Chapter 21: Not a Payment

Luca's POV

By the time I got through the crowd, the coat room was empty.

My brother and Gianna had gone out the side door.

I saw them from the steps, on the wet sidewalk, in two separate cabs going two different ways.

I didn't care where they went.

I cared about the woman at the bottom of the church steps in a green dress.

She had her phone in one hand and her shoes in the other.

"You took your shoes off," I said.

"They're a size too small. I wanted to hear your speech with my feet intact."

"How was it?"

"Long."

I came down two steps and stopped.

She was looking up at me with the streetlight in her hair.

I waited for the verdict, because I had earned one.

"You said you weren't going to ask me for anything," she said.

"I meant it."

"Then I'll ask you."

I couldn't speak for a moment.

"Take me home," Willa said. "Yours. Tonight. Not because of the speech."

"Willa."

"I mean it. I'd have said it before the speech."

She lifted her chin.

"I know how your head works. You'll decide you got me for a confession."

I had decided exactly that.

I opened my mouth and nothing came out of it.

"I'm not a prize," she said. "I'm not a payment."

She held up her shoes.

"I'm a person with bad shoes who wants to go home with you. Say yes, or say no."

"Yes," I said. "Yes."

My apartment is three rooms over a bakery on Hanover Street.

I'd never been so aware of how little I owned.

She walked straight through the kitchen with her shoes dangling from two fingers.

She looked at the one lamp, the books stacked on the floor and the unmade bed, and laughed.

"Oh, you're a bachelor," she said.

"I'm a cook."

"Same thing."

She set her shoes on the dresser and turned around.

I stood in the doorway, and I could not move.

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