She put her hands on his cheeks, stroking the angular shape of his bones, the faint, scratchy sting of his beard. “I will not make false promises,” she said softly. “Not to you, Val.”
He turned his head, kissed her palm, with those soft, hot, supple lips. “No,” he said, his voice stubborn. “The promise will be real.”
She shook her head. “You’re wildly romantic, Val, did you know that?”
“I suppose,” he said. “Since I met you, I have become so.”
“I hate to break this to you, but I’m the most unromantic person on the planet,” she told him. “Which doesn’t mean that I don’t care.
I did what I did because I care. I wish I could make you understand that.”
“I do understand it.” He grabbed her hand, rubbed it against his cheek. “But I reject it. I will not ask that of the woman I love. I would not ask it of myself. The subject is closed.”
Love. The word made shivers of marvelous terror course through her. Along with something else, something nameless, sweet and dangerous, that fluttered through her, rustling her, like wind shaking a tree.
She shoved it away instinctively. “Toughen up, Val.”
“Leave the subject alone,” he growled. “It is irrelevant now. We have burned that bridge, and thank God for it.”
“Not at all,” Tam said crisply. “As far as he knows, you burst in and abducted me. I could contact him, feed his vanity—”
“No!”
She sighed. “Damn it, Val. Do you want to save Imre, or not?”
“Don’t put it in those terms. It is an intolerable thought. Just let me protect you. Please. For once.”
She was startled, and moved. “I don’t need protecting,” she told him.
“Of course you do not,” he said wearily. “I do not give a fuck whether you do or not. I want to protect you anyway.”
She shook her head.
He grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it, shook it. “Tamar. My love.” His voice sounded exhausted. “If someone offered to protect me, I would not spit in her eye. I would be flattered. Perhaps even…touched.”
“Oh, I think we’ve got the touching part all covered,” she murmured, smiling in the dark. “Do you need protecting, Val?”
“No. But it would be nice to have someone care enough to try.”
She pressed her face against his shoulder and licked, savoring the deep, salty flavor of his dried sweat. Relaxing against his heat, his strength. She inhaled and realized that her chest had relaxed.
She was breathing so deeply. The breaths so unforced.
It was true, what he said. It would be tragically futile, to try and protect someone like her.
But it was so nice that he cared enough to try.
The overhead light switched on, without warning. Val and Tam both sprang up, Tam lunging for the purse, with the gun…
Ah. Never mind. It was just Signora Concetta, her hand on the lightswitch, her eyes huge and shocked. She crossed herself.
Tam grabbed for the towel that lay on the floor and wrapped it around herself. Val had no such recourse. He got up, picked up his trousers, and started putting them on. Lazy and unhurried.
The signora took a long look at Val’s body, and cleared her throat, with a great, phleghmy, gurgling cough. She looked as if she were trying not to smile, though the expression looked a bit rusty.
“Scusatemi. You wanted dinner,” she said stiffly.
“So I did,” Val said calmly. “I still do. Especially now.”
The good lady had taken Val’s suggestion of wine, bread and cheese as a challenge to inflict death by food. The assault started with a jug of homemade wine and two thick crockery cups to drink it out of. Then a crusty loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese with a filthy green rind that looked like it had been rolled in dead grass, and a creamy, yellow-white interior that smelled powerfully of sheep. A huge, phallic chunk of homemade salami followed.
“Cinghiale,” the signora said proudly. “Wild boar. My sons killed it.”
Then she went out onto the patio and bent over what they then realized was an enormous wheelbarrow. She began bringing in earthenware oven crocks, each wrapped in its own artfully knotted dish towel, each filled with a fragrant hot baked or stewed dish.
She covered the rickety table with them and went out again. Her next armful of jars held vegetables preserved in vinegar, oil and garlic; sun-dried tomatos, eggplants, peppers, olives. A basket of freshly picked oranges was the crowning touch, or so they thought until the signora reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a slender-necked corked bottle filled with a pale yellow liquor.
“Limoncello,” she announced proudly. “My own lemons. Very good.”
Val grabbed the lady’s hand, which fortunately no longer appeared to be covered with chicken blood, and kissed it fervently.
“Signora, you are an angel sent from heaven,” he declared. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
The signora yanked her hand back with a smirk and took a long, appreciative look at Val’s naked chest and half-fastened pants. She grunted her approval. “You will need it,” she said. “Buon appetito.”
“God, yes,” he said in heartfelt tones.
The signora frowned at Tam and pinched her upper arm. “Eat some of my braciole,” she admonished. “You’re too skinny. That man will squash you.”
After the signora had gone, they perched on the rickety, termite-riddled chairs on each side of the loaded table, and dug into the feast.
Tam discovered, to her astonishment, that food just kept on going right into her and space kept opening up for more. It was so different from her usual feeling when eating or trying to—that the food was bumping up against a blank stone wall that would let nothing through.
Not tonight. Tonight, she was open, yawning wide, eager.
Usually, strong tastes repelled her. Tonight, they were strangely marvelous. She ate three times as much as she usually managed to choke down, and Val inhaled over ten times that much on his own.
When she finally stopped, stuffed, she sat back and just watched in awe as he continued to eat, and eat, and eat.
“You’re risking your life with that stuff, you know,” she informed him. He layered sun-dried tomatoes with the wild boar salami, cheese, and fleshy red festoons of peppers on a huge chunk of dripping, oil-soaked bread. “Salmonella, botulism, and ten other lethal bacteria that I could name.”
“Don’t name them.” His white teeth bit down, eyes closing in delight as he chewed. “And this from a woman who travels with at least twenty different types of deadly poison in her beauty case?”
Tam grabbed an orange and began to peel. At least its contents would be more or less sterile. “That’s different. Those compounds were cooked in a lab under controlled conditions by people who hold advanced degrees in chemistry from MIT and Stanford.”
He ripped off another chunk of bread and fearlessly prepared another heap. “But they do not taste as good,” he pointed out.
She took a bite of orange. The explosive, tangy sweetness made her gasp. “The chicken blood alone might carry you away,” she warned.
Val stabbed his fork into the crock that held thinly sliced dark meat wrapped around flavorful cheese, hot pepper, parsley and garlic, floating in a rich lake of spiced tomato sauce. He chewed fearlessly and stared her in the face, a suggestive