. The longer they took me in, the more they softened and warmed. She may not know what I was thinking, but I knew she thought about our wedding night and how she wanted more. I also knew her stubbornness would hold her back. Then she blinked, and a new look softened her face. She smiled, looking almost embarrassed as she dropped her eyes to the floor. When she lifted her eyes to mine, something I’d never seen before—from any woman—hit me hard. A look I couldn’t identify but felt like kerosene to the warmth in my chest.