I don't own Antonio or any one else from the Women of the Otherworld series (even though I wish I did) they belong to Kelley Armstrong. However, I do own Mirella and the secretary, and I did think up this little plot I threw them all into.

I've had Antonio in my head for awhile and there's not enough focus on him, this plot is kind of floating in my brain, so let me know if there's anyone who wants to read more about him, Venice, and the deal with that new part time secretary.

Mira

I was on a date with a woman who Jeremy would describe as fitting the archetype of my type; blonde hair with a beautiful yet undistinguishable face. She was old enough to drink but young enough that she couldn't contribute to any type of real conversation, so I kept things simple for her. Yet in between her practiced laughs I found myself back in a stifling hot room in Venice watching delicate hands trip over the buttons of a cotton dress. I could feel the coarseness of the bed linens on my kneecaps, each individual thread scratching my skin as I watched that small hand waltz through the air and carefully grip the rods of that old brass bedpost.

There she was with no show, no make up or 300-dollar French lace lingerie. All she had was an intangible boldness that I hadn't ever encountered again.

It was then that I realized how pathetic I was. I felt as if I'd been banished to some kind of emotional purgatory, trapped somewhere between a lousy date and a memory so painfully wonderful that it made me grind my teeth. A memory so vivid that I could hear it breathing, sense its heart beating over the sounds of credit cards being swiped and napkins shifting impatiently on people's laps.

I was brought out of it, violently ripped into the present when she reached over the table to touch my arm, it was so fake, so staged that it jarred me. That feeling of her acrylic nails scraping against the pinstripes of my suit. Tara, Mandy, Lisa, Marie, whatever her name was, it didn't matter, they were all the same. I played their games; I let them believe that I was the rich powerful executive who expected them to pay off that 400-dollar meal they just ate. I let myself be coerced into having that type of stifling, unimaginative sex with Gina, Monica, and Kellie. In New York, Miami, France and Spain but not Venice, that was her place, her city. In my mind Mirella and Venice, Mirella and Italy were all the same thing. In any other city I could self medicate with sex and nice dinners with lackluster conversation, but Italy was off limits. I'd be damned if I turned it into a crack house the way I had with New York, turning the Ritz and the plaza into places where I shot myself up with mechanical sex from robotic girls. And silently snuck out in the morning with the hotel bill hidden in my suit jacket, carefully hiding it with the same shame as an addict not wanting any one to see their track marks. I'd go home and shower until my hands turned red and the water started to get cold and it was time for me to start my morning regiment. Putting on cufflinks, taking a car service I would go through all of it in a miraculously numb fog.

When I arrived in my office, the shame almost disappeared, but for some reason the morning after I'd had a night like that I could never look my part time secretary in the eye. She was young, with the type of dress up clothes she probably kept hidden in her closest until she had to wear them for spring choral concerts or special school assemblies. Yet she unnerved me somehow, she was all smiles and good morning that were carefully delivered to my desk each morning in an artfully toned down Brooklyn accent. For some inexplicable reason I felt as if she knew what type of man I was, that she knew about the women, the frivolity of it all and that it disappointed her. That's what ate away at me, it wasn't the look of random strangers on the street or the hotel staff when I checked out and told them to have flowers and breakfast sent up to the room, it was the look on the face of one secretary, who couldn't have been a day older than twenty one, as she handed me a cup of coffee in the morning.