Chapter Eleven
After she’d crept in to relieve the staff member who’d babysat Dominic and assured herself that her son, at least, was sleeping soundly, Hannah cried herself to sleep and then slept badly.
And with all the things she’d said to Antonluca in the middle of her typical Christmas Eve heartache—though, usually, it was less pointed and more of a general what will become of me ringing in her head—she decided once she woke up the next morning that she was afraid to actually admit she was awake.
Because she wasn’t sure she wanted to get up and face the mess she’d helped make last night.
Instead, she lay there with the covers pulled up over her head. She was keenly aware that Antonluca had not joined her in bed last night, at any point, for the first time in their admittedly short marriage.
Hannah didn’t like to think about what that could mean.
And so when she heard Dominic begin to sing in his room, it felt like a relief. Even if it was still dreadfully early.
At least this part was perfectly normal.
She poked her head out from under the covers and, sure enough, she could hear his little feet moving across the floor, and up the few stairs the way he liked to do now.
When he made it to the side of her bed, she leaned over and scooped him up, kissing him all over his face as he laughed and squealed and babbled in a mix of Italian and English to say the same thing.
It was Christmas, did she know? Because he was certain, as only small children could be, that Santa had come.
“Do you think you were a good boy?” Hannah asked him, very seriously.
His gray eyes widened in outrage, and he was so much like his father that it hurt.
“Mamma, lo ero. Lo so!” he cried at once. Then he said it again, in English, in case she needed a translation. “I was good, Mama. I know I was!”
She kissed him all over his face. “I know you were, angioletto,” she agreed. “You always are.”
Hannah had planned out their Christmas morning in advance, fairly certain that her husband was not likely to wake up filled with anything resembling Christmas cheer.
The good news, to her mind, was that Dominic was too little to expect anything.
He didn’t have any picture in his head about what Christmas ought to be.
So she had decided she would make it as relaxed as possible.
Breakfast. Gifts. Later, she would take him over to Cinzia’s, and perhaps they would join in the Christmas meal that Cinzia and her family always had.
This was almost exactly what she had done last year, and she’d loved it.
But as she got up from the bed, her attention was caught by the sunrise outside the windows and the beautiful, brightly colored light that spread across the sky and highlighted something else.
The fact that it was still snowing.
“Look,” she told Dominic. “It’s a white Christmas. Just like the song.”
She pulled on her own clothes and then brought Dominic down to his room so that he could get dressed, too, since he liked to kick off his pajamas in the night. They sang “White Christmas” the whole time—or she did, anyway, and he hummed along, with more enthusiasm than tune.
It was only when Dominic insisted on walking down the stairs of the tower, which meant that she had to keep herself angled in front of him in case he took a tumble, that Hannah realized there was something else magical about the morning.
It wasn’t simply the snow outside and a happy little boy. There was a glorious, sweet scent, everywhere.
She thought she had to be hallucinating cinnamon rolls.
But when they got to the bottom of the stairs and made it out of the tower and into the rest of the castle, both she and Dominic stared around in wonder.
Because this castle wasn’t the one she’d been in last night, before bed.
Overnight, as if by the wave of a magic wand, it was like they were in a completely different castle altogether.
“What happened?” asked her sweet little boy. “Was it Santa?”
“Maybe,” Hannah said.
She had an idea who it might be, other than Santa Claus—but it seemed so outlandish. So deeply impossible. So much so that she scooped Dominic up and settled him on her hip because she needed to hold on to something.
Then, together, they wandered through the main floor of the castle as if it was new.
Because in every way that mattered, it was.
In the few hours left of the night after she’d run upstairs, the coldest and most lonely castle in Italy had become…cozy.
There were rugs everywhere, tapestries on the walls, and evergreen trees festooned with lights.
The rooms they passed were no longer empty.
Instead, they were brimming with comfortable-looking furniture, fires in every fireplace, music playing—Christmas carols, no less—and all of the photographs that had been in her cottage, the photographs that hadn’t made it to the castle when Antonluca had moved her the night of their wedding, were displayed.
They were everywhere. Like this was their home.
Like all of this was theirs, too.
Not just a cell to occupy while they all did time together.
She found her way into Antonluca’s only previously furnished room and found that even it had suffered a makeover. Now it sported a big Christmas tree in one corner, lavishly decorated, with piles of perfectly wrapped presents laid beneath it.
Once again, Hannah felt her eyes get heavy with emotion because this looked more like the Christmas of her dreams than any she’d ever had.
Back home in Nebraska, even though everyone had always been on their best behavior on a day like this, there would always be undercurrents.
Muttering about agendas and high-falutin’ airs and dire warnings not to touch the cookies lest the cookie exchange be ruined.
Things she’d ignored because she’d wanted to enjoy Christmas.
Yet somehow Antonluca had dug into her finest, most dearly held daydreams, and had provided her with every single one of them come true.
And still, there was that marvelous smell of dough and sugar and cinnamon, making her stomach grumble.
She left Dominic to leap around in glee at all of the Christmas splendor and followed her nose back into the kitchen.
Where she stopped dead once again.
Because Antonluca was there.
But more amazing, he was cooking.
The counter was filled with platters of food, and even at a quick glance she could see that he had covered what looked like every possible Christmas tradition around.
There were piles of fragrant cinnamon rolls, there were bacon dishes and eggs, hot chocolate, sweets, panettone and pandoro, and many dishes she couldn’t identify at a glance.
She could hardly believe her eyes.
And when he turned around from the cooking range to face her, she caught her breath.
Because this was an Antonluca she recognized, but not usually outside of their bed. This was a man made of passion, and a wild, beautiful heart. She could see it in him. She could certainly see it in the food he’d prepared.
As if he’d found that magic in him again.
And she understood, as if he’d reached in and touched her heart with his, that he was showing her his love in the only way he could.
She understood other things then. Like why he had stepped back from cooking. Because it must have felt unrequited to him, all this intense and glorious love he had in him, especially after it had performed the task he’d claimed he’d learned it for.
Because he had never allowed himself space to do anything simply because he loved it.
That wasn’t in his vocabulary. That was anathema to the street kid who had simply needed to survive. She understood that now.
But here he was, cooking for her. And their son. On Christmas morning in that cold prison he had turned into a home overnight.
He stared at her from across the room, and Hannah had never seen this man look so…out of his depth.
He stood tall, his gray eyes a kind of storm she’d never seen before. For a long moment, he only stared at her and then he looked, almost helplessly, at the counter piled high with food.
With his art. His joy. His love.
“I didn’t know what you would like,” he said, his voice gruff and stiff and not like his at all. “So I made everything.”
“Antonluca,” Hannah managed to get out, though her throat was tight, holding his gaze the way she wished she really could reach over and hold him, too, “I love you, too.”
Dominic came rushing in then, squealing with delight, and ran straight to his father. Giving Hannah the piercing joy of watching her child and her husband bask in each other, as if love had always been a feast. As if it was supposed to be, not the crumbs she’d hoarded away in her family’s house.
She found that she had never been so hungry in all her life. Hannah went to the counter and fixed herself a plate. Then found tears rolling down her cheeks as she tasted, one bite and then the next, pure love.
Salty. Sweet. Perfectly fluffy, gloriously dense.
It was everything. It was the dance of flavor on her tongue, it was spice when needed, and the lightest, airiest pastry imaginable.
It was meringues with perfect peaks and fluffy eggs baked into fragrant quiches.
Perfect hot chocolate and decadently strong coffee.
Antonluca shooed them out of the kitchen and brought trays into the room that Hannah supposed was now their living room, where Antonluca and Hannah got to be parents watching an overexcited toddler amuse himself beneath the Christmas tree for the first time while they feasted and laughed.
And when Dominic had to take what would likely be his first sugar crash nap of the day, they found each other there on the floor. Surrounded by wrapping paper, a crackling fire, and watchful Christmas tree, they knelt together, gripped each other’s hands, and basked in each other, too.
“Hannah,” he said, holding her hands between his. “My beautiful, impossible Hannah, I wanted to show you the only way I could. I don’t know what love is, but I know how it tastes.”
“So do I,” she said, and kissed him.
He kissed her back, but then he sent her apart from him again. He smoothed his hands over her cheeks, letting his fingers find their way into her hair.
“I know how love tastes,” he said again. “A hint of sugar and the complication of the perfect spice. You, Hannah. And you have brought me more love than I could possibly deserve. You have given me you and our beautiful son. Somehow, last night, you even brought me back to my food, too.”
“It’s okay to love things,” she whispered. “It’s all right to let the act of loving them transform you. It’s not a weakness.”
“I didn’t know love,” he told her urgently, pressing kisses to her brow, her cheeks, her nose.
“But I discovered food and I poured myself into it, and I saved almost everyone I know. And for those I could not save, like my mother, it was like a tonic while they were there. And so for me, love became the fighting. And once it was not necessary for me to fight, I could not love, either.”
“And yet,” Hannah said quietly, like a vow, “look at how you love me. And our son.”
“Entirely because of you,” he said, and his voice was rough again, but his eyes gleamed like silver.
“Because you told the truth to that tabloid just as, last night, you told me the truth straight to my face. I don’t need to be a circus act.
I don’t need to keep myself in prison for crimes I did not commit.
I cannot blame my mother for what few choices she had before her, but it’s not my fault I couldn’t save her from it.
Sometimes, if I’m really honest, I think she didn’t want to be saved. ”
“Sometimes,” Hannah agreed, “we all have to save ourselves.”
“You say that,” Antonluca said quietly, tucking a bit of her hair behind her ear, “but I am quite certain, Hannah Hansen of Nebraska, that you are the only one in all the world who could have saved me. And you did, without my even knowing it.”
“I promise you this,” she said, smiling at him. “I always will.”
“And what I promise you in return, diavolessa,” he said, “my little devil of a bride, is that I will never turn my back on this life. I will always choose you and our family first. And I will learn how to love you all in a way that does not come with strings, but feels the way this morning tastes. Right. Endless. Ours.”
“Merry Christmas, my beautiful husband,” Hannah whispered, no longer caring that the tears were pouring freely down her face, not when she was smiling so wide and so hard that her cheeks hurt. “I have to tell you, this is the best one yet.”
He pulled her into his arms and settled her on his lap, so he could kiss her a little more thoroughly. But not too wildly, not yet. Not now. Not while Dominic slept there beside them, and he supposed that he would learn to love this, too.
The sweet anticipation, because he knew that they would end every night together. That even if they were separated for a day or two here and there, they would always have this.
Home.
Wherever they were together, that’s where he would be.
And they would play with these flames for the rest of their days.
“Just you wait,” he promised her, kissing her like it was the first time, because with Hannah, it always was. “I haven’t even started.”