was the warmth that did it.
Or perhaps the wine — good wine, Italian, from the property's cellar, which Dimitri produced one evening on the terrace as the sun went down in shades that should have been illegal. Or perhaps it was simply the accumulation of weeks, the slow erosion of the careful distance Jane had maintained, the growing impossibility of thinking of him in the clean, simple terms she'd started with.
They were sitting on the terrace. The last of the sun was painting everything gold. She had a glass of wine. He had one too, which surprised her — she'd begun to think of him as a man who didn't indulge in things.
"Can I ask you something honestly?" she said.
"You always do," he said. Which was, she thought, entirely accurate and slightly fond, in the way of someone who had come to regard a recurring quality with reluctant appreciation.
"The gala," she said. "You noticed me, and you had me watched, and then you took me. Was any of that — was there a point where it became about more than the logistics? Or was I always just a variable?"
He looked at the sea for a long time.
"You were never a variable," he said. "The logistics came after. The watching—" He stopped. Started again, and she could see the effort of it — the unusual, effortful honesty of a man saying things he didn't have vocabulary for. "I have encountered many people. I have never encountered anyone who made me—" Another stop.
"Made you what?" she asked, very quietly.
"Uncertain," he said. "I am not uncertain. It is one of the only reliable things about me. And then I saw you eat a canapé you clearly found disappointing and finish it anyway because you didn't want to waste it, and I felt something I didn't know what to call."
Jane laughed. She couldn't help it — a real, startled laugh that came out before she could moderate it. "You felt something because I ate a canapé?"
"It was very revealing about your character," he said, with the careful dignity of a man defending an unlikely position. "You were in a room full of people performing wealth and comfort, and you were — just there. You didn't need the room to see you."
Jane looked at him. The last of the light was on him, gold and warm, and she thought about nine-year-old boys and mothers who read fairy tales and men who had built themselves into fortresses and left one window, somewhere, barely cracked.
"Dimitri," she said.
"Hmm."
"For the record," she said carefully, "you should know that under entirely different circumstances — if you had perhaps introduced yourself at the gala rather than having me kidnapped — I would probably have found you very interesting."
He looked at her with those grey eyes in the last of the Italian light.
"Under entirely different circumstances," he said, "I would have introduced myself."
"Next time," Jane said, lifting her wine glass, "lead with that."
"There won't be a next time," he said. "There is only this one."
She looked at him. He looked at her.
The sun finished setting. The stars came out, one by one, with Italian efficiency.