“Look there. The sun’s breaking through.”

She studied the miserly opening in the gray, and the watery beam that struggled through. “Wow, the light. It’s blinding.”

He laughed, reached out to smooth a hand over the hair she’d just ruffled. “We’re out of our element, Lieutenant. Maybe it’s good for us to be out of the norm now and again.”

She knew her norm. Death, investigation, the insanity of a city that ran instead of walked, the smells of a cop shop, the rush and the burden of command.

Some of that had become Roarke’s norm in the last couple years, she mused. He juggled that with his own world, which was buying, selling, owning, creating pretty much every freaking thing in the known universe.

His beginnings had been as dark and ugly as hers. Dublin street rat, she thought, thief, conniver, survivor of a brutal, murderous father. The mother he’d never known hadn’t been so lucky.

From that, he’d built an empire-not always on the sunny side of the law.

And she, cop to the bone, had fallen for him despite the shadows- or maybe because of them. But there was more to him than either of them had known, and the more lived on a farm outside of the little village of Tulla in County Clare.

“We could’ve taken a copter from the hotel,” she said to him.

“I like the drive.”

“I know you mean that, so it makes me wonder about you, pal.”

“We’ll take a shuttle when we leave for Florence.”

“No argument.”

“And we’ll have a candlelight dinner in our suite.” He glanced toward her with that relaxed, happy smile. “The best pizza in the city.”

“Now you’re talking.”

“It means a lot to them that we’d come like this-together-for a couple of days.”

“I like them,” she said of his mother’s family. “Sinead, the rest. Vacations are good. I just have to work myself into the mode and stop thinking about what’s going on back at Central. What do people do here, anyway?”