Tuscan Heat by Kathleen Dienne Page B

the door. I stopped by an ordinary plastic skeleton hanging on a wire. I reached up and moved its jaw in time with the words Marco had sung to me in my hotel room. “Con taaaaay, par tee roooooow…”
    I couldn’t get any further before Marco broke up. The clerk glanced up and frowned at us, so Marco grabbed my arm. Together we ran out of the nearest door, barely making it outside before we shrieked with glee like children.
    “I do not remember the last time I laughed so,” he said at last.
    “You have a wonderful laugh,” I replied. I stretched my arms up to the sky. Something about being in the sunshine after seeing the models made me feel more alive than ever.
    “Thank you. You have a wonderful accent. You again surprise me with your Italian. You keep saying you speak none, but then you start singing in the language.”
    “That? You were singing it yesterday. I was only parroting.”
    We were standing in a little formal garden. He put an arm around my waist and led me away from the door. “Ah. Well, your memory is excellent then.”
    “Marco?”
    “Mmm?”
    “What do the words mean?” We seemed to have arrived at our destination. A graceful little alcove fronted with slender columns and occupied by an abandoned fountain. It seemed small, but it was possible to stand deep inside and be reasonably screened from view. My heart skipped a beat when he rubbed my palm with his thumb in a slow, suggestive circle.
    “Oh, it is mostly nonsense, about places that don’t exist.”
    “It didn’t sound like nonsense. It sounded happy when you sang it.”
    He brought my palm to his lips, and the deliberate kiss he gave me made me shiver. “It is a love ballad, so it is happy. The singer is looking forward to spending time with a new friend. Appropriate, no?”
    “Very.”
    He took my face into his hands and leaned in. I met him halfway.
    It was the kind of kiss that made me wish I was a poet and not a painter. Slow, hot and tender all at once until my toes were curling inside my shoes. He pulled away, but he didn’t step back. He kissed my eyelids, my nose, my cheeks and my jaw, raining down dozens of light little kisses until I felt like I was floating.
    I sighed, content for a moment to accept what he offered. The alarms were going off in my head just as they had at the Stibbert, but it had been so long since someone cherished me. When he was done, he held me close.
    “Thank you, Serafina.”
    “For?”
    “For seeing what I see in the museum.”
    “Seems silly to thank me for that. It’s like thanking me for having brown eyes.”
    “Ah, but you willingly shared yourself with me.”
    I couldn’t argue with that. Instead, my stomach growled. We started laughing again.
    “Sorry, lover,” I said. I stood on tiptoe to kiss him quickly.
    “How is your ankle? Could you take a little walk?”
    “What did you have in mind?”
     
    What he had in mind was a picnic “in a nice garden.” We stopped at a little hole-in-the-wall shop that sold bread, cheese, fruit and wine in a string bag I slung over my back. Back on the bike, we zipped past the sea of easels in the piazza in front of the Pitti Palace. I grinned, thinking of Marco’s horror at the thought that I might want to join them. We rumbled up around the side of the palace. The sleepy-looking guard stepped forward with his hands outstretched, but as soon as Marco lifted his visor, the gesture changed to a welcoming wave.
    I waited for Marco to park the motorcycle. “You know the owner?” I asked. It was getting to be a ritual with him.
    “Not this time,” he said, grinning. “I did some work here when the summer began, as a charitable donation. They said I might use the employee entrance from then on, and I thought you might like to see something that is actually on the tourist map for a change.”
    We had been climbing up a gravel path between tall hedges. The view opened up. I knew the Boboli Gardens were right behind the palace, but it’s one thing