Read Online Letters to the Baumgarters by Selena Kitt - Free Book Online

letting him go, I reminded myself. Better for everyone.
    He put his arms around my waist, bending his head to mine, reading my
mind. “I won’t let you go.”
    “You don’t have a choice.” I tried to disengage myself but he held me
tight.
    “Give me one.”
    I stopped struggling, meeting his gaze. “What do you mean?”
    “Say you’ll stay here in Italy.” The urgency in his words made everything
in me go silent. He was all seriousness, his eyes searching mine. “Stay with
me. Give me a choice to make.”
    “Oh Nico…” I closed my eyes against the hope I saw on his face, filled
with a pain I couldn’t fight or control. “I’m sorry.”
    “Dani…” He said my name, soft, but he let me go.
    And I walked home alone against the backdrop of a beautiful, blazing
Venetian sunset, crying the whole way, feeling as if my life was fading away
with the light, like an inferno in the sky.
     
     

Chapter Four
     
    Dear Carrie and Doc,
    You aren’t going to believe who’s showed up on my doorstep. I can
barely believe it myself. Mason! That’s right, I found my ex-husband sitting on
my stoop, waiting for me after class, with just a suitcase and an
English-Italian translation dictionary in his hands. I think I was too much in
shock to do anything else but invite him inside.
    And I swear to God, it’s really not my fault he spent the night. He
bought a one-way ticket and he didn’t even book a room! What was I supposed to
do, send him out onto the streets alone? He doesn’t know a word of Italian—you
should hear his accent, or lack thereof. Eek! But nothing happened. Well,
mostly nothing.
    Okay, okay, I admit, we, uh… we reconciled a little bit. Part of it
was the wine. That was my fault. And, you guys, he brought me Ho-Hos! (No
jokes, I mean it!) It’s one of those weird, occasional indulgences of mine that
I really miss. He knows me so well. It’s hard to say no to a man who does
something like that—not to mention the whole International flight to see me
thing. But I think it was mostly the wine.
    Of course, now this complicates things with Nico a bit. To say the
least. I’m not sure what to say to him, if anything. And Mason says he wants to
stay for a while, but I don’t know what that means exactly. “Let’s just see
where things go,” is what he said. I should have been mad at him, to tell you
the truth. I should have slammed the door in his face and told him to go home.
I mean, that’s what I should have done, right? Isn’t that what you would want
me to do?
    But I just couldn’t. So now he’s here, and I’m not quite sure what to
do about that…
    * * * *
    “Dani?” Mason’s voice beckoned me back from the siren-call of Ho-Ho’s in
my little kitchen. I licked the chocolate off my fingers, tucking my letter to
the Baumgartners away, and padded back into the bedroom, still nude. “What time
is it?”
    “Midnight.” I sat on the edge of the bed, the little lamp on the night
stand illuminating his sleepy face, eyes still half-closed—but his gaze was on
my body, already hungry. Still hungry. “You’re still on American time.”
    “Come back to bed.” His hand moved, warm, over my hip, still familiar,
even though it had been so long. I couldn’t believe how easily I had fallen
into bed with him, how easily I was falling... Maybe that thing about absence
making the heart growing fonder really was true. Not that I had ever really
stopped loving Mason. I’d divorced him knowing I would probably continue to
love him for the rest of my life—but love didn’t always solve everything.
    “What are you doing here?” I murmured the question, running my hand
through the soft, sandy bristle of his short-cut hair, so different from Nico’s
thick, dark curls. Thinking of Nico made my stomach lurch with guilt. I didn’t
want to think about what my actions tonight might be doing to him, to our
budding relationship. It hurt my head—and my heart—too much.
    “This.” He reached for me