few hints of silver threading his otherwise shiny dark hair. Skin the color of soft, pounded leather, a pair of glasses perched over a patrician nose. Not a particularly handsome or young man, but one who became utterly beautiful when he talked about the great artists of Florence. His deep eyes crinkled at the edges and danced. His hands came alive.
Two weeks into Nina’s course on classical Renaissance art, Peppe had lectured on Botticelli and took the class to the Uffizi to see the master’s work.
Long after the class had moved on, Nina stared at the Birth of Venus, absorbed by the curling strawberry blonde hair of the naked goddess and her unabashed curves as she stood on her shell. The fullness of her breasts, her thighs.
She had turned to find her professor equally entranced.
“Hypnotizing, is she not?” He stared at her while he spoke, waving his lithe, graceful hands toward the picture.
It was the first time Nina had imagined those hands on her. The first time she had imagined or wanted anyone’s hands on her at all.
Principessa.
That was what he called her, even before he learned who and what she was. The first time was when Nina had wandered to his office hours wanting more information about Botticelli and other masters. She was his principessa a few weeks later when he took her on a private tour of the lesser-known art hidden in Florence’s cathedrals, then kissed her in the shadow of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore while the Arno river shushed in the distance. And again in the golden light of his family’s deserted olive farm after making love to her in the cool spring night for all of Tuscany to witness. Once more when he had told her goodbye at the train station, cupping her face between those beautiful hands and promising her he would never forget her in a thousand years.
She couldn’t stay with him, nor him with her. Nina had a family to return to, and so did he. Two daughters and a wife, all waiting for him in their apartment near the edge of the city. A life that in her heart Nina knew could never be hers, but that she had wanted badly, nonetheless.
She pressed a hand over her stomach, over the remainder of that dreamlike farewell.
If only.
“Hey, lady! Get out of the road!”
Nina opened her eyes just in time to stop herself from falling into the street. Two cars and a taxi blared loudly as she stepped backward on a sharp breath and bumped into someone else.
“Oh my! I’m so sorry,” she said to an elderly Asian woman taking small, solid steps.
“Need some help, sweetheart?”
A warm hand steadied Nina’s arm, and she looked up to find a pair of dark, kind eyes twinkling with interest. A delivery worker, stopped mid-shift, unloading boxes of produce into the basement of a Dominican restaurant. He was handsome in that way some of her friends liked—the ones who engaged in short-lived affairs with their doormen or cleaning crew members, trying to avoid (or maybe provoke) their parents’ ire.
Such affairs never lasted, and, to be honest, Nina found them distasteful. The way her friends used men like these as objects, not people. And the way they used them back, like trophies, not women. They lasted a few weeks, a month or more. If there was any trouble, money took care of it. And if there wasn’t, even better.
Nina had managed to avoid those sorts of things, instead allowing her cousin Eric to act out enough for both of them. Truthfully, she had always enjoyed the way he goaded their grandmother, the matriarch of their great New York family, whenever she forced them through another etiquette lesson or dance class together. But while Eric was like a brother, he was also the dashing heir to the de Vries family fortune. His boyish misbehavior was chalked up to strength of character. Permitted, even if not fully condoned. Nina, on the other hand, couldn’t leave the house with a hair out of place.
Rules were always different for women.
Even so, Eric wasn’t always the golden boy. Nina remembered his face the first time Grandmother had told him that Penny, his Greek girlfriend from a working-class neighborhood, was utterly inappropriate for him. She remembered his stubbornness when he had kept seeing Penny and even brought her with him to Dartmouth the following year. She remembered the fiery defiance when he had announced their engagement last Christmas, just a few months