She flushed, but didn’t back away from him. He noticed her body was already reacting to his proximity. The hairs on her arms were drawn toward his energy and goose-bumps pricked her skin. He wondered what would happen if he reached out ran a hand along the smooth skin of her forearm. He could almost imagine the soft feel of it under his fingertips.
“You know…with the accent.” Her eyebrows drew together. “And the old-fashioned manners. And what’s with the grandmother-charming?” She glanced at him before looking back toward the guitarist. “Are you trying to charm me, too?”
A slow smile spread across his face. “Are you charmed, Beatrice?” he asked, letting her name roll of his tongue. “I don’t think you are.”
Ignoring his own reaction and reminding himself of his objective, he took a deliberate step back and slipped his hands in his pockets, nodding toward another musician at the end of the parking lot.
“Shall we?”
She followed where his eyes led and they stepped back into the flow of people.
“Your personality is too large for one letter, Beatrice. And, for the record, I don’t think anyone charms your grandmother. She does all the charming necessary.”
She laughed, her head falling back as her eyes lit in amusement.
Giovanni stopped for a second, entranced by the clear, joyful sound. He stared at her, drawn to her dark eyes. He stepped toward her a fraction too quickly, but the girl was lost in her own amusement and didn’t notice.
“Yeah, Gio. My grandmother got all the charm in the De Novo family. She’s got it in spades, my grandfather used to say,” she replied, still chuckling.
Not all of it.
“Gio?” he asked, amused she had chosen the name only his closest friends called him.
“Well,” she shrugged, “you don’t look like a ‘Gianni’ to me, so…yeah, ‘Gio.’ If you’re going to call me Beatrice, I’m going to call you Gio.”
He stopped in the middle of the crowd, staring at her until she halted and turned back to look at him.
“What?” she asked, and her forehead wrinkled in confusion.
The people flowed around her, the seemingly endless, monotonous stream of humanity he had lived among for five hundred years. But she stood, dressed in black, her fair skin flushed with life and her brown eyes lit with a kind of intelligence, curiosity, and humor that set her apart. For a moment, he allowed himself to forget his interest in her father and enjoy the unexpected pleasure of her company.
She was bold and shy, formal and friendly. She was young, he realized, and innocent in a way he could hardly remember, yet her short life seemed to have been shaped by loss and abandonment. She was, surprisingly, rather fascinating.
“Inexplicable,” he muttered under his breath, and walked toward her in the crowd.
He hadn’t realized she heard him, but her eyebrows lifted in amusement.
“Nothing’s inexplicable. Just not explained yet.” She smirked at him in the noisy mass of people, and he let his green eyes linger on her face for a brief moment before they kept walking through the fair.
“Perhaps, Beatrice. Perhaps you may be right.”
Chapter Four
Houston, Texas
November 2003
“Why do you dye your hair black?”
Beatrice looked up from the computer screen to see Giovanni staring at her again from his seat in the reading room.
“What?”
“It must be dark brown anyway; why do you dye it black?” he asked again, his eyes narrowed intently on her face.
She wanted to laugh at his confused expression but kept a straight face as she answered, “Because it’s almost black, but not quite.”
“I don’t understand.”
She looked at him over the reference desk, a small smile flirting at the corner of her mouth. “I just felt like it hadn’t really committed to a color, Gio. I don’t do things half-assed. I don’t want my hair to, either.”
He set his pencil down and leaned back in his chair. “So, you’re saying you dye your hair because you think it’s…lazy?”
He cocked his head in amusement.
She shrugged. “Not lazy, more indecisive.”
He smiled. “You realize that makes no sense, of course. Your hair color is determined by your genetic make-up and has no reflection on your personality or work ethic.”
She glared at Giovanni playfully before sticking her tongue out at him.
He looked at her in astonishment for a moment before he burst into laughter. She was startled by the unfamiliar, but not unwelcome, sound and joined him before she looked at the clock on the wall. It was already ten to nine.
Still chuckling, she said, “All right, hand over the book. I’ve got to lock up.”
He smiled at her and began to pack the manuscript for storage. She walked over, picked it up, and began her nightly closing ritual.
In the weeks since he’d joined her and her grandmother at the festival, Giovanni had become surprisingly friendly. She found him lingering around the student union on random nights of the week, holding cups of coffee he never drank and wandering through the student-study area in the library. He made a point of chatting with her, but she found his intentions as puzzling as his profession.
She had searched his name online, and though she found a myriad of rare books and antiquities dealers, his name never appeared. She found a copy of his business card with Charlotte Martin’s notes, but the only contact information on it was a phone number she was reluctant to call, though she did program it into her phone.