Chapter Three
Hannah expected fireworks, high drama, and soap opera scenes at every turn, as befit the kind of chef Antonluca had been when he’d spent all his time in his kitchens.
But there was none of that. Not the faintest hint of it from Antonluca when, if she didn’t police herself appropriately, she could still taste that mouth of his on hers.
And, frankly, even when she tried to police herself, for that matter.
She had to grapple with why she found that a little too close to disappointing.
So close, in fact, that every evening when she drove home through the sleepy village she had to interrogate herself over every last moment of their interactions because she was terribly afraid that she was the one who wasn’t quite maintaining the right level of professionalism.
It was galling. Especially because she had already proved to him how unprofessional she was in New York.
Twice, not that she was counting.
Over the next week, she met with Antonluca every day. They went over every part of the hotel and how it did business, and she found herself impressed with him despite very much wanting that not to be the case.
When it came to business, Antonluca was focused, engaged, and very, very smart.
She had somehow convinced herself that he wouldn’t be. That he couldn’t be.
That had been the gossip around the kitchen in New York. That, sure, once upon a time the man had been able to cook a decent dinner after a fashion, but that it was a bit of savvy marketing that had made him a name. All smoke and mirrors and excellent branding.
He’s basically a chain at this point, the restaurant’s chef had said once, though naturally without those remarks turning up in the tabloids. People trust the name. The food is secondary.
That counted as a sick burn in the kitchens of Manhattan.
But what Hannah learned during her time with him at La Paloma was that nothing was secondary to Antonluca Aniello. He was interested in everything. No detail was too small. No topic was off-limits.
Sitting with him each day, she found that he asked all the right questions, and many that she would not have thought to ask herself.
And as she watched him learn the ins and outs of the hotel in real time—and quicker than she had, if she was brutally honest—she could only be impressed with the way his mind worked.
By the end of that first week it seemed very unlikely to her that anyone but Antonluca had been responsible for his meteoric rise.
And really, there was something satisfying about that.
At least he’d earned his position in life.
There was nothing worse than someone who acted like they’d earned it, but hadn’t.
She found that she was okay with Antonluca’s business acumen—and the fame it had garnered him—now that she’d seen it in action. It made sense that he was as huge as he was. That was something close enough to comforting, really. How sad would it have been if she’d thought the opposite?
The business part of things was going swimmingly, Hannah thought.
It was that personal spark between them that she couldn’t quite get a handle on.
“How is it possible you did not know who I was?” he asked one day as they sat there, going over various spreadsheets and graphs.
When she looked at him, he raised one of those dark, slashing brows of his and she felt everything inside her…
flutter. “My face has been plastered across all of my various properties for years. It is inescapable.”
He did not say that as if he liked it.
But Hannah focused on the question he’d asked. It was that or the fluttering, and she thought it would be better all around if she ignored that.
“It has,” she agreed. She sat back in her chair, aware that she was sitting entirely too close to him and if she only leaned in— Stop that right now, she ordered herself.
“But it wasn’t this face, was it?” She waved her hand at him when his brow rose higher.
“First of all, the iconic image of Antonluca, celebrity chef, has you laughing. There’s some facial hair.
The actual hair on your head is significantly longer. ”
He gazed at her without comprehension.
Hannah sighed. “I’m afraid you look absolutely nothing like your picture.”
That clearly did not sit well with him. “I beg your pardon?”
“The man I met in the bar was intense. That whole night was intense.” That was an error, she realized, when the dark gray blaze of his gaze seemed to work its way inside her, connecting to that flutter and making it…
something else entirely. She hurried on.
“I’m not sure I have ever seen you smile.
Much less laugh. And I’ll be honest with you.
” Now it was like she was skidding down some icy hill in winter with no hope of stopping herself, so she didn’t.
Maybe she couldn’t. “For some reason, that picture of you always made me think you were short.”
He made a strangled sort of noise. “Short? Me?”
In fairness, that was likely greatly surprising indeed to a man who looked to be comfortably over six feet and three inches even while sitting. And better resembled a gloriously urbane giant when he was standing. And that wasn’t even getting into the things he could do when he was lying—
But really, she lectured herself. You must stop this.
“No one in the restaurant had ever met you personally,” she said.
“Except the chef, I think, but it’s not as if he spent any time talking to the rest of us.
” She shook her head, those chaotic, high-energy days bright in her memory for a moment.
She both missed them and wouldn’t return to them for all the money in the world, even if she could.
“There is no reason whatsoever that I should have thought that Antonluca himself would descend upon me that night. Then, afterward, I had other things to think about than one long night in New York City.”
Once again, she only realized the moment she said that sort of thing that she shouldn’t have.
It only encouraged the heat between them to thicken, to feel even more dangerous all around them when this was a professional meeting.
They were sitting in her office, a place she had made certain offered no hint about her private life.
Because she had learned, hadn’t she? If she behaved like a person, people treated her like one. If she acted like an impenetrable veneer of a person instead, they were too afraid of her to do anything.
She had learned, but now Antonluca was here and there was all that fluttering and there was something in his gray gaze that made her think he knew it. That he could feel it, too.
Hannah decided she really didn’t want to wait to hear his reply.
“I was fired, after all. And there was no getting a new job, not in New York. Or not in any New York restaurants, anyway.” She risked another look at him then, hoping the temperature had gone down somewhat.
But his gray eyes were as hot and intense on hers as ever.
She swallowed hard, and looked away again.
“I spent a few weeks denying reality and then I had to move out of my apartment before I bankrupted myself. I headed back to Nebraska. Not what I wanted, but I thought it was a good place to regroup and figure out my next move.”
“And was it?”
Hannah knew that this was an opportunity to tell him about Dominic.
This was not only an opportunity—she was already well overdue for that particular confession.
It should have been the first thing out of her mouth the minute she’d seen him.
She shouldn’t have allowed a single sentence or moment or whole kiss to go by without sharing the news that he was a parent.
She still didn’t know why she hadn’t done it. Why she hadn’t simply told him the way she’d always been certain she would, when she had imagined running into that gloriously decadent stranger again.
But even as she thought that, here in her office where the air between them seemed absurdly charged, she knew it was a lie. She knew why she hadn’t told him then. And why she hadn’t made up for that oversight since. She was afraid.
It was as simple as that. She was afraid that telling him about Dominic would fundamentally change the life she’d made here, probably forever.
It was highly likely that it would be ruined altogether because there were so many ways he could react—and most of them were negative.
This was a man who had come to confront her in person because he didn’t like stupid things she’d said to a third party. Look how that had ended.
The truth was that she’d thought it was entirely too possible that letting him in on Dominic’s existence would be as life-altering as letting him into her life had been back then.
And the trouble with life-altering events, she’d decided, was that it was impossible to tell how and where that alteration would occur. How it would really mess everything up.
Hannah had been afraid. She was still afraid.
Maybe even more afraid than before, because now she couldn’t tell herself that this man was a momentary madness and nothing else. She couldn’t assure herself that if she ever ran into him again, she would feel nothing and might even laugh that she’d ever felt so drawn to him.
There was no comforting herself with that fantasy any longer.
She stared at him for what felt like an eternity, then she made herself look back down at her tidy spreadsheets and careful graphs, where there was only data. Nothing to fear at all.
“Nebraska is always a good place to land,” she told him when she was certain she could keep her voice even. “It’s always nice to be back home. It allows me to really think about how to make the next move, and where I want to go.”