the last two centuries. We made our money on silk and banking and have proceeded to spend it on wine and sex—many varieties of sex."

There, I’d sent out a signal of my own, and the young American Dakota quite clearly showed that he knew exactly why he’d been sitting in the spot in this particular café. I felt a hand on my knee. It probably was a cool hand, but it felt hot enough to me to burn its way through the silk fabric of my trousers and brand my thigh for what I’d always known I was.

"Fascinating," he said, turning on that big smile of his again. "I’m just wandering through Italy, taking small jobs where I can to get me to the next village, or otherwise availing myself of the generous hospitality of the . . . men . . . of the region."

"If you are headed north," I said, trying to keep my wits about me and my voice level under the burning hand that was slowly creeping up my thigh, "perhaps you might be interested in availing yourself of my family estate, the Villa Montebella, for a few days."

"That would be super," Dakota was saying, but nearly all of my attention was now centered on his hand, which had reached my basket and was finding that I could be quite hospitable to him indeed.

Dakota busted out into a grin when he saw that I was driving a Lamborghini Murcielago, the fastest production car in existence, and I showed him just how fast it could go as we wound our way up toward Massa in the hills, hillsides covered with regular rows of cascading vines, heavy with luscious grapes, aching to be plucked. I was suddenly young again—not just in having a second chance at a similar experience that family traditions had denied me, but, strangely, at having a nearly identical experience to the most arousing and fulfilling experience I’d ever had. I idiotically wondered as I picked up speed on the familiar twisting road up into the hills whether Dakota could be both as forceful and gentle as my Kyle, and more idiotically still if his body was really as beautiful as Kyle’s had been and his tool as long, thick, and masterful as Kyle’s.

Dakota wasn’t helping. He was ensuring his welcome to Montebella by, first, rubbing my slowly hardening cock through my silky trousers, and, then, uncovering it and getting it unbelievably hard for a man of my years. If I hadn’t been such a skillful driver, and the road had not been so familiar, I’m sure that my trembling at his touch would have put us to tumbling down onto the rock-enclosed terraces cascading down to the sea.

As it was, when I told him we were now on Ghiberti land, he urged me, with a husky voice, to pull off into one of the side access roads, and we kissed deeply and he sucked me off with huge slurping sounds from him and groans and grunts from me. He was as vigorous and insistent and alive as Kyle had been that autumn, and I found myself imagining that my lover had returned to me and everything was just as it once was as I watched the golden curls on the back of his head billow and bob around between my belly and the Lamborghini’s leather-clad steering wheel.

I was being foolish, I knew. I had almost to pinch myself to acknowledge