Chapter Six
Antonluca didn’t sleep, and not only because he wished he hadn’t suggested he would take a small boy from his mother like he was auditioning to become any number of the terrible men who’d had too much influence over his own childhood.
Of course he wouldn’t do such a thing.
He had built himself an entire life to make certain that not only could no one do such things to him, but that no one could do these things to his siblings, either. He had made certain they were all protected.
Obviously he could do no less for his own son.
Still, he stayed up all night and made certain that his legal team got as little sleep as he did. He barked out orders and demanded action as if that could take away the sting that seemed to get deeper—and become more of a low, long ache—the longer he sat with it.
And there was nothing to do but sit with it.
Hannah had betrayed him.
He kept circling back to that because he could have really sunk in deep on the betrayal aspect. But he didn’t stay there—much as he might have wished he could, and even tried—because the real truth was that he had betrayed himself.
First that night in New York itself. He hadn’t been nearly as militant about birth control as he had been for the whole of his life before then.
A lot like the way he’d betrayed himself again this very same night, less than twenty minutes after he’d looked at the sleeping consequences of precisely that same behavior.
It was as if he’d wanted this all along.
But he knew that he had not.
He never had.
None of his siblings had partners or children, either. They were all proud of this, after the circumstances of their birth and early years. They had all watched their mother make a mess of every relationship she encountered, especially the one she’d had with them.
What they’d always had was each other. That and the empire that Antonluca had built. That was surely all the family anyone should need.
But now Antonluca had a son.
A son, he kept repeating to himself. My son.
The astonishingly perfect Dominic, who had looked nothing short of angelic lying there in that crib. There in that soft, sweet little cottage that was warm and bright and smelled like roses.
Nothing like anyplace Antonluca had ever lived as a child.
It made his chest hurt.
He paced around and around his castle, happy that Rocco and that awful Raffaele were nowhere to be found.
And at the first hint of morning light he found himself driving once again, following the winding roads into the village and then down to the base of the farthest hill, where a cluster of cottages were tucked into what must be a slope of glorious green come spring.
Even on a frigid, foggy December morning, it looked idyllic.
Antonluca had the strangest notion that his son was already living a life far better than the one he’d had when he was Dominic’s age.
That made his chest hurt, too. If differently than before.
And this time, when he pounded on her door, Hannah opened it with a wariness in her gaze and the little boy on her hip.
The wide-awake little boy, now, with grave gray eyes that Antonluca recognized all too well. He saw them in his own mirror every day.
“Good morning.” He thought Hannah sounded unreasonably calm and measured for a woman he’d had up against the wall in a sheer, blinding rush of temper—he told himself it had to have been temper, because he didn’t like to think what else it could have been—only a few scant hours before.
He had the distinct and nearly ungovernable urge to do it again, but there was a child to consider.
Not just any child. This was his child. This was his son.
It took some getting used to.
And in the light of day, he could see that the little boy not only had his eyes, but was fixing those eyes directly on Antonluca. While sucking his two middle fingers in his mouth, the way almost all of Antonluca’s siblings always had.
“Say buongiorno, Dominic,” Hannah coached the toddler. She glanced at Antonluca—only a quick brush of her green eyes that he felt everywhere, in ways that suggested temper had nothing to do with this—and then she returned her gaze to the child. “Say ‘Buongiorno, Papa.’”
Antonluca felt everything in him go still. This wasn’t what he wanted. Surely, this couldn’t be real life, not when—
But the toddler lifted his dark head from his mother’s shoulder, his gaze still disconcertingly direct. He removed those fingers from his mouth.
“Buongiorno, Papa,” he said in a bright and happy little boy’s voice.
And something deep inside of Antonluca seemed to…break in half. As if everything he had ever been or ever would be simply…
Changed.
In that simple, indelible moment, he was made new. Like it or not.
While he was trying his best to put himself back together, Hannah leveled another look at him—no less direct nor grave than their son’s. Then she stepped back and allowed him inside once again.
He didn’t know why he followed when everything in him was screaming at him to run. Maybe the trouble was that he didn’t know whether he wanted to run toward her or away from her.
Maybe that had been the issue with Hannah Hansen from the very start.
He followed her into the cottage’s one main room, and it was just as he remembered it from the night before. Even with toys strewn across the floor, it was bright and cozy.
Happy.
Nothing like the grimy flats—if they’d been lucky enough to have a flat, that was—that he recalled from his own childhood.
Hannah went to the brightly colored woven rug in the center of the floor and sat down, setting the little boy onto his feet beside her.
He was happy to stand, and then peered up at the strange man in his house.
Hannah, meanwhile, looked up as if she expected Antonluca to ponce about and avoid the toddler like the sticky gingered plague he likely was, but if there was one thing in this world that Antonluca knew better than he’d like to, it was children.
He found himself sitting down on the rug, too, then quickly getting drawn into an inspired discussion about the merits of plush toys versus little race cars with this tiny, chirpy human, who spoke in a mix of Italian and English and lisped his way through it all.
Antonluca became so engrossed in this debate that he almost forgot where he was. Until he looked up and saw Hannah looking at him, her eyes shining.
The finest green he’d ever seen, he couldn’t help but think.
“Stay where you are,” she told him softly. “I’m going to make Dominic some breakfast.”
He thought about the occasions his mother had cooked for them. There weren’t many, and it had never been breakfast. That had been a fend for yourself affair, and God help you if you were the one who woke their mother while she slept. “What does Dominic eat?” he asked.
“Today, pancakes.” Hannah blinked, then looked at him, her gaze guarded. “Would you like a pancake, too?”
Antonluca couldn’t help but think how strange this was. How they were treating each other with such odd formality after what was not, by any definition, a formal interaction last night. And when they were both here, sitting on the floor with a small child and a collection of toys.
“Thank you,” he said, though he had meant to say no. And then he heard himself continue, “I haven’t had a regular pancake in years. That would be lovely.”
He stayed where he was, sitting with Dominic as Hannah got to her feet, and moved across the airy main room into the open-plan kitchen area.
Then he had to try to concentrate on every last detail of this miraculous little boy in front of him while also being keenly aware of the things Hannah was doing in her kitchen.
He heard the stove click on as she lit it. He smelled sweet butter warm in the pan, heard her stir with efficiency in a glass bowl, then listened to the sizzle of batter.
What he could not remember, however, was the last time that anyone had cooked for him. He was not certain that anyone ever had, unless, of course, he had deliberately gone to patronize their restaurant. But such occasions were rarely intimate.
Not like this.
And there was something about this—or perhaps he meant there was something about her—that seemed to fill him up from within this morning no matter how furious he ought to have been with her.
Because Hannah seemed to have no qualms at all about serving a world-renowned chef with a selection of Michelin stars to his name a very simple pancake she’d whipped up in this rustic kitchen.
From, if he was not mistaken, a premade boxed mix,
If she gave any of those things the faintest bit of thought, he saw no evidence of it as she set an old, chipped blue plate down beside him.
But he had to think that it was her very matter-of-factness, with no hint of anything even resembling preciousness, that was the reason why this pancake he ate sitting cross-legged on the floor with a child would rate higher than many desperately indulgent meals he’d eaten all over the world.
He couldn’t decide if he was pleased or humbled by this.
Yet more fascinating by far, he told himself when he was finished quietly rhapsodizing about pancakes, was watching Dominic.
He would have recognized the child even if he hadn’t known who he was and where he’d come from, because he looked like all the rest of them.
That dark hair. His gray eyes. That particular, mischievous smile—though Dominic smiled a good deal more easily than anyone in Antonluca’s family ever had.
“He seems healthy and happy,” he acknowledged later, the taste of sweet pancakes still on his tongue.
“He is both,” Hannah replied. Her green gaze met his with a hint of affront. “Of course.” She seemed to consider the implications, then frowned at him. “Did you have some doubt?”