“Sorry about that,” he murmured with a hint of a smirk.
I smacked him on the shoulder. “No, you’re not.”
“No,” he admitted as his right dimple made an appearance. “I’m not. And I’ll probably do it again.”
But instead of making good on his promise right then, Eric got up and meandered back to his duffel bag, which had accumulated a few changes of clothes during our trip. He pulled out a shirt and plugged in the decrepit old iron. Five-star hotels were a no go, but Eric wasn’t willing to forgo his tailored style.
“I booked us tickets on the next train to Genoa,” he said. He removed his running shoes, waiting for the iron to heat. “From there we can see what’s available and just go. We’ll send another telegram to Brandon before leaving.”
I flopped back into my pillows and sighed. This had become our new normal. New burner phones in every city to contact only each other. Brandon had set up an account at Western Union specifically to receive telegrams from Eric, who sent them only when we were about to leave places, to let them know we were okay. Meanwhile, he collected messages left for him over the course of each week. Brandon was the point of contact with the private investigators hired to dig into John Carson’s history. The idea was to figure out what he really wanted, or at least some weaknesses to exploit. Because no one believed for one second that this strange vendetta had anything to do with the man’s love for me.
Eric pulled out a pair of charcoal wool pants to press. “I know. I’m sick of it too.”
“I just want to go home,” I replied to the ceiling. “Not that our grand European caper hasn’t been lovely.”
And it had. It really had. Shitty accommodations aside, we’d seen all the stuff in Europe I’d never been able to see as an actual poor college student. Art and architecture I’d only seen in textbooks; more markets than I could shake a stick at. I would have been in heaven if it hadn’t been for the potential threat lingering around every corner.
“We haven’t even heard from Carson,” I continued. “Don’t you think there’s a possibility he just gave up?”
The wry look on Eric’s face told me he did not. “John Carson waited exactly ten years before contacting me again. I just ran off with his daughter, whom he forbade me to touch. I don’t think he’s just going to let it go.”
“I still think we should talk more to your family. Not Calvin. Nina. Even Violet.”
For that, I received no response at all. As far as the de Vries clan knew, we were just taking a delayed extended honeymoon over the holidays. The board of DVS hadn’t been happy about it, but since Eric didn’t hold an actual position in the company, and they wouldn’t vote him in as chairman until after he had officially assumed ownership of the family’s stockholdings, all there was to do was wait.
But Eric acted as though we had no allies within his family, and I wasn’t ready to concede the point. Nina, for instance. Or:
“Your grandmother—”
“Who is dead.” Eric’s tone was hollow.
I swallowed. “Who is passed, yes. But she knew, Eric. She knew something like this would happen.”
“Maybe.” He turned his pants over and started ironing the other side.
We’d had this conversation a few times already, debating the extent to which Celeste had really anticipated John Carson’s maneuvering, and why. At first, Eric had thought it had been part of some greater scheme, but now he wasn’t so sure. He thought the sudden change was just a simple gift to us—a marriage by choice, if that’s actually what we wanted.
“Why else would she have changed the terms of her will so last minute?” I argued.
“Maybe she just liked you, Jane. A lot, apparently.”
A hint of a smile fluttered over Eric’s face—he was so serious most of the time, especially since we’d left New York. I wanted more of that levity.
“I don’t mean that,” I said. “Celeste and I seemed to understand each other by the end. The gift to me was after the engagement, but the other one—the one requiring cohabitation—that one she made the morning of the ceremony. Why didn’t she care if we were married anymore?”
Eric stared at his empty left hand—neither of us wore our rings—for a very long time. Long enough for the answer to dawn on him as it had on me.
“She really did know he was going to show up, didn’t he?” he murmured. “She must have seen Jude and Faber when they showed up at the rehearsal dinner.”
I nodded. “She did see them. She was shouting for you, don’t you remember? And they had the same coins, you know. Eric, do you think there is any possibility she recognized them like my mom did?”
Eric swallowed thickly as he clearly followed my train of thought. “Fuck.”
“She knew there was a chance the wedding would be stopped somehow. That someone would show up and—” My eyes practically popped out of my head as another thought occurred to me. “Eric, you don’t think they had anything to do with her…” I couldn’t quite say it. Was that what all of this had come down to? Murder?
My mother’s story whispered from the back of my mind again:
He tell me not to say anything. He give me money if I stay quiet. Or else, he said, I would end up like her.
Dead. In a melon field.
I had scoffed at the idea that John Carson was an outright murderer at the time, but after learning at least some of what he had done to Eric, now I wasn’t so sure. This new hypothesis about Celeste wasn’t helping.
But Eric just shook his head. “I’ve known these guys a long time. They don’t take kindly when people don’t keep their secrets, but I’ve never known anyone to stoop to murder. Just, you know, cruel and unusual torture. The dead aren’t useful to them anymore.”
I sat back in the pillows, unconvinced.
“She was sick, Jane. Really sick. I’m not surprised the drama of the day took it out of her.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. People who were capable of kidnapping and torture didn’t seem to have a particularly strong moral compass. But I had to default to his judgement on the matter.
“So the catch-22 wasn’t to trap us,” Eric murmured as he hung his pants over the back of a chair and started on a shirt. “It was for Carson.”
“Sixty days,” I said. “Just enough time for us to do it on our own.” To do exactly what we’d done. Run away. Stand up to John Carson.
I looked down at my messenger bag, which, unbeknownst to Eric, held the unsigned marriage certificate. The sixty-day deadline was approaching. In another ten days, just after New Year’s, we wouldn’t be married at all. The license would expire, and everything we had done would be nulled.
I considered saying as much, but I didn’t think Eric really cared about the marriage at this point. I had no idea what his plans were for after that deadline. We said this was a honeymoon, but a part of me wondered if he would think it wasn’t worth the trouble after a while.
Maybe he was just biding his time until we could say goodbye for good.
With a deflated sigh, I rolled out of bed and rifled around the ground for the t-shirt I’d tried to wear to bed last night. One look in the mirror told me that I’d have to bear another cold shower in the tub in the corner of the room. I grimaced. It made me look and feel like a plucked chicken. Not hot.
Now finished with his ironing, Eric stripped off the rest of his sweaty clothes and jumped into said shower like the water wasn’t icy cold. I watched appreciatively through the translucent curtain. Eric glanced over and caught me staring. He pushed back the curtain so I had an unadulterated view of his ridiculously cut body.
“Like what you see?” he asked coyly.
I tapped my lip. “You look like an ad for an at-home gym.”
His face screwed up in mock confusion. “Is that a good thing?”
I didn’t reply, just kept ogling.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” he said with a sly arch of one darkened brow. “You’re welcome to join me, you know.”
&nbs
p; I sighed. The bad dye job didn’t matter. After seeing the David in person just yesterday, I could definitively say that Eric was even better looking—and much better endowed—than Michelangelo’s famous statue.
“Jane,” he said. “Come on. The water is actually warm today. Get in here.”
His tone brooked no argument, and before I could think twice, I practically skipped across the room to join him. If thinking about the future wasn’t a viable possibility, then at least I could live in the moment.
Twenty-Three
“We have the rest of the day,” Eric said a little over an hour later as we stood at the bar downstairs and enjoyed a couple of cappuccinos for breakfast. He had splurged with a brioche too, and I was picking off little pieces of it when he wasn’t looking. “Signora Deflorio said she’ll keep our bags until we meet our train at five.”
“That was generous of her,” I said. The miserly old landlady couldn’t even be bribed to turn up the heat while we were here. “Or was it generous of you?”
Eric shrugged in a way that told me my second guess was the correct one. Then he took a sip of his coffee and made a face. A coffee snob to the nth degree, he barely tolerated the dark-roast styles of French and Italian espresso. I had already heard enough lectures on third-wave coffee and the merits of light roasting methods to last me a lifetime.
Before he could launch on yet another coffee tirade, I jumped in. “So, what’s on the list? Another trip to the Uffizi?” We had spent the majority of Tuesday there after we’d arrived, and Eric couldn’t get enough of the Caravaggio collection.
He set down his cup. “I thought maybe we could walk around town since it’s actually nice today.”
We peered out to the bluebird sky above Florence. It had been rainy most of the week, so our sightseeing had been confined primarily to museums and churches. There had been no idle walks by the river or winding around the Florentine streets, like all the travel websites promised.
“Exploring,” I said. “Okay, I like it. Lead on, sir.”
* * *
“Don’t you think that makes you stick out more than a phone would?” I asked for the tenth time as we stepped out of the central market with a backpack full of goodies for lunch later. Prosciutto, a couple of tomatoes, bread, and a half-bottle of wine to carry to wherever Eric was planning to take me today. It was cold and windy, but the sky was clear, and the off season meant minimal tourists. A good day for a picnic.
Eric turned the adorable paper map he insisted on using instead of a phone. Having been here before, he actually knew some parts of Florence reasonably well, but occasionally he needed some help, and that was usually where we got into trouble.
“It makes me look like a tourist,” he replied. “Just like everyone else.”
“Maybe if you were seventy. All right, Grandpa, where to?”
He turned to his map, studying it for the fifth time. Something I had learned about Eric on this trip was that he was only a good guide if he knew the place. But once he was disoriented, his sense of direction was terrible.
“Well, I was thinking maybe we could swing by Dante’s house first—I just want to see the outside. Then we can backtrack a little and cross via the Ponte Vecchio, since I know you wanted to see the shops. Which I think is…that way.” He pointed in the opposite direction of the Arno river, which the Ponte Vecchio crossed. Which he should have known, considering we’d walked across it approximately a zillion times in the last six days.
I grabbed his finger and rotated it in the right direction. He watched the action, then a slow smile crept across his face. Before I could say anything, he leaned down and kissed me.
“Thanks, gorgeous,” he said against my lips.
I readjusted my glasses—the kiss had knocked them off-kilter and fogged them up too. “Anytime. Shall we?”
“It’s only a thirty-minute walk all the way to the piazza, I think. Can those shoes take it?”
I looked down at the gorgeous black booties I’d bought in Paris, which went perfectly with my daily outfit of jeans and sweaters. I’d tried to steal a couple of Eric’s shirts just to change up my spare look, but he wasn’t having it.
“These boots were literally made for walking,” I said. “And that is what I’m going to do.”
One side of Eric’s mouth quirked again, and my insides hummed. How did he always manage to do that?
“Come on, Nancy,” he said, slinging a long arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go exploring.”
* * *
“I can’t believe you skipped Italy when you came to Europe,” he said for the twelfth time as we approached Ponte Vecchio, the famous medieval bridge crowded with jewelry shops over the Arno river. The stacked bridge also provided a helpful shield from the winter wind coming off the river.
“Well, I was twenty, and on a shoestring,” I said. “I had a rail pass and approximately twenty-five dollars a day to live on. Italy was too much of a detour.” I said it flippantly, but I had to admit he was right. I had missed something big by skipping Italy.
“It’s my favorite country in Europe. Everything here is beautiful. Even the ugly stuff is beautiful.”
Eric gesticulated toward the stolid, tile-roofed buildings that bordered the river up and down both sides. Florence wasn’t a huge city, but its center was dense, with tight, stone-colored streets that wove behind the main avenues like snakes.
I looked up and down the river as we crossed the bridge. I hadn’t really seen anything ugly in Florence, but the grime of age coated the bottoms of the stone and stucco buildings, and everything sat just a little crooked as the city had sunken unevenly into itself over centuries. It wasn’t ugly, though—not at all. I would say more that it had seen some stuff. Florence, maybe even more than most cities in Europe, wore its history like a pair of perfect leather boots, the kind that just look better with every scuff.
“Penny and I came to Europe in college too,” Eric said. He chuckled at some unspoken memory. “Man, I had to beg her parents to let her go. But I sponsored the trip from my trust, so they couldn’t really argue much—this was before Grandmother cut me off. They were just upset they couldn’t take her to Greece themselves.”
I listened curiously as we took a tiny side street to get out of the wind whipping off the river. It was a nice day, but it was December, after all.
Eric, however, continued to chatter uncharacteristically. For most of this trip, Eric had been too busy looking over his shoulder to engage in carefree conversation. I’d gotten used to his paranoia over the last month, but that didn’t make it enjoyable.
“It was for a month, and we did the rail pass thing too. Hostels and all of that. Penny was always kind of uncomfortable with luxury…” He trailed off, remembering the girl he’d lost ten years ago. “She couldn’t take this life with me,” he said quietly.
For the first time, I saw guilt in his memory. When he’d told me about Penny before, Eric had blamed her suicide on his family. It was because of their harassment that she’d slit her wrists, convinced she was worthless, to him or anyone.
But now…I couldn’t quite say why, but something about that story didn’t fit. I knew Eric’s family now. I had spent countless hours with his cousin, his aunt, his mother, and his late grandmother: the matriarchal quartet of a great New York dynasty. True, they weren’t the warmest bunch in the world. Nina, Eric’s cousin, was the nicest, and she was still basically an iceberg in training. Violet, her mother, and Heather, Eric’s mom, each had the warmth of a freezer, while his grandmother, Celeste, had been a glacier.
But while I’d suffered my fair share of hazing upon my introduction, the worst had been from outsiders, not the de Vries family themselves. And not once had his grandmother ever suggested that Eric and I split up. From the second I’d walked into her perfect Park Avenue apartment, complete with rainbow-colored hair and my very weirdest clothes, she’d wasted no time inducting me into the family, even if it was paired with incessant criticism of my looks and harsh ri
bbing. And by the end, whether it was through the hours of wedding planning or the weekly trips to the Met, somehow, Celeste and I had become almost close. Bonded, maybe, by our mutual love of Eric.
Which was why it was hard for me to believe now that she would have ostracized a young woman to the point of death. Celeste would have seen an impressionable, and probably beautiful, young woman that her grandson loved…and she would have molded her. Not isolated her.
“Have you ever talked to Penny’s parents? Since everything happened?”
Eric shook his head. “They were convinced it was my fault. They said she’d still be alive if she’d never met me.” The three worry lines across his brow suddenly appeared. “They were right.”
We walked silently down the long, narrow street, both of us lost in our thoughts. Occasionally a small car or someone on a moped would shove us back onto the “sidewalk” that was barely wide enough for one person, but for the most part, we had the cobbled street to ourselves. After checking his map a few more times (and making a couple of wrong turns), Eric eventually guided me up a large hill switch-backing up several wide, winding concrete staircases, until we found ourselves on top of the city.
“Look familiar?” he asked as we reached a large expanse of concrete surrounded by pillared stone railings.
I examined what looked like a glorified parking lot, dotted around the perimeter with a few cars and some closed stands. “Ah…should it?”
Eric smiled, then turned me around.
It was like looking at a postcard.
“Holy shit.” I strode to the edge of one of the railings to look out.
It was Florence. But not the Florence I’d been staying in for the past week. It was the Florence of a million Instagram posts, of thousands of landscapes, of countless movies. Balancing my hands on the wide stone rail, I stared out at the cityscape, taking in the familiar muddy line of the Arno, the bridges I’d crossed so many times, the towering battlements of the Palazzo Vecchio, the massive cupola of the San Lorenzo Basilica, plus countless other landmarks I’d come to know.
The Kiss Plot: Book Two of the Quicksilver Trilogy Page 25
