Chapter Seven
“We must get married,” Antonluca informed her, as if issuing a decree.
But since it was impossible that he had said such a thing, all Hannah could do was stare at him.
“What?”
That was not the sort of polished reply she was known for, but it was all she had.
It was the week before Christmas. They had been running around all day, preparing the hotel for its grand tree-lighting ceremony tonight.
Hannah had expected that Antonluca would make things difficult for her after he’d discovered Dominic’s existence.
She’d expected…retaliation, perhaps. Or at least some version of coldness or pettiness in case she was tempted to forget that he thought she deliberately betrayed him.
Last time around, despite the night they’d shared, he’d had her fired and blacklisted.
Lest she forget.
But this time around, with much higher stakes, he had disconcerted her by acting like a consummate professional.
If she hadn’t known only too well that he had only found out that he was a father a handful of days before, she wouldn’t have had the slightest idea that anything had occurred in his personal life.
She was certain no one else had noticed any change in him at all.
He is as unchanging as the sea, Léontine had murmured at some point.
The sea is ever-changing, Hannah had replied. That’s the whole point of it, surely.
Yet it remains the sea, replied the concierge, with a faint shrug.
Hannah had thought about that a lot.
Now he’d walked into her office, taken the chair that he normally did, and then come out with this…absurdity.
Hannah studied him, taking in the way his gray eyes glittered and the way he tilted that strong jaw of his, as if he was prepared to get belligerent if necessary.
There was no reason that should make her shiver, she chastised herself. Particular not in the absence of anything like fear.
He had taken to coming over every morning before work. Each time he did, it made more and more of Hannah’s heart hurt, because Dominic just loved him. Dominic couldn’t get enough of him. Add to that the inescapable fact that Dominic looked just like his father and it did something to Hannah.
It made her feel connected to Antonluca in a way she knew, logically, she wasn’t.
It made her daydream about becoming a family in a real sense when she knew that was something several degrees more than simply foolish.
She was, in the end, really not much more than a simple girl who was good at hospitality.
He, on the other hand, was…Antonluca Aniello.
Then again, she thought now, maybe foolishness was going around.
“I believe that you heard me,” Antonluca said. His voice was measured, but nothing about his expression or that glint in his gaze offered anything that suggested calm rationality.
She opted not to examine too closely the way that expression made everything inside of her…seem to gleam.
Just as she did not permit herself to remember that look that Antonluca had worn on his face after he’d seen Dominic for the first time. Or the way they’d crashed together after that, in such a bright, blistering fury—
“I did hear you,” she conceded, because that was better than letting that memory sweep her away. “But I assumed I must have misunderstood. What on earth would make you think that marriage was a good idea?”
Antonluca gazed back at her without comprehension. “We have a child.”
“Yes,” she said, and Hannah had to shove aside the wellspring of emotion that wanted to flood her then, with all this we. We have a child, he’d said.
As if they were that family she’d always wished she had—
But she had to stop doing this to herself. She had to. It was self-preservation at this point.
She cleared her throat. “We have a child, but we didn’t have to be married to make him and we don’t have to be married now, either.”
“I would like my child to have my name,” he told her, and even though those gray eyes of his glittered even more than before, if anything, his voice got smoother. Calmer.
Or maybe what it was, she thought as it seemed to expand inside of her, was implacable.
“If I had known you were having my child in the first place,”he said in that same voice, so it seemed that even his gaze was a bit darker, then, “I would have insisted upon it before he was born.”
“You would have insisted,” she echoed.
“My child should have every possible protection that my name offers,” Antonluca continued in that same calm, smooth manner. Yet with every syllable, it was as if more steel was infused into the words.
She stared back at him and realized that she hadn’t moved since he’d started speaking. It was as if she couldn’t. It was very much as if she’d frozen solid, but that was only her body. Inside, her emotions were running wild.
He wanted to marry her.
Except…it wasn’t really her he wanted to marry, was it. Marrying her was a means to an end. This was all about Dominic. This had nothing to do with her at all.
And Hannah was torn, because part of her was fiercely glad.
This was how she had felt about Dominic from the moment she’d finally come to understand what was happening to her body.
She had vowed that she would protect her baby as fully and as selflessly as she knew how, and if she didn’t know how, she’d learn.
But the other part of her, the part that could still feel Antonluca’s hot, hard mouth on hers, and the way he had surged deep inside of her as if he had always belonged there, was…less glad.
An alarm sounded on her phone then, and it was like being released from a spell. She looked away from him, saw the message on her lock screen, and blew out a breath.
“I will take your…proposal under advisement,” she said, trying her best not to sound too emotional. Or too anything, really. “But it’s time for me to go make sure the tree lighting ceremony is going on without a hitch.”
She stood up in a rush, gathered her things as best she could, and when he stood, too, she almost expected him to reach out and put his hand on her—
Maybe she only wished he would.
But he didn’t.
Hannah found herself a little more emotional than planned as she made her way out into the main lobby.
The guests had trickled in by now and the lobby was full, with holiday music playing in the background while the staff bustled around dispensing sweet treats—all from various Christmases around the world, from gingerbread men to Florentines to pfeffernuesse and more—and filling glasses with sparkling wine.
She was happy, immediately, that there was too much to do for her to sink too deeply into the mess inside of her, because she had the feeling that once she did, there would be no climbing back out.
It was not until later, after each and every evergreen that they’d set up for this festival was lit and carolers sang before the grand fireplace, singing in at least five languages, that she found herself tucked in a corner and finally able to think about the fact that Antonluca Aniello, the man who had rocked her world entirely in New York and was the father of her son, had proposed to her.
Well, she corrected herself with perhaps the faintest hint of something like bitterness—or perhaps it was simple disappointment—that isn’t strictly true.
It hadn’t been a proposal. It had been a demand and it hadn’t had much, if anything, to do with her.
Try as she might, she couldn’t seem to get past that.
All night, she hadn’t been able to really enjoy herself here, when this was truly one of her favorite nights of the year. It was even better this year, because the hotel was full and the guests were almost universally delighted. Hannah should have been floating on cloud nine.
Instead, she found herself returning again and again to a simple truth that she didn’t want to face. Namely, that she was far more of a romantic than she’d ever thought she was.
Because there was a part of her that almost wished she’d never found out who that man in New York was. Now that she had—now that she knew—she could no longer pull out that night to escape into when she had a need for it. It was no longer her safe place, her happy place.
She’d used it as exactly that for years.
And she could admit, standing here listening to a glorious rendition of “O Holy Night” that some part of her was mourning that loss. Deeply.
Though not completely, because there had been so much gained, too.
She was happy that the truth was out. She had expected it to be painful, and it had been—it was—but it had been painful to carry a baby to term and have him alone, so she supposed there was no way out of this without some measure of pain.
And as far she could tell, Antonluca understood that.
It didn’t mean he was happy about it, but after that first night, there had been little talk of betrayal.
Another truth was that she enjoyed spending time with him.
She had discovered, to her surprise, that they were an excellent team.
Whether he had originally planned to stay here this long or not, she had found that he was an excellent person to bounce ideas off.
If he didn’t know the answer to something, he knew how to find it, and always went about looking for it in intriguing ways.
Before Antonluca had found out about Dominic, Hannah had already been wrestling with the fact that she’d known him so carnally, so physically once. And then so intellectually these past few weeks.
It was like she only knew the man in puzzle pieces. And now he wanted her to put them all together into a form that didn’t make sense to her at all.
The carolers were singing a song about Joseph’s heart, and Hannah was entirely too aware of her own. It beat too fast. It was much too fragile.
It hurt.
The trouble, she could acknowledge now that she was half-hidden by evergreen trees in a room filled with people who were not paying attention to her at all, was not that she didn’t want to marry Antonluca.
On the contrary. Something inside of her leaped every time she considered it.