Puzzled, I turned to look at her. For some reason she looked upset.
“Sebastian, the most colorful thing in this room are your Dress Blues,” she cried. “The first time I saw you again, you were wearing those ridiculously bright red boardshorts.”
I looked down at the pile of white t-shirts, gray briefs and black socks. I kind of saw what she meant. And I remembered those boardshorts.
“Oh yeah. I’ve still got those somewhere. In a box in Ches’s garage, I think.”
“It sounds like Ches has all your worldly possessions.”
I could hear something that sounded like sadness in her voice, although I didn’t understand why.
“Pretty much. I didn’t take a lot when I left my parents’ place. But what the hell—it’s easy to pack up and move on when you’re not laden down.”
She looked so sad and I hated to think that look was for me. I didn’t need her pity. I changed the subject.
“Caro, how much of this stuff do you need?” I asked, pointing at her suitcase. No way we could take that into Italy.
“I definitely need my laptop and notebooks…”
“I mean clothes, Caro. I wouldn’t dare suggest to a reporter that she goes anywhere without the tools of her trade.”
“That’s right,” she said sharply. “You’d just stop her going where she needed to go in the first place.”
Were we back to that? I wasn’t going to apologize again for wanting to spend time with her. I decided that ignoring her comment would be best for both of us. Maybe she thought the same thing, because she started digging through her suitcase and putting clothes into my overnight bag.
“See,” she said, pointing. “Pink, green, blue, yellow and orange t-shirts. These are called ‘colors’. They’re what you get when you’re not wearing black, white or gray.”
“My jeans are blue,” I smirked at her.
She rolled her eyes. “So they are, Sebastian. Way to go.”
“I could maybe get into colors,” I commented, holding up a really fucking sexy lace bra in dark pink.
“I don’t think it would suit you,” she smiled.
“No,” I said evenly, “but I’m really looking forward to taking it off you.”
“That’s assuming you get lucky, Hunter,” she shot back. “You promised me separate rooms, remember?”
Ah shit, I did say that, didn’t I?
“You’re not going to hold me to that, are you, Caro?”
Her bright smile was teasing.
“I don’t know—depends how irritating you are.”
“What if I promise to be on my best behavior, ma’am?”
“Mmm, maybe. I was impressed how well you took orders earlier today.”
Oh fucking yeah!
“And there’ll be payback for that, Ms. Venzi,” I said challengingly.
She tried to step away as I paced toward her, but I caught her in my arms, brushing against her cheek and kissing her throat.
“And I’m looking forward to collecting. Maybe we should christen this bed,” I said, tugging her toward it.
“Christen it?” she said, sounding surprised. “I would have thought it had seen plenty of action.”
I paused, looking up at her. She still didn’t get it.
“No, you’re the first woman I’ve brought here. It’s … private.”
Her eyes widened, then she wrapped her arms around my neck, pulling my head down, meeting my lips with a kiss that had me hardening against her thigh.
“We’ll christen it when we get back,” she whispered.
“Something to look forward to.”
She pulled away and continued with her packing. It didn’t take long. Not like some women who take an hour just to re-touch their lipstick and put on a sweater. I guessed that being a journalist she was used to packing fast.
“Okay, I’m done,” she said, zipping up the bag. “By the way, where exactly are we going? It’s a pretty long way to Salerno, so I presume we’re going to stop somewhere en route.”
“Yeah, it’s just over 1100 kilometers, so…”
“Give me that in good, old-fashioned US miles.”
I laughed. “Seven hundred miles. I thought we’d stop at Genoa tonight—that’s just under 200 miles—take us about four hours.”
Or less, if she let me drive the speed I liked to go.
“How come you know all these distances off the top of your head?” she asked, as I stuffed a map of Italy into my jacket pocket.
“I’ve been planning to do this road trip for a while.” She seemed surprised. “You and I talked about it once, you remember? All the things we were going to do, all the places we were going to see? I just figured that as I was here, I’d go anyway. And … I remembered that you said your dad came from that village near Salerno. I thought I might find … I don’t know what I thought. I just wanted to see it.”
Shit, I was telling her too much too soon. I didn’t want to come over like I’d done nothing but obsess over her for the last ten years, even though that was pretty close to the truth.
She shook her head in disbelief, but at least she was smiling.
Outside, I loaded up the bike, packing everything away into the saddlebags.
“We could go straight to Genoa, using the Mont Blanc tunnel,” I suggested, “but I really like the idea of going up through the high pass. There’ll still be quite a bit of snow around—you up for that?”
I didn’t want to stress her out by saying that the mountain route was 100 percent hairpin turns.
She weighed the options, then said, “I vote for the route over the Alps.”
I picked her up, swinging her around, then kissed her firmly.
“God, you’re amazing, woman!”
“Wait, I should write that down,” she laughed, pretending to make a grab for her notebook.
“No way! You might use that against me in court. Do I have the right to an attorney?”
“Get on the damn bike, Sebastian, before I change my mind.”
I could definitely get used to the feel of her thighs against mine as she sat pillion on the bike.
Before we left Geneva, we had a quick breakfast of sweet rolls and coffee in a café overlooking the lake, then headed up into the mountains. Soon we were seeing heaps of snow at the sides of the road. Some were as high as six or seven feet: they’d been piled up by snowplows clearing the road. I was glad I’d insisted that Caro got some quality ski gloves to keep her hands warm. The woman argued too much.
A couple of miles later we really began to climb; the asphalt disappeared and we were riding on compressed snow. I dropped the speed as the hairpin turns began to take us up the mountain.
Caro lost her relaxed posture and tried to sit up straight when I leaned into the bends. She was throwing off the balance and making the bike wobble. I pulled to the side of the road and flipped up my visor.
“Baby, you’re going to tip us over if you do that, and I don’t know about you, but it looks like a helluva long way down to me.”
“What … what did I do?” she asked, nervously staring at the vertical drop.
“You’re trying to sit upright on the bike: don’t. You’ve got to lean into it or the balance goes for shit. Don’t try and do anything, just sit real tight and hang onto me.”
She swallowed several times as her eyes tracked down the sheer mountainside.
“Okay, good safety tip. Glad you mentioned it.”
Her hands gripped my waist even more tightly as I drove off slowly, keeping the speed low, the bike zigzagging up the mountain. The views were stunning and I decided to stop at the highest pass, allowing Caro to enjoy the scenery.
I cut the engine and turned around to smile at her.
“It’s really something, isn’t it?”
She clambered from the bike awkwardly and tugged off her helmet, shaking her hair free.
“Wow,” she breathed.
I couldn’t agree more—but I wasn’t looking at the view.
While she was staring down to Geneva spread out below us, the lake mirror-like in the sun, the valley of Z-bends that we’d just driven up, the sky too blue to be real, I was looking at her. I felt grateful to be here: this woman, this time, this place. Second chances didn’t come any better.