Chapter 90 WHAT SHE FELT

Chapter 90 WHAT SHE FELT


Ava's POV

I texted him the next morning.

Dominic had left early for a meeting about the Roan situation and Adrian was with Zara at the lobby café again and Elias was somewhere with my mother and the suite felt quiet in a way that had started feeling less peaceful and more like pressure.

I sat on the bed with Luca's card and stared at it for about three minutes and then typed: coffee still on the table?

He replied in under two minutes: corner café on 54th, twenty minutes.

I got dressed and told Maya I was going for coffee and she looked at me and said, "with who," and I said, "someone I met in the gym," and she said, "does Dominic know," and I said, "I'm getting coffee Maya, not eloping," and she said, "that's not a no," and I left.

Luca was already there when I arrived, at a small table near the window, two coffees already ordered, and he stood when he saw me and I thought about how long it had been since someone stood when I walked into a room for a reason that had nothing to do with crisis management.

We sat and he asked how my morning was and I said fine and he said his conference had started badly because the keynote speaker had shown up with the wrong slides and given a twenty minute presentation about the wrong country entirely and I laughed, actually laughed, and the sound surprised me a little.

We talked for an hour and it was genuinely easy. He asked questions and listened to the answers, not to analyse them or find a threat angle, just because he was curious. He told me about Milan where he grew up, about the apartment his grandmother still lived in that he went back to every Christmas, about the project he was pitching here that he'd been working on for two years and wasn't sure would survive this week's meetings.

He was funny without performing it and I noticed things about him, the way he leaned forward when something interested him, the way he turned his coffee cup in small circles when he was thinking, and none of it was threatening or loaded and that was the whole point.

"You're not going to tell me anything real about your life, are you," he said at some point, not accusing, just observing.

"I'm telling you real things," I said.

"You're telling me true things," he said. "That's different."

I looked at him and he smiled and looked out the window and I thought that was a perceptive distinction for someone I'd known for forty eight hours.

"It's complicated," I said.

"Most things worth anything are," he said.

We finished the coffee and he walked me back toward the hotel and we stopped at the corner and he looked at me and said, "same time tomorrow?"

"Maybe," I said.

"That's better than no," he said, and he reached over and brushed a strand of hair back from my face, his fingers barely grazing my jaw, and the mark on my shoulder went immediately warm, not painful, just warm, a pulse of heat that spread across my collarbone and I pressed my hand over it automatically.

He saw the gesture and his eyes went to my shoulder briefly and back to my face and he said nothing about it and that was somehow the most disarming thing he'd done yet.

"Tomorrow," I said, and turned and walked back to the hotel.

I got back to find the suite busier than I'd left it, Dominic back from his meeting and Elias and my mother both in the kitchen and Maya watching something on her laptop at the counter, and I came in and took off my jacket and Dominic looked at me from across the room.

Not suspiciously. Just looked at me with those eyes that missed nothing and I held his gaze and smiled and went to get water and heard him cross the room behind me.

He stopped close behind me at the counter and didn't say anything and I turned around and we were very close and he tilted his head slightly and said, very quietly so nobody else could hear, "you smell like someone else."

It wasn't angry. It was just stated, flat and certain, the way he said things he already knew the answer to.

I looked at him and said, "coffee with someone from the gym."

He held my gaze and said nothing for a moment and then said, "someone."

"His name is Luca," I said. "He's here for a conference. I had coffee with him."

Dominic looked at me for a long moment and his expression didn't shift and that was almost worse than if it had because I couldn't read what was happening behind it and Dominic was usually not difficult to read.

"Okay," he said finally.

"Okay," I said back.

He held my gaze for one more second and then stepped back and went to where Elias was and picked up the conversation they'd been having and I stood at the counter with my water and breathed and thought about the warmth of the mark when Luca touched my jaw and what that meant and whether I was going to think about it more or less than I already was.

Maya appeared beside me and said very quietly, "how was coffee."

"Good," I said.

"How good," she said.

"Maya," I said.

"I'm just asking," she said, and went back to her laptop.

I stood there and the suite moved around me, conversations and planning and the ordinary business of too many people in a shared space, and I thought about Luca saying you're telling me true things, that's different from real things, and thought that he was probably right and that was either a problem or it wasn't and I hadn't decided yet.

Then Dominic came back to me and said quietly, "I need you to know I'm not angry."

"I know," I said.

"But I need you to tell me when things are happening," he said. "Not find out from a scent."

"You're right," I said. "I should have said before I went."

He nodded once and that was that, conversation closed, and he went back to Elias and I stood there and felt the bond between us warm and steady and complicated and thought that was probably the most accurate description of everything right now.