Chapter Three #3
“I don’t think that it’s the sort of thing that can be explained,” Hannah replied mildly. She nodded at one of her vendors, and tried to unobtrusively herd Antonluca away before he offended everyone. “You either think it’s delightful or you don’t.”
When she looked at him then, he was staring around at all the different stands festooned with Christmas colors and piled high with holiday wares. And not as if he was in the least bit delighted by what he saw.
“Let me guess,” she said with a sigh that she told herself was amused. “This is not your favorite time of year.”
He seemed to take his time looking back at her and she swore that there was something almost…
guarded in his gaze then. “I prefer to work through Christmas. And every other holiday. People need to eat, and in any case, I have never felt the urge to…reach out to assorted angels or proclaim good news to anyone.”
But he said this so gruffly that it made something in her ache. More than it should have.
“Christmas was the one day a year where everyone pretended to get along,” Hannah told him softly, running her fingers over evergreen boughs piled high on a table as they passed.
“It was the one day a year where I could pretend that everything was the way it ought to have been. It always felt magical.”
“What is magical about pretending that something is other than what it is?” he asked. Tersely, she thought.
“It’s better than nothing, I think. Isn’t it?”
They had stopped walking at some point, and while Hannah was dimly aware of all the workmen and vendors rushing around them, all she could really focus on was Antonluca.
He looked like something out of one of those dreams she liked to have, alone in her cozy bed.
He wore a dark wool coat and a silk scarf and he was so beautiful that she was tempted to tell him that he need only believe in the archangel he found in his mirror—
But that was a bit fanciful, even for her.
“It’s perfectly all right if you don’t like Christmas,” she told him.
“But between holiday pricing and our expectations of profit from the Christmas Market, not to mention the other events we have planned throughout the rest of this month, the hotel will make enough that it could close for the rest of the year if it wished. We will have to see in January if my projections are correct, but look around.” It almost hurt then, to pull her gaze from his and to gesture about at the commotion on all sides. “Everyone else is thrilled.”
She expected him to bark something back at her, but he didn’t. Once again, he surprised her. He really did look around, that dark, restless gaze of his moving this way and that.
Taking it all in, she thought. Adding it all up in that ledger in his head, pluses and minuses. Or, anyway, that was how she assumed wealthy men thought about the world when, for all she knew, this wildly rich man was hanging around for vibes only.
Something she did not intend to say to him.
When his gaze returned to her it seemed darker, somehow. “I assume your projections will be correct. It’s one of the reasons why my restaurants have always stayed open on Christmas Day. Profit is hand over fist.”
And he had made such a point of telling her he wasn’t American. Or puritan, as he had put it. She had to take that to mean that there were different boundaries here.
So she asked him a question she would not have asked the forbidding La Paloma. Not without second-guessing herself, that was. “What are some of the other reasons?”
She thought he looked taken back, which was a kind of victory in itself. He let out a sound that might have been a laugh, though it sounded far too bitter.
“My mother usually made certain that she was completely out of her mind on Christmas,” he said in the same sort of tone. “I normally had to keep watch over her, to make sure she was still breathing. More than once, I was convinced she wouldn’t wake up. Joy to the world, indeed.”
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said at once. “I didn’t mean—”
“I understand the utility of a Christmas program, whether in a restaurant or, indeed, in a hotel that is attempting to become a premiere location in a country filled with such places.” He sounded almost impatient, now.
“I also understand that this is some kind of test for you. You are expected to face it and in so doing, prove your worth.”
Hannah cleared her throat. “That would, obviously, be the preferred outcome, to my way of thinking.”
“I will tell you now that I find it unlikely that there will be any other outcome,” Antonluca told her. Gruffly. “Once Christmas is done, I will leave the hotel to you. There is very little that your capable hands cannot handle.”
He looked so remote then, as cold as the blustery December day all around them, but something inside her seemed to twist in on itself. She had the strangest urge to reach out and put her hands on him. To make him feel better. To soothe him.
To do something about the ache she felt in her that she was certain came directly from him—
Thankfully, she controlled herself.
“That sounds as if we won’t see you on the hotel floor,” she said, and it cost her to sound so mild, yet upbeat. It actually hurt.
“You won’t,” he replied.
Hannah could tell that he’d…come to some decision then. It was the way he looked at her. It was that frozen sort of feeling, there between them.
It was the finality in the way he’d said that. You won’t.
“I thought you lived on the next hill over. Or that’s what I heard in the village, anyway.”
“I have a great many houses,” he told her, and it seemed…
She was sure that there was more happening here, in the thickening air between them, than it sounded like there was. Because she could feel it.
And this time it was more than a flutter.
“Of course you do,” she agreed. “I believe that’s the whole point of being a celebrity billionaire chef, isn’t it? The real estate alone.”
“I’m happy to own a hotel, Hannah,” he said in that brittle voice of his. “But that does not mean that I wish to run one.” He lifted a brow. “If I did, I would have no need of you.”
She told herself he could not possibly have meant to hurt her. He had simply stated a fact. Her feelings were her own problem.
But that didn’t seem to ease the sting any.
“All I ask is that you keep your opinions to yourself, please,” he said quietly.
Quietly, but there was all that intense gray behind it.
And somehow, out here where half of Tuscany was watching, they’d ended up standing far too close together. She felt her toes curl up in her boots. She felt herself flush all over, and was glad that today she’d thought to bundle up sufficiently that no one needed to know that but her.
“What I can promise,” she said, “is that I’ll keep my opinions out of the papers.”
If it killed her.
“I thank you,” he replied.
And she could hear that sardonic inflection. But she was looking up at him, and there was something so stark about his expression. Something that on anyone else, she might have called lost, there in the eyes.
She had never wanted to touch anyone as much as she wanted to touch him then.
But she didn’t. She couldn’t.
Instead, inside of her, she felt a great wave of shame—so intense that it hurt—because she still hadn’t told him about Dominic.
This was the moment. This was well past the moment, in fact, and she had no excuse for that. There was no justification for it, not when she’d spent the past couple of weeks in his company, enough to know that he was no monster. He was not abusive, or vindictive.
On the contrary, she found that all this time talking to him and working with him didn’t make her like him any less. Quite the opposite.
Tell him, she ordered herself. Tell him now.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
He was too close. His stormy gaze dropped from hers, down to her lips, and some kind of resolve took her over.
He was her boss. They had already kissed once, that first day in the library, but she thought that had been left over from before—from that night in New York. There was no need to go back there.
Because he’d said as much, hadn’t he? He wasn’t the sort to stay in one place.
He had houses all over the world, like every other wealthy person she’d ever heard of.
And when it came down to it, Hannah didn’t need anything from him.
She doubted very much that he would be at all interested in the child he’d made, and besides, if he said anything cruel about Dominic or made any move to harm her son, she would hate him forever.
It wasn’t worth the risk.
Her son had her, and he had Cinzia. Dominic didn’t need grandparents and other relatives who didn’t care about him.
Maybe he also didn’t need a father who didn’t know he existed and was unlikely to care all that much if he did.
More to the point, he wouldn’t even be around after Christmas. He’d said so himself. So what was the point of telling him now?
You are rationalizing, something in her hissed, but she shoved it aside.
“You do not look filled with the Christmas spirit at all,” Antonluca said. “You look something more like murderous.”
“I’m only in the Christmas spirit on Christmas itself,” she replied, though as she said it she could hear that she sounded much sharper than she should. She tried to modify her tone. “And in the meantime, I really will murder someone if they don’t set these tables up correctly.”
She told herself that she merely stepped away to look after the details of the Christmas Market—to do her job, she assured herself—but she couldn’t shake the notion that what she was really doing was running.
Like a coward.
But she told herself she was doing it for Dominic, and that made it okay.
She had to believe that made it okay.