Cecilia shoves her phone into her bag in a clumsy hurry and rushes toward me. I’m already moving to meet her.
We meet halfway, and I wrap my arms around her, pulling her in, lifting her feet off the ground as her breath catches next to my ear.
I bury my face in the curve of her neck. Dio… the scent of her, exactly as I remembered it, hits me so hard I have to close my eyes for a moment.
Her hands clutch the back of my jacket, and that simple pressure sends a spark through every nerve in my body. When she leans back, I set her down reluctantly, my hands sliding to her waist... and staying there.
“You’re here,” she says, wonder and surprise clear in every word.
“You said you wanted to see these places with me,” I murmur, my thumb tracing lazy, absent circles along the small of her back.
She smiles, a radiant smile that lights her entire face and brings out a smile of my own.
“You came,” she whispers.
I lift a hand to her cheek, and Cecilia closes her eyes. I wonder if she missed my touch as much as I missed touching her.
My heart pounds when I bend and press a lingering kiss to her forehead.
When she exhales, her breath trembles, and I can’t think of anything else. I cup her cheek and pull her to me, my hand resting on the small of her back... and I get lost in her eyes.
Chapter 15
Under the stars
Cecily
When I feel his hand on my cheek, my eyes don’t leave his until he kisses my forehead. I close them, leaning into the comfort of his lips on my skin... letting the reality of it sink in, reminding me that he is here. Really here.
A car horn blares loudly. We both glance at the vehicle rushing past, and when I look back at Alexander, we laugh under our breath.
He lets me go, only to reach for my hand a second later. “Come,” he murmurs. “Let’s go see this bookstore you’ve been talking about for days.”
We walk the short distance side by side. But the moment we step inside, the last thing I notice is the shelves lined with books.
“I still can’t believe you’re here,” I whisper. Alexander turns to me, a smile on his lips.
“I was nearby,” he says easily. “I thought I’d stop in... and maybe offer you a ride to Pisa in a couple of days.”
I narrow my eyes. “Weren’t you in Istanbul the last time we talked? Yesterday?”
I’d been talking to Alexander almost every day since this trip began.
When I finally told him I’d decided to go on the tour, he hadn’t hesitated, not for a second. He encouraged me, and made it clear that if I ever needed anything, at any time, he’d be there.
It had taken me a while to tell him. I wanted everything set first. I wanted to be sure before I said it out loud.
Since he left New York, we’d slipped back into our own easy rhythm, talking every day. And even though I’d been afraid something might change... It hadn’t.
We were still us.
Endless conversations. Long silences where one of us would stop speaking just to listen to the other breathe. Tiny moments from our days exchanged like small treasures, pulling us into each other’s lives, one word at a time, across an ocean.
The moment I told him I was coming to Europe in September, all our conversations circled around when we would be in the same time zone again.
And with every day that drew closer to my departure, it felt as if some invisible thread was tightening, pulling us nearer, inch by inch.
“Mm-hmm,” he finally replies, distracted by the antique edition in his hands. “Pretty close. Just a five-hour flight.”
