Chapter Nine
And then, suddenly, Hannah found herself living in some strange little fairy tale.
She worked every day in a luxury hotel, where every room was a study in soaring elegance, exquisite fragrance, everything lush and welcoming. Christmas Eve was fast approaching and as if the hotel was its very own Advent calendar, every day they unveiled a little more sparkle. A little more glee.
Every night when she left the hotel in all its graceful splendor, she let the starkly beautiful man who was not quite a stranger drive her home through the magical hills of Tuscany to a bare-bones castle, all forbidding stone and echoing, empty rooms.
But like any other fairy tale, she knew better than to look too closely at all that starkness, at all those hints of disrepair. Because he was her baby’s father. And more to the point, he was her husband.
And while his castle might have been cold and bare, there was nothing about the bed they shared that was anything but hot.
So hot, so blisteringly good, that Hannah often wondered if she was even the same woman she’d been before.
Because it had never occurred to her that the night they’d shared in New York City could be anything but an anomaly.
She’d even felt smug about that, pleased because then there were no other, less transformative facts about him or them to concern herself with.
There was no mundane when it came to one transformative night that she hadn’t expected to repeat.
She had assumed that they would fall into a routine now that they were married, but they didn’t.
He had not outdone himself in New York. It turned out. If anything, that night had only been the start. The faintest hint of what he could do and how they could come together and make that magic, that wildfire rush.
Within three days, Hannah understood things about her body that she’d never believed possible before, and Antonluca already knew each and every one of them.
In the morning, she would stand in the shower while he went to get Dominic up, and sometimes she even sobbed—but not because she was sad. But because she’d had no idea that it was possible to love another grown adult human this much, with her body as well as her heart.
And if she wasn’t mistaken, the better part of her soul as well.
Hannah wasn’t a complete fool. She was keenly aware that they were on a fast track toward building out their family, though they had never discussed it.
But did it require discussion? They both knew how Dominic had come into the world.
Yet neither one of them protested when birth control wasn’t used.
Again and again and again.
But then, she was just as capable of saying something as he was, and she wasn’t a virgin any longer. Hannah knew exactly what could happen and likely would.
In not talking about it, they were both speaking pretty loudly, she thought.
The truth was, she was glad.
Maybe she’d spend her life regretting these dark outside, brightly lit within weeks in this rush to Christmas, but she doubted it.
Because he could have locked her away in a tower, as kings with castles were wont to do, but he hadn’t. They were almost certainly making a future in these long nights, and Hannah thought he had to be as aware of it as she was.
And even if she did end up regretting this—this wild abandon, this glorious immolation—she found herself thinking that it would only be by the light of day. Come nightfall, when she was tucked up in her bed, locked away or not, she knew exactly what she would be dreaming about.
The slide of that huge, beautiful cock of his, deep inside her. The way he held her hips in his hands and guided her when he wanted to control the pace, the depth, and her reaction.
He was a demon, and he was some kind of archangel, and the contrast between their crisp and deliberate professionalism at work and the abandoned way they both succumbed to this fire between them in bed—
Maybe regret was the wrong thing to worry about. Maybe surviving this was going to be the challenge.
In many ways, she counseled herself each day, nothing has changed. Everything is more or less the same.
Mostly, she knew, because Antonluca had gone to great lengths to make certain that her transition from cottage to castle was easy as possible.
It was, once again, an indication that he was more thoughtful than she expected him to be. Or than anyone else ever had been. It made her heart ache a bit every time.
“And how goes this loveless marriage of yours?” Cinzia asked one morning.
The older woman came every day to the castle, conveyed by one of the largely invisible staff members that Antonluca had informed Hannah—stiffly—were there for her use.
I have long maintained a skeleton staff, if that, he had told her. But you and Dominic deserve more care. They will be only too happy to do your bidding.
Hannah had not known how to tell him that she did not know the first thing about staff. Not when it was to attend to her own needs. If they had been staff that she could direct to take care of hotel guests, that would have made sense to her. Staff for just…living?
Maybe she was more Nebraskan than she’d ever dreamed.
This morning, Cinzia had found them all in the kitchen, where Dominic had been eating his breakfast while Antonluca drank the bitter coffee he preferred and Hannah had a bit of toast. Because she liked toast, but also because it was something that she could prepare for herself, since it made her feel strange to ask staff members to wait on her like that.
Not to mention that the other adult who lived in this place was a world-renowned chef, though he acted as if he had never been inside a kitchen in all of his life. But that was a different issue—and one that felt like a minefield.
Hannah had decided that she was better off staying firmly anti-minefield for as long as she could.
Cinzia had watched as Antonluca had taken his leave, informing Hannah that he had meetings in London, but would be flying back that night. She’d watched as Antonluca had moved in and kissed her, deeply. As if they were alone.
And once he’d left, the older woman had made no bones about watching the way that Hannah flushed. Deep and long and very, very red.
Dominic was sitting on one of the high chairs at the counter, and started wiggling in a manner that suggested that he was moments away from flinging himself toward the kitchen floor.
Hannah took that as an opportunity to take him down before he cracked his head open.
She set him on the ground, with the added benefit that this gave her something to look at besides Cinzia.
“Il primo amore non si scorda mai,” Cinzia said quietly. Hannah wasn’t sure of the translation—something about first love cutting the deepest, she rather thought. “But this is a good thing, is it not?”
“I don’t know what it is,” Hannah replied, keeping her eyes on Dominic as he played with the chair leg, as if it had suddenly become deeply intriguing to him. “Maybe there’s no point analyzing it. Maybe there’s only living it and hoping for the best.”
“Remember,” her friend said, and her voice was so kind that Hannah found herself blinking back tears, “this is your marriage. Your family. Whatever happened before, with your parents or whatever his past might hold, you can choose to put it behind you. You can choose, if you like, to make something new instead.”
“You say that as if you’ve never heard of ghosts.” Hannah looked at her then, fighting the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “But this country is so old. You must be surrounded by them.”
“There is never any shortage of ghosts, child,” Cinzia told her with her wise, wide smile. “But here in Italy, we make friends with the things that haunt us. How else could life be so beautiful?”
Hannah found herself thinking about that all day.
That night, she put Dominic to bed in his castle room that he liked so much that he sometimes asked to go sit in it at different points in the day, just to be in it.
She read him an extra story and tucked him into the big boy bed he’d moved into when they’d come here.
And then, when he was finally asleep, she found herself padding around the strange, empty old stone rooms like she was the ghost here, after all.
She got her book and went in by the fire, but if she read anything at all, she didn’t know. Because the next thing she did know she was waking up to find Antonluca braced above her, a stern, arrested sort of look on his face as he gazed down at her curled up in his chair.
“When did you get home?” she asked.
His eyes seemed to darken at that, and the air between them seemed to thin. And Hannah understood that using the word home was loaded, here. In this bright fire of theirs where everything was a feeling and nothing was ever discussed outright.
She sat up straighter, rubbing her hands over her face, less sanguine than she wanted to be. Less in control of herself than she needed to be around this man.
My husband, she thought, and that word never failed to make her heart kick at her.
“I got in now,” he told her.
And she wasn’t sure that she could tell the difference between the appropriately remote boss he was at work and the man who stood before her now in yet another bespoke suit that made him look every bit as powerful as he was.
Or maybe she was tired of pretending they were two different men.
She uncurled herself from the depths of the chair, and it seemed to her that it took him a little too long to move back as she did.
But he did move. And then she was standing, and they were still too close, or that was what her body was telling her, anyway. Her heart was going wild beneath her ribs and she was sure that he could tell that she was flushed. Everywhere.
In all the places he liked to taste.
“You must be hungry,” she said. When he only stared at her, she shook her head. “What is it? You keep looking at me as if…?”