CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER TWELVE
It became a year or two of marriages and babies.
Each one of Irinka’s friends went before her, and for a time it seemed that all four of them were moving from one blessed event to the next. There was ample opportunity not only for them to congratulate each other and enjoy each other’s company, but for their formidable billionaire men to form a most unlikely friendship of their own.
Given that each and every one of them was so…intense. Each in his own way.
At one wedding or another, they all stood together in the corner and Irinka pointed out the fact that the four men were doing the same thing on the other side of the dance floor. Huddled together like a pack of wolves, each one of whom clearly considered himself the alpha—which was likely why they got along.
“It’s almost as if they’ve become their own set of work wives,” she said.
Lynna grinned. “I can’t wait to tell Athan that he has three work husbands.”
Maude smiled serenely, holding her baby to her shoulder. “Dominic might consider it something like déjà vu.”
Auggie laughed. “I informed Matias that they have no choice but to become the best of friends. But I do like the fact that they do seem to actually enjoy each other.”
After all, they all knew by now that trying to order around men like theirs made herding cats seem like a walk in the park.
Good job they were all particularly good at that sort of thing.
His Girl Friday changed, which was perhaps inevitable. Irinka no longer performed her previous services, but that didn’t mean she didn’t have other skills. She did, after all, have inroads into some of the highest levels of society. They all did now, but she was the one who was most likely to sail in, armed with a smile, and drum up business.
So that was what she did.
“I’ve decided that I’m going to put rainmaker on my business cards,” she told Zago one night in London. They had decided to keep her little house on the Portobello Road. She had taken a great deal of delight in showing him around, presenting him with all the different pieces that she’d collected, and watching him study each one as if it was a window into her soul.
Maybe she hadn’t appreciated the view because she’d been on the wrong side of it.
“Rainmaker?” Zago asked lazily, stroking her hair as they sat together on her rooftop. “Because something like client acquisition specialist is too boring?”
“I’m happy to be anything, my love,” she told him. “Except boring.”
This she had proved already, deciding that it wasn’t only Carnival where she could experiment with her love of costumes, but their bedroom.
He had yet to complain.
She put off introducing Zago to Roksana for as long as she could. When she finally made everyone sit down around a dinner table in her cozy house, where she could contain any damage, she was surprised to find that her mother was apparently capable of being charming when she wished.
“I had no idea you could have an entire conversation with a man without mentioning death or dismemberment,” she muttered at her mother when she walked her out later. “Where has this charmer been hiding?”
“You do not think that I have had so many lovers because I cannot charm them, do you?” her mother replied, arching a smug sort of brow. “Silly girl.”
As for their own shining, happy forever, Irinka and Zago took their time.
Nicolosa finished with university and got her first, appropriate boyfriend, who doted on her and treated her like a princess she was.
Neither Zago nor Irinka thought it wise or necessary to tell her the identity of that woman who had happily removed her from Felipe De Osma’s clutches.
And while all of Irinka’s friends were settling down to marriage and motherhood, she and Zago made up for lost time. He showed her the boundlessness of true love. She showed him the parts of her she had never showed anyone else, ever.
Together, they experimented with the very outer limits of vulnerability, and love, and everything in between.
When she had the urge to run away, she learned how to run to him, instead.
And when his ghosts became too much for him, she reminded him what it was like to be alive.
Irinka thought that she would have been perfectly happy to go on like this for some time. A forever or two, in fact.
So it was not until she was six months’ pregnant with their first child, and quite obviously so, that Zago took her out to the balcony that looked out over the Grand Canal at another summer sunset. And as the most golden, glorious light poured over her, and him, he went down on one knee.
He looked up at her, and said, “ Tesoro mio, amore della mia vita , I am afraid it is time.”
“Already?” Irinka smiled down at him. She reached her hand down so she could hold his beloved jaw and move her thumb over his cheekbone, because it turned out she could delight in that, too. That imprinting. That muscle memory. “I was thinking we could live in glorious sin for at least the first three children.”
“I would live with you in sin in a thousand lifetimes,” he told her, and leaned forward to kiss her rounded belly. “But in this one, I am a Baldissera, and there are legacies to consider. And so I must beg of you, my heart and my soul and my life, to make an honest man out of me after all.”
“Well,” Irinka said with a sigh. “When you put it that way, how could I refuse?”
And her heart was catapulting around in her chest, but there was a lot more room in there than there had used to be. She did not hold on to age-old sobs for a lifetime, not anymore. She laughed more. She cried more.
Sometimes she shouted out her feelings without thinking them through.
Sometimes her brain got in the way of her heart, but they had found delightful ways to untangle them.
And no matter what happened, every time she reached over, Zago’s hand was there to hold hers.
They were there to hold each other.
So she watched as he pulled out a ring that she had seen in the austere portraits in this grand old house. A huge diamond that she did not have to ask to know had belonged to a great many women who had lived right here, in this ancient place, surrounded not only by history but also by the history they would make.
“Will you marry me, my beloved?” Zago asked. “At last?”
“I will,” she told him, and it was the easiest vow she’d ever made. “I love you so much, it almost seems as if being your wife will be too much joy to handle.” She leaned down and kissed him. “But somehow I think I will rise to the occasion.”
And she did.
Thus, one day not far from then, Irinka Scott-Day gave up the name she’d kept her whole life out of spite, and took up a far better one for love, instead.
And then kept it, and cherished it—and the husband and children that came with it—all the days of her life.
* * * * *