“Tell me, baby.”
“The monsters in my life before made me run, but…when they chased me underneath the bed, you were there waiting for me.”
We stopped walking.
“You saved me, Matteo,” I whispered. “I’ve never felt safer.”
His fingers tightened around mine. “Saving you saved me.” His voice was raspy.
“We saved each other.”
“Matteo without Stella doesn’t make sense,” he said.
“Yeah,” I breathed out. “And Stella without Matteo doesn’t make sense.”
I felt a shiver go through him. It seemed to pass through me too. Like a ghost had breezed by both of us at the same time—or walked through both of us. It was the oddest thing I’d ever felt.
“My mamma told me that after the first time I saw you,” he said in almost a whisper. It was rough, like he was trying to contain his emotions. “You know she feels things. She felt I would have been wounded if I had gone back that night. I was going to.”
“Wounded…as in, you might have been taken away from me?”
“Yeah.”
This time, my fingers started to squeeze the life out of his. “If something would have happened to you…I wouldn’t be standing here today.”
We both allowed that to sink in before we started to move forward again. By picking up our feet, walking together, it felt like we were moving away from that scarring memory, the devastating separation, so thankful to be where we were instead of where we’d been. Even though I was too chicken shit to face my memories, know the truth about my mom, I still felt like I was healing, which made me feel so odd at times.
I wondered if I could bury enough of all that I’d been through to forget it?
“Matteo?”
“Yeah, baby?”
“That man…you didn’t tell me what he was doing here.”
He sighed. “He belonged to the Nemours. He’s been here. Waiting. The Nemours and the Russians knew I’d claimed you and were determined to stop me, even before the night we arrived here. They placed men in areas they knew were close to my family and me. The man was having an affair with Tipsy. He got lax and happened to be waiting in the road for a ride when Noemi’s car came down the road. He recognized you in the front seat.”
“Tipsy was having an affair?”
“She claimed she was afraid she’d give her husband another heart attack with her stamina.”
“Oh.”
“Her husband was of a different opinion.”
“He’s mad?”
“Tipsy is on a plane back to Texas.”
“I don’t think Tuscany will ever be the same. The ladies might find yoga boring.”
He snorted. “The men won’t.”
Even though what we were discussing was serious, I laughed. “Like your mamma said, Tipsy was a trip!” I laughed even harder thinking back on the yoga session.
“Speaking of trips…” He pulled me back some, and my leg went forward before we stopped. He took a deep breath, another, then another, and then uncovered my eyes.
I blinked at the sudden brightness, and then my eyes connected the picture. “A…bike?”
