It was packed and I could see why. This hotel cost a freaking fortune but it was in an awesome location with spectacular views.
Looking around, I did the right thing with the dress and sandals. If I’d thrown on a tee and shorts with this crowd, I would be way underdressed.
I was so busy studying those around me and patting myself on the back for my wardrobe decisions at the same time trying to look cool and aloof like this was an everyday occurrence for me that I didn’t pay attention to where the maitre d’ was taking me.
Then I paid attention and nearly passed out.
Seriously. I nearly passed out.
This was because every table was taken except one that was in front of two doors opened to the elements, the view of the lake, the sun shining in and at the table in the corner next to it, his back to the wall, sat Sampson Cooper.
Sampson Cooper!
Oh.
My.
Freaking.
God!
I couldn’t sit one table over from Sampson Freaking Cooper!
What was he doing in Italy?
What was he doing sitting alone at a table in a beautiful, expensive hotel in Italy?
Where was the supermodel-esque hot chick that had to be his woman?
Perhaps she was in their room, finishing up her makeup seeing as, when I finally tore my eyes from him, I saw he didn’t have any dirty dishes on his table, only a coffee cup and cafetière half-full of coffee. Perhaps he was tired of waiting for her, he needed caffeine, he was a man on the go and didn’t wait around for chicks, even hot ones that looked like supermodels, so off he went telling her to meet him downstairs.
Yes, that made sense. That had to be it.
While we approached and I tried not to hyperventilate, my eyes went from his cafetière to his face to see he was still looking out his set of opened doors, in profile, his strong jaw stronger in real life than in pictures or on TV, his high cheekbones higher and more defined, his straight nose straighter and more attractive, his thick, black hair clipped short to his head had a healthy sheen to it that was healthier in real life and the appealing dark tone to his skin he got from being half white, a quarter black and a quarter Hispanic was far more appealing in person.
Oh man, I was not going to be able to do this.
Sure, I had about ten thousand, seven hundred and twenty-two fantastical, intense and long-running fantasies about this guy, how we would meet, he would fall in love with me instantly and sweep me away from the hell that was my life and make me blissfully happy forever but now, faced with the possibility of sharing his airspace, I wanted not one thing to do with him.
The maitre d’ stopped and said something in Italian to me and when I stopped and turned dazedly to him, it hit me.
I knew how I would handle this.
Sampson Cooper didn’t exist.
Not across the table. Only in a dreamworld.
I would ignore him, his hot chick would show, my fantasy would be crushed but I’d get on with my day, my vacation and then use him as a totally killer travel story when I got home.
Paula and Teri would eat this up. They loved him as much as me. Teri even had a life-size, cardboard standing thingie of him in his Indianapolis Colts uniform. She kept it in her bedroom. She also asked me once if I thought that was putting off the real life men that she invited there (and there were a fair few) and many of them, more than seemed appropriate, found it difficult to perform. I did not have within my mental hard drive statistics about how often or what percentage of men could not go the distance. I was also not a man and therefore could not know if a life-size cardboard cutout of a hot guy wearing football pads would affect performance. What I did know was that if there was a life-size cardboard cutout of Pamela Anderson in her Baywatch suit in the same room as me and a guy doing the nasty, I’d definitely find it at the very least distracting.
So I decided I’d use him as a cool-ass story and they would never know I spent the entire breakfast ignoring his existence and staring at a lake.
I communicated in the universal language of smiling to the maitre d’, his already big smile got enormous for some bizarre reason that made me fear he was going to hug me and declare in Italian I was his long lost daughter, something which I wouldn’t understand since I didn’t speak Italian and thus I’d probably freak out and do this in front of Sampson Cooper.
No, no. Repeat after me. Sampson Cooper does not exist.
It would be fine. Everything would be fine.
Still smiling weirdly maniacally, the maitre d’ went on the move. I had wanted to sit with my back to Cooper’s table but the maitre d’ was scooting me in on the side facing him in a way that was strangely paternal at the same time it was aggressive. I had no choice but to go with it or maybe end up in a smackdown with a maitre d’hotel in an exclusive hotel on Lake Como with Sampson Cooper as one of my audience and, for obvious reasons, that wouldn’t do. It would be harder to avoid Cooper when he was sitting in my direct line of sight but I’d survived a very bad marriage, my husband had cheated on me and, with his girlfriend, plotted my demise.
If I could live through that, I could sit across from Sampson Cooper.
So I sat across from Sampson Cooper.
With a dramatic flourish that startled me so much I jumped a little, though it was kind of cool but I couldn’t exactly explain why, the maitre d’ flipped open my menu and plopped it in my upturned hands. Then he spoke swiftly to me in Italian all the while my head was tipped back and I glued my eyes with fierce determination at his face, my lips curved in a small smile that I hoped didn’t look stupid in the very unlikely event that Sampson Cooper was actually looking at me. He kept talking for some time and if he was describing the specials (did they do breakfast specials?), they had a lot of them.
Then he clapped his hands, fluttered them in the air for a second and turned toward Sampson Cooper. I caught his wink at Cooper, something else I thought was weird, then he scurried away.
I turned my attention directly to the menu.
Then I did what I’d been doing the last two weeks in Italy and that was calling up my very limited (but increasingly less so) experience of looking at menus in Italian restaurants. Cooter was not one to take his wife on the town and when he did, it was for pizza and not in the kind of pizza joints that printed their options in Italian.
Mozzarella, I knew but I didn’t see that anywhere on the menu (alas). I saw something that ended with di funghi which I was pretty certain meant mushrooms because other stuff I’d ordered with those words in it also had mushrooms. I hoped it was a mushroom omelet because that sounded really good and I had hope since the word before it was “omelette” and I figured an omelette was an omelet the world over.
I’d made this decision when a cafetière was plonked on my table with a small elegant pitcher of cream and matching sugar bowl and another Italian man, my waiter, started talking to me. He didn’t talk long but he did clap when he was done and move away without taking my order.
I watched him go and, as best I could without looking like a freak, I turned my attention to the lake without my eyes once hitting Sampson Cooper.
Then it struck me I needed coffee and I needed it STAT.
So, as casually as I could muster, I turned my attention to the cafetière, did the press thing, upended the coffee cup at my place setting and prepared my coffee.
Then, sipping carefully so as not to burn my tongue or choke, I turned my attention back to the lake.
Seriously, it was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it. It kind of sucked that Cooter and Vanessa wanting me dead was the reason why I had this gift but… whatever. It was a gift. I’d lived through hell, now it was my turn in heaven and Lake Como not only looked but felt just like what heaven had to be.
The waiter came back, shot some Italian at me and I made a stab in the dark and decided he was asking for my order. I didn’t bother speaking just did a lot of smiling and pointed to what I wanted on the menu. He nodded, snatch
ed the menu out of my hand, did a dramatic flourish with it in the air that took slightly less space than the maitre d’s flourish but, even more compact, it was no less theatrical, before tucking it smartly under his armpit and he hurried away.
I was looking after him in preparation for the taxing effort of once again turning my head and not acknowledging Sampson Cooper’s presence when I heard a deep, low, masculine chuckle and it was so attractive, without my permission, my eyes went to him.
Then my heart stopped beating. Total stall. It would take paddles to get it pumping again.
He was no longer chuckling but he was smiling.
At me.
“Do you speak English?” he asked and I blinked.
Holy cow! He was talking to me!
“Yes,” my mouth, fortunately, answered for me.
“These guys got it goin’ on,” he informed me and I blinked again.
“What guys?” my mouth, luckily, kept speaking.
He tipped his head in the direction of where my waiter was last seen and my heart started beating again, hard and fast. I could feel it in my neck, my wrists, even at my temples.
“You think they train them in that shit?” he asked and I blinked again.
Sampson Cooper just used a curse word in a swanky Italian hotel on Lake Como!
Why did I think that was so… freaking… cool?
“What…” I hesitated then cautiously went on, “shit?”
He smiled again.
My heart stopped beating again.
Then he answered, “The menus.” He shook his head then immediately proceeded to blaspheme in a swanky Italian hotel on Lake Como. “Jesus. The first time the head guy did it, thought he was gonna clock me.”
“That would have been unfortunate,” I observed and then I sucked in a sharp breath when he threw his beautiful head back and burst into deep, rough-like-velvet laughter.
I’d never heard him laugh. I’d never even seen him laugh. Smiles, lots. Chuckles, sure. Grins, more than occasionally.
Full on laughter.
Never.
He was the most beautiful man I’d ever seen in my life. By far. And that was before I saw him in real life and in real life he was more beautiful than ever.
But that deep, rough-like-velvet laughter glided right across every inch of my skin, leaving beauty in its wake that soaked through and, I swear to God, it felt like it settled into my soul.
He sobered but his dark brown eyes were still dancing when he focused on me and agreed, “Yeah, that would have been unfortunate.”
It was at this point I jumped at least six inches because the maitre d’ was suddenly there, talking fast, gesturing broadly, his head going back and forth between Sampson Cooper and me.
Then my waiter was there.
I had no idea what was going on and, further, had no hope of finding out because he not once used the words mozzarella, ciao, grazie, capisce or pizza and if he did, that probably wouldn’t have explained what was happening.
But before I could form any conclusions or, say, react at all, my entire body went rigid when I watched in sheer, unadulterated terror as the waiter moved my cafetière, creamer, sugar bowl and coffee cup to Sampson Cooper’s table.
What were they doing?
Cooper’s deep, rough-like-velvet voice came to me and my eyes shot to him when he asked, “Do you speak Italian?”
“Uh…” I was able to get out before…
No joke.
Seriously.
The maitre d’ grasped my elbow, forcibly yanked me out of my chair in that aggressive but paternal way he had then guided me around the table, shuffling me between my old table and Sampson Cooper’s definitely current table at the same time the waiter scooched with me. The waiter pulled out the chair across from Cooper and the maitre d’ plonked my booty in it.
I was deep breathing and feeling, acutely, like I was in the preliminary stages of my first ever seizure when my head tipped back for some reason and I saw Sampson Cooper had stood. Not fully, just up a little from his seat, his eyes on me. I thought it was to protest but when the waiter shoved my chair (with me in it, incidentally) under the table, he sat again and I realized it was because he was a man, I was a woman but mostly he was a gentleman who stood when a woman was seated at his table and I was a woman who found herself, for inexplicable reasons, seated at his freaking table.
No man had ever done that when I’d been seated at his table and there was a beauty to it that seemed to seep into my soul too.
My heart stopped again and, fortunately, because I didn’t want Sampson Cooper to see me panting, so did my breath.
The maitre d’ and waiter whisked themselves away.
“You figure they needed your table?” Sampson Cooper asked dryly and, considering my present circumstances, I had no idea how I managed to loosen up enough to do it, maybe because the situation was so bizarre, so extreme, so frightening, I had to let some tension go but at his comment, it was my turn to burst out laughing.
And, God’s honest truth, since Cooter died I’d smiled more than I had in years which might not say good things but there it was.
But I hadn’t laughed like that in so long I forgot how good it felt.
When I quit laughing, I focused on him to see him grinning at me but there was a look on his face, a warmth in his eyes, an intensity, it almost felt like… no kidding… like he found me fascinating.
Me.
Kia Clementine
And seeing that look in his eyes aimed at me, no one but me, a look I had seen in… never, never had I seen a look like that directed at me, I wanted to run. And I wanted to run because I wanted that to be it, my last memory of Sampson Cooper. I wanted to go somewhere and burn it into my brain. I wanted to keep it with me forever.
But I couldn’t do that so I forced myself to reply, “They are pretty busy.”
His grin faded but his lips still twitched when he agreed, “Yeah.” Then he sat back, snagging his coffee mug as he did and he asked, “Do you mind?”
“Mind?”
“Sitting with me,” he explained before taking a sip.
Uh. Yes! I was pretty certain my body needed my blood to flow through its veins and my heart was constantly stopping so I didn’t figure that was good.
But obviously I couldn’t tell him that so instead, I said, “Not if you don’t mind.”
His eyes changed again, they dropped quickly down my torso then up and he murmured in a sexy way that I was pretty certain made my nipples go hard, “Oh, I don’t mind.”
Oh.
My.
God!
Did he just do that?
And if he did, what did it mean when a man did that? The last man to flirt with me was Cooter and he did it by buying me extra tater tots at the local burger joint.
Did it mean what I thought it meant?
Oh.
My.
GOD!
He took another sip from his coffee, put it down and extended his big hand my way. I stared at it luckily not jumping ten feet and it was not my first time seeing his masculine, long-fingered, well-veined, strong-looking hand that I thought it was immensely attractive in a way that if I was just a shade on the sick side, I could create a religion based on it.
It was just the first time I saw it in real person.
“I’m Sam Cooper,” he introduced and I forced myself to lift my hand, put it in his and his fingers curled around instantly, warm and strong.
“Kia,” I told him, my voice softer because I was freaking out because he was holding my hand! “Kia Clementine.”
That got me another grin.
“Kia Clementine?” he asked.
I nodded.
He held my eyes.
He also kept hold of my hand.
My heart stopped again.
Then he murmured again in that sexy way, “Clementine.”
“Yep,” I said.
His head tipped to the side and he remarked, “Great name.”
&nb
sp; “It’s my husband’s,” I told him stupid, stupid, stupidly.
His hand tightened in mine for a half a second then released it.
Oh yes.
Stupid!
His face was still friendly but now somehow a shade remote when he noted, “You’re married.”
“Not anymore.”
Luckily, this came out calmly not quickly or desperately.
Thank God.
“Divorced?”
“He’s dead.”
His back straightened and his eyes again grew intense, this time in a different way. There was emotion there, compassion, and it, too, was knock your socks off beautiful.
“I’m sorry,” he said gently.
And that was when, no joke, I blurted, “Four months ago, half his head was shot off in a motel room while he was boinking my high school arch-nemesis who remained my arch-nemesis long after high school, though I didn’t know that until her husband burst in on them in the local motel with a shotgun he was prepared to use. My husband got dead. Her husband got five to ten for involuntary manslaughter.”
Sampson Cooper blinked.
Okay, uh… what was that? Why did I tell him that?
Not only was I in imminent danger of having a heart attack, I was also clearly temporarily insane.
I needed to get out of there, like, yesterday.
“No shit?” he asked into my mental strategizing on how to beat my retreat.
I shook my head.
“Christ,” he muttered.
“That about says it all,” I muttered back, looking from him to the table and wondering if I should pretend to have a crying jag at the passing of my husband and ask to be excused then get the first taxi, rental car, bus, train or plane out of Lake Como and go back to Heartmeadow, Indiana, a place Sampson Cooper had never been and one where he’d more than likely never go and immediately enter what would probably be years of therapy to deal with this encounter.
But before I could fake tears, his deep, rough-like-velvet voice came back at me.
“Are you okay?”
I looked up at him and again there was intensity, this was curious, cautious but also still warm.