“Because I love the way you argue back.”
She laughed, and the laugh broke something open in her chest — something that had been held tight and careful for too long. He smiled at the sound of it, a real smile, the one he almost never showed, and she thought: there it is. There is the thing I have been pretending not to want.
When he leaned in, it was slow. Unhurried. The way everything with Luca had always been — deliberate, considered, infuriating in the best possible way. She met him halfway.
The kiss tasted like the red wine they’d had at dinner and felt like finally.
They walked back to the estate hand in hand, and for once neither of them said a word. The music was still playing. The lights of Florence glittered in the distance like scattered stars.
At the edge of the terrace, her sister spotted them and grinned with the particular satisfaction of someone who had been waiting a very long time to be right about something.
“Finally,” Sofia said.
“Don’t,” Nadia warned.
“I introduced you three years ago specifically because I thought this would happen.”
Luca glanced at Nadia. “She’s not wrong.”
“You knew?”
“I suspected.” He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles, and she felt the warmth of it all the way up her arm. “I was waiting for you to catch up.”
She should have found something sharp to say to that. She had a hundred sharp things ready, always. But standing in the golden light of a Tuscan evening with his hand warm around hers and her sister laughing nearby and the whole weekend suddenly looking completely different than it had twelve hours ago — she found she didn’t want to use any of them.
She leaned up and kissed him again instead.
It wasn’t a favor anymore. It hadn’t been for a very long time.
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