But we’d never taken a real vacation, had never had an entirely new experience together, not since the vacations our parents had taken us on when we’d been kids, mostly road trips to national parks that involved tents, campfires, and hiking.
I was suddenly glad he was here, not just because he would help us find Dimitri Kaprolov but because he was my brother and I was happy to have this memory with him, this night before anything could be tainted by whatever Dimitri might choose to rain down on our family next.
“Your arms are cold,” Hawk said.
“Are they?” I rubbed my arms and realized he was right: I was cold. “I guess so.”
He paused to take the cardigan I’d brought (just in case) out of my hand, then slipped it onto my shoulders. “Better?”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
“Let’s try this one,” Jagger said, stopping at a stone building with a simple sign that readda Paolino.
We followed a well-dressed couple inside to an intimate dining room with soft lights.
A small Italian man asked how many people were in each of our parties, then held up a finger. “Un momento.”
We waited while he led the couple through a set of open patio doors.
“This is so nice,” I said. “It smells like lemon.”
The scent was tangy and strong, and I was hit with another wave of hunger.
“Wait until you try the grilled mozzarella on lemon leaves,” Jagger said.
I looked up at him, handsome and elegant in a silky dark blue shirt that exposed a large expanse of his tattooed chest. “You’ve been here before?”
“Once or twice,” he said.
The host returned a moment later and picked up five more menus. “Per favore, mi segua.”
He led us through an intimate dining room with soft lights and out onto a large patio.
It was so beautiful I almost stopped walking.
Lemons hung overhead like bright yellow baubles, the trees arcing inward from the sides of the stone patio. Several trellised eating areas had been arranged around the edges of the terrace to provided a private dining experience. Underneath the canopyof lemons, candlelight flickered from the tables while lanterns, hung in the lemon trees, glowed overhead.
I couldn’t believe I was here, so far from Blackwell Falls, couldn’t believe something so beautiful had existed the entire time and I hadn’t even been aware of it because I’d been too busy being Coffee Shop Cassie.
Except I wasn’t Coffee Shop Cassie anymore.
Coffee Shop Cassie didn’t wear a tiny dress and the highest of heels. Coffee Shop Cassie didn’t fuck three men at the same time. Coffee Shop Cassie didn’t travel on a private jet to an Italian island, tucked away in the Tyrrhenian Sea like a jewel.
Coffee Shop Cassie was dead.
I waited while Hawk pulled out a chair at our table under the lemon trees, felt the brush of his lips against my bare shoulder when he helped me scoot in.
“This is so beautiful,” I said, looking up into the lantern-lit lemon trees. “Like a storybook.”
“Someday we’ll come back,” Jagger promised. “When we can sleep in and lay on the beach and eat until we’re sick.”
“I already did that in the hotel room,” Vigo said. “But I’m fine now.”
Jagger ordered for the table and Vigo told us about Capri — how the island was a retreat for the Romans, how Tiberius spent the last decade of his life there, how it eventually became a target for Barbary pirates — while we waited for the food.
It was magical listening to him talk while we sipped limoncello and munched on focaccia with fresh rosemary, like falling back through time, the scent of lemon bright in the air.
Then the food started coming and everything was forgotten as we dined on crisp calamari (caught just that morning), fried zucchini flowers stuffed with ricotta, creamy seafood risotto, fettuccini with lemons and clams, and salmon tartare with avocado and ponzu sauce.
