Midnight in Venice by Meadow Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

was lit against the night sky. Tall, his dark hair just brushing his collar, he stood with his back to her, and unlike the other patrons dressed in black dinner jackets, he was wearing a black leather jacket.
Alessandro Rossi.
It had to be!
    She watched him, wondering what she would do if he turned around and saw her sitting there. Feeling a rising sense of excitement, she set down her glass, ready to wave should he look her way.
    Finally, the man did turn and said something to a couple sitting at the table behind him.
    It wasn’t him.
    â€œYour plague doctor again?” Marco asked.
    â€œNo,” she said. “Just someone I thought I knew. But then I only just arrived here, so how could that be?” She smiled and raised her glass again. “
La dolce vita
.”
    And if there was the tiniest hint of disappointment in her tone, she was sure she had concealed it well.

 
Chapter 6
    When Alessandro arrived home from his office, he poured himself a Scotch and took it out onto the narrow balcony of his apartment to watch a vaporetto pull up under the lights on the Sant’Elena dock. No one got off the water bus, but a few people got on, probably on their way over to Lido Island to pick up groceries.
    This was the quiet end of Venice. It was only a ten-minute walk along the
riva
from San Marco, but very few tourists came this way. In the spring, when the leaves were on the trees in the park outside his windows, he couldn’t see the dock or the lagoon beyond, although occasionally above the trees he could glimpse the smokestack of an especially tall cruise ship.
    It stunned his colleagues that he chose to live in such modest surroundings. But the apartment was convenient enough to his job, and unlike the palazzo on Giudecca Island that his father had bought him as a wedding present, it contained no memories of Katarina. There were, of course, the boxes of files stacked in a corner that related to her disappearance, but she’d never passed through its doorways, never sat in the little kitchen with a morning cappuccino, never waved to him from the balcony. It had only four rooms, and the furniture was functional and simple. Only his Fazioli grand piano gave an indication that he was anything other than a cop on a cop’s salary.
    Occasionally, on weekends and holidays, he went to the family home on the Brenta River outside Padua, a thirty-room Palladian villa of long, cool marble halls and enormous frescoed rooms that opened onto terraces where he could watch the swans drift on the quiet waters of the pond. He sometimes couldn’t believe it was his home, and the first thing he’d do on arriving was walk through the rooms like a tourist wondering what it must be like to live in such splendor. And yet it was his family’s, the place he’d spent his summers as a child. The Rossis had owned it for more than four hundred years, and it pained his father that Alessandro might never have children to pass it down to. Of course, he and Katarina had talked about having children, but they’d thought they had lots of time.
    As the vaporetto pulled away from the Sant’Elena dock, Alessandro took another sip of Scotch. It had been a long day, and it had left him more restless than usual. And while he told himself it was because it had been a waste, it was also because of that woman, Olivia Moretti. Beyond those violet eyes, he wondered, what impulse had made him give her his card? Was he finally ready? It had been almost four years. He remembered Olivia blushing as he picked up her lingerie. Did she know he was picturing her in it?
    It was cold on the balcony. So he came back in and, closing the French doors, went to sit at the piano. He put down his Scotch and resolved to focus on the music, a resolve that lasted less than a minute. He was soon playing aimlessly, his fingers wandering from one melody into the next.
    His father’s birthday was in early February, and when Alessandro had