Fallon checks me out with a long, lingering look.
“What?” I ask, suddenly feeling self-conscious.
I smooth a hand down the soft fabric of my dress. Compared to the glamorous, sophisticated women walking through the hotel doors wearing expensive clothes, five-inch stilettos, their hair in elegant updos, and their bodies draped in glittery diamonds from their ears to their fingers, I must look like Cinderella before her fairy godmother appeared.
“You look gorgeous.”
My soft bark of laughter is filled with disbelieving self-deprecation. “You need glasses.”
He slowly rises, all six feet two inches of him, and my reflexive reaction is to take a step back, but my feet won’t work.
Fallon lifts a strand of my hair and lightly tugs on the end. “You have always been the most beautiful woman in the room,” he says and takes another step toward me, pressing intimately closer.
A cascade of goose bumps float across my skin, and I’m literally frozen in place, my body refusing the commands my brain is sending. For the first time in years, I long for a man’s touch.
A man who isn’t my husband.
I stumble backward, instantly putting a metaphorical ocean’s worth of distance between us and rebuilding those walls sky high. What the hell is wrong with me?
Fallon slips his hands into his trouser pockets, his face set in a façade of stone and completely unreadable.
“Come on. I’m starving.”
He offers me his bent elbow, and it takes me a second before I’m able to accept it.
Wanting things to go back to normal,needingthem to, I ask, “Where are we going for dinner?”
“You’ll see,” he replies, enigmatic as always.
He guides me through the lobby and out the double glass doors. The evening breeze feels good on my suddenly overheated skin, and I breathe it in.
“No hint?”
He stops beside a sleek, matte-black McLaren, and I can’t stop my smile. This is so typical of Fallon.
“It’s the enjoyment of the journey, not the destination. Enjoy the journey, Elizabeth.”
I run my hand along the driver’s side door.
“If it’s in this car, then hell yes. Can I drive?” I ask as a joke, not thinking for a second that he’ll let me.
So color me shocked when he lifts the dihedral car door and walks around to the passenger side.
“You just going to stand there?” he says before ducking down and getting in.
Chapter Seven
FALLON
You Are My Everything
The narrowcalleopens to a quiet courtyard that overlooks one of Venice’s many canals. It’s a place tourists don’t know about, tucked away behind a private villa I recently purchased because I fucking hate hotel rooms.
Per my instructions to the staff, hanging directly above the solitary table, strings of golden fairy lights drip like stars, similar to the real ones dotting the late evening sky. The faint aroma of citrus from the potted lemon trees that line the courtyard melds with the floral scent of Elizabeth’s hair.Jasminum polyanthum, pink jasmine. I still keep pots of the damn stuff in my study at the Montgomery estate.
Elizabeth’s footfalls are muted against the cobblestone when she leaves my side and walks over to the table. Her long hair falls over her shoulders and catches the light like threads of spun gold. Her simple blue dress, effortlessly beautiful against her skin, clings to every curve. Elizabeth Fairchild has always been my obsession, even when all I had left of her were mere memories of our short time together. She was destined to be with Ry, and I was destined to be the villain in her love story.
She turns slightly, facing me with an arched brow. “Why do I have a feeling that we’re not having dinner at a restaurant?”
