Carrying a Sicilian Secret (Notorious Mediterranean Marriages #2)

Chapter Twelve

LIKE HIS FATHER , Tolis Vaccaro was born in his own sweet time, and was unyielding and uncompromising from the start.

Dioni loved him to distraction, immediately and completely, and not only because she lived through the birth and got to meet him. But it was Alceu who was besotted.

And it was as if that was all he needed. As if it took Tolis to make his heart open wide like that.

“I love him,” he said as they all lay together in the bed, the baby between them and all of that awe on Alceu’s face. But he was looking at her. “And oh, Dioni, camurria mia , I love you too.”

She laughed, and then she kissed him. “I know you do, you impossible man. I have always known.”

And after that, after the stone statue that was Alceu crumbled and became a man, all things that seemed impossible before became doable.

Marcella did not exactly turn into the gray-haired stereotype of a grandmother overnight—all baking and cooking and the like—but she, too, fell in love with the baby.

“It is as if,” Alceu said when Tolis was an intense eighteen months old and they were taking the family walk that had become their nightly habit, “she is trying to redeem herself.”

“I hope she does,” Dioni replied happily, watching his mother—still dressed inappropriately, but less so—walk with the determined little boy who insisted he needed to walk himself everywhere.

“Of course you do,” Marcella purred. She looked back over her shoulder and lifted a shaped brow. “Vaccaros must always have an exit strategy.”

“I will confess that I have none,” Alceu told her, his mouth at her ear. “That is how much I love you.”

“I am happy to hear that,” she said, tilting her head back to look at him. “Because I love you too.”

Especially because, by then, they had another baby on the way.

She and Alceu spent more time in the village at the base of the mountain, so that he, too, could spend time with Grazia’s parents. Because time had not stopped as their daughter’s life had. And they bore him no ill will, though they also liked that he had no intention of acting the way his father had. Ever.

“We have always known that if it was up to you, the ending would have been different,” Grazia’s father told him on one of those occasions. “And this is a good thing. I have told everyone I know that if a Vaccaro can be different, it is you.”

“I promised her first,” Alceu told the old man, his voice rough. “That was the only reason she agreed to talk to me.”

“She was her mother’s daughter,” Grazia’s father said, his eyes damp. “Hardheaded.”

Dioni would always think that was what finally got Alceu to make a decision about what he would do with the castle. He did not tear it down. He did not burn it.

Instead, he kept his promise and made it over into a kind of retreat center for those seeking solitude. Peace. A reset.

It was not a hotel, though Apostolis laughed uproariously every time he came to visit his namesake, because he couldn’t believe that there were now two famous hotels in the family.

And he never did get around to punching his best friend—long his brother in name, and now in fact—in the mouth.

Possibly because even an Adrianakis could see that the castle had become a place of serenity. A place to lose oneself in the silence, the sea and the sky, and to come out whole.

Dioni and Alceu moved their growing family to the cottage she’d stayed in only that one night, bringing the surly staff with them, and slowly, they all learned how to smile more. How to dance. How to laugh uproariously and chase the little ones around and around in the garden.

“My darling camurria ,” Alceu murmured to her in the bedroom where they hid away from their brood and reminded themselves of all the reasons why they could never manage to keep much more than a year between them, “you are appallingly fertile.”

“Don’t pretend you don’t like me pregnant,” she whispered as he rolled her beneath him and let his hands move where they would.

“There is nothing I don’t like about you,” he replied, letting his teeth graze down the side of her neck. “But I will always love you ripe.”

Dioni found that, unlike many women, she loved being pregnant. She thought it might be because they had left the castle and its curses and its legacies behind. They lived in the cottage now. Marcella lived in another cottage, and dressed in fewer and fewer evening gowns as the years went by. Their children were funny and adorable and frustrating and theirs , and there was no history bearing down upon them.

They spent as much time as possible with Apostolis and Jolie, and the cousins that they soon provided. On pretty Mediterranean evenings, the four of them would sit together in Greece or in Sicily, laughing as the sun sank gracefully into the sea and their children argued over which was better, a whole castle or the Hotel Andromeda —that the whole world could agree was legendary .

But it was not old buildings made of stone and dead men’s dreams that Dioni and Alceu talked about when they crawled into bed together and tangled themselves up in each other the way they always did.

It was the dark eyes of their children. Their shouts of laughter and howls of injustice. Their unique and fascinating little personalities and the young men and women they became as they grew.

Funny. Interesting. Beautiful in ways that Dioni found healing, and frustrating, and endlessly entertaining.

The family neither she nor Alceu had ever had, so they doted on the one they’d made.

Sometimes he disappointed her, but she disappointed him too, but they didn’t dwell on these moments. Sometimes they fought. He could be stone and darkness and she was never afraid to poke, and that was not always the right mix. Feelings were hurt. Tears were shed.

But they laughed much more than they cried.

They listened far more than they got loud.

They ruined each other nightly and saved each other repeatedly.

And always—always—they loved each other.

Heart and body and soul.

A great many years later, Dioni and her husband walked with their fingers interlaced through the grounds of the castle, the gardens long since planted, and these days, bright and vibrant with flowers.

They walked down the hill together, though their knees ached and they laughed about how much more slowly they moved these days. Just as they laughed about Alceu’s habit of issuing proclamations that made the children clasp at their chests and claim they’d been cursed at last . Just as they laughed at the fact that Dioni was as clumsy and bedraggled now, with her hair white, as ever.

Nothing changed and everything changed. There was a party up at the castle that night that their children, their children’s spouses, and their own grandchildren were throwing for them.

But together, alone, they walked down and stood in the tiny chapel where they had said those vows so long ago.

Because fifty years was a happy ending no matter how they looked at it.

“What can possibly be left?” Dioni asked her love, gazing up at him as they held each other on that old altar.

“The only thing that matters,” Alceu replied. He kissed her, with all the love and passion, hope and wonder, desire and longing they had always had between them and always would. Because happiness really was the best curse of all time. “Forever, my dear camurria . Together, just like this.”

If Carrying a Sicilian Secret left you wanting more, then be sure to check out the first installment in the Notorious Mediterranean Marriages duet, Greek’s Enemy Bride !