Chapter Five
Hannah made it home later that evening. The event had gone off without a hitch, and she was pleased about that, but she was even more pleased that she managed to get home in time to snuggle Dominic on his way to bed.
And then sit and have dinner with her neighbor and friend, as she got to do too seldomly.
“You never seem tired when you come home,” the older woman noted as they shared wine and broke bread together. “I think this job suits you.”
What Hannah thought was that her current companion at the job suited her, but she refused to say that out loud. It was tempting fate, surely.
More than that, it was entirely predicated on a lie of omission. If she was wise, she would stop pretending to herself that there was any way out of the situation she was in that wouldn’t leave someone hurt. Likely herself.
Just as long as it’s not Dominic, she thought fiercely.
But then, wasn’t she the one making sure that he would be hurt? By drawing out the inevitable moment of truth with the one man who could hurt them all?
After Cinzia left, Hannah went in to check on Dominic—or, if she was honest with herself, to try to make herself feel better about the choices she was making. And the quicksand it seemed she was standing in.
“I need to tell him,” she whispered as she stood there, staring down at her perfect little boy in his crib.
It was hard to imagine that soon—any moment now, really, and it was possible she was dragging her feet on this—it was going to be time for a bigger bed.
It seemed like only a blink since he was red and wrinkled and new, and spent most of his time a hot weight against her body.
And everyone said the time only went faster and faster.
Would she blink again and find her tiny baby boy a whole grown man?
Yet even thinking that made the guilt inside of her seem to swell and ripen, until she was terribly afraid something would burst. She knew she needed to tell Antonluca. She knew it, and every night she resolved that tomorrow would be the day—
But it never was, was it?
It turned out that Hannah really wasn’t the woman she’d always believed herself to be. The woman she’d been so sure she was, without question. She had been indiscreet with her friend in New York, yes, but she wasn’t the betraying kind herself. That distinction had always seemed critical to her.
And wasn’t it a bitter pill to swallow that she was, maybe, more like that terrible friend of hers than not?
In the crib he could already climb out of, Dominic shifted slightly.
Hannah gazed down at his sooty dark lashes as they rested there against his round, plump cheeks.
The urge to wake him up just so she could kiss him on those cheeks and love on him some more was almost overwhelming, but she was used to that.
She suspected that it would never get any better or any easier to keep from adoring this child.
She suspected this was simply motherhood.
Why shouldn’t Antonluca get to feel the same way? she asked herself as she crept out of the room, her heart full.
And also aching a little bit, she acknowledged as she went back to the main room.
But she didn’t know what to do about that aside from the obvious, first chance she got, so she busied herself tidying things up, though it wasn’t exactly necessary.
Cinzia was always good about leaving things a bit cleaner than she found them.
Another way her neighbor was perfect, to Hannah’s mind.
She was contemplating whether to settle in on the cozy sofa with a book and a glass of wine, or whether she might take both of those things into the bath with her for a soak, when there was a sudden, loud, demanding sort of thumping sound.
It took her a long moment to understand that it was the door.
That there was someone at her door, which made no sense.
She stood where she was and stared at it, confused when the thumping started again. Until she realized that there had to be someone standing there, pounding on the door with a fist.
But whether or not she found this personally alarming, what made her furious was thinking that someone thought they could come and make that much noise when there was a baby sleeping.
Not on Hannah’s watch.
She hurtled herself toward the door and flung it open, prepared to give whoever was standing there a piece of her mind—
But it was Antonluca.
And he looked… More intense than she’d ever seen him before.
Almost vibrating with that intensity and, if she wasn’t mistaken, somewhat…
ragged around the edges, besides. Or maybe it was simply that he was in casual clothes, when she’d never seen him in anything but a suit.
Suggesting he’d come rushing here from his home.
“What…?” she began, her mind already wondering what calamity could have befallen the hotel in the few short hours since she’d left for the night.
Already thinking that she could go back inside and grab a coat to throw over the sweater and lounging pants she was wearing, both quite a few notches above regular sweats, if not exactly up to her typical standards for the office—
“Is it true?” Antonluca gritted out.
It was cold out there tonight. She could hear the wind causing a ruckus. It smelled like snow. The dark seemed to press in on her. “I have no idea what you’re—”
“Is it true, Hannah?” he asked again, his voice darker. Rougher. “Do you have a child?”
And Hannah felt herself go terribly, frighteningly still. As if the world stopped turning, with a sudden, scary jolt.
She was a bit surprised that she wasn’t tossed straight off.
Or maybe she wished she was, because she couldn’t speak. She had never seen his gray eyes so dark, so haunted. She had never seen that mobile face of his, always so beautifully masculine, look so twisted. So anguished.
She had to say something. She needed to say anything.
But Hannah couldn’t seem to make her throat move or her mouth form words. Still seized up and frozen solid, she managed to nod her head.
Just the faintest little bit.
Yet it was enough.
Antonluca was filling up her doorway and then he leaned in, and it seemed to her that he put his face dangerously close to hers as the world began spinning again, too fast.
“Did you…? Do you have my child?” he asked, though it was more the suggestion of words. She wasn’t sure his voice made any real sound at all.
Hannah felt her eyes prick with emotion. She felt her chest go tight and full.
But she could have done this already and she hadn’t.
This was on her. She cleared her throat.
She nodded again, more jerkily this time, to make sure he saw it.
To make sure she was really doing it. “I found out I was pregnant after I moved home to Nebraska. I had no way to contact you. I didn’t even know your name. ”
“But you know it now,” he pointed out in that low, dangerous voice. “You have known it for some while, have you not.”
It wasn’t a question.
He moved then and she stepped back immediately.
And only realized after he swept into her cottage and she closed the door behind him by rote, to keep the cold out, that she really should have thought this through.
Because all of that seething fury on her doorstep was one thing, but it was something else inside the cottage itself. Moments ago she’d been thinking how cozy it was here, how bright and happy even in the darkest part of the year.
Now it was as if the darkness had taken over.
He was a shock against all that brightness, the brutal masculine beauty of him so tall and lean and furious right here in the middle of all this feminine space.
Antonluca made no attempt to look around, or make any small talk. He stood there in the middle of the room and stared at Hannah.
Through her, more like.
She swallowed hard, and didn’t bother trying to offer any kind of explanation. Instead, she moved across the room and beckoned him to follow her, though she lifted a finger to her lips as she eased open Dominic’s door.
Inside, the little boy was still fast asleep in his crib.
Beside her, Antonluca made a small sound, almost beneath his breath. But she heard it.
It made her heart kick at her, so hard it made her ribs ache.
And there was something exquisitely painful—though whether it was a terrible joy or a kind of loss, she couldn’t have said—to watch as the man that she’d created this perfect little boy with beheld him for the first time.
There was something almost sacred about it. Hannah found her hands over her mouth as Antonluca moved to the edge of the crib and looked down, that dark fury on his face changing almost at once to something that could only be wonder.
He put his hand out and she almost stopped him, but she thought better of it.
And so she watched as gently—so very gently that she thought she might start sobbing—he settled that big hand of his on Dominic’s belly.
For a long, beautiful, impossible moment, it was as if they all breathed together.
Hannah watched as Dominic’s faint restlessness went away. As if he knew his father’s hand and the heat that came from it.
As if he’d been waiting for exactly this to truly settle him down.
And still, it was the look on Antonluca’s face that almost undid her.
There was something so bright and sharp in his gaze.
There was something about the way he held his mouth, a tenderness she hadn’t imagined a man so gorgeous could possess.
She wasn’t close enough to him to hear what he whispered over the sleeping figure of the little boy, like some kind of prayer.
Her heart thought it knew.
But then it didn’t matter, because when he straightened from the crib and turned back to her, his face was like thunder.
Hannah could hardly bear to look at him, though she was equally incapable of looking away. But she had to give him her back as she led him out of the room again, and it wasn’t any better when she faced him again on the other side of Dominic’s bedroom wall, his door shut once more.