“As it was not so subtly pointed out to me, I can write a curriculum in Greece as well as I can in LA, at least until the semester starts.”
“Frankie?”
“Obviously.”
“Shit, Bianca, you got on a plane and came here without knowing . . .”
“Byrne,” a new voice calls out from behind him and he cringes. Yiannis, the guide, is back, and with him, the site manager, Grigórios, who already kind of hates him because he hates everyone who isn’t Paolo or one of the post-docs he recruited himself for the project. “What are you doing? Who is that? She can’t be here.”
“It’s okay, it’s . . . I know her.”
“Bianca?” Paolo’s voice joins them, coming up around the other side of the site, stepping closer.
“Hi Paolo,” she says.
“You’re here. She’s here. I thought you said . . .”
Xavier shakes his head. “I . . . was wrong, I guess.”
“It was bound to happen sometime,” his boss says, his eyebrows lifting. “Why don’t you call it for the day? We’ll see you tomorrow . . . or maybe the day after?” Xavier snorts, but Paolo’s not done. “It’s lovely to see you again, Bianca.”
“You too,” she says sweetly, somehow, even though Xavier wants to throttle everyone around them and from the look in her eyes, she does too. They were finally getting somewhere.
“C’mon,” he says, taking her arm, helping her over those stupid rocks that nearly murdered her on her way up here.
“No, wait. I’m not . . . I can’t . . . What were you going to say?” she asks, spinning on the toe of her sandal, nearly losing her balance and taking a header off the side of the ledge, but he catches her easily, pulling her in close.
“Byrne, get her out of here!” Grigórios shouts again, further away now but still very clearly pissed off.
“Xavier, what were you going to say?” she asks, ignoring everything around them, her hands at his forearms warm except for . . . a cool metal touch from her left hand, and when he looks down, there’s her ring, glinting up at him, and it makes him braver than he ever thought possible.
“You know, don’t you?” he whispers, lifting a hand to tuck a wild curl back behind her ear and tracing a slow path from her temple to her chin with his thumb. “You’re a smart girl. The smartest I’ve ever met. You have to know.”
She leans into his touch with a soft shake of her head. “This isn’t something I can know unless you tell me. It doesn’t matter unless you tell me.”
“Byrne!”
Fuck. Okay, he needs to get them out of there. Needs to take her someplace where they can have some privacy. To talk or . . . not talk, or whatever the hell she came here for.
“We’re going, we’re going!” he shouts back over her shoulder. “Come on, before they fire me and I’m on the next flight back with you to LA.”
He leads her down off the more precarious parts of the site, but once they’re back on the relatively new and unsightly-as-fuck paved pathways around the ruins, his hand slides from her elbow to twine their fingers together, relishing the feeling of that ring pressing a mark into his skin.
She’s still wearing it.
That must mean . . . fuck, that has to mean something.
Everything else, they can figure out.
“You’re staying in the city?” he asks, as they weave their way through the tourists and head out onto the streets.
“Just a few blocks away.”
“It’s probably nicer than my place. Do you want to go there?”
“Yeah,” she agrees. “So we can talk.”
“Yeah, talk.”
