The waiter laid out steaming dishes of seafood and pasta. A bottle of white wine was poured into crystal glasses.
He didn’t want to know more. So why did he have to open his mouth and ask, “You’re an only child?”
She shook her head and cast her eyes down on the tablecloth, but not before he saw them cloud over. “No.”
He knew there was a Pandora’s box of emotions in that simple word and refused to open it. He remained silent.
After several beats, she glanced up. “I bet you terrorized the local villages.”
Her smile was teasing, yet hesitant. There was a lopsided dimple on the corner of her mouth. Luca felt a strange disappointment that she deflected the topic of conversation back to him.
Luca’s lips quirked with the memory. “Oh, we did. My brothers and I were rivals with the Konstantinos boys. We tried to top each other’s pranks.”
“Tell me about them.” It was a perfectly natural question, but Luca sensed her unusual interest in the way she leaned slightly towards him.
“One time, in the middle of the afternoon when most of the locals were napping, Markos, the eldest Konstantinos boy, snuck to the village and stole all the washings that were hanging out to dry.”
Her fork arrested midway to her mouth, strands of pasta coiled tight around the tines. “Markos did?” There was something in the way she said his friend’s name that brought a surge of jealousy through him.
Merda! Was the little gold digger in love with his friend after all?
“I was following him, keeping really quiet until he reached the last house.” Luca sipped his wine, deliberately stretching the story so that he could study her reaction. “I recognized that little brick house. It was where Lucia, not her real name,” he quipped, “lived. She was the village beauty. Markos and I were madly in love with her. I was letting him do his naughty little deed until we both saw it at the same time.”
“Saw what?” She hadn’t touched her food. She appeared thoroughly absorbed by the story.
He paused, keeping her in suspense. “Her bra.”
“Bra?” She appeared perplexed.
He didn’t know why he was telling her all this. The other option, of Sabrina telling him all about herself...he didn’t want any of that. “There was no way in hell I was going to let Markos touch her underwear. Just as he was reaching out to pull her bra down,” he said, “I sprung out of nowhere and knocked his hand off. I was wearing a bracelet, and it got caught in a button in one of those shirts hanging out to dry, I think. Markos took a swipe at me and I tried to avoid it. It snapped the laundry line from one of its posts.”
“Oh no!” Sabrina cried, equally distressed and entertained.
Luca was gratified by her reaction and continued. “We were so busy fighting with each other we did not notice the family had come out. Lucia caught us tugging on both ends of her underwear.”
Sabrina groaned. “Poor girl! She must’ve been mortified.”
He shrugged. “That was nothing compared to our punishment. Our fathers made us wash all the clothes, go around the houses, apologize, and hang all the clothes back on the washing line.”
“It served both of you right.” She laughed, and it was a nice, unaffected laugh. Luca wasn’t immune to it. “Did Lucia ever speak to the two of you again?”
“She did, eventually.” Luca shot her a sly grin. “And there was more than speaking involved. I got her underwear after that fair and square.”
Predictably, she blushed. And as usual, Luca found it alarmingly…endearing.
“What about Markos? Did he get another of her underwear too?”
Merda! So it was back to Markos again. After he was through with her, the other man’s name would just be a mere echo in her memory. “We’ve never shared women,” he murmured coolly, ”at least not until now,” he added under his breath in Italian. He didn’t want any other man’s name on her lips when she was with him.
“What was that?” Her pale brows met in the middle again. “You said something not in English.”
“I said Markos lost interest in her.” He waited for a betraying reaction on her face. “He’s the kind who never looks back,” he said with an edge to his tone.
She lowered her lids and suddenly seemed to find her sea bass interesting. Her expression was inscrutable.
“What about you?” Damn. He’d gone and done it when he said he wouldn’t. He had caved in and asked.
She glanced up, startled. “What about me?”
“I bet you drove all the boys in your neighborhood crazy.”
She shook her head. “No. I was nowhere near being a Lucia. I looked weird when I was young.”