Midnight in Venice Read Free Page A

Marco said as they walked toward the exit. “You’ve only just arrived, and already you’re talking to handsome Italian men. Who was that tall, dark stranger?”
    â€œNo one,” Olivia said wistfully.
    â€œDoesn’t sound like ‘no one’ to me,” Marco said, with a teasing nudge. “Anyway, I’m sorry I’m so late. And to make things worse, when I arrived, the terminal was blocked off. A bomb scare, apparently.”
    â€œYes, apparently,” Olivia said. It was already beginning to feel surreal. “It was nothing in the end.”
    She went to put her passport back into her shoulder bag but stopped when she saw a business card tucked inside. She took it out.
Alessandro Rossi
, it read, along with the words
Buon Natale
. . . and a phone number.

 
Chapter 2
    â€œIs this the only luggage you have?” Marco asked, taking her suitcase—now just an ordinary, innocent suitcase—by the handle.
    â€œYes,” she stammered after a second. She tucked the business card back into her passport. Was he really hoping she’d call him?
    â€œYou travel light,” Marco continued. “I need two suitcases just for an overnighter.” Taking her by the arm, he kept up a light banter about people in Toronto as he directed her through the terminal and toward the docks where their water taxi awaited.
    Marco Moretti was a cousin on her father’s side. At thirty-eight, he had always been more of a big brother to her than a cousin. For a number of years, he’d worked as a developer for a company that designed antivirus software, and made a hobby of collecting art. On a whim, he’d developed a game called Happy Spiders, a parody of Angry Birds. No one was more surprised than he when it went viral and for a brief time became bigger than Angry Birds itself. Olivia didn’t know how much Marco had made in total, only that it was, in his words, “like winning a very, very big lottery.” It had allowed him to quit his job as a developer, turn his art-collecting hobby into a business, and open a gallery on Queen Street West in Toronto.
    She was thrilled for him, and even more thrilled when he offered to pay her student loans and gave her a job in his new gallery. It was Marco, along with her artistic father, who’d given Olivia an appreciation for art, but while she had gone on to complete a master’s degree in art history, she knew jobs in her field were few and far between. Until Marco’s offer, she had been psyching herself up to start an admin job in the tax-accountancy firm her sister worked for. “You’ve saved me from a fate worse than death,” she’d told him happily.
    She had been working in Marco’s gallery for a year when he teamed up with the world-renowned Silvio Milan. He’d been so proud when he’d hung the new sign over the gallery door: Silvio Milan—Venice, London, New York, and Toronto. Overnight, this partnership launched Marco into the international art scene on a level he could only dream of before—lunching with Damien Hirst in London one day and bidding on a Jackson Pollock in New York the next.
    When they reached the water taxi docks, Marco introduced her to Dino, a burly, dark-haired man in his mid-forties with the face of someone who’d been out in the wind and salt air for a long time. “Dino is relatively new to Silvio Milan but not to boats—he’s a licensed captain and even sailed to Antarctica when he was still in the Albanian navy. So you’re perfectly safe with him. All you have to do is call, and it’ll be billed directly to the company.”
    Olivia shook Dino’s hand and thanked him when he helped her into the boat with a big smile. He stashed her luggage in the boat’s cabin but suggested she sit outside. “If you get cold, you can move into the cabin, but the back of a water taxi is the best way to approach Venice.”
    Marco