Page 9 of My Dark Fairy Tale

The man within was still knocked out cold, his hands and feet locked tight with zip ties, a black hood over his head and a gag in his mouth. I checked his pulse to make certain he was still alive and then gave his cheek a little tap.

“Not to worry,” I murmured to him. “As soon as I get the girl situated, you will have my full and undivided attention.”

Chapter Three

Guinevere

I woke up groaning.

Not in the way I’d dreamed in my fantasies of meeting a handsome Italian and being caught up in his strong arms, but in the way of my entire body pulsing like one giant bruise. My eyelids were crusted together, and my head felt so heavy on the pillow I was almost surprised it didn’t fall straight through the soft down and mattress to the floor. Instantly, I wished I could go back to sleep, but the pain was too vibrant to ignore.

“Oh God,” I croaked, my throat parched and sore.

“You should not take the Lord’s name in vain.”

I lifted a weak hand to rub my eyes so I could pry them open to look at the man sitting on the edge of my bed.

Or not my bed.

Hisbed.

In his house in Florence.

It wasn’t really a house, though. Not like we had in the US.

Raffa had flippantly called it a palazzo last night as he led me blurrily through the massive home to a bedroom on the second floor.

I was sleeping in a literalpalace.

My life had become some seriously messed-up Italian version of a Grimms’ fairy tale since I’d arrived in Rome.

I swiveled my gaze over the high ceilings and stone walls, the modern furnishings a stark but attractive contrast to the old architecture. There was an actual marble sculpture in the corner of the room beside open French doors and a painting I was fairly sure, even with my blurry vision, was a real Botticelli.

“It was built in the sixteenth century, but I assure you, we have running water,” he drawled in that decadent Italian accent.

Even though the effort made me wince, I barely turned my head on the pillow to squint at him in the honeyed light spilling through the sheer curtains.

The sight of him in full daylight stole my breath straight from my lungs.

He was . . .

I scrambled for words to define him and wished fruitlessly that I had a better grasp of Italian. It seemed the only language romantic enough, beautiful enough, to fulfill any accurate description of him.

It wasn’t that he himself was soft or romantic.

No.

His face was all planes and angles, with the hard jut of a square jaw and slightly pronounced chin that made him seem imperious, especially matched to the arrogance of those thick brows, arched over eyes that were brown but pale. Light as sunlight caught in maple syrup, clear and completely unmuddied. It felt almost wrong to call eyes like that brown, as mine were.

They were piercing, cutting through me as I lay there, like hot knives pinning me to the bed.

It should have been terrifying, that level of intense, unwavering attention from a near stranger who was broad enough and tall enough to finish what Galasso had tried to begin the night before.

But I felt oddly settled by it.

Intensity was exactly what I had been searching for in Michigan, what I’d been yearning for my entire young life. I had a voracious appetite for life that urged me to crack it open with my bare hands and suck out the marrow, messy and violent with satisfaction. It was a kind of savagery I’d always had to temper back home.

That was the way my Italian stranger looked at me then.