Nina hummed the tune from The Beatles’ “Golden Slumbers.” Peppe loved The Beatles. She clung to these small details he offered like cellophane.
Still wrapped in sheets like one of Botticelli’s models, Nina preened in the bed, ignoring the crumbling plaster overhead. This apartment might have been falling apart, but it felt like a palace when her lover was in it.
“Very good,” Peppe said, ever the professor, even after sex. “Full marks for you, principessa.”
Nina stretched, allowing the worn linens to fall from her limbs, drawing him to her like a moth to a flame.
“All right, Professor,” she whispered as he returned to the bed and brushed the hair from her face. “Your turn to recite a little poetry.”
“There are many kinds of poetry, my principessa.” His voice was a hummingbird’s wing as it found the curve of her shoulder and set her skin aflutter. “Let’s explore another.”
The knock at the door, brisk and quick, shook me out of my daydream. I turned from the floor-to-ceiling window of the Grace Hotel penthouse, from which the Lower East Side spread, cooking with the rest of the city in the summer heat. The room was air-conditioned, but even so, my silk shell was sticking to the back of my neck. I needed to get these clothes off. I needed a cold shower
But I needed something—someone—else more.
“Nina?”
His voice pulled me to him, and before I could help myself, I was skipping over to the door and yanking it open like a child on Christmas morning. There I found the man who had stood in court and charged my husband with counts of racketeering, trafficking, and bribery.
It had been only a few weeks since the last time I had begged Matthew to see me one last time, but it felt like years. In this room. Where it all started. For one final night.
We can’t do this again.
So wrong.
The last time.
He had said them over and over again as he peeled the garments from my worn body like he was unwrapping a gift. Breathed the words as he set my skin alight with his touch. Whispered them against my lips before taking kiss after torrid kiss.
Still, he had meant them, and so had I.
Still, we were here.
He looked as dapper as ever. A man straight out of any woman’s fantasies, somehow belonging as much to an older time as his own. I’d seen this light gray Ferragamo suit before. It was the sleek, almost mod Italian cut he generally preferred, immaculately tailored to make his waist trim and his shoulders impossibly broad. A straw fedora—always a fedora—was tipped rakishly to one side as he looked me over with sooty, dark green eyes.
Matthew Zola, assistant district attorney.
Zola to friends, Mattie to his family.
But to me, he was just my Matthew.
I frowned.
His smile immediately morphed into a mirror image of my own. “Not exactly the welcome I was expecting, doll.”
“What’s your middle name?” I asked. “I just realized I don’t know.”
For some reason, I hated that I didn’t know. I wanted to know everything about this man who had somehow taken one half of my heart for his own.
The smile reappeared, roguish and slightly crooked over gleaming white teeth. Matthew resembled a pirate in many ways, most particularly because of the chiseled jaw and the graze of black over cheeks that he usually kept clean. He was also very observant, seeming to catch every stray glance of mine.
No one could read me like this man. Considering how trained I was to be unreadable, he might have been the only one to do it at all.
Or perhaps he just undid that training.
“I…well, I don’t have one, actually.”
I frowned more. He chuckled.
“Truly?” I asked.
“I have two first names, though.” He tipped his head. “Italian custom, according to Nonna. They get two first names, but no middle name. If this were Italy, you’d see them marked on the census with a comma. Matthew, comma, Luca Zola. But here it just looks like a middle name on my birth certificate.”
I reached out and fingered his lapel, then ran my touch over the collar of his polka-dotted shirt, the bright red tie. Matthew wasn’t the most well-dressed man in the city—not on a civil servant’s salary, and not with secondhand suits like this from his sister’s consignment shop. But he might have been the most stylish. Unlike most men I knew, for whom clothes were perfunctory uniforms, Matthew was like a character from one of the old movies he loved so much. With