Italian Kisses: A Billionaire Love Story

by Lambert, Lucy

  “Business can wait.”

  “Said no successful CEO ever,” I broke in. I tried to smile, but my lips refused to stop quivering.

  “You’re the reason I’m still in Rome. Well,” he said, glancing at the blurred landscape on the other side of the glass, “Italy, at least.”

  “Seems like a silly reason to me.”

  He sighed. “I’ve known it for a while now. Maybe even that first night we met. The fundraiser. I’ve just been trying to find the right place, the right way to say it. I thought maybe in Florence, surrounded by all the art you love so much. But I can’t wait. I can’t hold it in any longer.”

  “Are you sure? How can you be sure?” I said, my voice very small, so quiet I thought even the low thrum of the train might cover it up.

  “I’ve fallen in love with you, Emma.”

  My throat started closing up. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs started burning with the rest of me.

  My heart did its best to beat its way through my ribs. Alternating waves of hot and cold washed over me. This incredible joy started pulsing through me, along with an unbearable fear tinted with guilt.

  “You can’t be,” I said.

  “I am, though. I love you,” he returned without hesitation.

  It was then I noticed the little tissue dispenser on my seat. They’d thought of everything, it seemed. I pulled one out. Then another, for good measure. I dabbed at my eyes.

  “Are you sure?” I said. I didn’t feel worthy of his love, like I’d tricked him into believing it. Like it was some magical charm that would fade as soon as the potion wore off.

  I hadn’t let anyone love me for a long time. I didn’t think I was worthy of such powerful emotion. Who was I to make someone feel that strongly? No one, that was who.

  “As sure as a person can be about anything in this crazy, uncertain world and life.”

  He stood up and shimmied his way around the table, then sat in the aisle chair beside me. He grabbed my hand and held it tightly. Even though it felt like I burned, he was still hotter.

  “You make me see things in a whole new light. It feels like my stomach does a somersault every time you smile. I can’t get you out of my head, and I never want you to leave. Tell me you feel the same way. Tell me you feel something. Just tell me before I say something stupid and mess this whole thing up.

  “I’m trying to put how I feel into words, but there aren’t any words that truly describe how you make me feel, that will let me tell you what I want you to know.”

  He waited, his eyes searching. The tension in him kept building. I could feel it in the way his fingers squeezed mine, in the way his whole hand and the body attached to it started trembling.

  I searched myself and knew it was true. “I…”

  Liam’s shoulders rose and fell in a great, shuddering sigh. He thought I was going to say no. He thought I was about to tell him that he’d let himself open up to me for nothing.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I squeezed his hand hard, forced my eyes to his. “I do, too.”

  “Yeah?” he said, the tension started visibly draining from him.

  I smiled, even with the tears building up in the corners of my eyes. “I do. I’m in love with you!”

  The tension had dissipated enough that he could return my smile. “You make it sound like that surprises you.”

  “It does, though,” I said, “I never thought I’d feel this way about another person. Except I can’t help it with you. Does that make sense? I feel like I’m babbling.”

  “It makes perfect sense,” he replied. Then he slipped his hands from mine and cupped my face. He drew me forward and kissed me, not caring about how the few tears I couldn’t stop escaping from my eyes wet his cheeks, too.

  “You’re really staying in Italy just for me?” I said.

  “Not ‘just’ for you. Only for you. There’s a difference, don’t you see?” He said, his thumbs sweeping beneath my eyes, collecting any more tears that tried tumbling their way to freedom.

  Every other part of my life shrank, became less important. Trivial, even.

  I was just a girl who loved a boy. A boy who, incredibly, loved me back even though he knew about my faults and my baggage. But wasn’t that one of the definitions of love, someone who not only didn’t care that you had baggage, but who also helped you to shoulder it?

  I laughed, unable to express my relief, my shock and incredulity and joy in any other way. It was catching, it seemed, because Liam laughed, too.

  We laughed so much that the people sat in the group of chairs on the other side of the aisle kept glancing our way.

  Liam didn’t move back to his chair across from me, apparently unwilling to let go of my hand.

  And then I looked up through the window. “Hey, is that it?”

  A city astride a river started speeding towards us, the buildings growing in scale with each breath I took. I recognized the enormous home of the ancient and extinct Medici family and knew.

  “Welcome to Florence,” Liam said.

  We’d arrived in the historic city, but Liam and I had arrived at a destination I’d never let myself dream of reaching.

  Chapter 19

  Sometimes I wonder just how magical Florence really was. When we stepped off the train and Liam led me to a waiting cab, I wondered if it wasn’t a dream. A fantasy come to life.

  The energy of life suffused every fiber of me. I exuded it from every pore. The old buildings and the people who lived in them seemed imbued with that same energy, too. Had it been there all along? Was it everywhere?

  Was it something you could only see when new love, its fire so hot and white you thought it could never dim, had you in its clutches?

  There was also a sense of urgency. As though tomorrow might be too late. Too late to enjoy Liam’s touch, to enjoy all the sights and sounds and experiences that the world, that Florence, had to offer.

  Even our cab driver, an older gentleman whose hair had whitened almost everywhere, couldn’t help grinning when he glanced back at us. “Ah, to be young and happy,” he said.

  That might have been it, I thought. It was a moment of true happiness for us. No grey clouds allowed in our blue skies. Untainted by worry or anxiety or fear.

  The Uffizi was a huge building that reared up right along the Arno River, which itself cut through Florence. Uffizi is literally “Offices” in Italian. The building had belonged to the Medici and had been converted into one of the first true public museums in Europe after the downfall of the old family.

  It was massive, and seemed to consist of thousands of arches and windows. We entered the courtyard hand in hand and right away I felt the eyes of the many beautiful statues in their sconces along the wall watching us.

  The courtyard is said to resemble an idealized street. It did. At one end, the one from which we’d entered, you had the archways leading directly to the river. At the other side the ancient medieval palace called Palazzo Vecchio towered into the air.

  A covered walkway took up part of the ground level of each side of the Uffizi, columns marching alongside them.

  “They have a replica of the David standing out front, if you’d like to see,” Liam said, nodding towards the fortress. Even from this distance, I could already see the David. The statue was tall enough to dwarf the people walking up the stairs around him.

  “Let’s go into the museum,” I said, impatient to see the incredible array of artwork stored within.

  Feeling the way I did, the artwork within took on an ethereal quality.

  The happier I became, the happier Liam became. We rushed through the wings of the museum, both of us desperate to see everything, to take everything in at once.

  We ran up a grand staircase, the rails on either side broader than both of my hands set side by side and polished to a high smoothness. At the top of these stairs the busts of many ancient figures watched us impassively.

  “You have to wonder what they’ve seen with the passing of the centuries,” L
iam said, catching me up before I could go any further. He didn’t look at any face but mine, however.

  “And what is it you see?” I said, noticing my reflection in his eyes.

  “Exactly what I’ve been looking for my whole life.”

  He kissed me at the top of the stairs, other museum patrons having to walk around us.

  Soon we came to the paintings. So many of them, all masterpieces. They had Botticelli’s Adoration of the Magi, as well as Da Vinci’s painting of the same name.

  There were Rembrandts, Titians, Caravaggios. Those and more. All original. I could have died happy there that day.

  The paintings seemed like living things, the colors vibrant, the characters depicted in them in momentary pauses. As though as soon as I looked away they might begin to move.

  I’d never experienced the passion that must have gone into their creation as viscerally as I did that day, there with Liam. At its root, passion means suffering. And a great deal of suffering must have gone into making them.

  That must also have been why it hurt, deep inside, to be there with Liam. Love hurt. It hurt so good I hoped to never be without that particular pain.

  “Everything okay?” Liam said. We stood in front of a roped off Da Vinci sketch depicting a flying machine, and it made me remember that day Liam had taken me floating over Rome in a hot air balloon.

  “Better than okay. So much better,” I replied. “I guess I keep thinking about how if I hadn’t met you that night, I’d probably be back home in St. Louis right now, completely unaware of what I was missing here. Or maybe being aware of it and not caring.” That seemed the bigger crime to me, knowing that these things were here to see and choosing to not see them, even though I’d been so close.

  “I’d be in an office,” Liam said, “New York, maybe. Or London. Thinking about how even though it looked like I have everything that it still felt like I had nothing. It’s funny how lonely it can be.”

  “Then I suppose it’s a good thing we bumped into each other that night. It looks like we both needed some saving,” I said. If I closed my eyes I could recall the wind moving through my hair and how the city had lit up beneath the basket of the balloon as the sun dipped.

  “No argument from me,” Liam replied.

  “It was like we were both blind,” I said, leaning over the ropes to get a better look at the sketching technique Da Vinci used, “So much happening right in front of our eyes that we just couldn’t see.”

  Despite how much we both wanted to stay, eventually we had to move on. The outside world began pressing in.

  It happened when I saw a painting by Giulio Romano. That reminded me of the essay I’d written, which knocked over the dominoes of my memory in quick succession. The essay. The awful grade. Dr. Aretino, the reason for the awful grade.

  “Can we go?” I said, turning away from the painting.

  “Yes, of course,” he replied.

  He took me from the Uffizi, and I started moving towards the street to flag down a cab when he stopped me, clutching my elbow so that I couldn’t get away. “What is it?”

  “Over there,” he said. Then he took me over to one of those partially closed in walkways at the ground level of the Uffizi.

  A young Italian man sat on a three-legged stool, an easel with a large sketchpad attached to it in front of him, easily the size of a modest painting canvass. He had an intense look on his narrow face, and dark pencil dust smudged every one of his fingers.

  A small, hand painted sign leaned against the easel. In Italian, it read Portraits 20 Euros.

  “It’ll be fun,” Liam said, “A nice memento.”

  He pulled a Euro note from his wallet and handed it to the errant artist.

  The boy squinted at me, then told me to go stand over by the nearest column.

  “What about you?” I said, seeing that Liam meant for him to sketch me only.

  “No, I wouldn’t want to ruin it. I’m not very photogenic. Go, it’s okay.”

  That was a lie, of course. The pictures of him all over the internet belied what he said. But he seemed adamant about it, so I went and stood by the column while he stood beside the sitting artist.

  The young man glanced at me again, then rolled up his shirtsleeves and got to work.

  I’d never been anyone’s art subject before, and I actually felt quite self-conscious, wishing that maybe I’d have chosen better clothes, or done my hair differently.

  However, Liam’s smiling face gave me all the reassurance I needed. He watched the young man’s sketch take shape, the small smile on his face growing.

  The artist glanced quickly from me to the sketch, then back again. He picked up different size pencils and then attacked the canvass with them. He’d drop the pencil and then smudge at the lines with his thumbs.

  The whole process took about fifteen minutes. By then, nearly a dozen more pedestrians had come over to watch the piece of art come to life.

  Then he finished with a great heave of his shoulders, as though un-shouldering the burden of his art. The gathered crowd clapped, and I heard people telling each other how beautiful it looked, how it captured me perfectly.

  Liam took out another bill (I couldn’t tell the denomination) and forced it into the young man’s hands.

  “Can I see?” I said, anticipation and wonder spilling over inside me. I wasn’t that pretty. The young man had to have really cleaned me up, used his artistic license, that sort of thing.

  Except Liam wouldn’t let me. He took the paper from the artist and rolled it up, carefully but quickly so that I could only glance quickly. I didn’t see anything.

  “Hey! Let me take a look,” I said, pawing at it. He held it out of reach, grinning so that dimples formed in his cheeks.

  “Nope. Not yet,” he said.

  “I thought it was supposed to be a memento?” I said, incredulous.

  He shrugged as he walked towards the curb, me following in his wake. He waved at a passing taxi, which split from the rest of the traffic along the river to pull up near us.

  “I didn’t say it was a memento for you,” Liam replied as he held the door for me.

  “You will let me see, though, won’t you?”

  Another shrug, this one accompanied by a lopsided smile and a glint in his eye. “Maybe once we’re on the train. Ask me then. Not another word about it until then, though. Or you’ll never get to see. Gives me time to think of where I want to display it.”

  “You wouldn’t!” I said as the cab lurched away from the curb. It was one thing to have it, to look at it privately. Another thing entirely to put it where others might see it. No artist could possibly make me look interesting enough for that.

  Something about that pulled at my mind, but in my excitement I ignored it.

  I hadn’t felt like I did in that cab since probably preschool. Christmas Eve. Wondering what Santa had bought me. Wondering what lay hidden beneath the shiny wrapping paper.

  The suspense nearly killed me, which Liam noticed and made no effort to hide that he enjoyed it.

  Then we sat down in our seats on the train. I hardly noticed how comfy they felt. I didn’t care about the legroom. I hardly even realized that the usher had come and gone after offering us papers and drinks.

  I only wanted to know what that guy had drawn.

  Liam ignored me studiously, leaning back in his chair. He’d booked out the entire block of four again, and the rolled up sketch sat beside him. Its own tension began unfurling it, and I could see a few tantalizing graphite lines.

  I could reach out and grab it away if I wanted to. However, I thought that Liam expected that, and waited for it.

  He flipped through a magazine on his lap one handed, the other first pressing against his cheek in mock boredom.

  The train began moving again with that surprisingly gentle acceleration, turning Florence into a grayish-brown blur in my peripheral vision.

  “So how long are we going to play the waiting game?” I said.

  H
e glanced away from an Italian advertisement for a tiny Fiat coupe. “As long as I enjoy it, obviously. It looks like you’re about ready to vibrate out of your skin, by the way.”

  “Hmph,” I said, crossing my arms tightly and squeezing my ribs. I looked steadily out the window, trying to catch individual trees and buildings with my eyes so that the resolved into semi-normal shapes.

  All the while Liam watched me, amusement laughing in his eyes. And then he grabbed the rolled up sketch and pulled it flat between his hands, examining it himself.

  I did my best to keep my own eyes on the window.

  “He really did capture you perfectly. This is exactly how I see you. Exactly,” Liam said,

  I ignored him. It was the hardest thing I’d done since my aborted attempt to leave the country.

  The large rectangle of paper rustled while he turned it around in his hands. “I’ll stop torturing you now. You can look.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to anymore.” A muscle in my neck began twitching. I wanted to look so badly.

  “Fine. I guess I’ll roll it up…” The rustling noises began again.

  “No!” I said, facing forward. “Oh…” quickly followed.

  It was a beautiful drawing. The image of me had a faraway, dreamy look in her eyes, a touch of a smile on her lips that seemed both happy and a little bit sad.

  There were similarities to the woman I saw in the mirror. The cheeks, the eyes, the lips. But this woman in the sketch looked far more beautiful than I’d ever considered myself.

  “That’s not me,” I said, “He must have seen someone else wandering by with a passing resemblance and sketched her instead.”

  “He never looked anywhere but you and the canvass. I watched. This is you, trust me. Just as I see you. Do you think he takes bigger commissions? I’d like this same one, but a little smaller. Say, small enough for a frame for my desk.”

  “Stop,” I said, blushing.

  “No, seriously. I’d love to have this on my desk.”

  I couldn’t help smiling at that. He wanted to be able to see me even when I wasn’t there. Maybe show the picture and brag about it. Face it towards visitors.