—the last thing she wanted to do was remind Travis of how big she was, not when she had The Dress on, anyway. So instead of digging into the gnocchi, she took one dainty bite of the pasta and had to stifle the groan of ecstasy when it melted on her tongue. She put her fork down and dabbed at her lips with the napkin.
“Something wrong with your food?” Travis asked, his brow furrowed with concern.
“Oh no,” she said, “it’s incredible. I’m, um…”
“What? You’re starved, right? Eat up.”
Travis slurped in a bite of angel-hair pasta, and some sauce landed on his chin. Before she realized what she was doing, Lily reached over, wiped the sauce off with her middle finger, and licked it off.
Travis groaned. “There’s only so much a man can be expected to take. Do that again, and I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
Lily looked at her licked-clean finger and started. “I didn’t… wasn’t…”
Travis grinned. “I really wish you would, you know,” he said, then returned to his pasta with gusto.
What is that supposed to mean? Lily thought as she looked at him, confused by absolutely everything that Travis had said to her since he had apologized for his surly behavior when they sat down.
The smell of pasta and fresh-baked bread and sweet red wine wafted beneath her nose, and her stomach grumbled again, even more insistently this time. Watching Travis enjoy his food while she was using every ounce of will to ignore hers, she couldn’t help but think, Why can men eat as much as they want? Why do I always worry about eating in public? Who am I trying to impress? Travis? He’ll never be impressed by me, so why am I depriving myself of the best food I’ve ever seen?
Lily looked around the restaurant at the other diners, who were very much enjoying their dinners, and made up her mind. She was in Italy, and she was going to make the most of it. Reaching for her fork she took a bite of gnocchi, then another. A soft moan of delight escaped her lips, and when she looked up from her plate, she saw Travis watching her intently, his green eyes glittering in the candlelight.
Forcing the fearful fluttering in her belly to stop, she said, “Do you want some?”
Travis nodded, so she scooped up a forkful of pasta and held it out across the table. He wrapped his long, tanned fingers around her hand, sending a jolt of awareness up and down her spine. His eyes burning into hers, he put his mouth around the tongs of the fork and pulled the pasta onto his tongue. Lily could practically feel his warm lips suckling at her ni**les.
But no matter how swept away Travis’s touch made her feel, she had to remember that Travis had many lovers. Lily couldn’t fool herself into believing she was special. And judging by the beautiful clothes in his luggage, he had one stashed away nearby.
Abruptly, she pulled her hand away and set it down on the plate with a clank. “I’m tired,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to call it a—” But before she could bid Travis a good night and get away from the hot promise she read in his eyes, a gorgeous young Italian stallion approached the table.
“Bella signora, will you honor me with a dance?”
“Me?” She fought the urge to look over her shoulder to see if the young man was talking to a woman behind her. And then she remembered. I’m wearing The Dress. Evidently its magic powers hadn’t worn off quite yet.
Gracing the stud with a wide smile, she held out her hand to him, glad for the excuse to get away from Travis.
“The bella signora,” Travis interrupted with a sneer, “is otherwise occupied right now.”
If Lily hadn’t been so confused by the show of masculine rites going on between the two men, she might have been able to laugh at how Travis was obviously flexing his biceps.
It was just her luck, she cursed, that Travis had picked that particular night to become possessive of her.
Especially when she had already decided that she was not, under any circumstances, going to give in to her body’s demands, no matter how much she wanted to feel his heavy weight pressing her down into the mattress. Besides, since she was nearly positive that he had an Italian lover stashed away, Lily wasn’t about to miss out on her one chance to dance with a sexy foreigner. Sure, his shoulders weren’t as broad as Travis’s, his brown eyes didn’t have the smoldering heat that Travis’s green eyes did; but all that aside, he was definitely the second-cutest guy who had ever asked her to dance.
Ignoring Travis, Lily let the young man lead her to the dance floor. The stud held her close, pressing the firm lines of his body against hers, but Lily was hardly able to pay attention to him; not when Travis was staring holes into her back, not when she would rather have been in Travis’s strong, warm arms.
As if from a distance, she saw herself dancing with the gorgeous foreigner, his hands moving down her back, and knew, without a doubt, how proud Luke would be of her. Travis has never had a woman taken away from him, Luke had said. At the time, Lily hadn’t thought that she would be the first one, but now she hoped that when Travis saw how interested this guy was in her, he would begin to want her even one-tenth as much as she wanted him.
The warm chords of the classical guitar reminded her of that fateful night at the fashion show. It seemed like a lifetime away, a life where she was the invisible girl hiding in the corner, and Travis was the larger-than-life pirate who could ransack an entire ship and never once notice her for all the gold and silver blinding him. There in Italy, in The Dress, Lily felt that girl slipping away. It was frightening to lose the person she had always been; but the joy she felt at emerging from her cocoon, even if it had taken thirty years, was so great she wanted to sing it out to the whole world.
Caught up in a sudden rush of joy at the new colors that she saw before her, she pulled the Italian closer and relished the sensations of hard male muscle against her soft curves. He wasn’t Travis, but he was life, and right then, that was the most important thing.
The song changed from soft and slow, to pulsing and intense. Lily followed the lead of her partner, melting into him. He moved so well and she was feeling so alive, so brand-new. She was in beautiful Tuscany, in the arms of a well-built Italian man at least five years her junior.
Suddenly, all her senses came alive. Travis isn’t at our table anymore, she realized. He stole her from the Italian without a word and pulled her into his arms. She pressed her hips against his, rubbing herself against the thick bulge in the front of his jeans.