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"Okay," she says, and her voice slips into an easy, bright rhythm, the performance turning on like a light. "So tonight is basically the reason I'm in Milan. The people in this room—I mean, not all of them, some of them just came for the free champagne—but the ones who matter? They decide whether the spring rollout lives or dies."

"Mm." I let my eyes wander past her shoulder. A cluster of older men near the far columns. Buyers I don't know. Nobody I need.

"Francesca Renaud is somewhere in here." Amanda lifts her glass, sips, lowers it. Her hand is steady, but I can hear the nerves underneath the polish, the speed in her words. "She controls placement in the flagship stores. If she likes the campaign, we're golden. If she doesn't, two years of my life turn into a very expensive learning experience."

"And does she like it?" I ask, because I need her to keep going, and because some part of me wants to hear the answer.

"She hasn't decided." Amanda laughs, soft and quick. "Which is worse than no. At least no is an answer. Maybe just makes you crazy."

I almost smile at that.

My gaze moves on. Past the bar. Past a group of women in black. Past the wide arch that leads deeper into the palazzo⁠—

Elio steps out from a corner near the second bar, a glass in his hand he isn't drinking from. For a half second I tense, ready to find a reason to be irritated, because that is the easy thing to feel about Elio Mancini. Then I see what he's doing, and the irritation has nowhere to go but inward.

He's talking to three older men. Suits, gray at the temples, the comfortable bulk of men who've sat at tables longer than they've stood. He's nodding at something one of them says. His weight is easy. His shoulders are loose. He looks, for all the world, like a younger associate of theirs, a man who came up through somebody's company and earned his way into this space.

It's good. It's better than I expected. A man alone in a corner gets noticed. A man laughing with three others is expected. He's exactly where he should be, doing exactly what he should be doing, and the cold knot of worry in my chest loosens a fraction.

I hold my glass to my mouth without drinking and find his eyes for one beat over the rim. He doesn't react. He just lets his gaze pass over mine and keeps it moving, back to the men, back to the conversation. He's not as useless as I might want to believe. I'm not sure how to feel about that.

"—and the lighting director wanted to scrap the whole second setup, which, fine, except we'd already booked the studio—" Amanda is still going, her voice a warm current beside me, but I realize I've stopped paying attention.

I turn back to her.

That's a mistake too, in its own way. Because when her eyes find mine, I can't stop looking at that strange blue-green that always seems lit from somewhere behind, and whatever was left of the tension in my body drains out of me.

I don't understand it. I've stood in rooms with men who would have killed me without losing a breath or night of sleep, and my pulse never changed. I've watched for threats in a hundred crowds and felt nothing but the clean, cold focus of work. And here, in a room full of nothing more dangerous than money and ego, one civilian woman looks at me and something in my heart stops.

"You're not listening," she says. There's no hurt in it. Just amusement, the corner of her mouth lifting.

"I am," I say.

"What did I just say?"

"Something about a lighting director and a studio you'd already booked."

Her eyebrows climb. "Okay. Fine. Points for the bodyguard."

"I'm not your bodyguard."

"No?" She turns her glass slowly by the stem, watching me over it. "Then what are you, Conti?"

It's a casual question, thrown out lightly. The honest answer—a man who keeps finding reasons to be near you—is the one I will never say out loud, not to her, not to anyone. Not even in the darkness of my own room.

"Tonight," I say, "I'm a man who needs you to keep talking."

She studies me for a moment. The act vanished. Just for a second. But in that heartbeat, the bright mask slips and something underneath looks straight at me, searching. Then she lifts her chin, and her performance begins again.

"Lucky for you," she says, "talking is my one God-given talents."

Across the room, Elio laughs at something one of the men says, and the men laugh with him. Natural. Easy. Just as it should be.

Everything is where it should be.

So I have no idea why, when Amanda leans an inch closer to tell me about Francesca Renaud's terrible taste in shoes, my hand itches to move. To touch her. Wanting to find the small of her back, toward the bare warmth of her skin.

I take a deep breath and a sip of wine, stopping myself before I do something foolish.