said. "You look so much like someone I once knew."

"I’m American," he said, as if that would negate any possibility that we’d previously met.

"Yes, somehow I knew that," I answered. "So was he. Tell me, do you, by any chance, have anyone named Kyle in your family? Someone who had visited Italy before?"

"Well, I do have a granduncle with that name," the youth said. "And I do know he traveled in Europe when he was young, but I don’t know if he ever was in Italy."

"It seems quite likely he was," I answered, but I didn’t explain further when the young man gave me a quizzical look. "And your name, if I might ask?" I didn’t want the conversation to end, and I wondered yet again whether this young American had any idea what signals young men—at least local men—customarily were sending by sitting in this spot in this café. I began to be quite conscious of what was going on between my thighs. The waters of the Val d’Orcia had put me into the mood, and the reminisces of my golden autumn with Kyle those many years ago had directed that mood down a path I had studiously denied myself for decades.

"I’m Dakota."

"Dakota . . . ?" I wanted a surname; I wanted some sort of confirmation of a connection.

"Just Dakota," he said. "I’m traveling through Europe as a vagabond. Just finished law school in the States, and it was such a long, hard grind getting to that point that I’m rewarding myself with an autumn of wandering in search of paradise. I think I’ve found the perfect place for just letting my hair down and letting adventure take me where it will here in Tuscany."

"Indeed," I answered. The situation here was still enigmatic. I was receiving what I thought were signals, but did this luscious young man have any notion that signals were even in play here?

"I said, and what’s your name?" he was saying to me.

A waiter had come to the table for my order, which had cut through the fog of my ruminating, but I only belatedly noticed the sharp look the young American gave me after the waiter, knowing full well who I was, had practically genuflected to me both in approaching and leaving the table.

"Oh, the long version is that I’m the seventh Conte di Ghiberti of Massa, Tuscany. But you can just call me Luciano, if you like," I answered with a low laugh.

"My, that sounds very impressive and rich," he said, his eyes dancing in the sunlight. And did I perceive him move his chair a bit closer to me and lean in more toward me?

"Yes, I’m afraid that is my burden," I responded. And he had no idea what a burden it had been, something that forced me into a life I didn’t really want to lead and away from the greatest love of my life—who this blond god before me strikingly resembled. "I’m afraid my illustrious family goes back in the Tuscan area to a very rich and powerful distant relative and benefactor, Pope Pius V. He somehow inherited Tuscany as a personal duchy and set his favored relatives up in business. The Ghibertis have been entrenched in the hills north of here between the villages of Massa in the vineyard district and Marina de Massa on the Ligurian Sea for