Nadia had exactly three rules for surviving her sister’s wedding weekend in Tuscany: drink the good wine, avoid her ex, and never, under any circumstances, ask Luca Ferretti for anything. She broke the third rule before the rehearsal dinner even started.
It had seemed simple enough at the time. Her ex, Marco, had arrived with a new girlfriend — tall, effortlessly beautiful, the kind of woman who made rooms rearrange themselves. Nadia had panicked. She had grabbed the nearest warm body, which happened to belong to Luca, her sister’s insufferable best friend, the man who had spent the last three years correcting her Italian pronunciation and winning every argument they’d ever had.
“Pretend to be my boyfriend,” she had whispered. “Just for the weekend. I will owe you one.”
Luca had looked at her the way he always did — with that slow, unreadable expression that made her want to either scream or throw something. Then he had smiled, just slightly, and said, “You’ll owe me more than one.”
And so it began.
The vineyard estate where the wedding was held sat on a hillside outside Florence, all golden stone and cypress trees and air that smelled of rosemary and warm earth. It was the kind of place that made people fall in love without trying. Nadia was trying very hard not to.
Luca was annoyingly good at the performance. He rested his hand at the small of her back during dinner with a naturalness that made her breath catch. He laughed at her jokes in front of Marco with a warmth that felt completely unscripted. When her sister’s aunt asked how they’d gotten together, Luca had leaned in close and said, “She argued with me for twenty minutes about whether Dante was overrated, and I was completely lost after that.”
Nadia had stared at him. That was exactly what had happened the first night they’d met.
“You remembered that?” she asked later, when they were walking the stone path between the vineyard rows, the Florentine hills going soft and amber in the evening light.
“I remember everything about that night,” Luca said. He wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the horizon, and his voice was careful in a way it never usually was.
Nadia didn’t know what to do with that, so she did what she always did with Luca: she picked a fight.
“You spent half that night being condescending,” she said.
“You spent the other half being deliberately provocative.”
“Because you were smug.”
“Because you were interesting.”
He said it so simply, so without armor, that she stopped walking. The vineyard was quiet around them. Somewhere below, the estate lights were beginning to flicker on, warm and golden against the darkening blue of the Tuscan sky.
“Luca.”
“Don’t,” he said, and now he did look at her. “Don’t tell me I’m confused about what’s real and what’s pretend. I know the difference.”
She did too. That was the problem. Every time his hand had found hers across the dinner table, every time he’d tucked a strand of her hair back and looked at her like she was the only person in the room, she’d felt it — the terrifying warmth of something that had been building for three years and had never had a name.
She had called it irritation. She had called it rivalry. She had called it chemistry she was too smart to act on.
Standing in a Tuscan vineyard with the last light of the day on his face, she ran out of names for it.
“I didn’t ask you to do this because of Marco,” she admitted. The words came out quieter than she intended. “I mean, I told myself I did. But I think I just… wanted an excuse.”
Luca was very still.
“An excuse for what?” he asked.
“To be near you. Without having to admit that I wanted to be.”
The silence between them was the kind that held its breath. A warm breeze moved through the vines. Below, someone at the estate started playing music — something slow and Italian and achingly romantic, as if the evening had decided to make its point.
Luca reached out and tucked that strand of hair back again, only this time there was no audience. Just her, and him, and the truth they’d both been circling for years.
“You are the most stubborn woman I have ever met,” he said softly.
“You correct my Italian in public,” she replied.
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