Chapter 1 #3
She’d learned that walking in extremely high heels that looked as if they would break anyone else’s ankles like twigs conveyed an air of authority that no flat shoe ever could, so she’d practiced in her tiny New York apartment until she could play basketball in her heels, if necessary.
And she’d learned that the people who responded best to all of this were the kind of overtly wealthy, wildly arrogant clientele used to getting their own way, who frequented five-star luxury hotels like this one.
She had also learned that while friendliness was never out of place, becoming too friendly with staff she might eventually have to fire hurt everyone, herself included.
So Hannah did not sit down for any cozy chats with the rest of the staff about il maestro, whoever he was.
Asking any of the staff who, exactly, this person was would be tantamount to admitting that she wasn’t in control of every last detail in this hotel.
Hannah worked extremely hard to make it clear to everyone and anyone that she was more than in control.
That she was, in fact, the fuel that kept the whole place running smoothly.
This morning she walked inside the way she always did, in shoes that made other women wobble on the street.
She pretended not to notice the way everyone scurried about at the sight of her.
Everyone stood straighter, fixed their uniforms, and schooled their expressions to a pleasing blandness.
She even saw one of the women behind the desk try to surreptitiously straighten one of the floral arrangements when it was already a symphony of vertical blossoming that needed no encouragement.
Hannah bit back a smile, inclined her head at everyone who caught her eye, and marched herself straight into her office. Inside, she had pictures only of the hotel, the hills, the glorious landscape stretched out in all directions.
No pictures of the baby. No pictures to indicate that she had any kind of personal life at all.
She had learned that lesson entirely too well in New York.
A glance at the slim gold watch on her wrist assured her that she still had time before the meeting.
She was twenty minutes early, which was close enough to late for her.
Hannah settled into her desk chair and fired up her desktop computer, then set about putting out a few fires that had blazed to life overnight.
But New York was in her head again. Hannah didn’t like to think about New York.
About how she trusted her friend, back when she’d had what passed for a social life in the hours she wasn’t working at that restaurant.
She had trusted her friend, she’d been indiscreet in what she’d thought was a safe space, and then she’d found her comments all over the news.
Manager of New York’s favorite new hotspot doesn’t like the food, they had all crowed.
It had been like a nightmare, but Hannah had never managed to wake up.
Her phone had been filled with messages from all of her friends at work, wondering what on earth had possessed her.
And from the obnoxious head chef himself, who had called her names she didn’t like to think about, even all these years later.
She was surprised they hadn’t fired her on the spot, but had instead forced her to work the busy weekend ahead.
And she had only realized afterward that it had been a kind of exercise in public shame.
Because every single person who had walked in that door that weekend had asked her if she was the one who’d been quoted, and when she’d said yes—because she might have been a fool but she wasn’t a liar—had delivered a litany of hot takes on how wrong she was.
Or had asked her to point out the parts of the extraordinarily expensive menu that were, in her own words, up themselves.
It would have been far preferable to have simply been fired on the spot.
Maybe she should have quit, but she’d held on to some slim thread of hope that maybe, if she showed that she was still the same hard worker she’d always been, they might rethink one indiscretion…
They had not.
And then on Sunday night, after her last shift—-during which not one single person who worked at the restaurant would look her in the eye or speak to her directly—he had appeared.
By then she had accepted that she was getting fired. Because if she hadn’t been, she was sure that she wouldn’t have allowed the tall, almost brutally handsome man who’d watched her so intently from the bar to take her home.
She’d known that all the work she put into her life was about to be taken away from her. Worse, that it was her fault. She never should have trusted that she was in a safe space, not when the restaurant she worked at was the toast of New York.
It was the latest restaurant created by the billionaire restauranteur Antonluca.
Once considered the greatest chef in the world, he had stopped cooking years ago and had turned his attention to a series of astonishingly good restaurants all over the world.
He had even put together a series of television shows, none of which he appeared in, that had introduced an international audience not simply to his take on food but what many critics had dubbed the Antonluca dining experience.
Hannah had managed to be a part of all that, and had ruined it.
The man who’d turned up late and had watched her from the bar had seemed like an escape.
There was something about him. Stormy gray eyes.
Close-cropped, inky black hair. He had been dressed in what should have been casual clothes—a button-down shirt thrown over trousers—but there was nothing casual about him.
Maybe because it was clear at a glance that he was not American.
American men never seemed so polished, nor so effortlessly beautiful.
Even if it was his kind of beauty, that had seemed sharp at the edges.
The way she remembered it, she been drawn to him like he had her in some kind of tractor beam. Like she was helpless to resist.
You look unhappy, cara, he had said when she’d ventured near to pick up another silent order from the bartender she’d considered a friend, who had been acting as if she was a ghost.
What is happiness, really? she’d replied, realizing after she said it that it came out far more flirtatiously than she’d intended.
Maybe because she was so happy that someone was talking to her.
Something had shifted in that dark gray gaze of his. But if she’d expected him to flirt back at her, she was surprised. He had answered her question seriously.
To me, he had said, something intense in his gaze and all over his astonishingly perfect face, chiseled and male and beautiful, happiness is never the goal. It is too often used to achieve things that cannot matter. Do you not think? When truly, it is joy or pain that we remember, in the end.
He had said these things to her so intently. He had looked at her as if no other person existed in the world.
Looking back, was it any wonder that when he’d held out his hand, she put hers into his grasp without a second thought? It’d been a handshake, at first. When they’d still been in the restaurant.
Then, later, he had taken her in hand again. And he had taught her things that she still found herself dreaming about, all these years and his baby later.
She still didn’t know his name.
But when they had fired her the next day, calling her into the restaurant and dismissing her, she’d taken it better than she might have otherwise.
Because there was him to remember. There was that long, wildly hot night.
She had lowered her eyes and had attempted to look meek and remorseful while the chef and Antonluca’s business manager had decimated her.
Yet what she’d been thinking about was the way that beautiful man had moved inside of her. How he had kept her gasping and sobbing, trembling and begging, into the wee hours.
It had been like a balm.
Two months later, when she’d moved back to Nebraska because her name was poison in New York restaurant circles, it had been a bit less of a balm.
Because she still didn’t know his name. He hadn’t given her that or his number or anything else.
She wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to go about finding him, even if she could call the restaurant and ask them to go through the receipts of that night—and she knew they wouldn’t help her.
Even if they might, she hadn’t seen what he was drinking.
She’d thought it was a bit magical until then. She’d had this whole night out of time. A memory to tuck in her pocket and keep with her, something that was entirely hers and that no one else would ever have to know about.
Because, of course, she had not intended to get pregnant.
Then again, maybe things worked out the way they should, she thought as she checked her watch again and stood up.
She set her computer to sleep, and picked up her folder once more.
Because she now could not imagine a life without Dominic.
Just as she couldn’t imagine living anywhere but here.
She had grown accustomed to Tuscan hills and cypress trees.
And while her Italian was not fluent, it was getting there.
She’d had her first dream in Italian a few months back and she loved thinking in a different language.
Seeing and interpreting the world through the lens of a different vocabulary.
She also loved the small community she’d built here.
She wasn’t sure that she’d ever trust a friend again, but slowly, Cinzia had made inroads.
Not that Hannah ever intended to repeat her error, but she did feel that since she trusted her landlady and neighbor with her child, she could probably also trust her with anything else.
After what had happened in New York, and that particular ex-friend’s noted lack of remorse, that, too, felt like a balm.
So, too, did the hilltop village. There wasn’t much to it.
The trattoria. A tiny market. A handful of other shops that seemed open on a whim, if then.
All arranged around the little square where there was a war memorial and the old men sat about and told lies about beautiful women they had known in their youth.
It was a sweet, good life. Hannah would raise her son here and Dominic would learn the good things in life first so that when he encountered the bad, he would have all this goodness built up ahead of time. Like armor.
All she had to do today was convince the new owner—the maestro—that she had everything in hand.
“Nervous?” asked the concierge, a fiercely French woman named Léontine, who was the closest thing that Hannah had to a friend at work. And who was also giving her French lessons twice a week, to expand Hannah’s ability to interact with their international clientele.
If anyone else had asked her, she would have made it clear that the question was inappropriate. But this was Léontine, and Hannah could tell by the way she was asking it that she didn’t think Hannah was nervous, nor should be. She was simply bracing. It was part of her charm.
“I’m not nervous at all,” Hannah replied, which was true.
She had always loved the art of pitching.
She’d practiced it when she’d marched herself into this hotel, six months’ pregnant and here on a tourist visa.
If she wasn’t good at selling herself, she wouldn’t be any good at her job, which required that she sell the concept and fantasy of this hotel to everyone, including its owner.
“But I’m used to La Paloma. I spent a long time learning how to handle her idiosyncrasies. ”
“Yes, but this is a man,” Léontine said with a particularly French sort of shrug. “Whatever idiosyncrasies a man has, they are always…easily handled, in the end. Every woman must know this is so.”
And Hannah wanted nothing more than to stand there and quiz her on what, precisely, she meant by that.
But she couldn’t, and not only because that would betray how very little experience Hannah had ever had with men.
Something that she thought made her seem…
odd, at best. And not in a good way. Odd in a way that led to pity, or worse, offers to set her up on dates she didn’t want with men that she knew in advance she would dislike.
More pressingly, she could not risk being late.
She smiled at her not-quite-friend and set off, marching through the grand lobby and making certain that everything was perfect as she passed.
Every room was spacious, elegant, and set with windows that let Tuscany inside.
At this time of year, the hotel was also sparkling and bright.
Elegance gleamed from every direction. It was warm, inviting, suggesting Christmas without tipping over into the kind of raucous, American holiday displays that would be everywhere back home.
Suggestion was always more seductive than excess. Hannah had learned that in school and had seen it play out in each of her positions so far, though never so much as here.
Off the lobby, she made her way down the hallway that led to one of the hotel’s restaurants, a few of its shops, and beyond it, what was known as the library.
She stepped inside at precisely eight o’clock. Extremely early by Italian standards, but she’d imagined that was part of the test.
Because no matter what La Paloma might have said about her position being secure, Hannah knew that this was a test.
She stepped inside, closing the door behind her, and was already letting her lips curve in polite greeting as she walked toward the figure of a man that she could see standing there by the window.
But he turned.
And she stopped dead.
She was fairly certain that her smile tumbled straight off of her lips and crashed down at her feet—but it could also have been her heart.
Because it was him.
Him.
Her mystery man from New York City.
Her balm during the hardest weekend of her life.
This beautiful, brutally attractive man, who had fully taken her hand. And had then taken her innocence, too, and had left her full of dreams of him for years after.
This man who had not given her his name, but had given her a far greater gift.
Her son.
And as his dark gray gaze locked on to hers, then widened in dark, arrogant astonishment, something else occurred to her.
This man was the father of her son. And he didn’t know it. He couldn’t.
And unless she was wildly mistaken, or in the wrong meeting room, he was also the new owner of this hotel.
Which meant that the life Hannah had built so carefully, and loved so much, was about to come tumbling down.
Again.