He could smell the flowers that bloomed in abundance around the pool, the faint tang of chlorine and most of all Isabella. The spicy scent had been washed away and replaced by an aroma that was dizzying in its feminine purity.
He had only one sense left to explore. He opened his eyes and gazed at Isabella stretched out on the pool deck. Her hair hung thick and wet and luxurious down the narrowness of her back. Her black bathing suit clung to her like a second skin, caressing the curve of her back and the swell of her firm buttock. Her skin was as flawless as porcelain. The roundness of her cheek was pressed into the deck, and her lashes were so thick and long they cast a faint shadow there. Her lips had not a hint of lipstick on them, and yet they naturally called to him, full and plump and sensuous.
As if she sensed him studying her, she opened her eyes. He unabashedly threw himself into the color of them—it felt as if he was swimming in cool pools of sun-filtered greens and golds and browns.
A few days ago, he had gone to the chapel at the palazzo. It had been strictly work. If he was a bad guy, where would he hide? What were the weak places both in the chapel and around it? He’d taken some pictures and made some notes of the exterior and then moved inside.
Logan Cascini, the project manager for the whole restoration, had come up to him. Connor had been touching base with Logan on and off since he arrived, and there was an affinity between the two men.
“You have to see what has complicated my life today,” Logan had said wryly.
“That’s gotta be a woman,” Connor had muttered.
“That sounds like the voice of experience,” Logan said, raising a quizzical eyebrow.
“Show me your complication,” Connor said, not following Logan’s implied invitation to elaborate.
“This is the final wall we’re working on. We’re just pulling off that old wood paneling.”
Connor followed Logan over to a side wall of the church. The workmen were absolutely silent, their normal chatter gone.
As they uncovered it, Connor, who considered himself no kind of art lover, had stood there, frozen by the beauty of what he was seeing revealed.
“It’s a fresco,” Logan supplied, “probably centuries old, and probably by one of the lesser Renaissance painters.”
“I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” Connor said when he could find his voice. The fresco was the Madonna and child. The expression on the Madonna’s face was so infused with love that Connor could feel an uncomfortable emotion closing his throat.
“And like all beautiful women,” Logan said, “she is complicated.”
“Now you sound like the voice of experience.”
For a moment something pained appeared in Logan’s eyes, but then he rolled his shoulders and ran a hand through his hair. “You don’t find something like this and just keep on as if it’s normal. I’ll have to notify the authorities. Depending what they decide, the wedding could be delayed.”
Connor had let out a long, low whistle, loaded with the sympathy of a man who knew firsthand how the unexpected could mess with a guy’s plans.
Then, taking one more look at the fresco, he had said goodbye to Logan and left the chapel.
Now, days later, lying side by side at the pool with Isabella, with the sun warming their backs, he was feeling that again.
Paralyzed by almost incomprehensible beauty. When Isabella saw how intently he was looking at her, she smiled and didn’t look away. Neither did he.
The danger he was in came to him slowly. He’d tried to fight this attraction every way that he knew how. He’d tried to create distance. He’d tried to nip it in the bud. He’d even moved out of her house.
But still, he was falling in love with Isabella Rossi. Or maybe he already had. That was why he had felt such an urgent need to cancel that date, to get out from under the same roof as her. It was why he was in this state of heightened awareness and had been for days. The fact that he could see beauty so intensely was connected to what he was experiencing with this woman.
She reached out and touched his shoulder, and again, because of his heightened awareness, he felt that touch as though he had never been touched before, had never felt so exquisitely connected to another human being before.
“I’ve gone from being terrified of the water to loving it,” she said huskily.
“I know, you have been a great student.” He was the wrong man for a woman to love. He had always known that. His childhood had left him wary of relationships, and his choice of work had suited that perfectly. He had told himself he was protecting women from the potential for loss, but in fact he had been protecting himself.
Because he’d always known only the bravest of women could handle what he was dishing out.
True, he wasn’t in active service anymore. But what had just gone down in Azerbaijan was plenty of evidence he still had his knack for finding danger.
It seemed to him this little slip of a woman lying on the deck beside him was the bravest of women.
“Connor?”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never had that before, what I had just now.”
“What?”
“Just fun,” she said. “Just good old-fashioned fun. Even when I was a child, Giorgio was my best friend. He couldn’t run and play like everyone else, and so I stayed with him. We read and drew pictures, but I’ve never really had this. Just to let go of everything, to play until I’m so out of breath I feel as if I can’t breathe.
“I mean, I do it with my students. I have fun with them, but it’s not the same. I have to be the adult. I have to maintain a modicum of control. I don’t ever get to be this carefree.”
His awareness of her deepened yet again. Her beautiful eyes were sparkling with tears.
“So, thank you,” she said. “I’m never going to be able to thank you enough. Never.”
His awareness of himself deepened, too, but not in a good way. An unexpected element inserted itself into the pure and sizzling awareness of the moment. Connor suddenly felt ashamed of himself. He’d backed out of that date out of pure terror of what she was doing to him. He’d left her house because he couldn’t trust himself around her without wanting to taste her lips again.
But when he’d challenged her to embrace what terrified her, she had done it in a heartbeat. She had shown incredible bravery.
And now she was telling him she’d never had fun. That fooling around in the swimming pool was the most fun she’d ever had. She’d given her whole life to looking after others. Her husband, and then the kids at school.
It seemed to Connor he was being given an opportunity to do something good. Maybe the best thing he’d ever done. It wasn’t about whether or not he was comfortable. It wasn’t about that at all. That feeling that maybe he was falling for her deepened in him. Didn’t that call him to be a better man? Didn’t it ask him to be more than he had ever been before. Braver? Stronger? More compassionate?
“You know that date I canceled?” His voice was so low it came out sounding like a whisper.
She went very still.
“You want to give me another chance?”
“Yes,” she said, her voice low, too, as if they were in a church. “Yes, I do.”
“What about tomorrow night?”
“That would be perfect.”
* * *
Isabella looked at her bed. It was covered with every