Strangely, his formal speech and clipped tones had the effect of loosening her chest, and she looked at him, really looked at him, taking in the strain etched on his face and experienced a sudden swell of her heart to realise she wasn’t the only one to have acted completely out of character.
“I guess even an android’s hard drive can malfunction,” she said softly.
His eyes snapped back open.
She gave a small shrug. “For a brief moment in time, you seemed entirely human.”
He dragged a hand down his face and grunted a laugh. “For a brief moment in time, I felt more alive than I think I’ve ever done before.”
His honesty made her heart swell even harder.
Pulling the chair out next to his, she twisted it to face him before sitting down. Impulse had her putting a foot on his lap. The way he looked from her foot to her face made her smile. “I liked the human Gennaro.”
“You shouldn’t.”
“Yes I should. I’ve never come with a man before.”
His next grunt of laughter had more substance to it, and he shook his head. “Are you being serious?”
“Completely. Sex has never done anything for me,” she admitted.
He shook his head again in clear disbelief.
She wriggled her toes and expelled a long, peaceable breath. She’d spent so many years… her whole life… thinking of Gennaro as a forbidding block of ice – a gorgeous block of ice, yes, but a block of ice all the same – that she’d never allowed herself to imagine him as someone capable of having the same doubts and fears and uncertainties as everyone else, and certainly not as someone who ever lost control.
A few minutes earlier, they’d both lost control and her veins still buzzed from it.
“You make me feel sexy,” she said simply.
“And your previous lovers didn’t?”
There was only one, and no, he didn’t.”
“So why were you with him?”
“Because I loved him… just not in that way.” She pulled a rueful face. “If he’d made me feel like you do, I’d have married him in a heartbeat, but I guess you can’t force desire. It’s either there or it isn’t, and with you it is.”
His face fell, eyes narrowing with a warning. “Don’t fall in love with me, Luisa.”
“I loved Riccardo because he was a good, kind man. You, dear husband, are an arsehole.”
There was a beat of silence after this before Gennaro burst into a deep rumble of laughter.
It was such a rich, infectious sound that Luisa laughed too, laughing even harder to remember herself just a few hours earlier, all skittish and filled with nervous anticipation for what the evening would bring.
Well, the evening had brought her pleasure, and it had freed something in her too that allowed her to see her husband with the eyes of the woman she’d grown into and not the frightened child she’d once been.
His fingers wrapped around her foot. “You will remember that, yes? That I’m an arsehole?”
“I’ve only got four days left of being stuck with you so I’m hardly likely to forget.”
The amusement faded. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
She raised her shoulders. “You don’t have to worry about that – I hate you too much to let myself do something stupid like fall in love with you.”
His brooding face creased into a smile that was far more heartbreaking than she’d ever have imagined a smile fromGennaro could be. “Despite the childlike illustrations she produces, little Luisa Rossellini really did grow up.”
She grinned. “Just not in height.”